As I have shared before here in these 'pages,' I spent a fair amount of my time growing up in Laredo, Texas, reading comic books--specifically, a lot of Archie Comics.
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| Dan DeCarlo's Men's Humor Magazine work--not for Archie Comics! |
Many of my obsessions for women were probably inculcated through the india ink wonders that are the magic of
Dan DeCarlo--illustrator for Archie, Jughead, Betty & Veronica, and the rest of the gang in the Silver Age heydays of the 60s and 70s.
Harry Lucey, too, illustrator for my
Mextasy homage below, also takes some of the blame!
Back then, though I preferred Betty (she was nicer, and, as a blonde, an exotic for this chubby Mexican-American Laredense), it was Veronica, whose affections I fantasized about. I thought she was Mexican-American, a Latina--at the very least, she sure looked like all the middle and high school girls I was surrounded by at St. Augustine High School in Laredo.
So I dedicate this
Mextasy Poster below to Lucey, whose art gave flight to my fantasies, and to DeCarlo, whose ink-bourn dabblings imprinted me forever (and yes, deranged my libido in ways that only Freud, channeling
Cantinflas via
Rosario Castellanos, could fathom).
Veronica Lodge, no doubt, was not Latina, not Chicana, not Tejana--but for me, young, ardent, and filled with visions of fantasized erotic futures, it did not matter.
