I first started doing drawings of Bettie Page around 1995 although I'd known about her for many years. When Bettie Page experienced her second wave of popularity in the 1980's she was first well known among the comic book crowd and I was at one time a huge comic book collector. Sometimes I'm not exactly sure why I use Miss Page almost exclusively in my pin up drawings. It may be because of the great variety of and almost cartoonish quality of her facial expressions and without a doubt, her beauty; can't ignore a very cool haircut as well. Her very curvy and athletic body is also fun to draw.
Bettie Page's career pretty much spanned the decade of the 1950's and with the end of that decade came the end of her career. She did a lot of work with amateur camera clubs starting off and eventually became a mainstay of that era's men's "cheesecake" magazines. As well as magazines, she did a lot of photos for mail order work for Paula and Irving Klaw who ran Movie Star News which continues to exist in New York City to this very day.
The Klaw photos could be very innocent but also went into the realm of fetish and bondage. I use Bettie's photos as inspiration for my own drawings although I design all of the lingerie myself; it's a lot of fun trying to come up with retro designs that are wholly original.
By 1960 Bettie Page was gone from the modeling scene but not forgotten. The 1980's was the decade of her comeback although at first it was totally unknown to Miss Page who apparently professed astonishment that such a thing was occuring so long after she had left modeling. The catalysts were a series of books compiling photos of her old work, a comic book and a fanzine. The comic book featured Dave Steven's character, The Rocketeer and in one of the stories, Stevens included a character whose likeness was that of Miss Page. A man named Greg Theakston published a short-lived digest sized magazine called The Bettie Pages and a little perfect storm from the 80's carried it's momentum into the future, helped in no small way by the work of great illustrators like the aforementioned Dave Stevens and Olivia.
Before you knew it there were Bettie Page dolls, Bettie Page lunch boxes, Bettie Page biographies and lighters and posters and signed prints and on and on, culminating in a 2005 feature film called "The Notorious Bettie Page". Bettie Page was now far more popular and well known than she ever had been in the 1950's, attaining an iconic status to rank alongside that of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, though with a far different crowd and for far different reasons.
Although Bettie Page is gone now she had many years to enjoy her newfound status, hobnobbing with Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion and artists and filmmakers who seemed to adore her.
James May