Barbara Shermund’s Sallies

Barbara Shermund’s Sallies in Pictorial Review.

Shermund’s Sallies debuted in the August 13 1944 issue. Her cartoons were already very well-known to readers of The New Yorker and Esquire, magazines that had featured her work for many years. In those venues Shermund’s cartoons could be somewhat forward-looking and female empowering, but here in the Pictorial Review she mostly kept her sexy girls in the well-populated ghetto of gorgeous but dumb as a rock glamor girls. It’s a shame that the gags for these cartoons are so wince-inducingly dated now, but the lovely art certainly makes up for the text underneath. The feature offered two cartoons per page throughout its life, and Shermund made sure that there were plenty of doe-eyed beauties for the fellows to ponder on her pages.

The odd thing about this feature is that when one had an off week, the creator’s cartoons still appeared, but were instead featured on another gag page of the section. Why the titles didn’t travel with them I can’t understand, but that’s how the Pictorial Review operated.

Creator and artist: Barbara Shermund

Barbara Shermund, an incredibly prolific and pioneering feminist cartoonist, died on September 9, 1978 at the age of 80, leaving behind a major, yet unheralded body of work, including hundreds of New Yorker cartoons and 9 covers, decades of publishing with Esquire, Life, Colliers, Judge, and more. At the time of her death, New York newspapers were on strike and, as a result, an obituary was never published.

Thanks to Jeff Nelson

1944