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The Uranium Cafe existed in a couple forms before the current incarnation came into being. One version was under the URL http://uranium-cafe.com. That address is defunct and it is a long story I would rather not remember right now. That URL still pops up on Google for some reason. The URL http://uraniumcafe.com belongs to a retro gift store that, I assume, also named itself after the legendary diner outside Los Alamos NM, home of the first atom bomb tests. That site will show up on the first page of Google as well though this site,
http://uraniumcafe-the.com, has come to dominate searches with the term. I am proud of that. Another site however that will also appear on Google, though the term Uranium Cafe does not appear in the URL, is
the original Uranium Cafe at Opera.com. That site was abandoned after My Opera got blocked in china and I did not have the proxy savvy back then to maintain it. I was able one day to get back into the site using a proxy (that no longer works in China) and make a redirect notice for http://uranium-cafe.com but that site, as I said, is long gone and ain’t comin’ back. By the time I started this version I had actually forgotten my username and password for My Opera and I canceled the email it was connected to for spam reasons.
Where is this going you ask? Well, I think it is interesting that my My Opera site still gets hits and receives comments which i cannot reply to. And I was searching for info on the cartoonist Bill Ward and was led to Wikipedia where I saw my old site listed in the external links. I had actually forgotten I had done a post on the guy over there. I copied and pasted the article here and if you want you can visit the old site and see the Cafe in an early experimental form.
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Anyone who ever glanced at an old girlie magazine from the 60’s or 70’s (and 50’s too but I never saw any of those) had to have seen the cartoons of Bill Ward at one time or another. There is a new collection out of his work from Seattle’s Fantagraphic Books. I found some samples of his earlier work with Torchy and then a later character called Pussycat. The inks on the Pussycat comic book panels is by Bill Everette and his pens and brush washes enhanch Ward’s pencils beautifully. Ward had a classic near pin-up style of illustrating glamour girls that degenerated, in my opinion, into a crude, hurried style of blatant pornography by the 70’s. In later works the women’s boobs were so exaggerated as to be beyond belief. The men were always weak and powerless towards the physical charms of Ward’s women. He did a lot of work in bondage and S&M as well but none of the samples I found were suitable for the Café. They were simply hardcore. I did not care for where his work went later simply because I liked his early work so much and the change was pronounced and probably done for nothing other than money. His later stuff is not in anyway bad as far as porno cartoons go, what do you expect, but his early work, like Torchy, showed real talent.
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Also included here at the bottom are some of his great war propaganda cartoons. I know we are supposed to be ashamed of this stuff as Americans but something about confusing Imperial-psycho-Japanese soldiers with monkeys or seeing a couple Nazis about to get their swastikas splattered just makes me snicker.
THE WAR CARTOONS OF BILL WARD.
(SHOOT THE ONES WITHOUT TAILS. THAT’S GREAT!)
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Monday, February 1st, 2010 at
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February 2nd, 2010 at 6:58 am
I love Bill Ward- his telephone girls are just perfect. Nobody drew black silk stockings like him!
My wife blames my opera glove fetish on Ward. She may be right!
I was lucky enough to grab an original Ward Cracked page a few years back for $50… pretty sweet deal, considering it had a Ward girl AND a monkey on it!
February 2nd, 2010 at 2:50 pm
I had some of those cracked comics as a kid with his work. I have long, long ago lost my collection and sadly never saved any of those types of books anyway. I, of course, never bought romance comics as a kid and those old love comics are through the roof in value nowadays.
Wards ‘rocket’ boobies were frightening to me as a young adolescent as I recall. They looked dangerous. And I guess they were, but not in a bad way