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Jetta, Teenage Sweetheart of the 21st Century

A full 10 years before the Jetsons arrived on the scene, Jetta was a little-known comic by Dan DeCarlo, illustrator of Betty and Veronica from the Archies comics, Josie and the Pussycats, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and others. The buxom, redheaded star is typical of DeCarlo’s sexy but wholesome female characters with a space-age twist. This one is a rarity. Jetta first appeared in December 1952, and Standard Comics published only three issues of Jetta collections with three stories in each issue. Interestingly, the first issue was marked as No. 5 instead of No. 1 so as not to appear to newsstand dealers as an untested debut publication.

If you liked the teenage antics in The Archies and love mid-century modern futurism, you’ll go positively into orbit over Jetta! Scroll down for more images from The Good Girl Art Library’s book, Dan DeCarlo’s Jetta, with an introduction by Craig Yoe and renderings by 37 master pin-up artists.

 

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What Cool America Looked Like in the Late 50s

American Look is an awesome Technicolor short film commissioned by the Chevrolet division of General Motors in 1959 celebrating American mid-century lifestyle and design. The film showcases design of everything from dinnerware and furniture to automobiles and public art murals. Produced by the Handy “Jam” Organization, this film is fabulous right down to the music, the hairstyles, and the narrator’s voice. The evocative video and audio will make you wish you had a time machine to go back and live in the mid-century era. Enjoy!

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Astro Boy, Meet Kirobo

 

When I saw the story about Kirobo, the new robot astronaut from Japan (see the bottom clip below), it instantly called to mind Astro Boy (鉄腕アトム), the Japanese manga series that debuted in 1952 and was adapted into the first popular animated Japanese television series in the late 50s and early 60s which I saw as a kid on TV two decades later in Mexico. Astro Boy was one of the early creations of legendary Japanese animator and cartoonist Osamu Tezuka, the so-called “father of anime.” Surely the folks at Toyota were inspired by Astro Boy, the super-powered, space-age Pinocchio who lived in a world where robots coexisted with humans.

We don’t need a super-hero robot, but we’d love to coexist with a one or two who could help out with some household chores!