Bouquets for Bama: A Preview

(Above) The Midas Man, by Kenneth Robeson (Bantam, 1960), featuring artist’s model Steve Holland.

Following artist James Bama’s demise on April 24—just four days short of what would have been his 96th birthday—tributes to his work and longevity flooded the blogosphere and social media outlets.

“James Bama enjoyed several memorable careers as an illustrator, but [he] was arguably best known for his 60+ paintings of Bantam’s paperback series revival of Doc Savage, featuring his good friend, model Steve Holland as his subject,” recalled Michael Stradford, a director of Creative Content for Warner Home Entertainment and the author of last year’s beautiful release, Steve Holland: The World’s Greatest Illustration Art Model (Primedia).

“While there are dozens, maybe scores, of authors who have influenced me, I think there are only a handful of artists who made me who I am today,” added prolific fictionist James Reasoner. “James Bama was certainly one of them. My discovery of the Doc Savage series really made me aware of the pulps for the first time and started my on-going love affair with them.”

(Right) Bantam’s The Man of Bronze (1964), with cover art by James Bama.

“His vision of Doc Savage was a huge part of my childhood (and ongoing) obsession with the character,” wrote novelist Win Scott Eckert. “While I understand that [Walter M.] Baumhofer’s portrayal of Doc on the original 1930s pulp magazine covers may be more accurate, when I read Doc novels, I see Bama’s version in my mind’s eye. I can’t help it.”

Such praise didn’t come unearned.

The story goes that James Elliott Bama was born on April 28, 1926, in Washington Heights, then a booming middle-class neighborhood of New York City’s Manhattan borough. He demonstrated an early interest in and aptitude for artistic pursuits, honing his talents by copying the comic strips of Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon) and Hal Foster (Tarzan). “I was four months shy of eight years old when Flash Gordon came out in 1934 and I kept copies of that comic strip for 10 years, until I was 18,” Bama told the blog MensPulpMags.com in 2014. “I’d go to the candy store every Sunday and wait for the newspaper truck to come. I must have known how good he would be. Alex Raymond grew and grew and grew as an artist. He was incredible, and he was my first hero. I loved Hal Foster’s comic strips, too. In fact, I originally wanted to be a cartoonist.”

“As a teenager,” recalls an obituary, Bama “attended the Fiorello LaGuardia High School of Music and Art. His father died suddenly when Jim was fourteen, and since his mother had become an invalid after a stroke, he had to work after school and do the housecleaning.” The United States entered World War II in 1941, when Bama was only 15. He had to wait three more years, until 1944, to enlist in the Army Air Corps, “and was trained as a navigator and stationed in several southern states. The war ended before he would have gone overseas, but he still qualified for the G.I. Bill, and thus was able to go to the Art Students League, where he studied under the illustrator Frank J. Reilly.”

Once done with art school, Bama began soliciting commissions for illustrations, including assignments from paperback book publishers. His first cover art was for the 1949 Avon release A Bullet for Billy the Kid, by Nelson Nye—the project that introduced him to Steve Holland, a TV actor and model whose image would later grace myriad Bama covers. In 1951 the artist started a 15-year stint with New York’s Charles E. Cooper Studios, described in the book History of Illustration (2019) as “a renowned agency specializing in glamour illustration for advertising and women’s magazines … The illustrators received 50 percent of each advertising commission secured by the company’s account executives.” Wikipedia explains that “Bama had a 22-year career as a successful commercial artist, producing paperback book covers, movie posters and illustrations for such publications as Argosy, The Saturday Evening Post and Reader's Digest, and his numerous clients included the New York Giants football team, the Baseball and Football Halls of Fame and the U.S. Air Force.” He also created illustrations for such men’s adventure magazines as Stag, For Men Only, and Male.

Bama’s reputation as a hyper-realistic painter helped win him the commission, in the early 1960s, to provide cover art for a brand-new softback line of Doc Savage editions issued by Bantam Books. The hero protagonist of those pulpy tales (real name Clark Savage Jr.) was a scientist, doctor, martial artist, inventor, and “master of disguise” who “rights wrongs and punishes evildoers.” He was initially introduced in the March 1933 edition of Doc Savage Magazine, a Street & Smith periodical. Doc’s developers were publisher Henry W. Ralston and editor John L. Nanovic, but his printed escapades were credited to “Kenneth Robeson,” a house pen name behind which hid a melange of scribblers, most notably Lester Dent, who was involved with the series through 1949.

In 1964, Bantam purchased rights to the Doc Savage yarns and the company’s art director, Len Leone, hired Bama to portray their lead character—now sporting a distinctive widow’s peark—on a fresh line of releases. Bama, in turn, recruited Steve Holland as his cover model. He eventually “painted 62 of the first 67 covers with mind–blowing vigor and meticulousness,” says ThePulp.Net. “Every one of those covers is a miniature masterpiece to be marveled at.”

Between doing Doc Savage fronts, Bama fit in his work for other American paperback publishers. His burgeoning portfolio soon included paintings for mystery, romance, western, and historical novels, as well as non-fiction titles. Authors as diverse as James M. Cain, Stewart Sterling, Louis L’Amour, Mary Shelley, James Jones, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Gustave Flaubert, and William Goldman benefited from his expertise. The artist even created the art for a rather well-known early entry in the Star Trek tie-in series.

But Jim Bama had wearied of the hard-scrambling Manhattan scene. In 1964 he wed Lynne Klepfer, a New York University art history major whom he’d met the year prior, and had engaged as a book-cover model. Four years on, the couple relocated to Cody, Wyoming, and subsequently purchased a home in not-far-distant Wapiti. It was there that Bama started painting contemporary western scenes and subjects, working on his own fine art during the day, while laboring at night for publishers. “I never came out here with the idea to be a western artist,” Bama has been quoted as saying. “It just happened, and that’s the way it should be.”

(Right) Little Star, Bama’s portrait of a “beautiful Navajo maiden.”

By 1971, Bama had hooked up with art dealers in New York, and turned his focus from paperback cover art to painting likenesses of Native Americans, cowboys, and buffaloes. Over the next three decades, he generated one arresting canvas after the next. Of a one-man show Bama mounted at Gotham’s august Coe Kerr Gallery, art critic Gerrit Henry opined:

Bama’s is western art that any self-respecting art critic is automatically required to sneer at. But it’s hard to sneer. In a supernaturalistic style that makes New York Photo Realism look like Action Painting, Bama paints heroes of the contemporary West. … He takes the true stuff of American myth, Olympian figures of a dying past, and reinstates them in our cultural consciousness …

Sadly, Bama’s eyesight began to decline in the early 2000s, and he was compelled to forsake painting after a half-century-long career. His work remained popular, though, thanks in part to examples of his artistry being collected in book form. The Western Art of James Bama was released in 1975, followed by James Bama: American Realist (2006) and James Bama: Personal Works (2012).

Reports are that when Bama passed away last weekend, it was at his Wyoming home. He was soon afterward cremated.

Looking back, I’m surprised to discover that Jim Bama’s artistic virtuosity has been celebrated only twice before on this page, once in a round-up of his “teenager-in-torment” paperback fronts, and again for his art fronting a 1967 book about James Bond creator Ian Fleming. That changes today. In tribute to the talents of this late, great American painter, I’m readying a series of posts that display a breadth of his illustrative efforts, not only book fronts but also magazine spreads and even his box art for monster model kits. The opening installment will appear this coming Monday, May 2, with more entries set to roll out over the next two weeks.

Stay tuned.