Art For Art’s Sake #97: But It’s Art! (As The Actress Said To The Bishop!)

So, we’re a little into 2021 now, how’s it going? You doing all right? Getting enough rest, drinking enough water? Because we care, we really do, which is why we give you a weekly chance to wind down and take a look at some gorgeous artwork. So settle down and enjoy Art For Art’s Sake… great artwork, great artists, with a beautiful bit of Brian Bolland to end with.

This is simply beautiful, Nick Cardy original Wonder Girl from 2007.

Eoin Marron – Hulk Vs Hulkbuster commission, “based on the the scene from Avengers: Age of Ultron! Always enjoy a chance to go semi Otomo on some buildings”.

Jean Girard – A stunning Blueberry!

Joe Bennett The Immortal Hulk

Roger Langridge – Halo Jones commission

J Bone – Batman and Robin

Raul Allen

Classic bit of Jim Lee –

Frank Quietely

Future State Wonder Woman by Vasco Georgiev

Tess Fowler – Kid Lobotomy

Mike Allred – iZombie

Four now from the insanely talented Michael Cho – Marvel variant covers – I think you’ll know who they all are.

And finally, our usual extended look at something or someone.

This week, it’s something special from Brian Bolland, as posted up here on the Brian Bolland Appreciation Page by the man himself – “Here are all 14 pages of the Actress & the Bishop Go To the Seaside in one place to save people having to search for them.”

As for the origins of it all, well the strip comes from the phrase (or some variation of it), ‘as the actress said to the bishop’, is a wonderful bit of vulgarity, the classic double entendre, playing with words and ideas that can pretty much be used anywhere in an attempt to make something as rude as possible, all based on the idea of the pure Bishop and the impure Actress (from a time when actress and prostitute were considered by too many to be the same thing?.

And to use an example, sort of, from the strip below…
“Grab hold of the dipstick,”
“As the Actress said to the Bishop”

You get the idea. Anyway, Brian Bolland, in between doing things like Camelot 3000 and The Killing Joke, and so many gorgeous covers, decided to take the idea literally, putting an Actress and a Bishop into a series of wonderfully silly rhyming strips, all beginning in the great anthology A1 in 1989.  This, however, is the longest A&B strip from sometime in the 2000s, 14 beautifully rendered bits of Bolland… Enjoy…