 She doesn't actually have any super powers. But then again she doesn't need them. 
In this image, Japanese action star Reiko Ike, seated before a platter of lemons, oranges, and tomatoes, has just been told tomatoes are really fruits instead of vegetables, and now nothing about the world makes sense anymore. We still struggle with that one too. The photo appeared in the 1972 Weekly Playboy calendar, which we've been documenting each month. In thirty days we'll see if Reiko has gotten past this tomato thing.
 If this outfit doesn't make Hollywood notice me I have one last idea that might work. 
Though she looks a bit like Elaine Stewart or Coleen Gray, this photo shows U.S. model and actress Jean Moorhead. Her outfit is attention getting, but she got more acting parts after she was Playboy's October 1955 centerfold (as Jean Moorehead). Her most notable films were minor fare such as 1958's Attack of the Puppet People, 1957's The Amazing Colossal Man, and 1956's The Violent Years, so she cannot be said to have built a notable cinematic résumé, but even so, her best years were post-centerfold. See another shot of Moorhead in the same swimsuit here.
 *sigh* One day I'll kill dozens of men on the silver screen. I just know it.  
This shot of pinku actress Reiko Ike is from the same series that gave us the February page of her 1972 calendar, and she's shown few signs of movement since then. But she'll get up. After all, there are yakuza to slice and dice. In order for the calendar to have appeared at the beginning of 1972 it would have been shot just as Reiko's star was beginning to rise, with a mere three films to her credit. She would go on to appear in eight in 1972, nine more in 1973, and eleven in 1974-75 combined. It was a breakneck pace, not unusual for pinku actresses, but the heights of her success certainly defied the norm. She's had a very interesting post-cinema life as well, which we haven't remarked upon even once, but may get to at some point. For now, like her, we'll just picture the movie mayhem in her future. Oh, and, we altered this scan. We explain how and why at last month's Reiko post.
 It was a very, very good year. 
1972 was a leap year on the Gregorian calendar, which meant twenty-nine days of February to ponder Reiko Ike, rather than the usual twenty-eight. Above you see the second page of her Weekly Playboy 1972 calendar (the first is here). We altered it, but not in a way that matters. Originally, the second half of February ran across to an adjacent page, and the first half of March appeared as the bottom of this page. But we wanted to save March until next month so we swapped them. As we said, it's not important, but that's full disclosure for the collectible purists out there. More from Reiko in twenty-nine days.  
 So far so good. Only 364 days to go. 
Well, here we are in 2022, and karate kicking, sword swinging, yakuza slicing, mushroom cloud laying action movie icon Reiko Ike is here to welcome you to another spin round the sun. We think this image has gotten things off to an excellent start, even if Ike looks sort of like she's made a New Year's resolution to smack anyone who utters an unkind word in her direction. But that's just Reiko being Reiko. The shot is from the magazine Weekly Playboy, for which she starred in an entire 1972 calendar. For the fun of it, every first of the month or so, we'll share a new Ike calendar shot. We say “or so” because we used one a while back, and because she doubled up a couple of months in the calendar, but you get the gist—nine or ten new Ike images are coming. If she doesn't get you looking forward to the new year nothing will.
 Sometimes you have to look at things from a whole new angle. 
How many mid-century actresses began as Playboy models? An absolute raft of them. The 1957 photo above shows Dolores Donlon, who was the magazine's centerfold in August of that year. Donlon was an unusual case. She had been toiling in Hollywood since 1944, landing minor film roles and scattered magazine covers. She managed to earn seventh billing in 1954's The Long Wait, and third in 1957's Flight to Hong Kong, but they weren't major films. When she finally posed nude it was much later than usual—she was thirty-seven. It's hard to determine whether the new tactic directly paid off, but from that point forward she became a well established television actress, racking up more than twenty-five credits on shows such as 77 Sunset Strip and Miami Undercover. It wasn't movie stardom, but it was success. Was it Playboy that made the difference? Probably only she and her agent knew, and neither of them are around to tell us.
 She has terrible manners but a terrific flair for the dramatic. 
Above is another rare promo image of Japanese actress Reiko Ike, someone we've documented extensively through the years, and here, the big hair, bare skin, and brilliant pose make this one of her best shots. We have other Ike images in a stack of Japanese magazines, and if we can figure out how to keep our scanner from putting electronic streaks on the scans we hope to get those posted at some point. This one came from an issue of the magazine Weekly Playboy and was published in 1974.
 Vintage glamour magazine produces treasure trove of rare celebrity photos. 
Above you see the cover of Jem magazine, founded by famed bodybuilder Joe Weider as one of the first high budget competitors to Playboy. He also launched the similar imprint Monsieur. The scans above and below are from the very first issue of Jem, published this month in 1956. It came out during the heyday of the era when magazines of this type gave equal billing to Hollywood celebrities and erotic stars (something we try to emulate on Pulp Intl.), which means you'll not only see rare photos of actresses like Anita Ekberg, Jayne Mansfield, and Kim Novak, but also burlesque dancer and model Candy Barr (on the cover and in the beautiful masthead page), model Betty Brosmer (who was Weider's wife), and dancer Lili St. Cyr. Jem also poached July 1956 Playboy centerfold Alice Denham, which must have served as a shot across Hefner's bow. In addition to all those attractions, you get illustrations by Dwight Howe, Ken Wyeth, John Martin, and Jack Lyons. The magazine is so vibrant we uploaded every page that had either photos or art, making for a whopping fifty panels to enjoy below. We found this on Archive.org, but we're going to see if we can locate a few in real life.                                                  
 Oh, hi there. You're just in time. I was about to towel off. 
We're going to use a non-word to describe this photo. It's sunshiny. It's the most sunshiny shot we've seen in a while. It shows U.S. actress Joan Staley and was made somewhere in Southern California in 1958. Staley mostly acted on television in shows such as The Asphalt Jungle, Hawaiian Eye, 77 Sunset Strip, and Mission: Impossible, amassing more than one hundred smallscreen credits, by our quick count. Her bigscreen appearances were sporadic, but included Breakfast at Tiffany's, All in a Night's Work, Johnny Cool, and Cape Fear. Most of those roles were uncredited, but she piled up almost twenty. Altogether she had quite a résumé. Did she ever towel off, as our juvenile quip suggests? She did. She was a Playboy Playmate of the Month in November 1958, which means that, like Marilyn Monroe, she made the leap from nude model to Hollywood star. Actually, considering those one hundred-plus television roles you could even argue that, in a way, she was just as successful as Monroe. In a way. 
 Look! Down in the water. It's a fish. It's a submarine. It's super Joanne! 
This fun shot of American model Joanne Arnold is from a famous underwater series by legendary photographer Peter Gowland, images from which were first published in Playboy magazine in 1955. We ran across a rare shot from the session in the Goodtime Weekly Calender of 1963, which we scanned and put online a long while back, and later found her again in two Technicolor pin-ups. So this great image of Arnold is her fourth appearance on our website, but probably not her last.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1939—Batman Debuts
In Detective Comics #27, DC Comics publishes its second major superhero, Batman, who becomes one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, and then a popular camp television series starring Adam West, and lastly a multi-million dollar movie franchise starring Michael Keaton, then George Clooney, and finally Christian Bale. 1953—Crick and Watson Publish DNA Results
British scientists James D Watson and Francis Crick publish an article detailing their discovery of the existence and structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, in Nature magazine. Their findings answer one of the oldest and most fundamental questions of biology, that of how living things reproduce themselves. 1967—First Space Program Casualty Occurs
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when, during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere after more than ten successful orbits, the capsule's main parachute fails to deploy properly, and the backup chute becomes entangled in the first. The capsule's descent is slowed, but it still hits the ground at about 90 mph, at which point it bursts into flames. Komarov is the first human to die during a space mission. 1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot.
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