Material is a gallery /bookshop based in Ludlow (Shropshire) and London (Shoreditch). We sell beautiful prints and artwork designed by artists from all over the world, working a myriad of disciplines including gicl�e prints, silkscreen prints, letterpress, furniture making, product design, and interiors. We also sell books concerned with design and aesthetics (in subjects such as Graphic Design, Typography, illustration, fashion, architecture, photography, furniture /product design).

A great inspiration and, at times, referred to as the 'Queen of Comics', Nell Brinkley was a comic artist and illustrator whose career spanned four decades. In the the early 1900s she worked for an array of New York publications beginning  with The Journal where she produced illustrations and commentary on a daily basis, becoming one of the top commercial illustrators of the day.  Her beautifully illustrated curly-haired everyday working-girl drawings were known as the Brinkley Girl, which in not time at all upstaged Charles Dana Gibson's Gibson Girl. Her work was also distributed to newspapers nationally, becoming the most prolific and famous romantic writer-illustrator of the 1930s. Later, she illustrated books and produced topical multi-panel art pages of art, one of which was collected in a 1943 anthology of comics.

For over thirty years Nell Brinkley’s beautiful girls pirouetted, waltzed, Charlestoned, vamped and shimmied their way through the pages of William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, captivating the American public with their innocent sexuality. This sumptuously designed oversized hardcover collects Brinkley’s breathtakingly spectacular, exquisitely colored full page art from 1913 to 1940. Here are her earliest silent movie serial-inspired adventure series, “Golden Eyes and Her Hero, Bill;” her almost too romantic series, “Betty and Billy and Their Love Through the Ages;” her snappy flapper comics from the 1920s; her 1937 pulp magazine-inspired “Heroines of Today.” Included are photos of Nell, reproductions of her hitherto unpublished paintings, and an informative introduction by the book’s editor, Trina Robbins.

Nell Brinkley widened her scope to include pen and ink depictions of working women. Brinkley used her fame to campaign for better working conditions and higher pay for women who had joined in the war effort, and who were suffering economic and social dislocation due to acting on their patriotism. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she drew women of different races and cultures.