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Give credit where it's due, Whelk... these pictures are from the Art Frahm collection of the incomparable James Lileks. Do visit the gallery; Lileks's hilarious commentary is definitely worth the trip. And he'll probably get a kick out of referral links from this site.

A taste:

It is unfair to judge Art Frahm by these illustrations. He did many that were much, much worse. (And better, too.) But the falling-panty theme is a staple of his work. These pictures aren't taken from a calendar he did when hungry and desperate, chafing against the dictates of some gnomish pervert who wanted a year's worth of falling-panty pictures. These date from throughout the 50s. It's a theme to which he returned again and again - and you have to wonder why.

Look at enough of these pictures, and something deeply creepy emerges. For starters, their entire premise is untenable: underwear simply does not fall down like this, unless the wearer has no hips and the panties no elastic. This is some curious glimpse into someone's fantasy - a world where men regularly happen across women whose undergarments have fluttered to their ankles. A world where underwear failure in the middle of an everday chore is a signal, a cue, an invitation. Her pants are down and she can't run. Have at it, boys!

In most of these illustrations, the woman looks at the viewer with a mixture of shock and embarassment, but that's a waste of time: we're supposed to salivate at her, not with her.

To make matters worse, she not only has lost her underwear and her composure, but there's a fat leering John Wayne Gacy type behind her, grinning with glee: he cannot believe his luck. No prowling the town for a filly tonight - here's one whose panties have fallen clean off of their own accord, and she doesn't even know I'm here!

Each of these pages contains the full tableau, with close-ups detailing the less savory aspects of the scene - including the all-important question as to whether or not celery is involved.