Vintage 1993 Pin-Up Girls II 🎴 Vargas Trading Card Set, Sealed 21st Century Archives Box

Remember the Vargas Girls? 🎴 Vintage 1993 Pin-Up Girls II Trading Card Set, Sealed

Size: 2 1/2" x 3 1/2"

These come factory-sealed, never opened — new old stock.

🎴 What's printed on the box

This is a factory-sealed box of Pin-Up Girls II Collectible Trading Cards, published in 1993 by 21st Century Archives Inc. as the sequel to the company's 1992 Pin-Up Girls set — this box continues the numbering, cards 51 through 100. The front reads "1940s' Illustrations by Vargas / PIN-UP GIRLS II / Collectible Trading Cards / 21st Century Archives Inc." over a reclining blonde in white drapery, one bare hand lifted above her head, holding a single white flower. The back carries the company's own line: "Here is the much awaited follow-up to our first classic pinup series that was named 'Non-Sport Card Design of the Year,'" and states that each set holds one of 50 different Prizm parallel cards, with a complete Limited Edition Prizm set assembled only across a full case — so this box holds the 50-card base set plus one Prizm card, not the whole Prizm run. The box edge prints "© 1944, 1993 The Hearst Corporation," which is Esquire's own 1944 copyright on the artwork, carried onto the card the year Hearst — which had bought Esquire back in 1986 — licensed it for this release.

🎨 Alberto Vargas, the man behind the "Varga Girl"

Every card in this box reproduces the work of Joaquín Alberto Vargas y Chávez, born in Arequipa, Peru in 1896, the son of photographer Max T. Vargas. He trained in Zurich and Geneva before coming to the United States around 1916, where he found early work painting for the Ziegfeld Follies and Hollywood studios. In 1940 he joined Esquire, and over the next six years produced roughly 180 paintings for the magazine — the pin-ups that made him famous. He struggled through much of the 1950s until Playboy started commissioning him in 1959; he painted 152 more pieces for them over the next sixteen years, restoring both his career and his income. His 1978 autobiography, written with Reid Stewart Austin, brought him back into the spotlight late in life — he even painted album covers for The Cars' Candy-O and for Bernadette Peters around that time. Vargas died in 1982 at 86; a large body of his Esquire-era originals now lives at the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, donated in 1980.

✍️ The name that lost an "s"

Every card here is signed "Varga," not "Vargas" — Esquire's own spelling for the pin-up line starting in 1940, changed, by the record of the court case that followed, "by agreement of the parties." The story goes that Esquire pushed the change through so it could claim "Varga" as its own trademark rather than the artist's name — though the court record only says the two sides agreed to it. What's certain is how it ended for Vargas: when he later sued over being left off the credit line, the courts sided with Esquire, whose contract had given it the rights outright, and he spent years afterward locked out of the name that had made him famous.

🛩️ From the magazine rack to the fuselage

The story goes that much of the hand-painted nose art carried on American and Allied aircraft during the war drew straight from these Esquire pin-ups, Vargas's alongside his contemporary George Petty's — a Varga Girl riding into battle on the side of a bomber as a small piece of home.

🏢 21st Century Archives and Reid Stewart Austin

21st Century Archives Inc. built this release, and the earlier 1992 series, around Vargas's Esquire work, and went on to release a similar Petty Girl set built around George Petty's pin-ups the following year. These came out smack in the middle of the early-'90s non-sport card boom. Impel's 1990 Marvel Universe cards had lit the fuse, and Non-Sport Update's production manager said at the time that where six or seven years earlier there had been at most ten non-sport sets a year, they'd now counted 167 since the previous October. Most of that flood was comics, movies and TV, which is part of why I like this one: a quiet box of 1940s Esquire pin-ups, done properly, in the thick of all that noise. Every card back here carries text by Reid Stewart Austin, who spent about twenty years as a Playboy art director working directly with Vargas, co-wrote his 1978 authorized biography with him, and later wrote Varga: The Esquire Years and a book on George Petty's art — which is why the box calls him a "world-renowned pinup authority" and means it.