There were two pirate covers for Weird Tales, one near the beginning of its run, the other near its end. The first doesn't have any obviously weird elements. It's one of few covers for the magazine that could just as easily have been the cover for a general story magazine. The second cover is obviously for a weird story and misses my article "Coye's Uncategorizable Covers" by only this much.
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| Weird Tales, October 1923. Cover story: "The Amazing Adventures of Joe Scranton" by Effie W. Fifield. Cover art by R.M. Mally. |
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| Weird Tales, Sept. 1951. Cover story: "Gimlet Eye Gunn" by H. Bedford Jones. Cover art by Lee Brown Coye. Both story and cover were in Short Stories six and a half years before. |
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| Short Stories, March 25, 1945. This image reminds me of one of my favorite Aurora models . . . |
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| The Forgotten Prisoner of Castelmaré, with cover art by Mort Künstler, whose name, oddly enough, translates as "Death Artist" in French and German. |
Text and captions copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley
The Forgotten Prisoner was a wonderful, if perplexing, model kit. It was part of Aurora's "Universal Monsters" series that featured such classics as Frankenstein's Monster, The Mummy and The Creature From the Black Lagoon. As a kid in 1966 I wondered exactly what film this scene came from; it took me a while to figure out that it was simply a generic scene of Gothic horror...and a delightful one at that! It was 98 cents well spent...
ReplyDeleteMike,
ReplyDeleteIn reading up on the model for this posting, I found out that it had some kind of connection to Famous Monsters Magazine. You might know something about that.
TH
I do recall that this model kit had the Famous Monsters of Filmland logo prominently displayed, and full-page ads in comics and Warren publications proudly stating "Famous Monsters Presents" or some such. I'm not sure what the actual connection was, though. I do know that this association added to my confusion, to my erroneous certainty that this must be a scene from some well known horror film.
DeleteMike,
DeleteI always thought it was from a movie, too. I wanted to see the movie. Now my little brain is working on possibilities for storytelling . . .
TH