The Art of "The Moon Maid"

"The Moon Maid," the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Moon trilogy, was in Argosy All-Story Weekly as a five-part serial, from May 5 through June 2, 1923. As such, it would have been on the newsstand at about the same time as the first four issues of Weird Tales, March through June 1923. Burroughs' new novel was the cover story for the issue of May 5, 1923. The cover artist was P.J. Monahan (1882-1931):

The Moon Maid of the late-century fan's imagination is astride a centaur-like creature. (See the images below.) What the fan forgets is that the Moon Maid, called Nah-ee-lah, has come from a lunar city on mechanical wings. She is free and takes flight. She takes joy and pleasure in flight.

In 1926, A.C. McClurg & Co. published "The Moon Maid" along with the other two books of the trilogy in an omnibus hardbound edition. J. Allen St. John (1872-1957) was the cover artist:

This appears to be a cleaned-up and possibly slightly altered version of the original. If you look closely, you can see that Nah-ee-lah is a captive of the centaur-creature, one of the Va-gas. She is bound to him by a leather strap and is actually pulling away from him. He is not her servant or protector. Remember that part.

Roy G. Krenkel (1918-1983) executed the cover illustration for the Ace paperback edition of 1963. His drawing follows pretty closely St. John's painting from nearly forty years before, but that's mostly because he was instructed to make it so:

As you can see, the strap is gone--or maybe the blue cord now binds her. Although the Moon Maid is still leaning away from the centaur, she looks like he is serving her rather than holding her captive. She also wears a knife on her hip. That's a nice cover, I think. Krenkel liked it, too.

Krenkel was friends with and often worked with Frank Frazetta (1928-2010). Frazetta followed Krenkel and other artists in creating covers for Ace Books and other paperback publishers. Here is his version of The Moon Maid:

What a difference Frazetta made! Under the Frazetta treatment, Burroughs' worlds of the imagination became more powerful, more violent, more mysterious, more erotic. More than half a century younger than Burroughs, Frank Frazetta was influenced by the art and culture of twentieth-century America from which everything Victorian had been completely wrung out. With Burroughs, nineteenth-century sentimentality, moreover that century's all-too-common stilted prose, prevailed. Truth be told, J. Allen St. John, being a near contemporary of the author, was a better fit than later artists. Frazetta was probably too virile and masculine for Burroughs. You could make a case that the stories he told of John Carter, Tarzan, the Moon Maid, and other Burroughs characters were better than Burroughs' own versions. You might say that Frazetta's fantasy was superior, if only for that instant--that height of action and mystery--captured in his arresting images.

Frazetta may actually have read "The Moon Maid," for he brought back the wingèd figures and the sharp peaks from the story and from the Argosy cover of 1923. There are Moon craters, too, but these are in the wrong place: Burroughs' Moon is actually a hollow world, pierced like a whiffle ball with crater-holes, and its people live inside. They are unaware of the outside. (The setting reminds me of the Star Trek episode "For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.") Before I ever read "The Moon Maid," long ago when I was a kid and looking at Frank Frazetta's artwork, I thought that the centaur is protecting the Moon Maid. That impression is apparently a holdover from Krenkel's cover and a demonstration of the evolution of an image of culture. This version of Frazetta's Moon Maid is soft, lush, and romantic, like something from a dream.

Frazetta was famous (or infamous) for altering his original paintings. His Moon Maid got the same treatment:

Here the centaur is fiercer still, and there is still the impression that he is the servant and protector of the Moon Maid. Frank Frazetta's famous fanny fetish is on full display here. Nah-ee-lah is fleshy and voluptuous. But then the centaur is also at an extreme--of power, muscularity, and menace. I always wondered about the seeming flight of her mount in this version. The book explains it, that on the Moon, everybody can leap farther, like John Carter on Mars or the first iteration of Superman on Earth. (Hold onto that comparison. It will come again soon.)

I always like to show British and foreign-language versions of American works. Here are two of The Moon Maid:

This is a British edition, published by Tandem in 1975. Unfortunately, the cover artist is unknown. I like the woman's pale-gray hair and insouciant pose. The background is also interesting.

Here is the cover of a Dutch edition, published in 1973 by Ridderhof. I don't think this is really a scene from "The Moon Maid," although there is a catlike creature and a snakelike creature in the story. The cover artist was Jad (1934-2014).

Finally, the Del Rey/Ballantine edition from 1992:

Here in a cover design by Laurence Schwinger (b. 1941) the Moon Maid returns to her origins on the wings of a bird. (There is a wing in his name and several in his picture.) This is perhaps the most romantic of the illustrations shown here. It may also get to something, a change in emphasis from the Moon Maid as a captive--an object of rescue and one to be looked at by men--to a free woman, a figure larger than and superior to all male figures in this picture. In the previous versions, "The Moon Maid" is pretty clearly a fantasy for men, but here the story might be meant to appeal more to women. Women who read it may be disappointed, but then again, maybe not.

Next: The Art of "The Moon Men" & "The Red Hawk"

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley