Tentacles on the Cover of Weird Tales

Tentacles may or may not be the appendage of choice for tellers of weird tales, but there have been a few tentacled covers in "The Unique Magazine." I have seven to show here, but most are not quite right. Richard R. Epperly's cover for the first issue of Weird Tales shows tentacles when it should show pseudopodia. The cover illustrating "When the Green Star Waned" by Nictzin Dyalhis shows tentacle-like appendages, but they're actually arms. But then in February 1929, real tentacles arrived in Hugh Rankin's cover illustrating "The Star-Stealers" by Edmond Hamilton. And not only is the creature on the cover tentacled, it also looks likes a starfish, another of those alien-on-Earth type creatures with its slightly disconcerting radial symmetry.

There's a tentacled creature in the upper right of Hannes Bok's cover from March 1940. It's definitely not the star of the show in the way that Matt Fox's alien from November 1944 is. And then we have to skip four decades into the future for Hyang Ro Kim's take on the tentacled alien or monster. Finally, there is the current issue of Weird Tales and its cover by Bob Eggleton.

There are also covers on the themes of snakes, Medusas, and plants, some of which have reaching and entwining tendrils, but I think that tentacles, despite their similarity in appearance to these things, are distinctly different, for they are among the discoveries of science rather than subjects of myth, legends, and folklore. Authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries recognized that difference, and I think that's why we have tentacled aliens in fantasy fiction.

I haven't included issues of Weird Tales after the 1980s in my writing on this blog. There are almost certainly tentacle-covers in those issues, but that's a topic for another day.

"In the yard Peggy was half engulfed in a squamous, rubbery something which at first glance he could not analyze."

Weird Tales, March 1923, the inaugural issue, with cover art by Richard R. Epperly illustrating "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. These are the two cover variants of which I wrote earlier this month.

"They, the Things, slowly raised each an arm, pointed at one Aerthon in the group. He, back to them as he was, quivered, shook, writhed, then, despite himself, he slowly rose in the air, moved out into space, hung above the blobs that waited, avid-mouthed. The Aerthon turned over in the air, head down, still upheld by the concentrated wills of the things that pointed . . ."

Weird Tales, April 1925. Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. Cover story: "When the Green Star Waned" by Nictzin Dyalhis. I have included this cover here less because the arms of the aliens look tentacle-like than because Dyalhis seems to have been heavily influenced by H.G. Wells' tentacled Martians in The War of the Worlds.

"I heard sighs of horror from my two companions beneath me, and for a single moment we hung motionless along the chain's length, swinging along the huge pyramid's glowing side at a height of hundreds of feet above the shining streets below. Then the creature raised one of its tentacles, a metal tool in its grasp, which he brought down in a sharp blow on the chain at the window's edge. Again he repeated the blow, and again.

     "He was cutting the chain!"

Weird Tales, February 1929. Cover art by Hugh Rankin. Cover story: "The Star-Stealers" by Edmond Hamilton. Proof that tentacled creatures are tool-using.

Update (Feb. 26, 2023): Hugh Rankin is an overlooked artist, I think. I'm inclined to give him the award for Best Tentacled Cover for Weird Tales. His is art from another era and another kind of sensibility. Call it a cultural and historical artifact. It gives us a window onto the past. There are hints of Art Nouveau in this illustration, but Art Deco is the primary style. Note the flamingo-like birds in the background. Note also the triangular motifs that echo the shape of the creature's head, in the serifs of Rankin's hand lettering, in the dark gray side of the pyramid, and in the design containing the cover price.

Weird Tales, March 1940. Cover art by Hannes Bok. The tentacled creature in this cover is a bird-like thing in the upper right.

Weird Tales, November 1944, with cover art by Matt Fox, a master monster-maker. This cover makes me think of that golden-idol monstrosity recently erected in New York City. I included Fox's cover in an article called "Flying Saucers from Before the Great War," August 16, 2020.

Weird Tales, Winter 1985, with cover art by Hyang Ro Kim, aka Ro H. Kim. I have written about this cover before, too, on September 30, 2016.

Finally, the cover for the most recent issue of Weird Tales, what we can accept as the 100th anniversary issue, Number 366, with cover art by Bob Eggleton.

Update (Feb. 26, 2023): Regarding Hugh Rankin's starfish-with-tentacles cover of February 1929, here's another in the same vein, a far more famous cover of DC Comics' Brave and the Bold #28, featuring the Justice League of America in their battle against Starro the Conqueror, March 1960. Only thirty-one years separated those two covers. More than sixty stand between us and the first appearance of Starro.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley