R.M. Mally & the Misattributed Cover

When I started writing this blog in 2011, one of my beginning sources was The Collector's Index to Weird Tales, written and compiled by Sheldon R. Jaffery and Fred Cook and published in 1985 by Bowling Green State University Popular Press. It's an indispensable book and the result of some real yeomanlike work. If you doubt that, consider sitting in a library, before there was an Internet, and making long lists from 279 issues and thousands of pages of a magazine that may very well have crumbled a little bit more every time you touched it. Even so, there are errors in the book. One of them involves a cover created by an artist that Jaffery and Cook called "Washburn." That cover was for the November 1923 issue of Weird Tales. We now know the real artist's name to have been R.M. Mally.

In this blog, I have perpetuated Jaffery and Cook's error. I'm in the process of correcting my errors. I believe it was a reader named Jean-Yves Freyburger of l'Île-de-France who pointed out my error to me. On December 13, 2014, I posted an entry called "Ghosts on the Cover of Weird Tales" in which I misattributed the authorship of Mally's cover to the presumably nonexistent Washburn. Jean-Yves wrote two comments, the first on September 15, 2023, the second on November 21, 2023. In his second comment, Jean-Yves referenced his post on Facebook under a group heading called "Pulp Magazines Imagination." He posted his message and images on October 7, 2023, in between his two messages posted on this blog. You can see what he posted by clicking on the following URL:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/pulpsmagazines/permalink/1063225801286581/?mibextid=oMANbw

Jean-Yves was kind enough to post nine images. In his second image, a close-up of the upper righthand corner of the November 1923 cover of Weird Tales, you can clearly see the artist's last name: Mally. I believe Jean-Yves received those images from David Saunders, who writes about pulp artists on his blog Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists. Mr. Saunders' entry on Mally is at the following URL:

https://www.pulpartists.com/Mally.html

In that entry, David Saunders identifies R.M. Mally as George William Mally (1892-1971). Even so, there is the question of the initials and Mally's use of a seal or cartouche below his signature. Mr. Saunders has identified that seal as containing the initials of Mally's wife, Ruth Lena Mikelson Mally (1896-1977). "R.M. Mally," then, would seem to be the initials of Mally's wife, in which case, we should consider the possibility that she was the artist, or that they were collaborators. David Saunders brings up that possibility as well, but I believe I read about it somewhere before he posted his biography of Mally, which has a copyright notice of 2023. Now we should go back in time again.

On June 9, 2013, Weird Tales scholar Randal A. Everts wrote to me asking my opinion of his supposition that Mally the Weird Tales artist was George William Mally of Chicago. He had received a message from Mally's granddaughter, who had consulted her own father, Mally's son, before responding. In reference to her grandfather, she wrote: "While he did live and work in Chicago his whole life, and was an artist, we don't think he is the person you are looking for. His work was mostly watercolors of farm or landscape scenes, with some oil portraits and etching of bridges." Based on the evidence, I expressed an opinion to Mr. Everts that George William Mally was not R.M. Mally. The difference in the initials alone would have argued against the idea. However, I did point out Mally's use of a seal or cartouche below the signature (I called it a "doo-dad"), writing that, if we knew what it says, "[i]t might offer a clue." In any case, if David Saunders is correct, then Randal Everts was correct before him, ten years before him in fact. That's nothing at all against Mr. Saunders, but I believe Mr. Everts deserves every credit for being the first (apparently) to solve the mystery of who was R.M. Mally. And I regret expressing my opinion that George M. Mally probably was not R.M Mally. I also regret, though I had nothing to do with it, that Mally's family seems not to have known that George W. Mally created covers for Weird Tales.

That still leaves open the question of Ruth M. Mally's involvement in the creation of those covers of 1923-1924. If she was in fact an artist--or the artist--then she was the first woman cover artist for "The Unique Magazine" and possibly one of the first--if not the first--for any pulp magazine. And I guess if she was the artist, I was right after all. But I take no pleasure in that.

The Mallys were young at the time they created their covers, George in his early thirties, Ruth in her late twenties. As an artist myself, I recognize the signs of a young, inexperienced, or untrained artist at work. The draftsmanship in Mally's cover, shown below, isn't firm, to be sure. There's barely enough torso under the man's coat to make him a fully normal human. The skeleton in the foreground is also not very well made. "Untrained" might be the operative word here, in which case we might conclude that Ruth Mally really was the artist. Maybe she created some of their covers, maybe her husband created some, and maybe sometimes they worked together. Or maybe as a commercial artist, he received the assignment and simply passed it on to her. By the way, there was a precedent for an artist's code placed below the artist's signatures: when Fontaine Fox, creator of Toonerville Folks, signed his work, he underlined his signature, sometimes a lot, sometimes with only a few lines. The more lines that appeared under his name, the more it was his own work rather than the work of his assistant.

Before closing, I should point out that there was a writer for Weird Tales named Kirk Mashburn. I wonder if Jaffery and Cook got their notes mixed up somehow, and on top of that, turned an M into a W. Another mystery.

I would like to thank Jean-Yves Freyburger for his contribution, but I would also like to thank Randal A. Everts for his own yeomanlike work over the last several decades in uncovering and discovering the authors and artists who contributed to Weird Tales, as well as for all of his contributions to this blog and to my understanding of the magazine. If you're reading, Mr. Everts, I would like to hear from you again.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley