Reading the Pulps

Sunday, May 14

This afternoon, I finished re-reading Saul Bellow's first novel, Dangling Man, published in 1944. In its imagery of the twentieth-century American city and of life in that city, it makes me think of the stories of Fritz Leiber, Jr., for example, "Smoke Ghost" (Unknown Worlds, Oct. 1941), "The Hound" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1942), and "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" (The Acolyte #10, Spring 1945). It also makes me think of another first novel, Hanger Stout, Awake! by Jack Matthews (1967), in its form (a series of journal entries), in one of its themes (a young man waiting to go into the army), and in the imagery of its title (dangling vs. hanging). The story in Dangling Man, such as it is, is of a man named Joseph, last name unknown (like Josef K. from Kafka's earlier novel The Trial). Dangling as he is between a kind of freedom in civilian life and regimentation in the military, Joseph spends his time reading the paper, walking from place to place, and talking--too often arguing and fighting--with his wife, his family, and his friends. He likes the comics and sometimes reads them twice in the same daily. He makes note of a lower form of art and literature, as well:

January 13

A DARK, burdensome day. I stormed up from sleep this morning, not knowing what to do first. . . . I fell back into bed and spent an hour or so collecting myself . . . . Then I rose. There were low clouds; the windows streamed. The surrounding roofs--green, raw red blackened brass--shone like potlids in a darkened kitchen.

          At eleven I had a haircut. I went as far as Sixty-third Street for lunch and ate at a white counter amid smells of frying fish, looking out on the iron piers in the street and the huge paving bricks like the plates of the boiler-room floor in a huge liner. Above the restaurant, on the other corner, a hamburger with arms and legs balanced on a fiery wire, leaned toward a jar of mustard. . . . I wandered through a ten-cent store, examining the comic valentines . . . . Next I was drawn into a shooting gallery . . . . Back in the street, I warmed myself at a salamander flaming in an oil drum near a newsstand with its wall of magazines erected under the shelter of the El. Scenes of love and horror. . . . (Meridian Books, 1960, p. 107)

In its description of a world so remote and alien from our own, this and other passages from Dangling Man are like something from science fiction, something that no longer exists, drawn from what is for us a fantasy approaching that of Coruscant in its galaxy far, far away, or an urbanized Mars of the future as in Total Recall.

The events in Dangling Man take place between December 1942 and April (the cruelest month) 1943. Joseph's entry quoted above, then, is for January 13, 1943. The magazines that Bellow's diarist might have seen on that newsstand under the El would probably have been dated February or March, but for the snapshot below of a month in the history of science fiction, fantasy, and horror pulps, I'll choose the month of January 1943. As you can see, a couple show the imagery of war. The rest might easily have come from a time of peace.

War looms over Dangling Man as it does over the January 1943 issue and cover of Weird Tales. Art by A.R. Tilburne.

War, too, on the cover of Amazing Stories. Art by J. Allen St. John.

Art by William Timmins.

Artist unknown.

Art by Robert Gibson Jones.

Art by Rudolph Belarski.

Artist unknown.

Text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Peacocks on the Cover of Weird Tales

I closed the last series with a cover showing a peacock. That made me think of a further entry on the peacock covers of Weird Tales. I wish I could say that this is a happier topic than the previous several series, but there's more human sacrifice and bondage here. 

There are four peacock covers in Weird Tales, a fair number for a subject you wouldn't ordinarily associate with weird fiction, although Flannery O'Conner, who wrote what might in a broad sense be called weird fiction or at the very least gothic fiction, was known for raising peacocks. I suppose the association between peacocks and weird fiction has to do with the association between peacocks and the Orient: very often, weird stories are set in that part of the world, or its villains originate there.

Weird Tales, November 1926. Cover story: "The Peacock's Shadow" by E. Hoffman Price. Cover art by E.M. Stevenson.

Weird Tales, August 1932. Cover story: "Bride of the Peacock" by E. Hoffman Price. Cover art by T. Wyatt Nelson.

Weird Tales, November 1937. Cover story "Living Buddhess" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

Weird Tales, November 1943. Cover story: "The Valley of the Assassins" by Edmond Hamilton. Cover art by A.R. Tilburne. The artist Tilburne specialized in depicting animals. It's no surprise that his peacock would be the most prominent on the cover of Weird Tales.

I still have a few categories to go in completing this series on the cover themes and subjects in Weird Tales, but I would like to take a break from it and get back to the biographies of the writers and artists who contributed to "The Unique Magazine." First, though, I will write about the secret origins of zombies in America.

Text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

American Indians and the American West on the Cover of Weird Tales

American Indians and the American West appeared on four covers of Weird Tales. There is also one cover showing a scene from Old Mexico. Each of the four Western covers has a supernatural or weird element, signifying that they are part of what is now considered a distinct sub-genre, the weird Western. So what are the origins of the weird Western story? Well, if you look at the Wikipedia article "Weird West," you will see several lists of weird Westerns in different forms. The first chronologically on those lists is "The Horror from the Mound" by Robert E. Howard, published in Weird Tales, May 1932. It's clear by the following covers that there were Westerns with weird or supernatural elements before Howard's tale, but is a ghost story also a weird tale? I'm not sure that it is, if in fact weird fiction is a separate genre from the ghost story. That would bring up a question, then: What was the first weird Western story in the history of literature?

Weird Tales, January 1924. Cover story: None. Cover art by R.M. Mally. Like I said, a ghost story isn't necessarily a weird story. If an illustration doesn't have a story or poem as its subject--if it stands alone and tells its own story--then Mally's cover may be interpreted as a ghost story and may not be a weird tale. Or maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe this cover goes into the category of weird Western anyway.

Weird Tales, February 1924. Cover story: None. Cover art by R.M. Mally. Two successive months, two successive Western covers by R.M. Mally. First the cowboy, then the Indian. In fact, this is the first cover for Weird Tales showing what is now called a minority. I have written about it before in my entry on Ralph Allen Lang, here.

Weird Tales, January 1928. Cover story: "The Gods of East and West" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by C.C. Senf. I wrote about this cover recently. I find it bizarre, ugly, and poorly executed. I can't imagine what the editorial staff was thinking when they commissioned it.

Weird Tales, November 1928. Cover story: "The Mystery of Acatlan" by Rachael Marshall and Maverick Terrell. Cover art by C.C. Senf. This is a much better cover by Senf that the previous one, but I don't get the weird (meaning perverted) obsession pulp writers, artists, and readers had with whips, chains, bondage, and overall sadomasochism. You'll see more covers like this one soon. Too many in fact.

Weird Tales, September 1942. Cover story: "Satan's Bondage" by Manly Banister. Cover art by A.R. Tilburne. I have written about this cover before, too. It's partly a swipe. You can read more about it by clicking here.

Text and captions copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Dragons on the Cover of Weird Tales

While we're on the subject of mythological creatures, I figured I would show the covers of Weird Tales with dragons. I count four of them and I like all four. As a bonus, there is a unicorn in the fourth image. You have seen all of these before in different categories, but here they all are, together at last.

Weird Tales, July 1926. Cover story: "Through the Vortex" by Donald Edward Keyhoe. Cover art by E.M. Stevenson. Donald Keyhoe was trained as a pilot. It's no wonder that he would cast his heroes in the mode of a pilot or other similar adventurer. For his (or her) part, the artist Stevenson created five covers for Weird Tales, all in 1926.

Weird Tales, January 1941. Cover story: "Dragon Moon" by Henry Kuttner. Cover art by Harold S. De Lay. I have written about this cover before. It reminds me of works by Frazetta--or maybe I should say it the other way around.

Weird Tales, September 1943. Cover story: "Black Barter" by Robert Bloch. Cover art by A.R. Tilburne. Yeah, I know, Tilburne swiped from other artists sometimes. It looks like he swiped one of Virgil Finlay's creatures for this illustration (below the man's left hand). But as long as he made pictures like this, I think we can forgive him.

Weird Tales, July 1948. Cover story: None. Cover art by Matt Fox. I don't know about you, but I think the cover artists for Weird Tales in the 1940s stack up pretty well against the cover artists of the 1930s. Matt Fox's gorgeous, phantasmagoric cover here is a demonstration of just how well.

Text and captions copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Haunted Houses and Graveyards on the Cover of Weird Tales

Today is Halloween and time for cover art showing haunted houses and graveyards. I count thirteen of them, mostly from the postwar era and more than half of them from two artists, Lee Brown Coye and Matt Fox. Again, there seems to be some significance to the fact that after World War II, popular culture returned or at least tried to return to prewar monsters, horror, and fantasy. Did it work? Maybe for a while. The again, maybe not. The war changed the world beyond any going back, despite the drive among writers of fantasy and weird fiction to return to the past or to bring the past into the present. The haunted house, a kind of ruin in which people from the past reside, and the graveyard, where the past, though never at rest, lies buried, seem to be the proper setting for weird fiction. As these covers show, they also offer the artist plenty of material for his or her picture-making. Notice, for example, that in nine of the thirteen images below there is either a bird (a vulture or a crow) or a bat.

Weird Tales, April 1939. Cover story: "Susette" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by Virgil Finlay.

Weird Tales, September 1944. Cover story: None. Cover art by A.R. Tilburne. This is a fine cover. Unfortunately it's a swipe, as the image below shows.

The American Weekly, Sunday, October 18, 1931. The article is called "A Painter Interprets Beethoven; Music Translated into Pictures," and though the image of this page is too small to read, it seems certain to me that it is about the Spanish artist Josep Segrelles Albert (1885-1969), also called Josep Segrelles or Jose Segrelles. Segrelles' art predates Tilburne's by thirteen years. You could argue that Tilburne, up against a deadline, might be justified in swiping an image from an old newspaper article. In other words, no one would have known. You could also argue that Tilburne made the image his own in some ways, by redoing the background and in general by tightening up and more or less posterizing the remainder of the image. His vulture actually looks better than that drawn by his predecessor. (Tilburne was especially good with animals.) Still, it's a swipe and seemingly done without attribution. Speaking of attribution, the website Yankee Classics identified this swipe before me.

Weird Tales, July 1945. Cover story: None. Cover art by Lee Brown Coye. This was Coye's first cover for Weird Tales. It's not quite accurate to say that there was no cover story. It's just that the cover story didn't appear in Weird Tales. Now that you're confused, I'll explain: Lee Brown Coye provided illustrations for the hardbound anthology Sleep No More (1944), edited by August Derleth. One of the stories in that book is "Count Magnus" by M.R. James. Coye drew a black-and-white illustration for that story, which was published in Sleep No More, then executed this color version of the same drawing. The editors of Weird Tales placed it on their cover. Unfortunately, M.R. James (1862-1936), a very fine writer of ghost stories and weird fiction, was never in the magazine. But an illustration for one of his stories was. Revision (Nov. 3, 2016): Now that I look at this picture more, I'm not convinced that it shows a scene in a graveyard. In fact I'm starting to think I should have a separate category for Lee Brown Coye's otherwise uncategorizable covers.

Weird Tales, March 1946. Cover story: "Twice Cursed" by Manly Wade Wellman. Cover art by Lee Brown Coye. I'm not convinced this is an illustration for a story. It might just have been an exercise in surrealism by Coye. I can't say, as I have not read the story. The image is strange and unsettling, though. I'm not sure that it shows a haunted house, although there is a silhouette of what looks like a building on the right. I'm not sure that it shows a graveyard, either, although it shows a cross in the ground on the left. Where else would I put this cover, though? With skeletons and skulls? Revision (Nov. 3, 2016): One of my readers suggests that the shape in the background is a butte. That could very well be. Or it could be a castle. So if that isn't a gravestone on the left, then this cover has to go somewhere else, into "Skulls and Skeletons" or Coye's uncategorizable covers. Second revision (Nov. 5, 2023): I have read Wellman's story and I find that this is in fact an illustration for his story. It is nonetheless strange and surreal, but we should expect nothing less from Lee Brown Coye.

Weird Tales, May 1946. Cover story: "The Valley of the Gods" by Edmond Hamilton. Cover art by Ronald Clyne. A very well done illustration, I think, and I think I detect the influence of Rockwell Kent.

Weird Tales, March 1947. Cover story: "Mr. George" by August Derleth. Cover art by Boris Dolgov.

Weird Tales, March 1948. Cover story: None. Cover art by Lee Brown Coye for the twenty-fifth anniversary issue and with a who's who of weird fiction writers on the cover. I think that's supposed to be a crow on the left. It looks more like a coot or a gallinule.

Weird Tales, May 1948. Cover story: "City of Lost People" by Allison V. Harding. Cover art by Matt Fox. I really wish we could have Matt Fox back.

Weird Tales, September 1948. Cover story: "The Whippoorwills in the Hills" by August Derleth. Cover art by Lee Brown Coye. The story is about birds, but there are no birds on the cover.

Weird Tales, November 1949. Cover story: "The Underbody" by Allison V. Harding. Cover art by Matt Fox.

Weird Tales, May 1951. Cover story: "Notebook Found in a Deserted House" by Robert Bloch. Cover art by Lee Brown Coye.

Weird Tales, January 1952. Cover story: "The Black Island" by August Derleth. Cover art by Jon Arfstrom. I heard it from Jon Arfstrom himself: this was a portfolio piece submitted to Weird Tales. It was not in the proper proportions for a cover illustration but was made so with a green patch pasted under the main title. So I'm not sure this is an illustration for a particular story, but, again, I haven't read the story and can't say for sure.

Weird Tales, March 1952. Cover story: "Morne Perdu" by Alice Farnham. Cover art by Joseph R. Eberle.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN FROM

TELLERS OF WEIRD TALES!

Revised on January 20, 2017.
Text and captions copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Mummies & Egypt on the Cover of Weird Tales

Mummies, Egypt, and subjects related to Egypt have been on the cover of Weird Tales seven times by my count. The first was the triple-issue first anniversary number of May/June/July 1924 and shows a generic Egyptian scene of Sphinx and pyramids. The next three show women being menaced by one thing or another. The last three are a little more complicated and not easily categorized.

There were Orientalists among the first generation of writers for Weird Tales, Otis Adelbert Kline and E. Hoffman Price chief among them. Farnsworth Wright must have been one of them, too, as he eventually saw a pet project, Oriental Stories/The Magic Carpet Magazine, into print. In any case, the mysterious East held the imagination of writers, artists, and readers alike for decades before Weird Tales came along, but an event of the 1920s brought Egypt to the fore, namely, the opening, on February 16, 1923, of King Tut's tomb. The first issue of Weird Tales, dated March 1923, was probably on the newsstand by then. A year later, as investigations at the tomb continued, Weird Tales capitalized on the interest in Egypt, pyramids, tombs, and mummies with its cover, by R.M. Mally, for Harry Houdini's story "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs." Universal Pictures got in on the action eight years later with what I think was the first mummy movie, called, appropriately enough, The Mummy. Like the covers of Weird Tales from the 1920s, that movie also featured a woman menaced by a villain, in this case, the mummy himself, come to life. And like the last two Weird Tales covers on the subject of Egypt, it had that woman in ancient Egyptian dress.

Finally, as a friend calls it, some hypostulatin': I wrote last time about World War II and noted that the last Weird Tales cover on that subject came only midway through the war. It seems to me that after the war, American popular culture had some new things to deal with and responded accordingly with some new or rapidly evolving genres: film noire, science fiction, the Cold War thriller. But it also retrenched (to use a military metaphor) into horror, fantasy, and monster movies, stories, and comic books. As we have seen, stories of monsters, being stories of the supernatural, have had a hard time surviving in a world in which all things are scientified (my neologism, not my friend's). Almost every monster movie made these days is actually a science fiction movie, as all the monsters have a science-fictional explanation. Even the recent Mummy series, overloaded as it is with computerized effects, has the look of a science fiction extravaganza. Anyway, it's strange to see an Egypt cover on the Weird Tales issue of March 1945, the month in which the Allies broke into Germany on the Western Front, while the war in the Pacific was finally nearing the Japanese homeland. What was in people's minds at the time? Did they think that we would just go back to the way things were before the war? Was there a kind of nostalgia for the prewar world? Even if there was such a thing, the people of the time must have known that the world had changed beyond measure and that there would be no going back.

Weird Tales, May/June/July 1924. Cover story: "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" by Harry Houdini. Cover art by R. M. Mally.

Weird Tales,  August 1927. Cover story: "The Bride of Osiris" by Otis Adelbert Kline. Cover art by the underrated Hugh Rankin.

Weird Tales, April 1928. Cover story: "The Jewel of Seven Stones" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by C.C. Senf.

Weird Tales, June 1929. Cover story: "The House of Golden Masks" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by Hugh Rankin.

Weird Tales, April 1930. Cover story: "The Dust of Egypt" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by Hugh Rankin.

Weird Tales, November 1938. Cover story: "I Found Cleopatra" by Thomas P. Kelley. Cover art A.R. Tilburne.

Weird Tales, March 1945. Cover story: "Lords of the Ghostlands" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by A.R. Tilburne.

Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

A Note from PulpFest

PulpFest this year was far less eventful for me than last year's show. I found a few books and magazines to add to my collection. I also found a couple of items for my research about my home state of Indiana and its connection to the pulps. And I saw a magazine cover that made me think of a recent comment from one of my readers who asked me to post images of all of the swipes Frank Frazetta made in his artwork. That's not something I can do, of course, as I don't know about all of the swipes Frazetta might have made in his long career. All I can do is look at Frank Frazetta's swipes and possible swipes--of which there are few by my estimate--and the swipes other artists made of his work--of which there are hundreds, if not thousands--and do this only as I find them.

And I found one, maybe, at PulpFest:

Here is the cover of Adventure for March 1931 (first) with a cover by Leonard Cronin. When I saw this image, I couldn't help but think of a painting by Frank Frazetta:

His cover painting for Atlan by Jane Gaskell (1968).

So is that a swipe? I don't think anyone can say for sure. In art, there is the concept of rhythm, that is, a repetition of elements so as to give a sense of movement. A pack of wolves lends itself to a rhythmic treatment, as in these two images. All are wolves, but each is slightly different from the rest of the pack. Together they give an impression of animation and movement.

Here's another wolf cover:

Weird Tales, September 1942, with a cover by Albert Roanoke Tilburne.

Note the encircling movement of the wolves in each picture and the way they advance into the foreground after emerging from beyond the horizon. Tilburne was known to make a swipe or two, but is this a swipe from the earlier Adventure cover? As Mr. Owl says, "Let's find out."

Here is the Adventure cover, flipped so that the wolves are in the same orientation as in Frazetta's and Tilburne's covers. There is some similarity in Frazetta's picture to the flipped version of Cronin's picture. More incriminating is Tilburne's treatment, for the wolves in the rear are posed in exactly the same way that Cronin posed his wolves more than a decade before.

So Tilburne is guilty, but is Frank Frazetta? That last wolf is suspiciously familiar: it looks a lot like Cronin's last wolf. Ditto the leaning conifer. But is this a swipe? You'll have to decide that for yourself.

Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley