Weird Tales in The Pulpster

Weird Tales published issue number 366, a sword-and-sorcery issue, in early 2023, but there was no mention in its pages of an anniversary. I found that odd. Did the publisher and editor not know that their magazine was turning 100 years old at about the time they were making their newest issue available? You would think they would, but I think it's very possible that they didn't. We should remember that the businesses behind the magazine have been extremely secretive for years. And we should realize that secrecy is a hallmark of dysfunction. Just be up front. Tell us the truth. We can handle it. We're adults.

I have found out during 2023-2024 that the business behind Weird Tales magazine is also more or less incompetent. We should never underestimate the power of incompetence in making a wreck of things. We see that every day now that we're a quarter of a way through the twenty-fist century. We might actually be living in a Golden Age of Incompetence. One of the bad things about living in a Golden Age of Incompetence is that we might not survive long enough to live in the Silver Age.

Anyway, there is no anniversary content in Weird Tales #366, issued in early 2023. (That issue is otherwise undated.) If there was any on its way, it would have to wait until the next issue was published, which would be--when exactly? We didn't know. So what happened instead? Well, Weird Tales was scooped by The Pulpster, the magazine of the pulp-fiction convention PulpFest, held every year in the Pittsburgh area, formerly in Columbus, Ohio.

Actually Weird Tales was scooped in this very space. After all, I wrote on January 5, 2023 (here), about the one-hundred-year anniversary of "The Unique Magazine." But that wasn't anything in print. Print means something far more significant than do a bunch of organized electrons, and so we have to give PulpFest and The Pulpster credit. If there was anything in print before The Pulpster #32, dated August 2023, I don't know what it was.

PulpFest is an annual pulp fiction/pulp magazine convention, usually held in about the middle of summer. I didn't go in 2023 and I don't have the dates marked on my calendar. I believe it was in about the first week of August as it has been for the past few years. Every year, PulpFest publishes a nicely made magazine called The Pulpster. I have a copy of that magazine from last year's PulpFest. It was a gift from my friend SP, who is an artist, illustrator, and fan of comic book art and popular illustration. Thank you, SP.

The editor of The Pulpster #32, August 2023, was William Lampkin. The assistant editor was Peter Chomko, and the publisher was Mike Chomko. There are five thematic sections included in issue number 32, plus some other content. The fourth section in the magazine is called "A Century of Weird Tales." Its contents:

• "A 'Weird Tales' Club Member's Claim to Fame: Hugh Hefner's Love of the Pulps Was Reflected in His Men's Magazines" by Tony Davis (pp. 42-43+), plus a sidebar called "What Kind of Man Reads 'Blood 'n' Thunder'," also by Tony Davis (p. 43).

• "Remembered for 'Weird Tales,' HPL: Frank Belknap Long Reflects on Writing Supernatural Horror and Science Fiction" by Darrell Schweitzer (first published in Nyctalops 11/12, Apr. 1976) (pp. 46-50).

(Boldface added.)

There are also mentions of Weird Tales and some of its authors elsewhere in the magazine, including in advertisements. The current Weird Tales placed a full-page, full-color advertisement on page 44. That ad includes part of the iconic Bat-Woman cover from November 1933. The copy reads:

Weird Tales

100 Years of Weird

1923 - 2023

A couple of pages before that is an advertisement for the sale of a complete run of Weird Tales. I might have met the man who was offering that collection for sale. That was a few years ago at PulpFest, when it was held in Columbus, Ohio. Anyway, the going price was $125,000. I don't know whether that collection sold or not. At an original average price of about 25 cents per issue, the total price for those magazines would have added up to about $70.

PulpFest is put on and attended by diehard fans. They know their stuff. This is more than what we can say, I think, for some people who are actually active in writing, editing, and publishing genre fiction. So, congratulations to PulpFest and The Pulpster for being first in print (as far as I know) to observe the centennial of Weird Tales, and for its continued success. Next year's event is scheduled for August 7-10, 2025, in the Pittsburgh area.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales-The Gorilla Connection

In 1924, a young girl of Chicago discovered science fiction in the pages of Weird Tales magazine. She had already seen a real-life fantasy land. Her mother had written about it:

     We were in a fairy forest, trees gray with lichen and green with cushioning moss, trees dripping with ferns and garlanded with vines. When the sun shone through that forest the moss gleamed with golden richness. There were trees with sharp, down-pointed leaves, a russet glow at the leaf stalk that hung like a jeweled filagree against the tropic blue of the sky. There were clouds of pink, orchid seeming flowers, that were not parasites, like orchids, but grew in silver green bushes, and everywhere were snowy reaches of wild carrot and wild parsley, and the familiar pungency of crushed catnip.

    There are no words to describe that forest. Pictures can give but faint clews. It was a magic spot. Arthur Rackham has dreamed of some of its moods, some of its wizard trees with long, curved arms, its crooked, outspread groves, like magicians in flight; but its color, its delicacy, the infinite fragility of its moods, the seduction of every line, the subtle revelation of its lights, are beyond dreams.

Joseph Faus and James Bennett Wooding wrote the first gorilla story, "The Extraordinary Experiment of Dr. Calgroni," in Weird Tales. It was published in March 1923, in the year before that little girl of Chicago first came upon the magazine. I speculated last time that gorillas made their way into popular fiction by way of the Tarzan stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first of which was published in 1912. I wondered, though: could gorillas have been in the news in 1922, in the run-up to the issuing of "The Unique Magazine"? I did a search, and the answer is yes, they were. I can't say that gorillas in the news were an inspiration for Faus and Wooding. But I found something more definitive and much more interesting.

The mother of that young reader of Weird Tales was American author, traveler, and later war correspondent Mary Hastings Bradley (1882-1976). In 1921-1922, Mary traveled in Africa with her husband, Herbert Edwin Bradley (1871-1961), a big game hunter in Africa and a real estate developer in Chicago, and her uncle, the taxidermist, explorer, naturalist, and conservationist Carl E. Akeley (1864-1926). The purpose of their trip was to learn about gorillas in their natural habitat in the Virunga Mountains of East Africa and the Belgian Congo. In her travels, Mary Hastings Bradley returned dispatches for syndication in newspapers in the United States. In 1922, her book On the Gorilla Trail was published.

Mary and Herbert Bradley took their six-year-old daughter with them on their 1,000-mile trip through Africa. There are pictures of her in old newspapers, sometimes dressed as a little explorer, posing with the chief of the Kikuyu, standing next to the Congo River, seated on a reel of cable on board ship on the return of the party to the United States. There are several pictures of her in On the Gorilla Trail as well. Her name was Alice Hastings Bradley. Born on August 24, 1915, she was, like her mother, an author. She wasn't known by her unmarried name, though, nor even by her married name, Alice Bradley Sheldon, sometimes just plain Alice Sheldon. Instead the world knew her--and knows her still--as the science fiction author James Tiptree, Jr.

A snippet of a newspaper feature article, "Studying Man's Big Brother in His Jungle Home," syndicated in American newspapers in early 1922. This version is from the San Francisco Examiner, January 29, 1922, whole page number 86. Shown here are Mary Hastings Bradley, her daughter Alice Hastings Bradley, and her uncle, Carl E. Akeley. There are more pictures in this article. I have left them out, for they show gorillas that had been shot in the course of the expedition. During this expedition, Akeley is supposed to have come over to the idea that gorillas should be protected rather than hunted. He helped to persuade King Albert I of Belgium to establish the first national park in Africa for just that purpose. It is still in existence as Virunga National Park.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Earl Peirce, Jr.-Aside No. 3

Bloch & Lovecraft

Robert Bloch (1917-1994) discovered Weird Tales in the summer of 1927 when he and his aunt were at the Chicago and North Western railroad terminal in his hometown. She told him to choose any magazine he wanted from the newsstand. "I immediately zeroed in on Weird Tales," Bloch recalled more than half a century later. His aunt wasn't very happy with the choice, but at the tender age of ten Bloch had made the discovery of a lifetime. (1)

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), Bloch's soon-to-be idol and mentor, didn't have a story in Weird Tales that summer. Bloch would have had to wait until the October issue to read one instead. If that's what happened--if the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales really was Bloch's first encounter with Lovecraft--then it would have been a perfect introduction, for that's when "Pickman's Model" first appeared. I'm pretty sure "Pickman's Model"--the Night Gallery version--was my introduction to Lovecraft, too, though I didn't know it at the time.

Six years later, Bloch was living in Milwaukee and rising at 6:30 on the first of every month to dress and then rush away from his home on East Knapp Street to the cigar store on Ogden Avenue, gasping, clutching his quarter, hot to buy the first of only two or three copies of Weird Tales carried by the spinster ladies who ran the store. (One sold cigars. The other smoked them.) (2) Bloch turned sixteen that year. Only a couple of more years would pass before his own byline began appearing in Weird Tales.

Nineteen thirty-three year was a fateful year in Bloch's career. He had already had his first letter printed in "The Eyrie," the letters column of Weird Tales. That was in November 1932. (He asked that Weird Tales remain decidedly weird. His letter is also about Conan, a character Bloch is supposed to have disliked intensely.) Shortly after his sixteenth birthday, Bloch wrote a fan letter to Lovecraft. In pretty short order, he received a reply, dated April 22, 1933. Thus began a short but voluminous correspondence. "He was the man who I most admired in fantasy, next to Edgar Allan Poe," Bloch remembered. "He is the man who suggested that I write, encouraged me to write. He is the man responsible for my writing career. And I would say he is probably the strongest formative influence--outside of my own parents--on my entire life." (3)

The letters between Bloch and Lovecraft would continue until the end of Lovecraft's brief remaining years on earth. Bloch was devastated when Lovecraft died in March 1937. "At the age of twenty, the news of his fate came to me as a shattering blow," Bloch remembered. (4) In an effort to recuperate from the blow, he answered an invitation from Henry Kuttner (1915-1958), another young author who had suffered the shock, to visit him in California. Bloch made the trip in May. During his stay on the West Coast, he also met Fritz Leiber, Jr. (1910-1992) and C.L. Moore (1911-1984), fresh from her Hoosier home. Kuttner and Moore would later marry.

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb) lists more than four dozen published letters and cards from Lovecraft to his young correspondent. (There is no corresponding list, no pun intended, of letters from Bloch to Lovecraft.) Six of these letters were published in Lovecraft's Selected Letters, which were issued in five volumes by Arkham House. (And other publishers, too?--I'm not sure.) They are: No. 624-June 9, 1933; No. 645-Aug. 19, 1933; No. 662-Nov. 1933; No. 748-Jan. 25, 1935; No. 780-Apr. 30, 1935; No. 814-Dec. 4, 1935. Lovecraft's last letter in the ISFDb list was dated January 25, 1937, the same month in which "The Thing on the Doorstep," Lovecraft's last story published in his lifetime in Weird Tales, appeared. Two months after that he was in his grave. Bloch also wrote letters to Weird Tales. According to Thomas G.L. Cockcroft's index, there were twenty-six of them between November 1932 and July 1945. That number puts him in sixth place behind Henry Kuttner in the list of most prolific letter writers in "The Eyrie." 

I have one more piece of information from the Centipede Press book Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle (2009). In an article called "Robert Bloch on Weird Tales," the author remembered his association with the magazine and its contributors. Asked by his editor to mention his own favorites among the stories he wrote for Weird Tales, Bloch responded: "Certainly there will always be a special place in my affections for the early yarns written in the Lovecraftian style--the Egyptian cycle which gradually evolved from them," and so on. In this series, I have written about what seems to be a kind of mini-mythos invented by Robert Bloch, with Mysteries of the Worm (or De Vermis Mysteriis) by Ludvig Prinn playing a central role. Now it seems that the mythos has a name: the Egyptian Cycle. It's not in my imagination after all. In fact, Robert Price has already written about it in an article called "The Egyptian Tales of Robert Bloch" on The Lovecraft Ezine. That happened six years ago, on October 14, 2014. You can read it by clicking here. Mr. Price has also discussed the stories in the cycle, all from Weird Tales:

• "The Faceless God" (May 1936)
• "The Opener of the Way" (Oct., 1936)
• "The Brood of Bubastis" (Mar. 1937)
• "The Secret of Sebek" (Nov. 1937)
• "The Fane of the Black Pharaoh" (Dec. 1937)
• "The Eyes of the Mummy" (Apr. 1938)
• "Beetles" (Dec. 1938)

Half of these were published during Lovecraft's final year on earth. "The Brood of Busbastis" appeared in the same issue in which Earl Peirce, Jr.'s story "The Last Archer" was published. Ironically, that was in March 1937, the same month in which Lovecraft died. Peirce's story seems to be connected to Bloch's Egyptian Cycle. Maybe we can add it to the list as Story Number 7-1/2. As I have already noted, Peirce's first story, "Doom of the House of Duryea," mentions Ludwig Prinn, but doesn't seem to have a connection to the Egyptian Cycle. So were there actually two connected mini-mythos creations, the Egyptian Cycle and the Mysteries of the Worm/Ludwig Prinn cycle? Or maybe a more important question is this: Does it really matter?

Notes

(1) "Time Traveling with H.P. Lovecraft: The First World Fantasy Convention," by Robert Bloch in Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle (Centipede Press, 2009), page 255.

(2) Ditto, page 256.

(3) "Robert Bloch Interviewed by Will Murray, 1975," in Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle (Centipede Press, 2009), page 269.

(4) "Time Traveling with H.P. Lovecraft: The First World Fantasy Convention," by Robert Bloch in Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle (Centipede Press, 2009), page 261.

From left to right, Henry Kuttner, Catherine L. Moore, Robert Bloch, and an unidentified woman, possibly C.L. Moore's friend Marjorie, a picture taken in Southern California in or about May 1937, possibly by Forrest J Ackerman. Bloch made the trip at Kuttner's invitation. Both were in mourning at the death of H.P. Lovecraft in March, but both seem to be having a little fun.

Kuttner had a kind of dour appearance, I think, but he was supposed to have been one of the funniest men in science fiction. He has reason for a little happiness in this picture, even if it isn't showing exactly: that's his future wife sitting next to him. The force of her gravity is even drawing him in a little.

As for C.L. Moore, she must have had the bluest of eyes, so blue that her irises often disappeared in photographs, like the eyes of Johnny Reb or Billy Yank from days of yore--like the eyes of her hero, too, Northwest Smith. Count Kuttner lucky: Catherine L. Moore was an extraordinarily charming and beautiful woman. Count me a little jealous, too.

Bloch doesn't seem to be too broken up, either. Being in the company of women can do that to a man. In fact he's clowning for the camera, pretending the kind of mayhem that one of his characters might have perpetrated. A shy or introverted man is likely to do that kind of thing, too, when women are around.

The other woman is unidentified, but Bloch later remembered a friend of C.L. Moore who accompanied her on the trip from Indiana. He even remembered her name, Marjorie. I suspect it is she, and if it is, I'm happy we have her picture and identity after these many decades.

The photograph is from Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction by James Gunn (1975), page 142.

I would like to acknowledge the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, Thomas G.L. Cockcroft, and Robert Price, and to thank Randal A. Everts for the book Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle.

Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Rod Serling and Weird Tales

Yesterday I wrote about Charles Beaumont. That leads me today to Rod Serling (1924-1975) and The Twilight Zone.

Not long ago I read a story reprinted from Weird Tales--I wish I could remember the title--and when I reached the end, I thought, "This is like an episode of The Twilight Zone." Then it occurred to me that a story from Weird Tales isn't like an episode of The Twilight Zone. If anything, the reverse is true, for Weird Tales came first. That leads to this question: Was Rod Serling a reader of Weird Tales in his youth? It took me awhile to find the answer.

I started with a biography, Rod Serling: The Dreams and Nightmares of Life in the Twilight Zone by Joel Engel (1989). The book lacks an index, so I had two choices: read it or page through it. I paged through it and finally came to this:

So what attracted Rod Serling, the writer, to the world of the fantastic? Bob Serling says that his brother told him "The Twilight Zone" sprang from his frequent insomniac nights, when his active imagination--fed by his lifelong love of horror films, his war experiences, and the stories of such writers as Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and H.P. Lovecraft--contrived fantastical plots that seemed plausible in the predawn. Carol Serling says that her husband "wanted to believe" in the unseen, but had no direct experiences himself. (p. 103)

Although Robert A. Heinlein contributed to Weird Tales, he was more closely associated with Astounding Science-Fiction. Ray Bradbury had twenty-five stories printed in Weird Tales beginning with the November 1942 issue. It's likely that if he read Ray Bradbury, Serling also read Weird Tales. However, in pretty rapid order, Rod Serling turned eighteen (on December 25, 1942), graduated from high school (in late January 1943), was inducted into the army (the next day), and boarded a bus for Fort Niagara (on February 3). In other words, he got exactly one chance to read a story by Ray Bradbury in Weird Tales before reaching draft age. But Bob Serling mentioned H.P. Lovecraft, too, and though Lovecraft's works were reprinted here and there after his death in 1937, his name is inextricably linked with the magazine Weird Tales.

Still no proof.

Next I found The Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Scott Zicree (1982). The index in that book is scanty. That meant more page-by-page searching--but not much. Here's Bob Serling again on page 3:

We were fairly close as kids . . . . The two of us used to read Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, Weird Tales--all of the pulps.

With that, we can put Rod Serling with Ward Cleaver on the list of famous readers of Weird Tales.

All that brings up another question. Was The Twilight Zone in the genre of weird fiction? I can't say. I have never read a good definition of the term weird fiction. But there are episodes of The Twilight Zone that are very much like stories from Weird Tales. Rod Serling read Weird Tales as a boy. In his insomnia, he "contrived fantastical plots." Although Weird Tales met its end in 1954, it would still have been fresh in the memory when The Twilight Zone made its debut in 1959. Maybe one way of thinking of Rod Serling's brainchild is simply as a continuation in the spirit of Weird Tales.

Note: You can read more about Rod Serling and Weird Tales in my article of September 16, 2011, "Weird Tales on Film: Rod Serling's Night Gallery," here.

Rod Serling (1924-1975), not from The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) but from Rod Serling's Night Gallery (1970-1973).

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Gahan Wilson (b. 1930)

Cartoonist, Illustrator, Author

Born October 18, 1930, Evanston, Illinois

The last illustration in the last issue of Weird Tales (September 1954) was by Gahan Wilson, then just twenty-three and at the beginning of his long career as an artist of the macabre. Born blue and breathless, Gahan Allen Wilson was shocked into life by an alert physician. Raised an atheist by his Catholic mother, Wilson went to the Art Institute of Chicago as she would have liked to do. P.T. Barnum and William Jennings Bryan were relatives, helping to make his family an unusual milieu. It's no wonder that he draws weird, creepy, strange, and demented cartoons. What counts is that they're also funny.

Over the course of his career, Gahan Wilson has drawn cartoons for Playboy, The New Yorker, Collier's, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and National Lampoon. He has also authored and illustrated several books. Fantagraphics Books has recently published a number of collections of his work. Mr. Wilson is well known for his cartoons for Playboy. What is less well known is that Hugh Hefner, co-founder and editor-in-chief, was also a reader of Weird Tales.

Gahan Wilson's Illustrations in Weird Tales

"The Night" by Dorothy Quick (Sept. 1954)

Further Reading

See "Gahan Wilson and the Comedy of the Weird," an interview by Richard Gehr, in The Comics Journal on line, April 27, 2011, at:

http://www.tcj.com/gahan-wilson/

See also the official Gahan Wilson website at: http://www.gahanwilson.com/.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales on Film-Leave It to Beaver

Leave It to Beaver

Who was the most famous reader of Weird Tales? You can make a case that it was Ward Cleaver, fictional father of Wally and Beaver in Leave It to Beaver. In a 1958 episode entitled "Voodoo Magic," Ward explains to June that there isn't anything wrong with the boys seeing a horror movie called Voodoo Curse. After all, he saw hundreds of horror movies when he was a kid. He also read Dracula four times. And he had a subscription to Weird Tales! One of television's greatest dads, shaped by Weird Tales!

Ward was of course played by Hugh Beaumont (1909-1982), a journeyman actor who had been in movies since 1940. Beaumont usually played either a serviceman or an authority figure such as a policeman, doctor, or minister. He was also in several genre films and TV shows, mostly Western and crime dramas. He played detective Mike Shayne in three quickies from 1946. Beaumont also appeared in an episode of The Adventures of Superman, called "The Big Squeeze" (1953). His science fiction films include Lost Continent (1951), The Mole People (1956), and The Human Duplicators (1965). By the way, no one should mistake Hugh Beaumont for Hugh Marlowe, another long-time actor who appeared in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956).

You can read more about Ward Cleaver and Weird Tales at a website called Television Terrors, here.

Lost Continent, from 1951, is a variation on the Lost World theme, used in countless tales by writers of fiction (and pseudoscience) and real-life adventurers. Hugh Beaumont played Robert Phillips.

The Mole People is based on a different theme from fantasy fiction (and again, from pseudoscience), the subterranean civilization or hollow earth. Readers of science fiction may have remembered the controversy over the Shaver Mystery, which had raged in science fiction circles in the late 1940s. Beaumont played Dr. Jud Bellemin and saw his name appear on the movie poster. Alan Napier by the way played Alfred the butler on Batman.

The Human Duplicators (1965) was Hugh Beaumont's last film. This time alien invasion is the theme.  Judging by this poster, Voodoo Curse would have been pretty mild fare compared to The Human Duplicators.

Thanks to MMH for the tip on Ward Cleaver as a reader of Weird Tales.

Copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley