The Return of "Ooze"

I have a couple of things left over concerning the first Weird Tales cover story, "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. I also have something new.

The first Weird Tales cover and the only illustration in the first issue was Richard R. Epperly's depiction of the events in "Ooze." Epperly's illustration isn't of just one scene from "Ooze," though. In fact, it combines different characters and different parts of the story into one image.

In the illustration, a young man rushes in from the left, brandishing a rifle and a long knife. In the center of the image is a frightened young women in the grip of a monster, a kind of land-octopus.

However, in the story, Lee Cranmer, the son, is first on the scene. He carries only a rifle.

John Corliss Cranmer, the father, is next to arrive. By the time he is on the scene with his pistol and knife, his son and daughter-in-law have already been engulfed by the giant amoeba.

The wall, shown in the background of the illustration, comes later in the story. John Corliss Cranmer has it built in order to keep the amoeba from escaping.

And of course the creature is not octopoidal (if that's a word) but protoplasmic, an eyeless and limbless colloidal creature made from ooze.

And in the story to ooze it returned.

* * *

After beginning this long series on the origins of ooze and the first issue of Weird Tales, I read "A Song for Lya" by George R.R. Martin. This was part of our weird fiction book club, conducted by my friend Nathaniel Wallace. Thanks always to Nate.

"A Song for Lya" was first published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact in June 1974, forty-nine years ago this month. In other words, Mr. Martin's story came along about halfway between "Ooze" and now. It shows how much things had changed in the time before and how little they seem to have changed in the time since it was published. Anthony M. Rud came of age before the Great War. His story is set in 1913, in the year before the war began, you might say before a long, sad withdrawing of the sea of faith that formerly ringed the world, or, at least at that late date, America. Now we find ourselves high and dry.

In both stories, there is the image of a woman being absorbed by a blob or protoplasmic mass. In "Ooze," that image is horrifying, so much so that it drives the elder Cranmer insane. That shocking and terrible image, though not made so vivid in Rud's prose, is very vivid in my own imagination. It sticks with me even now. It's no wonder that Cranmer's mind went off its hinges, for he had seen what he had wrought in the most terrible of ways.

George R.R. Martin described his own ooze-like creature:

Its color was a dull brownish red, like old blood, not the bright near-translucent crimson of the small creatures that clung to the skulls of the Joined. There were spots of black, too, like burns or soot stains on the vasty body. I could barely see the far side of the cave; the Greeshka was too huge, it towered above us so that there was only a thin crack between it and the roof. But it sloped down abruptly halfway across the chamber, like an immense jellied hill, and ended a good twenty feet from where we stood.

And what it looks like when the creature, called the Greeshka, absorbs one of the natives of his faraway planet, the Shkeen:

     I looked. His beam had thrown a pool of light around one of the dark spots, a blemish on the reddish hulk. I looked closer. There was a head in the blemish. Centered in the dark spot, with just the face showing, and even that covered by a thin reddish film. But the features were unmistakable. An elderly Shkeen, wrinkled and big-eyed, his eyes closed now. But smiling. Smiling.

     I moved closer. A little lower and to the right, a few fingertips hung out of the mass. But that was all. Most of the body was already gone, sunken into the Greeshka, dissolved or dissolving. The old Shkeen was dead, and the parasite was digesting his corpse.

That is soon to be the fate of the title character, who seeks union and in realizing it leaves her lover, named Robb, behind. He's devastated, but maybe only a little and not for long. (Strange devastation.) On his way off of the planet, he hooks up with another woman, who is also seeking union but has failed to achieve it with her now ex-boyfriend, the planetary administrator Valcarenghi. Valcarenghi is an individual, with boundaries he has established around himself like the wall Cranmer has built to keep in the amoeba. He does not seek an individual- or boundary-dissolving union with another person. He also believes in God, though perhaps only in an offhand way. He appears to be an untroubled man, or a man who keeps himself and any troubles he might have very carefully under control.

In "Ooze," union with a colloidal creature is terrible and horrifying. No one wants it. The woman, John Corliss Cranmer's daughter-in-law, goes to her doom involuntarily. She is the prey of the amoeba. In Mr. Martin's story, on the other hand, union is made to seem somehow attractive and desirable. The title character Lya willingly goes to her own dissolution. She wants to lose herself and be joined in love with others within the mass of the Greeshka. Cranmer, creator of the giant amoeba, believes in God. Lya and her lover Robb do not. They are devoutly atheistic. By turning away from God, Lya believes that her only hope for love and union is--to reduce things in the way materialism and reductionism require--to be dissolved in protoplasm. To his credit, Robb doesn't want to go out that way.

In the twentieth century, as in all others, there were those who burned with a desire to lose their identities and their individuality by being taken into a mass of men. This was one of the insights behind The True Believer, subtitled Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, written by Eric Hoffer and published in 1951. Little is known of Hoffer's origins or early life. Call him the Nictzin Dyalhis of a wider American philosophy and culture. He is supposed to have been an atheist, like Lya and Robb, who observes, "The Union is a mass-mind, an immortal mass-mind, many in one, all love." Mr. Martin may be an atheist, too. I can't say for sure. But that seeking after love and union, seemingly so necessary among us, also satisfied by a belief in God and actions based on such a belief, would also seem to be behind the worldly or atheistic drive after the dissolution of the self and of individual identity and autonomy. God offers us one thing. We refuse it and desire to replace it with something of our own making. Like children, we want to do it ourselves. And in the process, we--either gradually or suddenly--destroy ourselves or as much of the rest of humanity as we can. We need look no further than the murderous mass movements of the twentieth century--still alive in our own--as evidence of that. We seek after the eternal, the infinite, and the absolute without seeing that our seeking is in itself evidence of the Creator of all things eternal, infinite, and absolute.

I'll close by saying that being dissolved in protoplasm is in my view horrifying in both "Ooze" and "A Song for Lya." The difference is that it's made to sound not so horrifying and to be actually desirable in "A Song for Lya," at least by some of the characters in that story. I suppose that readers of today prefer the later horror over the earlier one, even if both are essentially the same. What a difference a century--actually only half a century, 1923 to 1974--has made.

"A Song for Lya" by George R.R. Martin was originally in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact in June 1974. The cover art, by Frank Kelly Freas, is for a serial entitled "Stargate." Interior illustrations for "A Song for Lya" were by James Odbert. This is where the connections begin.

The author of "Stargate" was Tak Hallus, a pen name, the meaning of which, in Urdu and Persian, is apparently "pen name." In "A Song for Lya," the title character's lover is named Robb. I can't help but associate his name with the word robot, more distantly with the character Robby the Robot, in other words, with something mechanical, material, and non-human.

"Stargate" is also the title of a television show. The premise of the show seems to be based in an older concept, one example of which is in the novel Gateway (1977) and its sequels, written by Frederik Pohl. The main character in Pohl's Gateway is named Robinette. He is human. His psychoanalyst, a robot named Sigfrid, is not, though, like Pinocchio and Data, he wishes to be.

Anyway, like I said, Tak Hallus is a pen name. (It sounds like a character name in one of Nictzin Dyalhis' stories of Venhez and Aerth.) The author's real name was Robinett, Stephen Robinett to be exact, who also went by the name Stephen Robinette.

Robinett's first genre story was "Minitalent," also in Analog, in March 1969. In "A Song for Lya," the psychics Lya and Robb are called Talents, for their psychic powers. So in 1974, when "A Song for Lya" was published, decades had gone by and yet there were still stories about psychic powers in Analog, which was, before that, called Astounding Science Fiction, and which was, of course, edited by a man who believed he had discovered a scientific basis for such things. We're still waiting for his results.

I haven't read "Stargate" by Stephen Robinett. But I wonder if Frederik Pohl could have been inspired by him and his story in conceiving and writing his own novel Gateway. Or maybe his use of the character name Robinette is just a coincidence.

By the way, Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" (1867) figures very prominently in "A Song for Lya." I sneaked in an allusion to it earlier in this essay. "Dover Beach" is an essential poem. Anyone who reads in English ought to read it and know it and return to it, again and again, like a wave on the beach.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

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

Weird Tales, March 1923: Main Title Logo

The first issue of Weird Tales was dated March 1923. What many fans forget is that "The Unique Magazine" had a companion title that had begun in print nearly six months before. It was called Detective Tales, and the first issue had a cover date of October 1, 1922. Edwin Baird was the editor of both magazines, which were published by Rural Publishing Corp., a then-new company started by J.C. Henneberger and John M. Lansinger.

There were five issues of Detective Tales leading up to March 1923. Their numbers and dates:

• Volume 1, Number 1--October 1, 1922
• Volume 1, Number 2--October 16, 1922
• Volume 1, Number 3--November 1, 1922
• Volume 1, Number 4--Nov. 16/Dec. 15, 1922
• Volume 2, Number 1--February 1923

Detective Tales started out in its first issue with eleven stories, plus eight nonfiction pieces, plus two editorial pages. I believe the first four issues (i.e., all of the issues comprising Volume 1) had forty-eight pages each. By February, the magazine had expanded to 192 pages and had begun calling itself "America's Biggest All-Fiction Magazine." The issue of March 1923 was Volume 2, Number 2. It, too, contained 192 pages. There were twenty-two stories in that issue, plus an editor's page called "A Chat with the Chief."*

Richard R. Epperly created the cover illustration for the first issue of Weird Tales. He also created the cover illustration for the March 1923 issue of Detective Tales. These two covers appear below, side by side. As you can see, both covers were printed using a two-color process, and the color scheme on both is the same, orange and black. However, Epperly's illustration for Detective Tales is a line drawing, whereas his illustration for Weird Tales is done in half tones. I'm not sure of the medium, but it looks like watercolor.

The designs are similar. Both have, on the left, a plaque-like design (or cartouche) containing cover blurbs. These were no doubt typeset. Above are the main title logos and subtitles for each of the two magazines. The main title logos appear to have been hand lettered, while the subtitles and other information (date, place of printing, price) were all typeset.

Richard Epperly was a commercial artist. I haven't yet read very much about his career, but I assume he took a course of study in cartooning, illustration, lettering, commercial art, and/or advertising art. His hand-lettered main title logos for Detective Tales and Weird Tales are essentially the same in terms of their design and technique.

I have a book called Speedball Text Book, prepared by Ross F. George. Mine is the 16th edition, which is dated 1952, but I doubt there were many changes from earlier editions. I think the first edition is from the early 1930s, or not long after Epperly created the cover designs you see below.  In any case, Epperly's lettering is similar to what George called Round Gothic with an F-B-1 Speedball pen point (p. 13) or Condensed Poster Gothic using an A-1 point (p. 41). Maybe Epperly modeled his lettering after one of these or a similar display face, or maybe he created his own style of lettering based on his art training.

Again, we should probably consider Detective Tales a companion magazine to Weird Tales. That's how I'm going to look at it. As such, it's deserving of study. I'll look into Detective Tales soon. But first, I have more on the first cover and the first issue of Weird Tales.

*Thanks to The FictionMags Index for its list of issues and contents of Detective Tales magazine.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales, March 1923: Cover Variants

The first issue of Weird Tales has a cover date of March 1923. The price was twenty-five cents. That was a lot for a pulp magazine, but inside were twenty-six stories, including twenty-two short stories, three novelettes, and the first of a two-part serial, 192 pages in all. The cover art was by Richard R. Epperly, a young commercial artist in Chicago. His was the only illustration in that first issue.

The cover story in the first issue of "The Unique Magazine"--it was called that from the beginning--was "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. Epperly's illustration shows the eternal triangle of man, woman, and monster, the man playing his role as hero and rescuer, the woman as damsel in distress, and the monster as monster. Was this the first depiction of a science-fictional monster (versus a folkloric monster) on the cover of an American pulp magazine? I can't say.

The cover of Weird Tales, Volume 1, Number 1, may have been a first of another kind: it was probably the first American magazine with cover variants. That wasn't intentional. Somebody at the printing plant messed things up by switching either the printing plates or the ink so that orange printed in black and vice versa. I'm not sure how many surviving issues there are of Weird Tales #1, but both variants are still in existence. And I can't say how many of each variant were printed. Suffice it to say that Rural Publishing Corp. was almost certainly not in a financial position to destroy the issues printed in error. The cover with the switched colors is a little odd--it looks kind of like a negative image--but it's not a complete disaster. Sometimes you just have to go with what you've got.

The explanation behind the mistake is that the printer switched the printing plates or the colors of ink. That suggests that this was a two-color process rather than a three-color process. The color orange, then, would have been printed from one plate (orange) rather than two (yellow plus red or magenta to make orange). The other plate would have been black of course. A two-color process would have been cheaper than a three- or four-color process but would still have allowed some color on the cover. A black-and-white cover--i.e., a one-color cover--would probably have been bad for sales, even if Weird Tales was the first magazine of its kind and practically guaranteed to find an eager and waiting readership.

That explanation doesn't go all the way, though, for the main title logo is the same in both versions: in both, the lettering is black and the lines above and below are orange. So could the cover have actually been printed twice, first with the logo, then with the illustration (or vice versa)? That doesn't make much sense. If you're trying to keep down costs, you don't send your stuff through the printing press twice. Maybe someone who knows about these things can propose an explanation.

Anyway, the first issue of Weird Tales was also the first issue of an American magazine devoted to fantasy fiction. Maybe (though I doubt it) it had the first science-fictional monster on the cover of an American pulp magazine. And it was possibly or probably the first American magazine with cover variants, even if those were unintentional. There are more firsts on their way and more about the first cover and the first issue of Weird Tales.

Revised February 13-14, 2023.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Bacharach, Blob, & Brennan

Today I write about a circle. The circle begins with Burt Bacharach, who died two days ago, on February 8, 2023, at age ninety-four. Everyone who grew up in the 1960s through the 1980s remembers his songs. There are so many that are so good and come so quickly to mind that as soon as you hear his name, one of them is bound to start playing in your head.

Burt Bacharach and Mack David collaborated on the theme song for the 1958 film The Blob. If you grew up during the 1950s through the 1970s, you probably saw The Blob either at the theater or on late-night television. Maybe a horror host presented it for your consideration.

The star of The Blob was Steve McQueen, about whom I wrote recently. We think of The Blob as a science-fiction monster movie or an alien invasion movie, but it's also a car movie and a teenager movie (even though Steve McQueen was already twenty-seven when it was released). Teenagers drive around in their cars and save the day in The Blob. The plot is like a cross between the first encounter with Mothman in 1966 and the movie American Graffiti.*

The plot is also like Joseph Payne Brennan's novelette "Slime," from Weird Tales, March 1953. Brennan gets short shrift when it comes to The Blob. You might think that the similarity between the two stories is just a coincidence. Maybe it's a case of convergent evolution. But if you consult the description of the Joseph Payne Brennan Papers at Brown University Library, you will find that there appears to have been legal action involving The Blob and "Slime." The word plagiarism comes up in fact. Unfortunately, we have only a description of the papers available to us on line. It would take a trip to the library, I guess, to find out what it was all about.

Click on the words below for a link:

Joseph Payne Brennan papers (Ms. 2009.011), Brown University Library, Box A, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912

"Slime" was the cover story for the March 1953 issue of Weird Tales. As it so happens, that was the thirtieth-anniversary issue of "The Unique Magazine," an anniversary that seems to have been observed only in "The Eyrie," in a letter by Irving Glassman of Brooklyn, New York, on page 70. That was the last chance for anyone to observe a nice, round-numbered anniversary issue in the original run of Weird Tales. The magazine came to an end exactly a year and a half later, in September 1954. Virgil Finlay did the cover art for both, March 1953 and September 1954.

Thirty years before "Slime," there appeared another slime-blob-jelly-ooze cover, the first in fact for Weird Tales. This was of course in the first issue of Weird Tales, March 1923. The cover story was "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. The monster on the cover looks more like an octopus. If you read the story, you will find that it's actually a giant amoeba. Whereas Rud told his story from the point of view of an after-the-fact human investigator, "Slime" begins with the monster.

And that leads into the next few parts of this series.

Two slime-blob-jelly-ooze covers of Weird Tales. On the left is the cover for March 1953, illustrating "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. The cover artist was Richard R. Epperly. On the right is the cover for March 1953, illustrating "Slime" by Joseph Payne Brennan. The cover artist was Virgil Finlay. Note that, although thirty years separated these two issues, the cover price was the same. Of course the first issue had a lot more content. As for the cover art, well, Virgil Finlay simply outshone most pulp artists. This is no exception.

*Terrence Steven McQueen (1930-1980) and I share a first name, though his has one more "r" in it. That gave him extra Vrr-oom. He was born in Beech Grove, Indiana, a town that has been swallowed like the Blob by my native city of Indianapolis. James Dean (1931-1955) was also from Indiana. I think Steve McQueen is way cooler. He was also a better driver.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

100 Years of Weird Tales

Welcome to the 100th anniversary year of Weird Tales.

Weird Tales began in March 1923, and despite nearly perishing the following year, it went on for a total of 279 issues in its initial run, finally reaching its end in September 1954.

Marvin Kaye dubbed Weird Tales "the magazine that never dies," and so far he has been right. Weird Tales has passed from publisher to publisher, editor to editor, and--I believe--from license-holder to license-holder. Even today, there are new issues in print and being readied for print. Few magazine titles from 1923 can make such a claim.

I'll jump ahead and say that the original Weird Tales celebrated its 25th anniversary in March 1948 with a special issue and cover art by Lee Brown Coye. August Derleth and Seabury Quinn contributed essays of appreciation in the form of long letters to "The Eyrie," the regular letters column of the magazine. Derleth's Arkham House placed an advertisement congratulating Weird Tales on its quarter-century in print. The magazine reached its end six and a half years later, in September 1954, or exactly thirty one and a half years after its beginning.

In the 1960s, Leo Margulies edited four paperback anthologies of stories, mostly from the original Weird Tales. Margulies had purchased the Weird Tales property in the 1950s. His plans for a revived magazine never panned out, but at least we have these four very nice books, two with cover art by Virgil Finlay.

In the 1970s, Weird Tales returned with four pulp-sized issues edited by Sam Moskowitz. Finlay once again contributed a cover illustration, this one for the fiftieth-anniversary issue, or whole number 280.

More returns followed:

Lin Carter assembled four paperback-sized issues of a new Weird Tales in 1981-1983. Next came the two Bellerophon issues edited by Gordon M.D. Garb in 1984-1985. A more confused era began in 1988 and continues to this day. As far as I can tell, there was no 75th anniversary issue, which would have come in 1998.

Publication of Weird Tales hasn't been regular or continuous since 1988. Nonetheless, Weird Tales at the century mark is still in print and still recognizable as a pulp-style magazine. That's fitting, I guess, for a type of fiction that very often returns to the past for its themes and subject matter.

If you go to the Weird Tales website, you will see that whole issue number 365 is available for order and that number 366 is being prepared for publication. In other words, there is an issue for every day of the year, plus one for leap day.

Weird Tales #366 is to be a themed issue, one that has been in preparation for several years, I believe. The theme is sword and sorcery. Sword and sorcery as we know it didn't come along until a few years after the original Weird Tales began. Nonetheless, if number 366 comes out by March 2023, we'll accept it as the 100th anniversary issue and I hope be happy with its contents. Bob Eggleton is the cover artist. His illustration shows a white-haired warrior facing a Cthulhu-like monster. In that, Mr. Eggleton has married the two genres, science-fantasy and sword and sorcery--as well as the two authors, H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard--most closely identified with Weird Tales magazine. Both of course also included themes, devices, and subjects common in two additional genres, weird fiction and supernatural horror, in their work. The so-called "New Weird" is supposed to be a mix of various genres and sub-genres. Proponents of the "New Weird" should know that that kind of thing has been going on for a long time and in fact came long before Weird Tales. A good example is in "The Gold-Bug" by Edgar Allan Poe (1843), about whom I will soon have more to say.

So I will begin a series on 100 years of Weird Tales.

Weird Tales, First and Last

Weird Tales in its initial run began in March 1923 and ended in September 1954. From the start it called itself "The Unique Magazine." (The word unique appears again on the cover of the final issue.) And Weird Tales was indeed unique, being the first American magazine to devote itself to tales of fantasy, horror, and weird fiction. The first magazine of science fiction, Amazing Stories, came along three years later, in April 1926.

The cover on the left, by Richard R. Epperly, illustrates "Ooze," an "extraordinary novelette" by Anthony M. Rud. It features what I have called the eternal triangle of man, woman, and monster. "Ooze" is a science-fantasy and a kind of super-mystery or science-mystery. I wonder if it could have influenced H.P. Lovecraft in his composition of "The Call of Cthulhu" just three years later.

The images shown above are not quite at the same scale. According to Robert Weinberg in his history The Weird Tales Story (1977), the first issue of Weird Tales is only 6 by 9 inches, or about the dimensions of an octavo-sized book. The last issue, with cover art by Virgil Finlay, is digest-sized, or about 5-1/2 by 8-1/4 inches. Finlay's cover, by the way, is a reprint of an earlier cover from August 1939: by its end, Weird Tales seems to have been just scraping by--until it wasn't any more. Weird fiction is about the past, often about decay and descent. By 1954, the magazine was in a state of decay. But now here we are nearly seventy years later, and Weird Tales yet lives.

Revised on January 6, 2023.
Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Eternal Triangle: Man, Woman, Monster

First I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year. I hope this year offers health and happiness to all.

Second, I would like to begin a new series in which I attempt to classify the covers of Weird Tales magazine. I'll begin with the cover of the first issue from March 1923 and the pattern it set for many covers to follow. The pattern is one of the eternal triangle of man, woman, and monster--not an animal, not another man, but a monster.

Every boy wishes to be a hero, to rescue the beautiful damsel in distress, to slay the horrible monster that threatens not only her but also perhaps his own happiness. (After all, if he is to go on living, he must have her and be loved by her.) I suppose every woman in her heart wishes to be a damsel, in distress or not. There may be something else at work in the eternal triangle though. A boy may wish to be a hero. An adolescent or man on the other hand may see himself as more monster than man. The eternal triangle in fantasy allows a man to identify with the hero rather than with the monster--to escape the real or imagined facts of his own existence. I think that's one of the appeals of the TV show Beauty and the Beast: the man who sees himself as a beast can believe that he might win the love and affection of a beautiful woman.

Pulp magazines abounded with images of the eternal triangle. In science fiction, the monster was often of the bug-eyed alien variety, a creature so common that it earned an acronym: BEM. In weird fiction and fantasy fiction, the monster was of other types, some of which you'll see below. With its illustration of Anthony M. Rud's "Ooze," Weird Tales began with a cover showing the eternal triangle. The man and woman are the subjects of a search by the narrator of "Ooze." The monster is the reason they are missing. Richard R. Epperly's depiction of the monster isn't quite accurate, for in the story the monster is not an octopoid (or Cthuloid) creature but an outsized amoeba. In any case, let the menacing and the rescuing begin.

Weird Tales, March 1923, the first issue of "The Unique Magazine." The cover story is "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud.  The artist was Richard Ruh Epperly. There is also supposed to have been a variant cover in which the black and orange plates were reversed.

In the eternal triangle, the woman is menaced by a monster while the man comes to her rescue. The woman may be in the clutches of the creature as in this illustration. In other variations, she is threatened by the monster (see July 1926, immediately below), or she is shielded from the monster by the man (see Feb. 1928, below that). The man sometimes has only his bare hands with which to fend off the monster's advances. More often he has a weapon, either a gun or a blade. The man in the illustration above isn't taking any chances: he has both gun and knife.

Note the somewhat childlike or primitive aspect of the drawing. Rather than face the monster as they would in three dimensions (thus facing away from the viewer), both man and woman are shown in profile and are looking at the monster as if they and it exist only in two dimensions. I doubt that any readers of the first issue of Weird Tales quibbled with the art: for the first time, they had before them an American magazine title devoted exclusively to weird and fantastic fiction.

Weird Tales, July 1926. The cover story is "Through the Vortex" by Donald Edward Keyhoe, later of flying saucer fame. The artist was E.M. Stevenson. The cover is now in full color, but there is still a somewhat primitive aspect to the art, especially in the dragon. The woman is being threatened by the monster, but the man--a classic pulp hero--intervenes. His weapon of choice: a pistol.

Weird Tales, February 1928. The cover story is "The Ghost Table" by Elliot O'Donnell. The artist was C.C. Senf. Once again, the man intervenes between the woman and the monster, in this case a scary table, so scary that the woman swoons. The weapon is again a pistol. This is the same issue in which "The Call of Cthulhu" appeared for the first time, yet the editorial staff of Weird Tales chose "The Ghost Table" as their cover story. That might not be as bad as giving Milli Vanilli a Grammy for best new artist, but you get the idea.

Weird Tales, September 1928. The cover story is "The Devil-Plant" by John Murray Reynolds. The cover artist was C.C. Senf. The monster this time is a plant. The man seems to be in no great hurry to chop at it with his knife, which--for some reason--has blood on it. Sexual imagery is probably unavoidable in depictions of the eternal triangle. Often the woman is wrapped in snakes or tendrils or threatened by long-necked dragons as in the cover from 1926. Here she is being engulfed in flora, more symbolic of the female than of the male, especially when the parts of the plant are vertically bifurcated. So this cover is unusual in that the monster is more feminine than masculine. There will be more monstrous plants in a later category of cover illustrations.

Weird Tales, February 1929. The cover story is "The Star-Stealers" by Edmond Hamilton. The cover artist was Hugh Rankin. C.C. Senf was a competent artist and occasionally produced a really fine cover. But for true weirdness, none of the early Weird Tales cover artists could match Hugh Rankin. And speaking of triangles, get a load of that monster. Note the influence of art deco, especially in the female figure, her clothing (such as it is), the bird-like motifs, and the lettering, no doubt done by hand by the artist himself.    

Weird Tales, September 1931. The cover story is the third installment of "Tam, Son of the Tiger" by Otis Adelbert Kline. The cover artist was once again C.C. Senf. The monster in this example is humanoid. The hero's weapon is a sword. I haven't read "Tam, Son of the Tiger," but I suspect it was inspired by the tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs. By the way, four of the six installments of "Tam" were cover stories. All four of those covers were by Senf. "Buccaneers of Venus" (following) also earned four cover spots.

Like some weird alien camel-like creature, sexual imagery rears its head again in Senf's illustration, nowhere more obviously than in the woman's skirt. The question is this: Does an artist purposely inject (no pun intended) symbolism into his work? Or is symbolism unconscious? I would suggest that symbolism is by definition unconscious. That's why the artist often shrinks (no pun intended) from showing his work: he knows that it reveals something about him, something that he may not know himself on a conscious level, yet is immediately obvious to the viewer. Did C.C. Senf mean to lay the staff of the monster's trident (perhaps as an extension of the monster's arm and hand) so neatly across the woman's breasts? Probably not. What about the club? The sword? Or the camel's neck and head? Did the artist mean to show them as sexual symbols? My guess is probably not, probably not, and probably not.

Weird Tales, December 1932. The cover story is the second installment of "Buccaneers of Venus" by Otis Adelbert Kline. The cover artist was J. Allen St. John. Here's a variation on the man-woman-monster triad. This time there are two monsters. The snake will reappear in a later category of covers. The man's weapon: a sword. Kline was back at it with "Buccaneers of Venus." The resemblance to the tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs is even stronger here. Weird Tales even used Burroughs' artist in J. Allen St. John for this cover.

Weird Tales, February 1933. Another month, another monster. The cover story (installment number four) and cover artist are the same as in the previous example. The monster, apparently a sort of spider-scorpion, is vastly different. Critics of Margaret Brundage might object to her floating figures, yet if she was guilty, so was J. Allen St. John on occasion. St. John's influence on Frank Frazetta, moreover on Roy Krenkel, can be traced back to illustrations like this one.

Weird Tales, May 1934. The cover story is "Queen of the Black Coast" by Robert E. Howard. The cover artist was the aforementioned Margaret Brundage. Again, the monster (enter stage left) is humanoid. Again, the weapon is a knife. But in this case, the man seems more vulnerable than the woman. She almost seems to be protecting him. Margaret Brundage was a big, tall woman and no shrinking violet. Her female figures by contrast are usually small and dainty. But perhaps only a female artist could have depicted Robert E. Howard's mighty barbarian in this way. (See also her cover for "The Hour of the Dragon," Dec. 1935).

Weird Tales, February 1937. The cover story is "The Globe of Memories" by Seabury Quinn. The cover art was by Virgil Finlay. The undead are monsters, even if they were once people. The hero must always overcome the prohibition against killing another human being if he is to survive among them. The hero in this illustration could be a self-portrait of the artist. The woman doesn't seem very involved in what's going on. She is clearly a posed model, more likely a photograph of a posed model from Finlay's morgue--no pun intended.

A photograph of Virgil Finlay from almost the same angle. I'd say yeah, that's him. 

Weird Tales, May 1940, the first issue with Dorothy McIlwraith as the editor. According to Jaffery and Cook, the cover art, created by Hannes Bok, does not illustrate a story in the magazine, despite the fact that Edmond Hamilton's byline and the title "The City from the Sea" are pretty prominent here. I haven't read the story, so I can't say one way or another. In any case, a little naked elf is still a man, and a woman in the clutches of a giant, green, furry bat-creature is still a woman in need of rescuing.

Weird Tales, January 1941. The cover story is "Dragon Moon" by Henry Kuttner. The cover artist was Harold S. De Lay. By 1941, Robert E. Howard was gone. Readers would have to make do with Henry Kuttner. The cover illustration is another iteration of the hero, damsel, and dragon image. Later readers of fantasy looked for the drama, action, and mystery of a Frazetta painting. De Lay's illustration is more subdued, but if you look closely, you can see foreshadowing of Frazetta in the horsemen in the background, in the technique in the dragon's scales and the hero's armor, and in his cloak, sword, shield, scabbard, and leggings.

By comparison, here is a painting by Frank Frazetta from 1972.  The man and the monster are somewhat similar to the figures in De Lay's painting. Unfortunately the woman is missing. Frazetta's work is entitled "Monster Out of Time." The double meaning may not have been intentional.

Weird Tales, July 1941. The cover story is "The Robot God" by Ray Cummings. The cover artist was newcomer Hannes Bok. (The male figure looks like a self-portrait of the artist.) What a change: the monster is a new type, the science-fictional monster, in this case a robot. H.P. Lovecraft, long dead, is relegated to a tiny blurb at the top of the cover. Ray Cummings, still kicking at fifty-three, gets the cover spot with a science fiction story. Note also the confessional and very topical title "I Killed Hitler." Not quite the Weird Tales of old.

A photograph of Hannes Bok, the artist and undoubtedly the model for the male figure in the illustration above.

There were 279 issues of Weird Tales, not counting variants published in Canada. I count thirteen covers in the category I have called The Eternal Triangle of Man, Woman, and Monster. Next, a variation: woman and monster.

Updated on January 23, 2014.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley