Weird Menace Magazines-Part 2

The weird menace pulps, also called the horror or shudder pulps, began with the October 1933 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine, published by Harry Steeger and his Popular Publications. Steeger got the idea from attending Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Paris, Grand Guignol for short. (Strangely enough, the name means "the theater of the big puppet.") Weird menace was such a big hit that Steeger added two titles to the line over the next two years. Terror Tales was the first. It arrived on newsstands in September 1934. Horror Stories followed in the first month of 1935.

Rogers Terrill did triple duty as editor of Popular Publications' weird menace titles. He required three elements in every story: mystery, horror, and credibility. In other words, supernatural horror was not allowed. The events in a story had to have a logical explanation. "Throughout the next seven years [after 1933, that is], the contributors to Popular's big three horror pulps bent, mutilated, and twisted the word 'logical' into the most unimaginable shapes possible." (1) Although both call themselves weird, weird menace and weird fiction are separate genres.

If weird menace can be considered high-end, then Harry Steeger's magazines were it. Artists included Amos Sewell and Walter Baumhofer, both of whom later moved up to illustrating slick magazines, as well as Rudolph Zirm, John Newton Howitt, and John Drew. Among Terrill's stable of writers were Wyatt Blassingame, Paul Ernst, Arthur J. Burks, Hugh B. Cave, Arthur Leo Zagat, Nat Schachner, Ray Cummings, John Knox, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, and Bruno Fischer, aka Russell Gray. Mary Dale Buckner, who wrote under the name Donald Dale, was one of few female writers to contribute to the genre. Ernst, Cave, Zagat, Schachner, and Cummings also contributed to Weird Tales.

Dime Mystery Magazine announced a change in format beginning with its September 1938 issue. Thenceforth detective adventure would take the place of weird menace. The announcement was an early sign that the fad for weird menace was coming to an end. Nonetheless, Popular began publishing two new magazines of weird menace, Startling Mystery Magazine and Sinister Stories, in early 1940. Both had the misfortune of arriving at about the time New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia was waging a campaign against obscenity in magazines. Neither title lasted more than a few months. (2) Terror Tales and Horror Stories came to an end a year later, in spring 1941. By then, torture, blood, and violence were no longer mere abstractions, for World War II had begun. Fiends and madmen ruled not just the pages of pulp magazines but also half the planet.

Terror Tales

Sept. 1934 to Mar. 1941

51 issues
Published by: Popular Publications

Edited by: Rogers Terrill

Format: Standard pulp

Horror Stories

Jan. 1935 to Apr. 1941

47 issues

Published by: Popular Publications

Edited by: Rogers Terrill
Format: Standard pulp

Notes

(1) From the 21st Century Archives trading card set "Women in Terror" (1993).

(2) Startling Mystery was in print for only two issues, February and April 1940. Sinister Stories lasted for three issues, February, March, and May 1940.

Terror Tales, October 1934.

Horror Stories, March 1935.

Both could have been covers for Weird Tales.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Menace Magazines-Part 1

You can split fantasy fiction as finely as you like. The resulting list of genres and sub-genres might exhaust an ordinary reader. There is science fiction, space opera, planetary romance, science fantasy, weird fiction, supernatural horror, ghost stories, high fantasy, low fantasy, and on and on. Then there is weird menace, also called terror stories, which found a home in the so-called shudder pulps of the 1930s and '40s. Weird menace is distinct from weird fiction, so distinct in fact that the weird menace titles of the pulp era probably can't be called rivals of Weird Tales. But I'm making a catalogue here and I want to be thorough.

So how might one characterize weird menace? I can't say for sure. I have never read anything that I recognized as part of the genre. Maybe the best way to learn about weird menace is to look at the covers of the magazines in which weird menace stories appeared. It's not something you're likely to enjoy, not because the art is bad (it isn't), but because those covers show torture and cruelty, terror and torment, bondage and sadism, in short, every brand of violence and depravity an ordinary reader might want to avoid. In the minds of some, the word pulp means trash if not pornography. My guess is that a good deal of that reputation for pulp trashiness came about because of weird menace.

We can lay the blame for weird menace at the feet of Henry Steeger, president of Popular Publications (not to be confused with the Popular Fiction Company, publisher of Weird Tales). "I got the idea during a trip to Paris," Steeger explained. "They had the Grand Guignol Theatre there, with these violent situations, and the audience was very enthusiastic. I thought, 'We could do a magazine like that with the same sort of emphasis'." (1) One of Steeger's titles, Dime Mystery Magazine, was faltering at the time. The publisher decided to give it a jolt. To quote Lee Server, author of Danger Is My Business, "The October 1933 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine launched what would prove to be the most depraved and blood-soaked chapter in the annals of American publishing." (2) With that issue, the genre of weird menace was born. That was eighty years ago next month. Maybe we should say happy birthday.

According to Mr. Server, two aspects of weird menace distinguish it from stories of supernatural horror. First, there isn't anything supernatural: the events of the story are explained rationally--if not logically--by story's end. Second, the horrors in a weird menace story are recounted in great detail and with extreme intensity. If you detect a pornographic or fetishistic element upon looking at the covers, you're probably onto something. I don't believe it's pornography or fetishism of sex so much as of violence directed at one of the sexes. Weird menace may not be a sub-genre of fantasy per se, but it seems to contain an element of fantasy, perhaps of a different kind.

Because the horror in weird menace is natural rather than supernatural, the monster must be human: mad scientists, cult leaders, psychopaths, fiends, "gnarled dwarves, brainless mutants, [and] horny hunchbacks" abound. (3) Popular culture had placed women in peril before. (A look at the covers of the shudder pulps will show that those being tortured and tormented were mostly if not exclusively female.) The Perils of Pauline (1914) kind of story, from a generation before, comes to mind. The Snidely Whiplash character, who ties young women to railroad tracks or wants to run them through a sawmill, became a cliché early on. (4) I doubt, however, that anything before the weird menace stories was as explicit or depraved. That leads me to wonder: Why then? Why the early thirties? I won't hazard a guess just yet, but I'll listen to opinions. (If you would like to make a comment, please do so below.)

Violence, torment, and torture aimed at women are still with us of course. The hacker and slasher movies of the last half century have thrived on that formula. (5) I have written before about the demise of the supernatural monster in our scientific and technological age. There may not be any more room in the world for a werewolf or a vampire. An ax-wielding psychopath is another story. There's more to it than that, I think. It has something to do with women and sex, and maybe with emancipation. After writing six paragraphs, however, I guess I'll have to leave the theorizing for another day.

Dime Mystery Magazine

Dec. 1932 to Dec. 1949
154 Issues (39 Volumes)

Published by: Popular Publications

Edited by: Rogers Terrill

Format: Presumably pulp size

Notes: According to the cover blurb, Dime Mystery Magazine was combined with 10 Story Magazine with the December 1944 issue. It became 15 Mystery Stories with the February 1950 issue.

Notes

(1) Quoted in Danger Is My Business by Lee Server (1993), p. 106.

(2) From Danger Is My Business, p. 105. The book was published in 1993. I wonder if the last twenty years' worth of depravity would cause Lee Server to reconsider his assessment.

(3) From Danger Is My Business, p. 109.

(4) Relentless Rudolph, from C.W. Kahles' comic strip Hairbreadth Harry, is one example. Dan Backslide in the cartoon "The Dover Boys" (1942) is another.

(5) Other anniversaries: Blood Feast, which was, according to Wikipedia, the first "splatter film," came out in 1963. That same year, the first Italian giallo, La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much), also arrived in movie theaters. Giallo, by the way, is Italian for yellow, the color of mystery/thrillers in the Italian magazine and book market since 1929. Gialli--"yellows" or "yellow books"--is actually the name of the genre. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) is an exemplar (if that's the right word) of the hacker/slasher film. That anniversary is still a few months away.

Here's a typical, though comparatively tame, weird menace cover from the pioneering title in the genre, Dime Mystery Magazine. Guys with hoods are pretty common. So are women on tables, though usually they're bound in some way. It's interesting that mummies and Egyptian motifs are pretty common, too. (I suppose The Mummy [1932] was a sort of weird menace story.) I don't know the year or the name of the cover artist. "Harrison Storm" was a pseudonym of Bruno Fischer. "I was a little . . . I wouldn't say embarrassed," Fischer recalled, "but it was the thing to do, to use a pseudonym for these magazines." (Quoted in Server, p. 113.) Wyatt Blassingame (1909-1985) was a prolific author of stories and books, even for children.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Frederik Pohl (1919-2013)

Frederik Pohl has died. Pohl wrote a brief entry on his blog, The Way the Future Blogs, on the morning of September 2, 2013. Suffering from respiratory distress, he went to the hospital, where he died that afternoon. Frederik Pohl was ninety-three years old.

I reread his novel Gateway just a few weeks ago and learned a new appreciation for it. I'm eager now to read its sequels. There is only a little that's wrong about Gateway and far more that's right, including the ending, which is a surprise and adds a whole new dimension to the story.

Yes, this is living, and we should all do it while we can.

Copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Rivals of Weird Tales-Tales of Magic and Mystery

I have called this series "Rivals of Weird Tales" after an anthology of the same name, edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, and Martin H. Greenberg, and published in 1990. The stories in that book are from:

• Tales of Magic and Mystery
• Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror
• Horror Stories
• Strange Stories
• Unknown and Unknown Worlds
• Fantastic Adventures
• Stirring Science Stories
• The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
• Beyond Fantasy Fiction

I'm not sure that rivals is the right word. It suggests that either these magazines or their readers saw them as rivals of Weird Tales. I don't know that either one of those things was true. Weird Tales may have had a reputation for literary quality, but it was no moneymaker. If there was any rivalry, it would have been for prestige's sake. In any case, Weird Tales kept going over thirty-one long years. Rivals or not, other magazines of weird fiction and fantasy came and went. Tales of Magic and Mystery was one of the first to do both.

Tales of Magic and Mystery is remembered today mostly for having published H.P. Lovecraft's short story "Cool Air." Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, originally rejected "Cool Air." That's how it ended up in the March 1928 issue of Tales of Magic and Mystery. Wright must have had second thoughts, for he reprinted "Cool Air" in Weird Tales in September 1939. Lovecraft was gone by then, but readers still hungered for his fiction. "Cool Air" could almost have been considered a new Lovecraft story.

It's worth noting that "The Call of Cthulhu" was published in Weird Tales in February 1928. "Cool Air" appeared a month later. The two stories were probably on the newsstand at the same time. "The Call of Cthulhu" is the more innovative of the two, not only in its themes but also in its structure. "Cool Air" is more of an old-fashioned tale and bears a resemblance to "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" by Edgar Allan Poe. (It also reminds me of an episode of Tales from the Darkside called "A Case of the Stubborns" from 1984. The star of the episode was Eddie Bracken, a true national treasure, gone now these many years.) "Cool Air" was adapted to television in 1971 in Rod Serling's Night Gallery. The part of the narrator is played by a creature seldom encountered in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft: not just a woman, but a beautiful woman.

Tales of Magic and Mystery was a mix of fiction and non-fiction. The emphasis was on magic, as in stage magic. It's hard to read that last cover (see below), but it looks like the only byline to appear on any of the covers was that of the renowned stage magician Howard Thurston (1869-1936). Walter B. Gibson, also a professional magician, edited and wrote for the magazine as well. (Gibson was also known as Maxwell Grant, chronicler of The Shadow.) A good deal of the content of Tales of Magic and Mystery, including the artwork, appears to have been anonymous. The five covers are drawings rather than paintings. Only the first appears to be signed, and I can't even be sure of that. If you look at the bottom of the purple specter, you might see some unreadable letters.

Tales of Magic and Mystery came and went in less than six month's time and Weird Tales was once more without rivals.

Tales of Magic and Mystery
Dec. 1927 to Apr. 1928
5 Issues (Unknown number of volumes)
Published by: Personal Arts Company, Camden, New Jersey
Edited by: Walter B. Gibson
Format: Pulp size?

The covers of Tales and Magic and Mystery in chronological order, from December 1927 to April 1928.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Rivals of Weird Tales-Ghost Stories

If a magazine of genre fiction has to be the size of a pulp magazine and printed on pulp paper in order to be a pulp magazine, then Ghost Stories wasn't a pulp magazine, at least in its first two years of publication. It may not have been a weird fiction or fantasy magazine either. But for the sake of completeness, I'll cover Ghost Stories here in this series on rivals of Weird Tales.

Ghost Stories ran for five years under two different publishers. Bernarr Macfadden (1868-1955) published the magazine from 1926 to 1930. Good Story Magazine Company, under Harold Hersey, took over for the last two years in print. There were sixty-four issues in all. Fulton Oursler (1893-1952), later author of The Greatest Story Ever Told, served as editor. The magazine seems to have been tailored to women readers.

According to Wikipedia, Ghost Stories published tales by Robert E. Howard, Carl Jacobi, Frank Belknap Long, Agatha Christie, H.G. Wells, and Charles Dickens. A look at the covers will show that other authors included Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellen Glasgow, F. Marion Crawford, Upton Sinclair, and Roy Vickers (William Edward Vickers).

Ghost Stories gave up the ghost in late 1931. Weird Tales survived. 

Ghost Stories
July 1926 to Dec. (?) 1931
64 Issues (Unknown number of volumes)
Published by: Macfadden Publications (1926-1930); Good Story Magazine Company (1930-1931)
Edited by: Fulton Oursler (1) 
Format: Magazine size and coated or semi-slick paper until Aug. 1928, when the magazine converted to pulp size and pulp paper

Notes
(1) I found an oblique reference suggesting that Walter Adolphe Roberts (1886-1962) was also an editor. Can anyone confirm or deny this?

If you do a search on the Internet for Ghost Story covers, you'll get lots of results. I have chosen just four covers to show here. I don't know the year of publication nor the identity of the cover artist for any of these covers.

Ghost Stories was a companion title to True Story and True Detective Stories, both of which were supposedly true and usually confessional. The cover above demonstrates that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. The first two story titles--"She Married Her Astral Lover" and "Haunted by the Ghost of Myself"--are clearly confessional. If you add "I Went" to the beginning of the third title, you'll have another confession. The last title takes a little more work--maybe "I Was the Man Who Was 10,000 Years Old." I would rather point out that the title has a typical weird fiction construction: "The Man Who _____." I count thirty-five titles of that type in Cockcroft's index of titles.

Here's a typical Ghost Stories cover showing a spook scaring a nicely dressed young woman. There's that title again: "The Man Who _____." Note the absence of bylines, another difference between Ghost Stories and the typical pulp magazine.

Here's a byline, but only one: H.G. Wells, an author readers were likely to have known. The covers of Ghost Stories very often showed a ghost in his shroud. Seeing them reminds me of Ambrose Bierce's objection to a belief in ghosts:

There is one insuperable obstacle to a belief in ghosts. A ghost never comes naked: he appears either in a winding-sheet or "in his habit as he lived." To believe in him, then, is to believe that not only have the dead the power to make themselves visible after there is nothing left of them, but that the same power inheres in textile fabrics. Supposing the products of the loom to have this ability, what object would they have in exercising it? And why does not the apparition of a suit of clothes sometimes walk abroad without a ghost in it? These be riddles of significance.

A final Ghost Stories cover: there's the nicely dressed woman, there's the spook (this time without a shroud), and there--instead of story titles--are the names of four authors. On top of all that, the cover art is signed (but I can't tell by whom).

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Rivals of Weird Tales-Golden Fleece-Part 1

There's more to Golden Fleece Historical Adventure than meets the eye. It ran for nine monthly issues from October 1938 to June 1939. True to its subtitle, the magazine printed stories of kings, Romans, pirates, knights, Vikings, cavaliers, and swashbucklers of every stripe. Thomas G.L. Cockcroft included Golden Fleece in his indexes of weird fiction magazines. I have never seen Golden Fleece and I'm not sure I have ever read any stories from it. I can't say how much weird fiction might be found in its pages. But I'll take Mr. Cockcroft's word for it and include Golden Fleece Historical Adventure in this series on weird fiction and fantasy magazines.

Golden Fleece began in the year that the Golden Age of Science Fiction is said to have commenced. Science fiction of course looks forward. By definition, historical fiction casts its gaze into the past. So why, at a time when science fiction was proliferating in the pulps and in popular culture in general, did Sun Publications of Chicago decide to publish a magazine against the trend? I don't have an answer, but that hasn't stopped me from speculating before.

When we think of pulps, we think of genres: science fiction, fantasy, Western, romance, detective, and so on. However, in the early years, individual pulp magazines included a mix of genres. The leading titles--Argosy, Adventure, Blue Book--were generalists: they printed adventure stories and romances of every kind. It looks to me like Golden Fleece was an attempt at that more generalized approach. The title--Golden Fleece--would have evoked the title Argosy. (1) After all, Jason, a hero of Greek myth, quests after the Golden Fleece aboard his ship, the Argo. The stories from his voyage comprise the first Argosy. The subtitle of Golden Fleece--Historical Adventure--is informative, but it, too, echoes the title of an earlier pulp magazine, Adventure. (2)

What else was going on at the time? World War II was brewing and all eyes were on the Old World and the historical forces that had shaped a continent. I'm not sure that's it, though. Here's a better explanation: Ron Goulart wrote a book about newspaper comics of the 1930s and called it The Adventurous Decade. But it wasn't just an adventurous ten years in the comics. The movies were pretty adventurous, too:

• Moby Dick (1930)
• The Count of Monte Cristo (1934)
• The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934)
• Treasure Island (1934)
• Captain Blood (1935)
• The Lives of  a Bengal Lancer (1935)
• Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
• She (1935)
• The Three Musketeers (1935, filmed again in 1939)
• The Last of the Mohicans (1936)
• Captains Courageous (1937)
• King Solomon's Mines (1937)
• The Prince and the Pauper (1937)
• The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)
• The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938)
• The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
• The Buccaneer (1938)
• Beau Geste (1939)
• Gunga Din (1939)
• The Man in the Iron Mask (1939)
• Stanley and Livingstone (1939)

That's only a partial list and even then it's too darned long for a blog entry. The point is that the 1930s were a decade of adventure. (3) It would only have made sense for a magazine publisher to attempt to cash in on the popularity of historical adventure. I don't think there's any doubt that the decision was economic.

Most of the covers for Golden Fleece were painted by Harold S. De Lay. Margaret Brundage created the last cover. Both artists also contributed to Weird Tales. The names of authors published in Golden Fleece make a familiar list: H. Bedford-Jones, Anthony M. Rud, Robert E. Howard, E. Hoffman Price, Ralph Milne Farley, Murray Leinster, Victor Rousseau. The most prominent name on covers of the magazine who was not also published in Weird Tales was that of Talbot Mundy.

Golden Fleece Historical Adventure

Oct. 1938 to June 1939

9 Issues (Volumes 1 & 2)

Published by: Sun Publications, Chicago

Edited by: A.J. Gontier and C.G. Williams

Format: Pulp size (6-1/2 x 9-1/2 inches); 128 pages

Notes

(1) Argosy was still in print at the time. I won't go into the various name changes, but in one form or another Argosy was published from 1882 to 1978, a pretty astonishing run for an American magazine. Argosy was also the first pulp magazine.

(2) Adventure also had a long run, from 1910 to 1972. To round things out, Blue Book was in print from 1905 to 1975. Evidently the 1970s were a bad decade for old magazines.

(3) They were also the last decade in which the physical world was still mysterious to the vast majority of Americans. World War II, the Cold War, the end of empires, and other events would bring all that to an end. The events of this week show that Americans have grown weary of the world.

To be continued . . .

Part 2 published on October 19, 2013. Click here.

The nine covers of Golden Fleece Historical Fiction. According to Thomas G.L. Cockcroft, the first six are the work of Harold S. De Lay. Margaret Brundage was the artist on the April and June covers. Harold McCauley (1913-1977) painted the cover illustration for the May issue.

Updated on October 20, 2013.
Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Rivals of Weird Tales-Strange Stories

Published by Ned Pines' Standard Magazines, Strange Stories was more successful than some weird fiction and fantasy magazines, but only by a little. It lasted for an unlucky thirteen issues published from February 1939 to February 1941. Mort Weisinger was the uncredited editor. Leo Margulies may have served as editor-in-chief or executive editor. It's worth noting that Standard Magazines also published College Humor, which originated with J.C. Henneberger, founder of Weird Tales.

The credits for Strange Stories read like a who's who of contributors to Weird Tales: Robert Bloch, Otis Adelbert Kline, Henry Kuttner, August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, C.L. Moore, David H. Keller, Manly Wade Wellman, E. Hoffman Price, Seabury Quinn, Dorothy Quick. Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft were by then gone from the earth.

I assume that Strange Stories paid better than Weird Tales. It was also in publication at about the time that Weird Tales changed hands (1938) and editors (1940). Those three things together may have sent some of the writers from Weird Tales in search of new markets. C.L. Moore was one of them. Her last story for Weird Tales, a reprint, was published in the December 1939 issue. Eli Colter was another. Her last story for Weird Tales came in November 1939. Both were members of husband-wife writing teams. (You could make the argument that both were also the more skilled writers in their respective teams.) C.L. Moore wrote with her husband, Henry Kuttner, whom she married in 1940. Eli Colter wrote with her husband, Don Alviso, aka Glenn FaGalde, whom she married in the early 1930s. If the word "Featuring" on the cover of Strange Tales indicates the cover story, then Henry Kuttner, Eli Colter, and Glenn FaGalde accounted for eight of the thirteen cover stories, and Eli Colter and her husband had every cover story between October 1939 and June 1940. For a time, their little stone house in Azusa was a fiction factory. Eli Colter also had the last cover story for Strange Stories.

Although Hannes Bok drew some interior illustrations for Strange Stories, all the credited covers were by Earle K. Bergey and Rudolph Belarski. All subsisted on standard pulp imagery, especially the image of the woman in peril. Boys and young men can imagine themselves as rescuers of women. I suppose that's one of the reasons why so many pulp covers show women being menaced or threatened. We shouldn't underestimate the appeal of the scantily clad female form either. But there's also a current of misogyny running through the pulps. (1) The weird menace pulps, cousin to the weird fiction pulps, carry that misogyny to the extreme. But even a weird fiction magazine like Strange Stories could occasionally go too far, as in the cover for June 1939, which shows the severed head of a woman. It's a sick, gratuitous, and misogynistic image. I don't think Weird Tales would ever have published such a thing.

As I said, Weird Tales changed owners in 1938 and editors in 1940. Strange Stories was in publication from February 1939 to February 1941. In March 1939, Weird Tales and Strange Stories were joined in their ranks by Unknown, published by Street & Smith and edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. Pulp magazines were still very popular, but three prominent titles in the field of weird fiction and fantasy may have been too many (maybe two too many). Strange Stories came to an end in February 1941. At the same time (Dec. 1940-Feb. 1941), Unknown went from a monthly schedule to a bimonthly schedule. Although Unknown (later Unknown Worlds) was and still is highly regarded, it lasted only until October 1943. Even after all its troubles, Weird Tales ended up on the top of the heap. It would carry on for more than a decade.

Strange Stories

Feb. 1939 to Feb. 1941

13 Issues (Volumes 1-5)

Published by: Standard Magazines

Edited by: Uncredited, but widely accepted to have been Mort Weisinger

Format: Pulp size (6-7/8 x 9-7/8 inches); 128 pages (Feb. 1939 to June 1940); 96 pages (Aug. 1940 to Jan. 1941)

Notes: Standard Magazines also published Thrilling Wonder Stories (Aug. 1936-Jan. 1955) and Startling Stories (Jan. 1939-Fall 1955).

Note

(1) That misogyny has carried through into popular movies of today, in which women are treated so cruelly by screenwriters and directors, even if it is in very subtle ways. And we shouldn't make the mistake that these are the actions of mere fictional characters, for the male character that punishes, torments, mutilates, rapes, or murders a female character is nothing more than a stand-in for the moviemaker who very obviously hates and fears women.

The first issue of Strange Stories from February 1939, with cover art by Rudolph Belarski (1900-1983). One of the appeals of the cover art on Weird Tales is its weirdness. No other pulp magazine could have offered a home to artists like Matt Fox and Lee Brown Coye. The cover artists for Strange Stories, Rudolph Belarski and Earle K. Bergey, were good artists to be sure, but perhaps a little too literal-minded for weird fiction. You can see that in this illustration, especially in the faces of the three men, who were obviously drawn from models. 

According to the Speculative Fiction Database, the cover art for the second issue, April 1939, is uncredited. It's an improvement, though: a little weirder, a little more eye-catching. Once again, there is a woman in peril. The suggestion of decapitation is disturbing however.

Now there isn't just a suggestion of decapitation but a depiction of it, in color and on the cover. According to the Speculative Fiction Database, this cover for the June 1939 issue of Strange Stories was the first cover for Earle K. Bergey (1901-1952) in the realm of science fiction and fantasy. I wish he could have gotten off to a better start. 

August 1939, another cover by Bergey and one of the best of the whole series.

October 1939, another cover by Bergey, and another of the myriad pulp covers showing a woman in peril. I have to say, her two boyfriends aren't much good. 

Another Bergey cover, from December 1939. Bergey showed a big improvement in his technique over the course of 1939. Luckily he wasn't required to paint any more severed heads.

It looks like the three female characters from these two covers ran into a sale at the local dress shop: three identical dresses in the three primary colors. 

February 1940 and a Bergey cover.

Ralph Belarski was back for the April 1940 cover. Incidentally, Bergey and Belarski were both from Pennsylvania.  

June 1940, another Bergey cover and another supine woman in peril. This time the dress is green.

August 1940. Bergey was the artist. It looks like he might have used an airbrush on the woman's face.

October 1940 with art from an uncredited artist. 

If she's not being menaced by sorcerers, fiends, mad scientists, or conjured monsters, the woman in peril has to face some kind of animal. Here in Earle Bergey's cover for December 1940, it's a tangle of snakes. I think this is one of the better covers in the series.

The last cover for Strange Stories, February 1941. The art is uncredited, but note the woman's red Bergey dress.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley