The Mysterious Dolgov-Part Three

One of the things about this ever-expanding Internet is that sources that were unavailable even a week ago are now suddenly here before us. I first wrote about Boris Dolgov on August 27, 2016. At the time, the only person I could find in public records by that name or anything close was Boris Dolgoff (1897-1989), a Russian-born Jewish poultry dealer in Seattle, Washington. I knew then that he wasn't our artist, but I wondered about a possible connection to Hannes Bok, who lived in Seattle for a couple of stints during the 1930s. Now, through a new search, I have a candidate for the Mysterious Dolgov, a supposition based on two and a half bits of evidence.

First, I found a death record. And after I found a death record, I found mention of Boris Dolgov's cause of death. I'll take the cause of death first.

On the website Notasdecine, the author, who seems to be anonymous, wrote in June 2009 a parenthetical statement about Dolgov's cause of death. Here it is in its entirety:

(Over the years I've heard stories from several old timers that he fell to his death by falling from the fire escape to his own apartment)

You might say the author at Notasdecine skimped on his information and sources. His sentence doesn't even end in a period. But if we accept that Dolgov fell from a fire escape; and we know that his genre credits ended in the 1950s, suggesting that something greater ended then, too; and we can guess that Dolgov was about the same age as Hannes Bok, then we can say that his death was untimely and tragic, just as Bok's own death would be in 1964.

That's half a piece of evidence. Now comes a whole piece from the Internet and posted there since I first wrote about Dolgov in 2016: a death record, from the New York, New York, Death Index, 1949-1965, states that a Boris Dolgoff, born circa 1910 (meaning, I think, that his age at his death was thought to be about forty-eight), died on November 4, 1958, in Manhattan. All of that lines up pretty well: the age is about right (Bok was born in 1914, making the presumed Dolgov four years his senior), the disappearance from genre work is about right (according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, Dolgov's last genre illustration was in the penultimate issue of Weird Tales, July 1954), and the untimely death is right (leaving only "old timers" to remember it).

Boris Dolgov isn't in the indexes for The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom by Sam Moskowitz (1954), All Our Yesterdays: An Informal History of Science Fiction Fandom in the Forties by Harry Warner, Jr. (1969), or The Futurians: The Story of the Science Fiction "Family" of the 30's That Produced Today's Top SF Writers and Editors by Damon Knight (1977). I have only a paperback edition of The Way the Future Was: A Memoir by Frederik Pohl (1979). There isn't any index, and I came up empty in only a cursory search of the text. The Mysterious Dolgov seems to have remained mysterious even among science fiction fans, writers, artists, and editors of the 1930s and '40s. It would seem also that he was a pretty peripheral figure. If a fan-based artist of that time was remembered at all, he was the middle third of the pen name Dolbokov, i.e., Hannes Bok. All of that is a shame because Boris Dolgov was a good and interesting artist.

Now for the second whole bit of evidence: In the Manhattan City Directory of 1957, there is a listing for a Boris Dolgoff with an address of 630 East 14th Street and a telephone number of O Regn 3-8552. (I take that to mean that his number was OR3-8552, or 673-8552.) I don't know much about Manhattan (the Bronx and Staten Island, too), but it looks like that address would fall within the East Village. In reading about the East Village on that ultimate source of all knowledge, Wikipedia, I find that it was home to the Yiddish Theatre District in the early to mid twentieth century, also that it became home to poets, artists, musicians, writers, and general Beatniks during the 1950s. That second fact is pertinent when we're talking about an artist, but the first fact may be pertinent, too. The reason is that there was a Jewish performer of the 1920s through the early 1950s who shared Boris Dolgoff's last name, and so maybe we have a place of origin and a possible family member for the Mysterious Dolgov.

To be continued . . .

Copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Mysterious Dolgov-Part Two

Readers have suggested two possible identities for the Mysterious Dolgov. Hannes Bok is one. The other is Boris Artzybasheff.

Boris Artzybasheff (1899-1965)

Once or twice a century, an artist comes along whose vision is so extraordinary that he can hardly be categorized or placed with other artists. Boris Artzybasheff was one of these artists. He was born on May 25, 1899, in Kharkov, in what is now Ukraine. I believe that birthdate was under the old calendar, as Artzybasheff gave his birthdate as June 5, 1899, in his petition for naturalization. He arrived in the United States, at the port of New York, on June 17, 1919, after having left Russia from the Black Sea port of Novorsisk more than a month before. I don't know much about the tangled and tragic history of the Russian Revolution, but I believe Novorsisk may have been a last refuge of White Russian forces in 1918-1920. There were pogroms in Ukraine at about the same time, carried out by the Green Army, but I believe Artzybasheff's family to have been Eastern Orthodox and not Jewish. Still, socialism has its depredations, and the young artist escaped from them at about the same time that so many of his countrymen and countrywomen did, including at least three tellers of weird tales, Maria Moravsky (1889-1947), Nadia Lavrova (1897-1989), and Edith M. Almedingen (1898-1973). Artzybasheff's father, Mikhail Artsybashev (1878-1927), also an artist, escaped not long after his son, going to Poland in 1923. Artsybashev was a fierce opponent of Bolshevism and edited a newspaper in Poland called For Liberty! According to endlessly repeated sources on the Internet, his surname became the root of a Soviet pejorative, artsybashevchina.

One of my readers has suggested that Boris Artzybasheff, who by the 1940s was a well-established and successful commercial artist and illustrator, contributed to Weird Tales under the pseudonym Boris Dolgov, effectively slumming among the pulps. I don't like to call improbabilities impossibilities, but I also don't think that to be very likely. Although it's true that the Mysterious Dolgov worked in a uniquely 1940s style, his art bears little resemblance to that of the other Boris, Artzybasheff. Beyond that, Artzybasheff was famed for his advertising work, moreover for his covers for Time magazine, of which he created more than 200 from 1941 to 1966. It doesn't seem likely that he could have been induced to contribute to Weird Tales for the kind of pittances the magazine offered artists during the 1940s and '50s. I like writing about Boris Artzybasheff and showing his art. I would like to think that he could have contributed to "The Unique Magazine." But it just doesn't seem to me that he was Boris Dolgov, especially considering that there really was a person by that name and identity. We know that from the photograph shown in the previous posting (here). I'll show more evidence in the next. I would like to thank my reader, though, and invite him and others to continue to comment and offer their research, suggestions, recommendations, and so on. It's always good to explore possibilities.

Boris Artzybasheff in his studio, ca. mid 1940s. In contrast to the Mysterious Dolgov, Artzybasheff was well known and frequently photographed. He was also very successful and widely published as an artist. And we know a lot about his life, including his birthdate, May 25, 1899 (O.S.), and his death date, July 16, 1965. A dedicated artist to the end, Artzybasheff died in his studio in that artist's haven of Connecticut, in his case, in Lyme. Artzybasheff moved from New York City to Lyme in mid 1955 at his wife's behest. Tragically, she died just half a year later, on December 11, 1955. She was the former Elisabeth Southard Snyder (1904-1955), whom he had married on February 22, 1930, in Manhattan. They spent just a quarter of a century together. The image is from Forty Illustrators and How They Work by Ernest W. Watson (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1946), page 9.

As I said, Artzybasheff was an artist of extraordinary vision. He could only have understood that about himself, as demonstrated in the cover image and title of his own book, As I See, from 1954.

Artzybasheff was the son of Mikhail Artsybashev, or Artzybasheff as in this cover. The elder Artsybashev (1878-1927) was a Polish-Russian writer, editor, artist, and journalist. Among his novels was The Savage, published in paperback in 1951 when just about any piece of literature, high or low, could be put into print as long as it had a suitably trashy and suggestive cover. The artist here was Tobey. I'm pretty sure that he wasn't the painter Mark Tobey (1890-1976), who knew Hannes Bok, but like I said, I don't like to call improbabilities impossibilities.

Boris Artzybasheff was not only a painter but also a graphic artist. Here is what looks to be a scratchboard drawing from his own book, Poor Shaydullah, from 1931, reproduced in Forty Illustrators and How They Work. The Wizard of Oz-like character in the middle of that blossoming whatsit looks like George Bernard Shaw.

Artzybasheff was renowned for his personified machines. "I like machines," he said. "I would rather watch a 1,000-ton dredge dig a canal than see it done by 1,000 spent slaves lashed into submission." That quote, from The Hartford Courant, July 17, 1955, I think has hidden meaning in it, for Artzybasheff, having lived under socialism, had had personal experience with the mass slavery of the Machine Age. Another biographical note coming from this image: Artzybasheff was born in Kharkov, later site of four great battles during World War II between Nazis and Communists.

Artzybasheff's art might be called unique but it seems to me to have been a part of a distinctive look of mid-century American illustration, advertising art, and commercial art. For example, this image looks like it could have been created by the great James Flora (1914-1998) . . .

While this one bears resemblance to the crazy art of Basil Wolverton (1909-1978) . . .

And this one looks a little like drawings made by Hannes Bok (1914-1964), who of course collaborated with the Mysterious Dolgov. I'm not sure that Bok had repressed hostility, but I'm pretty sure that he had a repressed something or other.

There is still more to come in this series, including a possible death date and cause of death for Boris Dolgov.

Text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Mysterious Dolgov-Part One

I have written before about the artist Boris Dolgov, dates currently unknown, who contributed to Weird Tales in the 1940s and '50s. You can read what I wrote about him by clicking here. Almost nothing is known of Dolgov. We might wonder whether he ever really existed. I have comments from a couple of readers speculating that Boris Dolgov could have been Hannes Bok or even Boris Artzybasheff. I'll take those speculations one at a time.

Hannes Bok (1914-1964)
Boris Dolgov and Hannes Bok (né Wayne Francis Woodard) were friends who worked together on a few published illustrations under the combined name Dolbokov. I suspect that they met in New York City in about 1939-1941. Born in Kansas City but a wanderer in his childhood and young adulthood, Bok had arrived in the city from Seattle in December 1939. That was the same month in which his first illustrations appeared on the cover of and in Weird Tales. Dolgov's first illustration for "The Unique Magazine" was for Thorp McCluskey's short story "The Music from Infinity," from September 1941.

Dolgov may already have been in New York City when Bok arrived. He may even have been a native. Whatever the case, the two artists had met and had begun collaborating as early as the summer of 1941 when their first joint drawings, published under their Dolbokov name, appeared in Science Fiction Quarterly. The stories they illustrated together were "Earth Does Not Reply" by John B. Michel and Donald A. Wollheim and Michel's own "Path of Empire."

John B. Michel (1917-1968) and Donald A. Wollheim (1914-1990) were active in science fiction fandom in New York City during the 1930s and '40s. Bok (1914-1964) had been, too, in Los Angeles, before moving permanently to the East Coast. Damon Knight (1922-2002) reported that Bok attended a meeting of the New York-based science fiction fan club the Futurians on August 21, 1940. (The Futurians by Damon Knight [1977], p. 53) Those facts lead me to think that Dolgov came out of fandom, too, possibly New York fandom, and that he may have been around the same age as Bok, Michel, Wollheim, and Knight, who was the baby of the group.

Both Bok and Dolgov were acquainted with the renowned American painter and illustrator Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966). Proof of that is in a photograph that I have seen in three different places on the Internet. I'll show it again here:

American painter Maxfield Parrish (left) and Boris Dolgov (right) in a photograph taken by Hannes Bok. The date is supposed to have been sometime in the early 1940s. This image is from an unknown original source and has been repeatedly reproduced on the Internet, here for the fourth time at least. The original photograph was presumably taken at Parrish's home in Cornish, New Hampshire. If so, and if this really is a picture of Dolgov, then he and Bok may have scored a kind of coup, for as Susan E. Meyer wrote, "Parrish was an intensely private man, preferring to keep others at a distance at all times." (From America's Great Illustrators [New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1978], p. 115.) There is distance even in this image. In later years, Parrish did not recall having met Bok. Bok told a different story.

Here are the three websites on which I have found the image above showing Parrish and Dolgov together:

• Notasdecine, June 2009, here.
• Null Entropy, October 26, 2012, here.
• Darkworlds Quarterly, January 12, 2020, here.

I suspect that each has simply copied from one of the previous sources, as I have done also. The website Notasdecine shows an accompanying photograph of Bok posing with a painting made by Parrish. That picture was presumably taken by Dolgov. Bok is known to have had art done by Parrish in his possession later in life.

If you look closely, you will see that the image reproduced here has been screened for printing. Presumably, then, this version was originally either in a book, a magazine, or a newspaper. It does not appear to have been scanned from a photographic print for reproduction on the Internet. That tells me that it was mass produced in print, on paper, and that there could be more information on it in that original published source. Now if we can just find the original source. A place to start might be in the writings or collections of either Emil Peteja (1915-2000), Bok's friend and biographer, or Gerry de la Ree (1924-1993), a science fiction fan and collector and also a Bok biographer.

In any case, if the story behind this picture is correct, then there really was a Boris Dolgov (or variation thereof--you'll get my meaning in a few days), and he was not Hannes Bok. I think you can see that in their artwork anyway. There are similarities to be sure, but it's clear to me that Bok had deep psychosexual problems and that these problems came out in his artwork. That's not to say that Dolgov didn't, but if even he did, they don't clearly show through in his work, which is far more innocent and even has a childlike quality. As some people have already noted, Dolgov's work also resembles that of Lee Brown Coye (1907-1981), who had psychosexual or just plain psychological problems of his own.

So, I think we can fairly say that Boris Dolgov was not Hannes Bok, based in part on the photograph shown above, but also, I think, on the respective works of art made by these two men. If you're okay with all of that, we can move on to Part Two.

Revised and corrected February 29, 2020
Original text copyright 2020 Terence E. Hanley

Voodoo on the Cover of Weird Tales

I have covered zombies on the cover of Weird Tales. Now I'll cover Voodoo and the magic and sorcery of the Caribbean, Central America, and the American South. I have five covers here, but only three are obviously about Voodoo. The first may be related to Voodoo, while the last may not be related at all.

There are still more zombie topics on the way.

Weird Tales, December 1924. Cover story: "Death-Waters" by Frank Belknap Long. Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. "Death-Waters" is not explicitly a tale of Voodoo, and there are no zombies, but the black man in the story is, evidently, a kind of sorcerer with power to call forth masses of snakes. The man's power may be related to the concept of Li Grand Zombi, the serpent spirit of Voodoo folklore in Louisiana. By the way, "Death-Waters" takes place in Central America, possibly in Honduras, and not in Africa.

A few weeks ago, a reader commented on this story. I read it so that I might understand better what's going on in the illustration. I can tell you that the story and its characters are complicated. The reader was right: the man in the middle is the least sympathetic character. (He may also be a more subtle racial stereotype than appears: named Byrne, he is stubborn and quick to anger, matching what many people thought--or think--of Irishmen.) The man in the rear is more or less inarticulate. Though loyal, he's kind of a numbskull. The man in front is not what I would call sympathetic exactly (the narrator--the man in the rear--sees or believes that he sees in the black man horrible things). However, he gets into a battle of wills with Byrne and is made to heel. The snakes come to avenge his humiliation. As you can tell, this is not a simple story and definitely not a simple case of racism or racialism against black people.

Weird Tales, August 1925. Cover story: "Black Medicine" by Arthur J. Burks. Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. I haven't read this story yet, but I assume that it's about Haiti and that the figure in front is a Haitian magician or sorcerer. That would suggest that the figure in the rear is a zombie. I hope to read this story soon, so I'll let you know.

Weird Tales, March 1930. Cover story: "Drums of Damballah" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by C.C. Senf. Damballah is a god of Voodoo and may be synonymous with Li Grande Zombi. (I can't say as I don't know much about Voodoo.) The connection to snakes is evident in the illustration. Speaking of connections, I wonder if there is any etymological connection between Damballah and Allah.

Weird Tales, May 1941. Cover story: "There Are Such Things" by Seabury Quinn [?]. Cover art by Hannes Bok. According to Jaffery and Cook's index of Weird Tales, there is no cover story for this issue, but the illustration and the story named on the cover seem to go together.

Weird Tales, July 1951. Cover story: "Flame Birds of Angala" by E. Everett Evans. Cover art by Charles A. Kennedy. I don't know that this is a story of Voodoo. Published in 1951, it actually seems kind of late for the Voodoo/zombie craze of the 1930s and early '40s. But I'm putting it here until I know something different.

Text and captions copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Dwarves on the Cover of Weird Tales

In his book Danger Is My Business: An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines: 1896-1953 (1993), Lee Server recounted the story of the weird menace magazines of the 1930s, titles that included Dime Mystery Magazine, Terror Tales, and Horror Stories. Despite the shared word "weird" (and despite some overlap between the two), weird menace and weird fiction are separate genres. Mr. Server explains:

The "terror" or "Weird Menace" stories, as they came to be known, had many of the trappings of the horror genre, but there were distinct differences. Unlike the traditional scary story, the new form eschewed the supernatural. . . . No ghosts or vampires or black magicians, but equally creepy types out of real life, the mutilated and the psychotic, renegade scientists and crackpot cult leaders. (p. 106)

Weird menace was inspired by a trip that pulp publisher Henry Steeger made to Paris, more specifically to the le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, where he saw theatrical violence, cruelty, and gore in abundance. "We could do a magazine like that," Steeger realized, "with the same sort of emphasis." (Quoted on page 106.) Lee Server sees other possible influences, writing:

Steeger may also have had an eye on such contemporaneous movies as Island of Lost Souls, Mystery of the Wax Museum, and Freaks, each offering similar modern-dress horrors--vivisectionists, deformed maniacs, denizens of the carnival sideshow, all staples of the Weird Menace world. (p. 106)

He continues:

Villains, when they did materialize, were a mix of scheming psychopaths--mad scientists, religious cultists, vengeful old crones--and their repellent assistants--gnarled dwarves, brainless mutants, horny hunchbacks. They invariably came equipped with a panoply of elaborate devices for torture and slow death, bubbling vats, buzz saws, iron maidens, branding irons, or flame throwers. (p. 109)

Note the phrases "gnarled dwarves" and "horny hunchbacks."

Now, I can't say that Weird Tales was influenced by the weird menace magazines in its depiction of dwarves. After all, four of the eight covers shown here predate the arrival of Dime Mystery Magazine, the first of that type, in 1933. Instead, it seems to me that weird fiction and weird menace both drew from popular culture, folklore, fairy tales, and other sources in how they treated dwarves, hunchbacks, and other people not deemed of normal stature, build, or appearance. I suppose the idea was that sin or moral failings are expressed in the physical appearance of sinners. Even Tolkien's dwarves, heroes that they are, are sometimes lacking in moral fiber. Writers and artists of the pulp era fell too easily into stereotyping not only black people (as seen in a previous posting) but also dwarves. One difference is that black stereotypes in art are often about appearance, whereas stereotypes of dwarves seem to be about their moral character or about their role in the human drama. Either way, the pulps were not always kind to little people.

I count eight covers of Weird Tales showing dwarves or other little people. Six of the eight show dwarves as bad guys, or suggest that they are. One is neutral. And only one, the last, is positive. Note that the first dwarf cover following the advent of the weird menace magazines, from May 1937, could easily pass as one among that genre. The blurb on the cover--"a powerful tale of weird horror"--should remove any doubt that Weird Tales, usually "The Unique Magazine," was in this case imitating rather than standing alone.

Weird Tales, March 1926. Cover story: "Lochinvar Lodge" by Clyde Burt Clason. Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. You could call this the classic image of the dwarf in fantasy. He could easily have been one of J.R.R. Tolkien's inhabitants of Middle Earth. Unfortunately, it looks like the dwarf here is a villain. On top of that, he is about to be walloped.

Weird Tales, April 1926. Cover story: "Wolfshead" by Robert E. Howard. Cover art by E.M. Stevenson. I'm not sure that this is a depiction of a dwarf, but he looks pretty small in stature. Whatever he is, the man here is a villain, and he appears to be animated by the spirit of a wolf.

Weird Tales, March 1927. Cover story: "The City of Glass" by Joel Martin Nichols, Jr. Cover art by C.C. Senf, another bizarre cover by the artist. The dwarf's bodily distortions make it almost like something from a hallucination or a dream. I still can't figure out what is that thing on his foot. Update (Dec. 21, 2016): Now I've got it. That's not a thing on his foot. It's a stool. Apparently the woman has been sitting. Upon getting up, she has upset the stool and his foot is behind it. I'm an artist and even I had a hard time reading this picture.

Weird Tales, July 1929. Cover story: "The Corpse-Master" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by C.C. Senf. Update (Jan. 9, 2017): Again, here's a threatening dwarf and again he's green. 

Weird Tales, July 1930. Cover story: "The Bride of Dewer" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by C.C. Senf. The dwarf here is not obviously a bad guy. The depiction here appears to be neutral at worst.

Weird Tales, May 1937. Cover story: "The Mark of the Monster" by Jack Williamson. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. I'm not sure that the male figure here is a dwarf, either, but again, he looks small in stature. Even if he is a normal-sized man, he has physical deformities, making him a suitable weird menace villain. Margaret Brundage drew a lot of pictures of women being tormented by men. She was no shrinking violet, and maybe the reading public demanded it, but I wonder if she felt that way herself sometimes.

Weird Tales, July 1938. Cover story: "Spawn of Dagon" by Henry Kuttner. Cover art by Virgil Finlay. Here is the typical Virgil Finlay Tor Johnson-like muscleman or eunuch and the typical moping face on the dwarf in front of him. Note that his skin is green, like that of two of the preceding dwarves. I take the color green to be a signifier of alienness. Plants are green. So are snakes and frogs. So, too, are many monsters, like Cthulhu.

Weird Tales, May 1940. Cover story: "The City from the Sea" by Edmond Hamilton. Cover art by Hannes Bok, who created the only obviously positive image of a dwarf on the cover of Weird Tales. It looks to me that the image of dwarves, like that of black people, softened as Weird Tales matured in the late 1930s and 1940s.

Revised January 9, 2017.
Text and captions copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Hannes Bok's Uncategorizable Cover, Then Politics on the Cover of Weird Tales

Hannes Bok is known for his strange and fantastic people, monsters, aliens, and other creatures. In March 1940, this design by Bok appeared on the front of Weird Tales:

The image above could go in other places in my categories of covers for Weird Tales: with woman and monster (maybe); with devils and demons (maybe); with vampires and bats (maybe); or with winged creatures (maybe). That's a lot of maybes, and that's because this cover isn't easily categorizable, for the woman isn't a woman, the demon isn't a demon, and the bat isn't exactly a bat. Heck, even the sloth is part bird. That's why I have put this cover alone . . .

Except that it isn't alone, because thirty-three years after "The Unique Magazine" printed that cover, it printed this one (albeit under different ownership and editorship):

The artist was Gary Van Der Steur, and his illustration was clearly meant as an homage to Bok's cover from so many years before. The bat is now a bird (it could be a dove). The demon now looks like a demon and carries a knife with a bloody point. The fetal cyclops remains. So does the face in the lower part of the picture, only instead of a fantasy animal, it looks like (and is) a depiction of Richard Nixon. Times had changed.

By personal correspondence, Mr. Van Der Steur let me know that he had included Richard Nixon in his illustration. As I write this (on Nov. 10, 2016), election week is ending and we now have a president-elect. It seems safe to say that this has been the weirdest election year in American history. I'll close the month in which the election occurred with the only political cover (as far as I can tell) for Weird Tales.

Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Robots and Men in Iron on the Cover of Weird Tales

I have found five covers showing robots and men in iron on the cover of Weird Tales. Two show robots, the other three show men in iron. Note that the first robot cover, from 1926, refers to "metal giants," while the second, from 1941, calls a metal monster a "robot." I think that difference can be explained by the origin of the word robot in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R., first staged in 1920. R.U.R. was not translated into or performed in English until a couple of years later. That left not enough time, I suspect, for the word to enter into common usage or for a popular readership in 1926 to know its meaning. Anyway, here are all of the clinking, clanking, clattering collections of caliginous junk on the cover of Weird Tales. 

Weird Tales, December 1926. Cover story: "The Metal Giants." Cover art by Joseph Doolin. This looks like it could easily be a comic book cover from the 1940s or '50s. I'm thinking in particular of a typical Basil Wolverton scene of destruction.

Weird Tales, June 1929. Cover story: "The House of Golden Masks" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by Hugh Rankin. I showed this cover not very long ago, but Hugh Rankin is always worth a second look.

Weird Tales, July 1941. Cover story: "The Robot God" by Ray Cummings. Cover art by Hannes Bok. There were only two robot covers in the old Weird Tales. This one is not very much different from Doolin's cover from fifteen years before.

Weird Tales, May 1944. Cover story: "Iron Mask" by Robert Bloch. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. See what I mean about Margaret Brundage's covers from the 1940s being so much different from those of the 1930s?

Weird Tales Canada, September 1944. Cover story: "Iron Mask" by Robert Bloch. Cover art by an unknown artist. If you really want to show a woman in peril, take away her male protector. By the way, the guy in the picture reminds me of . . . 

This guy, Doctor Doom, from the cover of Fantastic Four #57, from December 1966, nearly half a century ago. How time flies.

Text and captions copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Winged Creatures on the Cover of Weird Tales

I have written before about monsters, aliens, bats, devils, and demons. We have already seen most of these covers. The exceptions are the second and third shown here. The second is of two winged people, the third of what looks like a god or idol and one that I should add to my listing in that category. All others shown here are of monsters or aliens, a couple of which appear to be benevolent or helpful.

Weird Tales, January 1927. Cover story: "Drome" by John Martin Leahy. Cover art by C. Barker Petrie, Jr. This is one of my favorite Weird Tales covers, for its poster-like simplicity, the great flying-monkey kind of monster, and the pose and costume of the female figure. This story can be added to a polar fiction database of "The Unique Magazine."

Weird Tales, November 1927. Cover story: "The Invading Horde" by Arthur J. Banks. Cover art by C.C. Senf. This is an odd image, I think. With their helmets, goggles, and dress, the two figures here look like aviators except that they seem to have flown in by their own power. Notice the wings on their backs. The setting is almost surrealistic, and if there is any threat, it is offstage. Putting aviators on the cover of your magazine makes sense if you remember that Charles Lindbergh made his famous transatlantic flight in May 1927, half a year before this issue of Weird Tales was published. I don't know the story, but it seems likely to me that it and this illustration were designed to capitalize on the popularity of Charles Lindbergh or the general popularity of aviation in the 1920s. 

Edward Hopper's "Rooms by the Sea," from 1951. In a moment, Senf's two winged figures will fly through the doorway and alight in this sunny room.

Weird Tales, September 1932. Cover story: "The Altar of Melek Taos" by G.G. Pendarves. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. The winged creature here looks like a god or idol of an eastern persuasion, fitting for the Orientalist 1930s.

Weird Tales, May 1934. Cover story: "Queen of the Black Coast" by Robert E. Howard. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. This is a simple and somewhat awkward composition. One of the things that stands out for me is that the man--Conan--is in an inferior position and the woman intervenes between him and the winged creature that threatens him. That seems to be a recurring theme in Margaret Brundage's art. You might imagine that she was one of her dainty little women. In fact she was tall, strong, and tough.

Weird Tales, March 1940. Cover story: None. Cover art by Hannes Bok. Here the winged creature is in the background and not obviously the focus of the picture. 

Weird Tales, May 1940. Cover story: "The City from the Sea" by Edmond Hamilton. Cover art by Hannes Bok.

The figure on the far left of Bok's painting makes me think of a figure in the same position in this work by Frank Frazetta. That doesn't look like a swipe to me. Instead it looks like two artists separated by time and space but solving the same kind of problem in the same way.

Weird Tales, September 1940. Cover story: "Seven Seconds of Eternity" by Robert H. Leitfred. Cover art by Ray Quigley.

Weird Tales, July 1942. Cover story: "Coven" by Manly Wade Wellman. Cover art by Margaret Brundage, a different kind of work by the artist, characteristic of her covers from the 1940s.

Weird Tales Canada, November 1942. Cover story: "Coven" by Manly Wade Wellman. Cover art by an unknown artist. This is one of at least three Canadian issues with the same cover story and subject as their American counterparts.

Weird Tales, March 1944. Cover story: "The Trail of Cthulhu" by August Derleth. Cover art by John Giunta.

Weird Tales Canada, July 1944. Cover story: "The Trail of Cthulhu" by August Derleth. Cover art by an unknown artist. Each of these two images has its merits. Although the Canadian artist here had a greater talent for verisimilitude, Giunta's painting is filled with the spirit of adventure and has a childlike sense of the fantastic.

I have written before that both images remind me of this painting by Frank Frazetta. Again, this isn't a swipe. However, it seems likely to me that Frazetta knew of Giunta's original work, for Giunta was his mentor when Frazetta broke into comic books in the mid 1940s. 

Weird Tales, May 1945. Cover story: "The Shining Land" by Edmond Hamilton. Cover art by Peter Kuhlhoff.

Weird Tales, July 1948. Cover story: None. Cover art by Matt Fox.

Weird Tales, November 1948. Cover story: None. Cover art by John Giunta.

Weird Tales, March 1949. Cover story: None. Cover art by Matt Fox.

Weird Tales, Winter 1985. Cover story: None. Cover art by Ro H. Kim. This must be the most bizarre of all the winged creatures shown here.

Text and captions copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley