Weird Tales at Ninety & Ninety-Five

Ann VanderMeer became editor of Weird Tales with its issue of November/December 2007.  She remained at that post until the Winter issue of 2012, collecting awards along the way. She announced her resignation on August 20, 2012, which would have been H.P. Lovecraft's 122nd birthday had he been treated for many years with large volumes of cool air. This was all part of a controversy that took place so long ago that its has probably been forgotten by everyone except for perhaps its most aggrieved parties.

Marvin Kaye took over after that. The first issue under his editorship came along in Fall 2012. This was the "Cthulhu Returns" issue. The theme would have gone against Jeff VanderMeer's desire to move past Lovecraft. For those who don't know, Jeff VanderMeer is the husband of Ann VanderMeer. On September 1, 2012, as the Weird Tales controversy proceeded, he posted on the Internet an essay entitled "Moving Past Lovecraft." You can read it on the website Weird Fiction Review, here. I have written before on Mr. VanderMeer's essay. You can read what I wrote by clicking here.

The workings of Weird Tales during and after the controversy remained a mystery for most of us. For a long time there wasn't any content on the Weird Tales website. There were also long delays between issues. In 2012, there were only two issues published. In 2013 and 2014, there was only one issue per year. Each was a themed issue. The theme in Summer 2013 was fairy tales. In Spring 2014, it was the undead. At some point, Marvin Kaye had announced a sword-and-sorcery issue. Alas, that issue was not to appear until late 2022, by which time Jonathan Maberry had taken over as editor. Marvin Kaye died more than a year before that, on May 13, 2021. I think we can say that we still feel the loss.

Once again there was a break in the year-to-year record of publication of Weird Tales. The lone issue of 2014 was the last of a run that had begun in 1998. I'm not sure what the difficulty was. Again, we were not allowed to know what was going on behind the scenes. If the publisher and editor had asked me to do it, I would have put out an issue every year during those missing years of 2015 to 2018, even if it was basically just an ashcan edition. In my opinion, Weird Tales has gone on for so long and is so significant in our popular culture--at least in a subset of our popular culture--that it has become a kind of common property. I think the legal holders of that property have a responsibility to readers and fans. If they're not up to it, they should pass it on to someone who will take care. And while it's in their care, they should not abuse Weird Tales. I would say there has been some abuse in recent years.

Anyway, Weird Tales was not in print in 2018 when it could have observed its own ninety-fifth anniversary. However, it was in print five years before, in 2013, for its ninetieth.

The Summer 2013 issue of Weird Tales was Volume 67, Number 1, whole issue number 361. Again, the theme was fairy tales. The cover art is by Jeff Wong. Marvin Kaye was the editor. The front cover doesn't mention the anniversary but the back cover does. "Celebrating 90 Years of Weird!" it reads. And there are tentacles. There is dreck on the title page, which calls Margaret Brundage the "artistic godmother of goth fetishism." Whatever. You can read the same kind of dreck on the current Weird Tales website. All of it has been written by supposed professional writers and editors. I think some of them should go back to school.

In "The Eyrie," which used to be a letters column, Marvin Kaye mentioned the ninetieth anniversary, but he resolved to publish new stories rather than reprint old ones. I think we have to give the late Mr. Kaye credit for an abundance of content in the fairy tales issue. There is even a gag cartoon by Marc Bilgrey. Was that the first in the pages of Weird Tales? I can't say. And then comes an essay, "Ninety Years of Weird Tales," written by Darrell Schweitzer. Mr. Schweitzer's essay is only two pages long but it covers a lot of ground. I'll quote just one sentence, which is in regards to the classic Weird Tales main title logo, designed, incidentally, by J. Allen St. John: "To ever discard it would be unthinkable folly." And yet that's what happened under the previous editors,  Stephen H. Segal and Ann VanderMeer, who replaced it with a logo that should be buried deep in the ground and never resurrected.

Immediately following Darrell Schweitzer's essay is an interview with J. David Spurlock, conducted by Lynne Jamneck on his co-authorship of The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage--Queen of Pulp Pin-Up Art (2013). I think recognition of Margaret Brundage is fitting. The ninetieth-anniversary issue was a good place for it. I think the subtitle of Mr. Spurlock's book is inaccurate, but nobody asked my opinion. Margaret Brundage created most of her covers in the 1930s. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the term pin-up in reference to pictures of women pinned on walls is from about 1940 at its earliest. Has anyone ever seen a contemporaneous photograph of a Brundage cover pinned to a wall? Probably not. Anyway, I think people put into their stuff whatever they think is likely to make it sell, thus the Cthulhu Returns issue (No. 360), the Undead Issue (No. 362), the Margaret Brundage bat-woman ripoff cover of No. 363, the Sword and Sorcery issue (No. 366), the Cosmic Horror issue (No. 367), and, as Yul Brynner would say, et cetera, et cetera.

And now we're finally to the 100th-anniversary of Weird Tales, finally observed in 2023.

Weird Tales, October 1933, cover art by Margaret Brundage. The real thing, accept no substitutes, although to be fair to the cover artist on Issue #363, she was probably instructed by the editor or art director to draw what people call "an homage." I know we're looking at some of Bat-Woman's other features here, but have you noticed how long her fingers are?

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales at Forty

You could say that Weird Tales magazine had its first run from March 1923 to September 1954. You could also break up that first run, the most obvious break being from August to October 1924 when the business behind the magazine was reorganizing and there weren't any issues published at all. A better way of saying it is that Weird Tales was just trying to survive that summer and fall. Survive it did. Last year at around this time, Weird Tales observed its own 100th anniversary with a new issue. This time this year, we find ourselves in the one-hundred-year anniversary of the first hiatus and the almost-disappearance of "The Unique Magazine."

You could make other breaks, too, if you wanted to. In its first run, there came a break after twelve almost-monthly issues, published from March 1923 to April 1924, all with Edwin Baird as editor. Then came the first and only quarterly issue of May/June/July 1924 with Baird, or Farnsworth Wright and Baird, or Baird, Wright, and/or Otis Adelbert Kline as editor. Then came a three-month break, during which there could have been another quarterly issue published. Then, finally, in November 1924, there was a return, with Wright as newly promoted editor, a post he would hold for the next fifteen and a little more years.

There weren't any breaks during the Wright years, even if there were changes made along the way. Weird Tales was published continuously during that time, even after Dorothy McIlwraith took over in May 1940. Call that a break if you want. Finally, in September 1953, Weird Tales went from being pulp-sized to being digest-sized, another break if you like. The magazine survived exactly a year in that format.

Leo Margulies acquired the Weird Tales property after the magazine ceased publication. He held it for about twenty years, finally to sell it to Robert Weinberg in the early to mid 1970s. The story is that Margulies wanted to revive Weird Tales as a magazine in the early 1960s. And the story is that Sam Moskowitz talked him out of it for fear Margulies would lose his shirt. Nevertheless, several paperbound anthologies came out at around the fortieth-anniversary year of Weird Tales. All have introductions, either by Margulies or Moskowitz, as well as shorter introductions to individual stories. None of these books is explicitly an anniversary issue, even if all look back with fondness and nostalgia on the Weird Tales years. I think the 1960s and '70s were an age of nostalgia for the popular culture of the 1920s through the 1940s or so. The Weird Tales anthologies came out near the beginning of that age.

I have written before about three of the four Weird Tales anthologies of the early to mid 1960s. They were:

• The Unexpected edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid Books, Feb. 1961, 160 pp.), with an introduction by Leo Margulies and eleven stories (Margulies called this "a usurer's dozen"), all from Weird Tales. Cover art by John Schoenherr.

• The Ghoul Keepers edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid Books, Oct. 1961; 1965, 157 pp.), with an introduction by Leo Margulies and nine stories, all from Weird Tales. Cover art by John Schoenherr, recycled from The Unexpected.

• Weird Tales edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid Books, May 1964, 155 pp.), with an introduction by Leo Margulies and eight stories, all from Weird Tales. Cover art by Virgil Finlay.

• Worlds of Weird edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid Books, Jan. 1965, 158 pp.), with an introduction, "The Forgotten Creator of Weird Tales, An Introduction . . ." by Sam Moskowitz and seven stories, all from Weird Tales. Cover art and interior illustrations by Virgil Finlay.

Pyramid Books issued two more anthologies at around that time, both edited by L. Sprague de Camp. These are in the same format as the Weird Tales anthologies, but not all of their stories were from "The Unique Magazine." These two books were:

• Swords & Sorcery edited by L. Sprague de Camp (Pyramid Books, Dec. 1963, 186 pp.), with an introduction by L. Sprague de Camp and eight stories, four of which were in Weird Tales. Cover art by Virgil Finlay.

• The Spell of Seven edited by L. Sprague de Camp (Pyramid Books, June 1965, 192 pp.), with an introduction by L. Sprague de Camp and seven stories, two of which were in Weird Tales. Cover art by Virgil Finlay.

One of these books is called Weird Tales. Another was published in 1963. Maybe together they make a fortieth-anniversary issue. Or take all six as an observance and celebration of forty years of Weird Tales. Finally, I should point out that Leo Margulies also reprinted stories from Weird Tales in his magazines of the 1960s, including The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine, in print from 1966 to 1968.

The Jove edition of Weird Tales, published in 1979, is a reprinting of the Pyramid edition of 1964 except that Robert E. Howard's story "Pigeons from Hell" was removed. Also, Virgil Finlay's cover illustration--a good one to be sure--was replaced with this iconic image by Margaret Brundage, originally on the cover of the magazine in October 1933. I'm not sure that any other image is more closely associated with Weird Tales than this one.

By the way, the Pretenders' song "Back on the Chain Gang" includes the lyric "Got in the house like a pigeon from hell." That sounds an awful like a reference to Howard's story. As much as some fans and readers might want themselves and their favorite fiction to be separated and isolated from the real world--as much as they might want to escape from the world--it can't be done. If you're going to think about and write about genre fiction, you have to face the world, its people, its history, and its culture.

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Fifteenth Anniversary

Weird Tales magazine turned fifteen years old in March 1938. In the anniversary installment of "The Eyrie," from May 1938, the editor allowed readers to speak on the occasion:

Fifteenth Anniversary

Richard H. Jamison writes from Valley Park, Missouri: "Congrats on WEIRD's fifteenth anniversary! You really started something with that March 1923 issue, for with that issue the first (and best) of the fantastics was born. There's been a world of improvement in the lusty youngster since he first saw the light of day fifteen years ago.

The first issue had rough edges, no interior illustrations, and many of the stories were pure and simple detective stories. But now we have smooth edges, the best illustrated magazine on the market, and the stories are uniformly good weird tales with quite a number of little masterpieces among them. I noticed a letter in the Eyrie in which the writer asked who had written the most stories for WT. Seabury Quinn has that distinction, having contributed no less than ninety-two stories since his first appeared in October 1923. He has also had two stories reprinted. His closest competitor is August Derleth with sixty-nine stories, no reprints."

The author of that letter would appear to have been an early cataloguer of Weird Tales, its contents, and the authors who wrote for the magazine. Good for him. Seabury Quinn would remain the all-time champion with 145 stories and fourteen articles published in Weird Tales in its original run. And August Derleth would remain in second place. As for Richard H. Jamison, he was presumably the same man who wrote letters to "The Eyrie" as Richard F. Jamison. If that's the case, then he would also have landed on a list of "Who Wrote the Most . . .?", for Jamison had eleven letters in "The Eyrie" from January 1937 to March 1940, and that would have tied him with six others for eighteenth place on the list.

Letters to "The Eyrie," May 1938, continued:

Back in 1923

Arthur Lincoln Brown writes from Dallas: "For a number of years now I have been reluctant to write you this letter, but today it rived its fetters and escaped to you. Back in 1923, when your magazine first made its appearance on the news stands, it was primarily a magazine daring to open the way to the inexhaustible field of weird fiction. I have watched it grow, expand, and improve until now it has reached the acme of weird fiction. In my estimation, it is today at the pinnacle of success. WEIRD TALES is a piece of literary art founded on the genius of its authors--on the co-operation of its readers--on the receptiveness the editor holds for each new suggestion of improvement. Readers of fiction sometimes are fortunate to discover WEIRD TALES early; others must advance, explore and read their way through numerous cheap and pulpy magazines that litter the news stands before they discover WEIRD TALES. By this I mean that some of us have had to graduate to it before we became satisfied; but once we have perused our first copy we are enmeshed within its realm of weird narratives. It has finally reached the summit of weird fiction, and may we keep it always superb in its unequaled uniqueness."

(Boldface added in both letters.)

Unfortunately, I can't say for sure who Richard H. Jamison and Arthur Lincoln Brown were. But at least we have their thoughts from nearly ninety years ago.

Weird Tales, May 1938, with a cover story, "Goetterdaemmerung," by Seabury Quinn and cover art by Margaret Brundage. Note the blurb at the top: "16th Year of Publication." That same blurb appeared on every cover during 1938 from March through December.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Sunday Swipes No. 2

A few weeks ago, I discovered a blog entry called "Pulp Cover Swipes of the Golden Age," written by Yaniv Elancry and posted on the blog Streyflexin Collectibles on April 20 of some year. The article was originally on a website or app called Shortboxed. Mr. Elancry did a nice job of compiling swipes made by comic book artists from pulp magazines. One of those swipes is from a cover of Weird Tales:

On the left is cover art by Margaret Brundage for Weird Tales, March 1933. On the right is the cover of House of Mystery #1 by Win Mortimer and Charles Paris from 1951-1952. Margaret Brundage's cover is of course in the category of "Woman and Wolf," about which I wrote on January 27, 2014, here.

There are lots of other swipes and lots of good artwork in Yaniv Elancry's blog posting. You can read it and see it by clicking here.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Donald V. Allgeier (1915-1955)-Part Two

Donald V. Allgeier was a real fan of popular culture. You can tell that by the nearly three dozen letters he wrote to fantasy and science fiction magazines between 1932 and 1952. But there was another great fan of pop culture in his very extended family. Everyone knows his name. I have three of his very finely made books just a few feet from where I sit. He was Russ Cochran.

Donald Allgeier and Russ Cochran were related through their mother's families. I'll start with:

Jeremiah Van Wormer (ca. 1783-1851), who was a soldier in the War of 1812. He married Eunice Parke Wattles (1787-1878). Their son was:

Judge Aaron Van Wormer (1808-1881), a newspaperman and a member of Company A, 10th Missouri Cavalry during the Civil War. (One of the officers in that unit was Lt. Col. Frederick W. Benteen, who was at the Battle of Little Bighorn.) Aaron Van Wormer married Mildred D. Sutherland (1831-1864). Their sons were:

1. Andrew Van Wormer (1855-1940), who married Nancy M. Dixon (1858-1932).

and

2. Joseph Lawrence Van Wormer (1859-1933), who married Alice "Allie" Padon (1864-1927).

Andrew and Nancy M. (Dixon) Van Wormer had a daughter named:

Mary Francis Van Wormer (1891-1973). She married Russell Sage Cochran (1890-1967). They had a son:

Russell Van Cochran, Sr. (1914-1984), who was about the same age as his second cousin, Donald V. Allgeier. Allgeier visited with him in 1929. Russell Van Cochran, Sr., married Dulcie Anona Morrison (1915-1996). Their son was:

Russell Van Cochran, Jr. (1937-2020), physics professor at Drake University, musician, and most importantly for our purposes, fan, collector, and publisher of comic art. You can read more about him in a remembrance called "Russ Cochran: 1937-2020" by Steve Ringgenberg, from March 3, 2020, on the website of The Comics Journal, here. Another very fine and more personal and familial remembrance is in "Remembering Russ" by Michael Cochran, from March 24, 2020, on the website of the West Plains Daily Quill, here.

Joseph Lawrence and Alice "Allie" (Padon) Van Wormer had a daughter named:

Elsie Louise Van Wormer (1894-1973). She married Harry Vinson Allgeier (1888-1974). Their son was:

Donald Vinson Allgeier (1915-1955), who, in his youth, wrote letters to Weird Tales and other fantasy and science fiction magazines, went to war as a young man, and after the war became a college professor. If I have figured all of this right, he and Russ Cochran were second cousins once removed.

It's funny what you find when you start to look.

* * *

The Van Wormer, Cochran, and Allgeier families were a pretty amazing bunch. I would like to mention three more of their members:

First, William Dixon "Billy" Cochran (1913-1984), son of Russell Sage and Mary Francis (Van Wormer) Cochran, was a bit-player in movies. He was in It Had to Happen (1936) with George Raft.

Next, Katherine (Van Wormer) Chauvin, daughter of Andrew and Nancy M. (Dixon) Van Wormer, was a stage actress. She lived in New York and Paris.

And lastly, John Andrew "Jack" Van Wormer (1916-1939), a grandson of Andrew Van Wormer, was an aviator killed in the crash of a stunt plane in Shamrock, Texas, on August 27, 1939. Jetta Carleton's novel The Moonflower Vine (1962) is set in southwestern Missouri. One of the pivotal events in her story is a plane crash in which one of the daughters--the only fully fictional daughter--is killed. Could Jetta Carleton have been inspired by the story of Jack Van Wormer?

All things make circles: In the 1930s, Donald V. Allgeier wrote letters of comment to Weird Tales magazine. Ray Bradbury got his start in Weird Tales and was one of its mainstay authors during the 1940s. Weird Tales was an inspiration to EC Comics, which adapted many of Bradbury's stories in the 1950s. As a kid, Allgeier's cousin, Russ Cochran, was a fan of EC Comics. In the 1960s he came back to fandom. In the 1970s, he began publishing reproductions of EC Comics. An arc from within that circle: In Haunt of Fear #6 (Mar.-Apr. 1951), EC adapted Ray Bradbury's story "The Handler" from Weird Tales, January 1947. The cover art by Johnny Craig reminds me of . . .

This illustration for "The Artificial Honeymoon," the first in a series called "The Adventures of a Professional Corpse" by H. Bedford-Jones, published in Weird Tales in July 1940. The cover artist was Margaret Brundage.

Nineteen forty was the last year in which Donald Allgeier had one of his letters in Weird Tales. More important things were impinging upon him--adulthood, the beginnings of his teaching career, and, in 1941, enlistment in the U.S. Army and the starting of a family with his wedding on Christmas Eve of Martha Elizabeth Reynolds.

To learn more about EC Comics' adaptations of Ray Bradbury's stories, see "EC Comics & Ray Bradbury: There Will Come Soft Rains!" by and on the blog Mars Will Send No More, dated October 16, 2012, here.

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Mars on the Mind

Tonight (February 16, 2021), I heard on the radio a story about the 100-year anniversary of The Planets by the British composer Gustav Holst (1874-1934). I'm not sure why the story was on tonight. Holst wrote The Planets in 1914-1916, and it was first performed in 1918. The first performance of the entire suite took place on November 15, 1920. That's still more than 100 years ago.

Anyway, Holst began his work by composing "Mars, The Bringer of War," the intended or eventual first movement of The Planets.* Holst didn't bring on the war in his composition of "Mars," but it came anyway, war that is, on July 28, 1914, just a few months after he had begun. The Planets made its premiere on September 29, 1918, just a few weeks before the war ended.

Mars was on people's minds in those years. It all began with Giovanni Schiaparelli's observations of what he called canali on the surface of the Red Planet in 1877. Percival Lowell picked up the ball and ran with it in the early 1890s with his own observations of an intricate webwork of canals, as well as other features on Mars. He wrote about these things in three books, Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1906), and Mars As the Abode of Life (1908). His visions of Mars endured for generations, even into the 1960s and '70s.

H.G. Wells carried Lowell's interpretation to a logical and terrifying conclusion in The War of the Worlds (1897, 1898). Finally there came along a lowly pulp story, "Under the Moons of Mars" by Norman Bean, aka Edgar Rice Burroughs, serialized in The All-Story beginning 109 years ago this month, in February 1912. His story was published in book form as A Princess of Mars in 1917. Since then, gazillions of young fans have wanted to be his hero, John Carter, and have fallen in love with Burroughs' princess, Dejah Thoris.

Gustav Holst was influenced by astrology, not pulp fiction, but that hasn't stopped anybody from giving his record covers the science fiction treatment. Here are a few of them. I saved the most science-fiction-y--and the only scandalous one among them--for last.

-----

*Update (Feb. 2, 2022): The part of the soundtrack of Star Wars backing the destruction of the Death Star has its similarities to "Mars, The Bringer of War."

That looks enough like Mars in the background for this image to earn its place as first in this series. In the foreground is an aerial view of the current state of Texas.

I like these highly stylized versions of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. The faces of Jupiter and Mars look almost like those of living beings. And Mars here is the Mars of the popular imagination, Percival Lowell's Mars with its canals and oases. 

Here's a version done by the great space artist Chesley Bonestell (1888-1986). Entitled Saturn as Seen from Iapetus, it appeared in the book The Conquest of Space by Willy Ley (1949) and before that in Life magazine. The difference is that the image here is flipped for some reason, maybe to make Saturn read better in visual terms: as your eye drifts across the image, it can ride the ramp of Saturn's rings to reach the title "The Planets."

This is a pretty small picture, but I can still detect a swipe . . .

The picture on the right is by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, that on the left by Margaret Brundage. I've showed this juxtaposition before in "Brundage and Ingres," dated April 4, 2019, and accessible by clicking here.

Chesley Bonestell seems to have swiped Ingres' painting, too. See the endpapers of The Art of Chesley Bonestell by Ron Miller and Frederick C. Durant III (2001) for that and for another depiction of Percival Lowell's Mars.

This version of The Planets is supposed to have been banned. You can kind of see why. Comic strip fans will recognize the more fully dressed of these two figures as a repurposed Flash Gordon. Here's another one: 

On the cover of the hardbound edition of The Best of C.L. Moore (1975). The figure on the left is the Shambleau from the story of the same name. If you haven't read "Shambleau" yet, you should. Those who have read it know that it takes place on Mars, the Red Planet and Bringer of War. Anyway, one of these images was banned while the other was not. Go figure. The art, by the way, is by Chet Jezierski (b. 1947). 

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

July: Weird Tales #363

Four years ago this month I asked the question, "Where Is Weird Tales?" The magazine hadn't been seen since Spring 2014 when issue #362 was published. For years afterward there wasn't any news forthcoming from the publishers, and the Weird Tales website was stuck in an information-less state. Now I have news that Weird Tales is back with issue #363, published in July 2019 and announced on August 14 on a website which shall remain nameless. The Weird Tales drought seems to have ended for now.

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database doesn't yet have anything on this issue. Information seems hard to find in general (a continuing trend, I guess), but I have the following:

Weird Tales #363, July 2019

Publisher: Nth Dimension Media (presumably)

Editor: Jonathan Maberry

Cover art by Abigail Larson

80 pages

Contents

• "The Eyrie"
• "What Waits in the Trees" by Stephanie Wytovich
• "Up from Slavery" by Victor LaValle
• "Erasure" by Stephanie Wytovich
• "By Post" by Josh Malerman
• "A Housekeeper’s Revenge" by Lisa Morton
• "A Woman Who Still Knows How to Die" by Stephanie Wytovich
• "Due to the Memory of Scars" by Stephanie Wytovich
• "The Shadows beneath the Stone" by Jonathan Maberry
• "Outside the Shells of Horseshoe Crabs" by Stephanie Wytovich
• "I-O-U" by Sherrilyn Kenyon
• "Payday" by Hank Schwaeble
• "Distant Drums" by Marc Bilgrey
• "Amelia Delia Lee" by Tori Eldridge

I don't know whether there is any interior art. If there is, I hope that it doesn't include any digital dreck, but that's probably too much to hope for these days.

The blurb above the title reads: "The Return of the Magazine That Never Dies." Down below you'll see that this is "An Unthemed Issue." (I guess the plan for an all sword-and-sorcery issue went by the wayside years ago.) The cover, by the way, is a swipe of Margaret Brundage's iconic bat-woman from October 1933. And although the Weird Tales website now has some content, it is--well, suboptimal might be a nice way to put it. Finally, I should tell you that I don't have any of this directly from the publisher or editor, and I have no idea how they are going to handle the backlog of complaints against them, from authors, fans, readers, and subscribers. Anyway, Weird Tales is back. Let's hope that it's a worthy successor to previous incarnations, and let's wish the new editor and staff good luck in their efforts.

Copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Brundage and Ingres

No, those are not emotional states. ("I take Brundage at your remark!" said Margaret. "I am in turn Ingres at you!" replied the Frenchman.) They are the names of artists. Margaret Brundage (1900-1976) of course drew dozens of cover illustrations for Weird Tales magazine. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) was a French painter. Whether she realized it or not, Margaret Brundage worked in a Romantic tradition. Ingres, on the other hand, was a leading Neoclassical artist who worked in reaction to Romanticism. Both, however, created fantastic scenes, including the two shown below.

I am not the one to make the connection between these two images. That distinction goes to Jacques Sadoul (1934-2013), a Frenchman and a fan of science fiction and fantasy. He may or may not have put his observation into writing, but we have it from another fan, Richard Minter (1920-2005) of North Carolina, who wrote to The Weird Tales Collector in 1978 (#4, page 12), letting us know that it was Jacques Sadoul who pointed out to him the resemblance of the Brundage drawing to the Ingres painting. I have come upon the late Mr. Minter's letter because I have finally completed my collection of The Weird Tales Collector: last month, I found the missing issue #5 in a dark, dusty room in the back of an antique mall in Nitro, West Virginia. Thank you, West Virginia.

At the left, the cover of Weird Tales for June 1933, with a drawing by Margaret Brundage illustrating "Black Colossus" by Robert E. Howard. At the right, "Jupiter et Thétis" by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, from 1811. The resemblance of the first image to the second is unmistakable; whether Margaret Brundage was inspired by or even swiped the painting by Ingres is another story. I suspect that this pose--the supplicant kneeling at the foot of her god and touching his mouth or chin--is rooted in the natural expressiveness of the human body and the ways that it moves and poses itself in various emotional or psychological states. In any case, Ingres is recognized as an extraordinary draftsman--just look at the folds in the drapery over his two figures--but I have never liked his distortions of human anatomy--the rubberiness and stretchiness of arms, legs, shoulders, necks, and so on. (People have skeletons, you know.) Margaret Brundage seems to have floated her figures into the scenes she drew. Ingres manipulated them--to his own artistic purposes to be sure--like he was pushing and pulling on Stretch Armstrong.

Text and captions copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weasels on the Cover of Weird Tales

Okay, so this a weird category, but I wanted to get at something and so here we are. There are two weasel covers for Weird Tales. They're actually ermine covers, but with weasel and weird, you get some alliteration and a snappier title. Anyway, here they are, both for the same story, "John Cawder's Wife" by P. Schuyler Miller.

Weird Tales, May 1943. Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

Weird Tales Canadian edition, September 1943. Cover art by an unknown artist.

This is what I wanted to get at: When I looked at this cover today, an image leapt into my mind, that of Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in that famous, minutes-long, unbroken scene in the shipboard stateroom in The Lady Eve (1941). The woman in this picture looks like Barbara Stanwyck and the man looks like Henry Fonda, and they seem to be in the same arrangement, more or less, as in that scene . . . except that they aren't. I misremembered the scene, and so what I had thought was a discovery--that the unknown artist here worked from a movie still from The Lady Eve--actually isn't. Anyway, Margaret Brundage's cover design has its merits, chiefly its fine psychological portrait of a woman. The Canadian version, on the other hand, has a distinctly 1940s glamour and gloss. (It's what made me think of a Hollywood movie.) To me it's gorgeous, a portrait of hair as much as anything. (I have always wondered what the top of those 1940s women's hairdos looked like . . . )

As a bonus, here is Leonardo da Vinci's version of the lady with an ermine, from 1490, executed for Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milano, and now pretty well acknowledged as a portrait of his mistress, Cecilia Gallerani. I have never seen this painting, the real thing that is, but I have visited il castello Sforzesco in Milano more than once. It is one of my favorite places in that city of excitement and wonder.

Text and captions copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Doctor Satan on the Cover of Weird Tales

I wrote the previous series on superheroes, supervillains, supermen, and super-words in order to get here today. My hypothesis was that these words and concepts originated in the 1890s, give or take a decade. The evidence seems to bear out my hypothesizing. I didn't realize how strong would be the connection between super-ness and the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, though. Even so, we as Americans more or less took these words and concepts away from European high culture and its distant and abstruse philosophizing and adapted them to our popular culture, in the process making them safer and more immediate, democratizing them, deflating them, and reducing the danger they represented to humanity. (1) There were echoes of words and concepts from Nietzsche--of supermen and super-words--in the popular press and in popular culture as late as the pulp fiction era, but as the twentieth century progressed, the superhero, as the successor to the hero in popular, folkloric, conventional, and sentimental literature, became more positive than negative, a force for the preservation of civilization and society rather than for their destruction, or for his striding over them in Nietzschean fashion. The superhero or superman came first, and in becoming positive, he had to have something against him, an antagonist, a foil, a counterweight. That's how, I think, we came to have the supervillain.

In my search for various super-words, I found a first occurrence of supervillain in the 1910s, significantly, I think, in drama (or melodrama) and in the cinema, in other words, in pop-cultural forms rather than in high culture or belles lettres. Tarzan and John Carter, two of the earliest superheroes, first appeared in 1912. The following year, one of the earliest supervillains, the insidious Fu Manchu, showed his face for the first time. (2) Tarzan and John Carter were and are regular and recurring characters. In that way, they have one of the qualities we associate with superheroes. But neither has a regular and recurring supervillain to oppose him. Likewise, Fu Manchu does not have a superhero against him. Instead there is Sir Denis Nayland Smith, a kind of Sherlock Holmes to Fu Manchu's Moriarty. Perhaps that was the model for the Doctor Satan stories that appeared in Weird Tales, beginning in August 1935.

In 1984, Robert Weinberg collected the Doctor Satan stories in a softbound booklet called, appropriately enough, Dr. Satan. In his introduction, Mr. Weinberg explained the origin of the series as a response to the popularity of the weird horror or terror titles of the early 1930s. These magazines were in competition with Weird Tales. If the editor, Farnsworth Wright, was going to keep up, he would have to feature stories of weird detectives in his magazine, or so he must have thought. "The Death Cry," by Arthur Reeves, printed in the May 1935 issue of Weird Tales, was the first entry in the magazine's journal of weird detective tales. The Doctor Satan series, by the prolific Paul Ernst, followed over the next year or so.

Whether he was ever referred to as a supervillain or not, Doctor Satan fits the bill. He has superpowers (his are supernatural) and regularly wears the same costume, at least on the cover of Weird Tales, making him instantly recognizable to children and fans. His foil is Ascott (or Ascot) Keane, a detective who may or may not be super. (He's definitely no Batman.) The two fought it out, as heroes and villains do, for eight stories spread out over a year's worth of issues. Still, the conventions of the superhero genre were not well established in the early to mid 1930s. There may have been superheroes at the time but not always supervillains to match them. Conversely, there may have been supervillains, like Doctor Satan, but no superheroes in possession of equal and opposing superpowers with whom they might contend.

Doctor Satan was on the cover of two issues of Weird Tales, in his debut in August 1935 and in his penultimate appearance in May 1936. In the meantime, the author, Paul Ernst, had his byline on the cover of the magazine several times. Unfortunately for him and his supervillainous character, the Conan stories, by Robert E. Howard, were running at the same time. Conan won the cover contest by a score of three to two in the year he and Doctor Satan shared space in Weird Tales. Conan the superhero is still remembered today. Doctor Satan the supervillain is, on the other hand, almost forgotten.

The Doctor Satan Stories in Weird Tales
"Doctor Satan" (Aug. 1935)
"The Man Who Chained the Lightning" (Sept. 1935)
"Hollywood Horror" (Oct. 1935)
"The Consuming Flame" (Nov. 1935)
"Horror Insured" (Jan. 1936)
"Beyond Death's Gateway" (Mar. 1936)
"The Devil's Double" (May 1936)
"Mask of Death" (Sept. 1936)

Notes

(1) Here is Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Vintage, 1991): "I will argue that high culture made itself obsolete through modernism's neurotic nihilism and that popular culture is the great heir of the western past." (p. 31)

(2) There were supervillains before Fu Manchu, of course. One example is the Invisible Man from the novel of the same name by H.G. Wells, first published in 1897.

Weird Tales, August 1935. Cover story: "Doctor Satan" by Paul Ernst. Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

Weird Tales, May 1936. Cover story: "The Devil's Double" by Paul Ernst. Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

These covers also appear in my entry "Devils and Demons on the Cover of Weird Tales," from October 24, 2016, here.

Text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Zombies, Liches, Corpses, and the Undead

So far, February has been Zombie Month at Tellers of Weird Tales. I guess I'll keep it up for a while, beginning with all of the covers of Weird Tales showing zombies, liches, corpses, and the undead, plus a couple of creatures that look like they could be from among the undead. I count more than a dozen of these covers. One thing I noticed in pulling them together is that many of the undead seem to have lost their pupils, like Little Orphan Annie. If the eyes are a window upon the soul, I guess that makes sense. Anyway, the first cover is for a story by Arthur J. Burks, who may be the forgotten father of the zombie in America. I don't know for a fact that the taller of the two figures is a zombie, but once I learned a little something about Burks, the cover made sense: in front appears to be a bokor, houngan, or mambo, and in the rear, a zombie? I plan to read this story soon. When I do, I'll let you know for sure.

Weird Tales, August 1925. Cover story: "Black Medicine" by Arthur J. Burks. Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch.

Weird Tales, April 1930. Cover story: "The Dust of Egypt" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by Hugh Rankin. The creature in the middle looks like one of the undead, plus he doesn't have any pupils. You have seen this cover before in the categories of Egypt and of the reaching hand, but I think it has a place here, too.

Weird Tales, January 1931. Cover story "The Lost Lady" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by C.C. Senf. Another reaching hand, and in the rear, a zomboid creature. Or maybe he's a ghoul.

Weird Tales, August 1932. Cover story: "Bride of the Peacock" by E. Hoffman Price. Cover art by T. Wyatt Nelson. More than a skeleton, less than alive. In my book, that makes for one of the undead.

Weird Tales, October 1936. Cover story: "Isle of the Undead" by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach. Cover art by J. Allen St. John. There's no doubt about this cover.

Weird Tales, February 1937. Cover story: "The Globe of Memories" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by Virgil Finlay.

Weird Tales, October 1937. Cover story: "Tiger Cat" by David H. Keller. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. I don't know that the men in the picture are of the undead, but their eyes are blunked out, as MAD magazine put it in its parody of Pogo, so here they are. Update (Feb. 18, 2017): I have just read this story. You can read it, too, by going to this issue of Weird Tales at the website pulpmags.org, here. As it turns out, the men in the story are not undead, and though the woman is defending herself from them, the whole situation is not what you might think. Just read for yourself. I think you'll like the story.

Weird Tales, July 1938. Cover story: "Spawn of Dagon" by Henry Kuttner. Cover art by Virgil Finlay. More missing pupils, plus the short guy in front is pretty green and seems to be past his expiration date.

How did Virgil Finlay see the future so well?

Weird Tales, November 1939. Cover story: "Towers of Death" by Henry Kuttner. Cover art by Virgil Finlay. This is a rare cover and one we haven't seen before (if I remember right).

Weird Tales, July 1940. Cover story: "An Adventure of a Professional Corpse" by H. Bedford-Jones. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. This guy wins the prize for the spiffiest corpse so far.

Weird Tales, Canadian edition, November 1943. Cover story: Uncertain. Cover art by an unknown artist. The Canadian edition of Weird Tales had its own look. You would barely know that it was the same magazine as the American edition. And some of the Canadian covers were superior to their American counterparts.

Weird Tales, Canadian edition, March 1944. Cover story: "The Valley of the Assassins" by Edmond Hamilton [?]. Cover art by an unknown artist. More blunked-out eyes. Are these men undead?

Weird Tales, July 1947. Cover story: "Weirdisms: The Vampire" by E. Crosby Michel. Cover art by Lee Brown Coye. This is actually a vampire cover, but Coye's vampire looks more like what we think of as a zombie. Coye tended to draw and paint decrepit people, but I think that with his artist's keen vision, he saw and depicted the true nature of the vampire as an evil and depraved being. People who think of vampires as cute and sexy have forgotten or overlooked that. Why do they have to be reminded that vampires are here to kill us all?

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

Text and captions copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley