C.C. Senf (1873-1949)-Part 1

February 2, 2014, 8:26 am

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Curtis Charles Senf

Commercial Artist, Lithographer, Illustrator

Born July 30, 1873, Alsace-Lorraine, German Empire

Died April 24, 1949, Chicago, Illinois

I have been writing lately about cover illustrations for Weird Tales but only a little about the artists who created them. I would like to take some time out from the one to write about the other. The life and work of C.C. Senf are a good place to start.

Curtis Charles Senf, better known to readers of Weird Tales as C.C. Senf, was born on July 30, 1873, in Alsace-Lorraine, then a relatively new addition to the German Empire. (1) Senf's parents, Constantin Ernst Senf and Rosette "Rosa" Senf, set out for the United States in June 1881 with their four children in tow. Curt was then just seven years old. His younger siblings, Gertrud, Robert, and baby Elise, ranged in age from six years to seven months. The Senf family made Chicago their new home. By 1900, Constantin Senf was gone, and Rosa was then living in St. Louis with her family. Curtis, her oldest, was married and had by then started a career of his own in Chicago. (2)

You can read the biography of C.C. Senf on a website called Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists by David Saunders, here. I don't want to rehash too much of what Mr. Saunders has already written. According to him, Senf studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and in 1896 joined the then new Palette and Chisel Club. Lorado Taft (1860-1936), a renowned sculptor and a teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago, was a leader of the club. We'll hear more of Taft later. On June 29, 1898, seventeen years and one day after the ship delivering him from Germany landed in New York, Curtis C. Senf married Harriet L. Loesch at St. Paul's Church in Chicago. Nicknamed Hattie, Senf's wife was also a German immigrant. Together, the Senfs would have two daughters, Ruth and Evelyn.

I don't know Senf's course of study, but a listing in the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry from 1914 described him as a commercial artist and lithographer. That listing leads to some speculation on Senf's lineage as an artist.

C.C. Senf turned fifty in the year that Weird Tales made its debut and was fifty-three when he created his first cover for the magazine in March 1927. (3) Age should not of course be a limitation for an artist, even in a new field of endeavor. Fletcher Hanks for instance was fifty-one when he began working in comic books in 1939. But it's hard to deny that Senf's work has an old-fashioned look to it, even for the 1920s. To be fair, Weird Tales was an old-fashioned magazine in many ways. After all, weird fiction is essentially about the past and about decadence. (4) Senf's artwork may have suited the mood and the editorial slant of the magazine pretty well. In any case, he created forty-five covers for Weird Tales between March 1927 and September 1932, or about three-quarters of the covers for that period. Senf's tenure as cover artist at Weird Tales nearly coincided with that of another Old World artist who worked for the competition. And thereby hangs a tale.

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) The Internet Speculative Fiction Database give's Senf's birthplace as Roßlau, Duchy of Anhalt, German Empire, in central Germany. I have based my information on public records, but I'm not going to argue with anybody on this. Public records are often wrong.
(2) Isabella Senf was the youngest child enumerated in the home of Rosa Senf. Presumably she was the last of the Senf children. Curtis C. Senf's younger brother, Robert Senf, was enumerated with him in Chicago in 1900. Robert was then an artist. Later he became an engraver in New York City. Born on December 3, 1875, Robert Gunther Senf died in Manhattan on November 29, 1924, a few days short of his forty-ninth birthday.
(3) Prior to that, Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales, had relied on a number of artists for his cover designs. There were eight in the four years before Senf arrived on the scene in March 1927. Together, Senf and another newcomer, Hugh Rankin, did the cover illustrations for all but one issue of Weird Tales for the next five years, until May 1932. The exception was by C. Barker Petrie, Jr., from February/March 1931. Senf created forty-five covers between March 1927 and September 1932. Rankin created fifteen covers between August 1927 and December 1930. They were succeeded by J. Allen St. John and Margaret Brundage, who dominated the 1930s at Weird Tales.
(4) In contrast, science fiction is about the future, even when it is set in the present or the past.

Weird Tales, April 1927, the first issue with cover art by C.C. Senf. I believe this is a watercolor drawing, yet the technique in the textures of fur, skin, foliage, and grass gives it the look of a lithograph. By the 1920s, lithography had been replaced by photoengraving in the popular press. The artist, who was fifty-three years old when this cover was printed, had studied art in the 1890s, but even then lithography as a commercial process was nearing the end of its days. (Currier and Ives, a leading seller of lithographs, went out of business in 1907.) Like wood engraving before it, lithography would soon fall into the domain of the fine artist rather than the commercial artist. Nevertheless, C.C. Senf seems to have held on to the look if not the use of lithography even into the 1920s.

So the technique is somewhat old-fashioned. The subject matter and the depiction of the figures are also old-fashioned, and to my eye distinctly Old World in appearance. European culture casts its gaze into the past; the European monster comes from folklore. He is a giant, a troll, a vampire, a werewolf. American culture, being young and without a past, looks to the frontier or to the future for its monsters. American monsters may come from tall tales, like the Hodag, but most are cryptozoological (Sasquatch) or in some way scientific or technological (the space alien or the android). The psychopath, which in Europe is called a werewolf or a vampire, is another type of scientific--hence American--monster. He is explained by the soft science of psychology. In any case, this cover for Weird Tales looks European to me. It's no surprise to learn that its creator was born in Europe and worked in a tradition more European than American.

Here is an example of a chromolithograph--a color lithograph--from the late nineteenth century. (The Internet source for this image says 1884. The book Popular Prints of the Americas [1973] dates it to the 1890s.) Note the attention to detail in the grass and the foliage in the background. You may not see it very well, but the man's jacket is also highly textured.

Here is a later chromolithograph, a label for Mephisto Cigars from 1897. The figure is fantastic, but note the stiffness and formality in how it is depicted. Victorian might be the best word to describe that look. Pulp magazine illustration would help bring all that to an end.

Weird Tales, October 1927. Again, an example of Senf's nineteenth-century sensibilities, though less so in terms of technique. Here, the old-fashioned look is more in the subject matter and the treatment of the figures. It reminds me of a historical film, which would at that time have been silent. Moreover, it reminds me of nineteenth-century academic art, the kind that Modernists wanted to tear down and replace with their own work.

Here's an example: "From an Absent One" by the Dutch-British artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912), who was famed for his historical paintings of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. By the early twentieth century, Alma-Tadema and artists like him had fallen far out of favor. Taking their place were parades of Cubists, Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and Fauves, the last not insignificantly called "the wild beasts."

Weird Tales, June 1928. Few covers for Weird Tales were as European as this one, and probably no other artist would have been as comfortable with it as C.C. Senf. (Even the author of the cover story, Signe Toksvig, was European, though transplanted to America.) Senf seems to have handled this illustration with complete confidence. The figures, the dress, and the horse's outfit ring with authenticity.

So C.C. Senf was old-fashioned in his technique, in his subject matter, in his treatment of the human figure, and in his work in the European tradition. That's not to say that he was a bad artist or ill-suited to Weird Tales. After all, he proved to be a workhorse in his five years creating covers for the magazine. I'll write more about his artistic lineage next time.

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C.C. Senf (1873-1949)-Part 2

February 3, 2014, 5:10 pm

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Weird Tales, the first American magazine devoted exclusively to fantasy, made its debut in March 1923. Subtitled "The Unique Magazine," it was indeed unique, but only for a time. In April 1926, Amazing Stories, the first American science fiction magazine, crowded onto the newsstand with Weird Tales. Although science fiction and fantasy titles proliferated in the 1930s and '40s, Weird Tales and Amazing Stories continued to hold a place of prominence. Both are still in existence in an electronic format if not always in print.

The first cover of Amazing Stories was the work of Frank R. Paul (1884-1963), one of the most well known and influential of science fiction artists. Paul was born in the old imperial city of Vienna on April 18, 1884. Unlike C.C. Senf, he studied art and reached adulthood in Europe, arriving in the United States in 1906. While in London, Paul studied mechanical and architectural drafting. That training showed in his work, for he had a flare for buildings, machinery, vehicles, and equipment. (1) In 1914, Paul met Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967), an entrepreneur and publisher, and--like Paul and Senf--a European immigrant. (2) Only four months younger than Paul, Gernsback came to the United States before him, in 1904. Gernsback was an enthusiast of electronics and radio (then called wireless) and founded two magazines on his favorite subjects, Modern Electrics in 1908 and The Electrical Experimenter in 1913. Both published catalogues of parts, instructional and informational articles, and scientific romances, what Gernsback later called scientifiction. One of the earliest of these was "Ralph 124C 41+," Gernsback's own work, which was serialized in Modern Electrics beginning in April 1911. (3) Frank R. Paul, who did illustrations for Gernsback's electronics magazines, also provided the cover art for the hardbound version of Ralph 124C 41+, published in 1925. With the debut of Amazing Stories in 1926, Paul became a regular cover artist for Gernsback's science fiction magazines as well, including Amazing Stories Annual, Amazing Stories Quarterly, Air Wonder Stories, Science Wonder Stories, and Science Wonder Quarterly.

Although Frank R. Paul excelled at drawing the architecture and gadgetry of science fiction, his work, like that of C.C. Senf, has a decidedly old-fashioned look. That is especially true of his human faces and figures. There is a certain stiffness and formality in Paul's people. Moreover, their hair, dress, and facial features are not especially modern in appearance. Both men were of course fully capable of drawing people, but an air of the Victorian Age pervades their work. Frank R. Paul was younger than C.C. Senf by eleven years. That difference seems not to have mattered much in their art. Like Senf, Paul fussed over details, although to be fair to him, a certain fussiness is necessary when you're drawing objects of such mechanical precision. In that way Paul's work is often a wonder to behold. His perspective and his sense of how a purely imaginary machine is put together are flawless. You can actually count bolts and rivets, and they are in precisely the place necessary to hold the thing together. Also, a certain amount of precision may be unavoidable for an artist of German origin or training. (4, 5, 6) In any case, there is a strong contrast between the early Germanic pulp artists Senf and Paul, and later artists--mostly American-born--who dashed off loose, impressionistic, action-packed magazine covers. As examples, I offer Rudolph Belarski (1900-1983), Walter Baumhofer (1904-1987), and Norman Saunders (1907-1989), all men of a younger generation, each of whom probably cut his teeth on golden age illustration and early newspaper comics.

To be concluded . . .

Amazing Stories Annual #1, 1927, with cover art by Frank R. Paul. Note the attention to detail in the clothing and equipment. Note also the nineteenth-century appearance, especially the look of a lithograph and the stiffness of the male figure. This scene, from "Master Mind of Mars" by Edgar Rice Burroughs, is one of the most iconic in all of science fiction. Generation after generation of artists has depicted it or variations thereof.

Weird Tales, November 1929, with cover art by C.C. Senf. Here for example is a version by Senf. His scientist is a villain rather than a savior. Again, note the old-fashioned look.

Amazing Stories, April 1927, with cover art by Frank R. Paul. A scene that looks even more Victorian than the first two. The man on the lower left looks like a depiction of Sherlock Holmes, right down to his Victorian- or Edwardian-era suit and collar. Again, Paul's work looks like a lithograph.

Weird Tales, May 1927, with cover art by C.C. Senf. It looks like Senf was more comfortable with the human figure than was Paul, but there is still a certain posed stiffness to much of his work. Or maybe staged is a better word. I have called Senf and Paul old-fashioned, but Hollywood movie stills from the same period looked a lot like this. It may have been that moviemakers were still thinking in terms of the stage and had not yet gotten it into their heads that they were working in an entirely new medium. Maybe pulp artists were in the same boat. Pulp magazines were a new form, but artists were still looking to the past for inspiration. For example:

Amazing Stories, August 1927, with cover art by Frank R. Paul, illustrating War of the Worlds, a story by H.G. Wells from the Victorian Age. It's an exciting image and has a certain pulp garishness, with flat and very bright colors. Note the artist's fascination with and mastery of mechanical objects.

Frank Reade Weekly Magazine #10, January 3, 1903. That fascination with mechanical objects may have been simply a personal preference with Paul. On the other hand, it may been a throwback to so-called "Edisonades," or stories of invention from the Victorian and Edwardian Ages. (7) Note the similarities between the work of Senf and Paul, and the much earlier work of the anonymous artists who illustrated dime novels: the formalized composition and treatment of figures; the attention to detail, especially in textures, foliage, and machinery; and the use of the medium of lithography.

Frank Reade Weekly Magazine #46, September 11, 1903. Another example of a dime-novel "Edisonade." So, a quarter century separated the dime novels I have shown here from the pulp covers drawn by C.C. Senf and Frank R. Paul. To be sure, there were changes in those twenty-five years, but none as dramatic as those that took place in the next decade:

Argosy, January 8, 1938, with cover art by Rudolph Belarski. Note the more dramatic composition and the ease with the human figure. Note also that most of the detail has dropped out. There is a machine in the picture, but the artist has refrained from showing every rivet and joint on its surface. Note a certain slickness and glamour in the presentation. The three main characters could be movie stars (maybe Alan Ladd, Dorothy Lamour, and Anthony Quinn). It's a story from the past, but it looks like the future with all its perfect people and clean, streamlined surfaces. There is even an evocation of the perisphere and trylon from the 1939 World's Fair in the planet and the wing of the aircraft.

Startling Stories, May 1941, with cover art by Rudolph Belarski. Another Belarski cover, more action-packed than the previous. Note the impressionistic brushwork, especially in the creatures in the foreground. Moreover, note the composition: you are not just looking at a tableau; you are actually right beyond the bounds of the picture.

Doc Savage Magazine, November 1933, with cover art by Walter Baumhofer. Only four years separated this cover from Senf's November 1929 cover shown above, yet the difference is remarkable. Was Baumhofer a better artist than Senf? Maybe so and maybe not. That's beside the point. What matters here is the gulf separating the artist working in a nineteenth-century European tradition from the artist working in a new, twentieth-century American style.

Secret Agent X Detective Mysteries, June 1938, with cover art by Norm Saunders. So what happened in the ten years or less between Senf and Saunders? I can't say for sure. I can speculate that the torch was passed from one generation of artists to the next. Each of the three previous artists was born after 1900. They would not have had any memory of dime novels, Currier and Ives, or any other trappings of nineteenth-century America, nor would they have been trained in a European tradition. Despite his Polish name, Belarski was born in Pennsylvania and attended the Pratt Institute, as did Baumhofer. Norm Saunders came from the sticks, too. He studied with Harvey Dunn, a student in turn of Howard Pyle, the father of illustration in America. They and artists like them grew up looking at books and magazines illustrated by giants--Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth--and by artists of glamour and sophistication--Charles Dana Gibson, Howard Chandler Christie, and James Montgomery Flagg. They would also have read newspaper comics with all their verve and vitality. And they would have witnessed the transition of movies from simply filmed plays to a new kind of art. Maybe that was the difference: from the mid or late '20s and into the 1930s, pulp magazines became something new--not a dime novel or penny dreadful, not a magazine from the golden age, but a new form and something uniquely American.

Notes

(1) Frank R. Paul was also very good with designing alien life forms. I can't help but think that Stanley G. Weinbaum was inspired to create his Martian Tweel by looking at pictures by Paul.

(2) Hugo Gernsback was born in Luxembourg.

(3) The title "Ralph 124C 41+" is a pun--"Ralph, one to foresee for one"--and lets us know that Gernsback's story is one of prophecy and prediction.

(4) Before you get upset about supposed ethnic stereotypes, you should know that I'm about half German, and I'm from Indiana, a state with a lot of German-Americans. I recognize the German sense of precision and order in myself and in many of the Hoosiers I have met over the years. I would guess that Germans recognize these qualities in themselves as well.

(5) In the late nineteenth century, there was a certain tension between artists working in the French manner and those working in the German manner. In an example from the world of music, the French composer Erik Satie stated in a lecture:

At that time [presumably circa 1890-1892] I was writing music for Le Fils des Etoiles . . . and I explained to Debussy the necessity for a Frenchman to free himself from the Wagnerian adventure which in no way corresponded to our national aspirations. And I told him that I was not anti-Wagner in any way but that we ought to have our own music—if possible without choucroute [sauerkraut]. Why shouldn't we make use of the methods employed by Claude Monet, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc.?

Using sauerkraut as a shorthand expression for German or Germanic music may have originated with Debussy. I believe Ravel also used the expression. A further example from the world of art: Indiana artists John W. Love and James F. Gookins established the first Indiana School of Art in 1877. The school lasted just two years and was dissolved in part because the two men differed in their approaches to art. Love studied in France and worked in an Impressionistic manner. Gookins on the other hand studied in Germany and labored over his paintings in the German manner. We should remember that France and Germany fought a war in 1870-1871. A German victory secured Alsace-Lorraine, the birthplace of C.C. Senf, for the German Empire. We should also remember that France and Germany have had a couple of tussles since then, one of which began one hundred years ago this year. If you read The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, you'll find that there were certain feelings of cultural inferiority among the Germans who went to war against France in 1914.

(6) Senf's and Paul's artwork is decidedly Old World in appearance, but their heritage need not have locked them in a box. After all, William F. Heitman (1878-1945), one of the first artists for Weird Tales and a near contemporary of C.C. Senf, was also born in Germany and also came to the United States as a young boy. In contrast to Senf, Heitman possessed a loose, rapid-fire, journalistic technique. He may not have been the draftsman that Senf was, but Heitman got the work done in a hurry, and he produced--a lot. The interior art in some early issues of Weird Tales was entirely his work.

(7) The term Edisonade is relatively new, but the idea is old. The Tom Swift books were another brand of Edisonade. For boys who were more interested in building machines rather than just reading about them, there were toy trains, Erector sets, model airplanes, and model rockets. By the way, I think early science fiction too often lavished attention on technology while skimping on characterization. I recently read some early stories by John W. Campbell, Jr., in which there is an almost pornographic description of science and technology at the expense of other elements of storytelling. These "stories" often amount to little more than plots.

Text and captions copyright 2014 Terence E. Hanley

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C.C. Senf (1873-1949)-Part 3

February 4, 2014, 3:00 am

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C.C. Senf created his first cover for Weird Tales in March 1927 and his last in September 1932. In that five-and-a-half-year period, Senf (forty-five covers), Hugh Rankin (fifteen covers), and C. Barker Petrie, Jr., (one cover) were the sole cover artists for "The Unique Magazine." By my count, Senf also contributed interior illustrations to thirty-four issues of Weird Tales from April 1927 to June 1932.

C.C. Senf turned fifty-nine in 1932. That seems too young for retirement, yet his cover for the September issue of Weird Tales was evidently his last credit in the field of science fiction and fantasy. (The Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists only his illustrations for Weird Tales and no other.) I don't know of any other credits for him, and I have not found anything in the Chicago Tribune. That seems a shame to me. In any case, Senf lived another seventeen years. His death came on April 24, 1949, in Chicago. Curtis C. Senf was buried in Memorial Park in Skokie, Illinois, with his wife.

C.C. Senf's Cover Illustrations for Weird Tales
Mar. 1927, "The City of Glass" by Joel Martin Nichols, Jr.
Apr. 1927, "Explorers Into Infinity" by Ray Cummings
May 1927, "The Master of Doom" by Donald Keyhoe
June 1927, "A Suitor from the Shades" by Greye La Spins
July 1927, "The Return of the Master" by H. Warner Munn
Sept. 1927, "The Wolf-Woman" by Bassett Morgan
Oct. 1927, "The Dark Lore" by Nictzin Dyalhis
Nov. 1927, "The Invading Horde" by Arthur J. Burks
Jan. 1928, "The Gods of East and West" by Seabury Quinn
Feb. 1928, "The Ghost Table" by Elliot O'Donnell
Mar. 1928, "The Strange People" by Murray Leinster
Apr. 1928, "The Jewel of the Seven Stones" by Seabury Quinn
May 1928, "The Bat-Men of Thorium" by Bertram Russell
June 1928, "The Devil's Martyr" by Signe Toksvig
July 1928, "The Witches' Sabbath" by Stephen Bagby
Aug. 1928, "Red Shadows" by Robert E. Howard
Sept. 1928, "The Devil-Plant" by John Murray Reynolds
Oct. 1928, "The Werewolfs Daughter" by H. Warner Munn
Nov. 1928, "The Mystery in Acatlan" by Rachael Marshall and Maverick Terrill
Jan. 1929, "The Black Master" by Seabury Quinn
Mar. 1929, "The People of Pan" by Henry S. Whitehead
May 1929, "The Scourge of B'Moth" by Bertram Russell
July 1929, "The Corpse-Master" by Seabury Quinn
Sept. 1929, "The White Wizard" by Sophie Wenzel Ellis
Nov. 1929, "The Gray Killer" by Everil Worrell
Jan. 1930, "The Curse of the House of Phipps" by Seabury Quinn
Mar. 1930, "The Drums of Dumballah" by Seabury Quinn
May 1930, "The Brain-Thief' by Seabury Quinn
July 1930, "The Bride of Dewer" by Seabury Quinn
Sept. 1930, "The Invisible Bond" by Arlton Eadie
Nov. 1930, "A Million Years After" by Katherine Metcalf Roof
Jan. 1931, "The Lost Lady" by Seabury Quinn
Apr.-May 1931, "The Dust of Death" by Hugh Jeffries
June-July 1931, "Tam, Son of the Tiger" by Otis Adelbert Kline
Aug. 1931, "Tam, Son of the Tiger" by Otis Adelbert Kline
Sept. 1931, "Tam, Son of the Tiger" by Otis Adelbert Kline
Oct. 1931, "Tam, Son of the Tiger" by Otis Adelbert Kline
Nov. 1931, "Placide's Wife" by Kirk Mashburn
Dec. 1931, "The Dark Man" by Robert E. Howard
Jan. 1932, "The Monster of the Prophecy" by Clark Ashton Smith
Feb. 1932, "The Devil's Bride" by Seabury Quinn
Mar. 1932, "The Vengeance of Ixmal" by Kirk Mashburn
Apr. 1932, "The Red Witch" by Nictzin Dyalhis
May 1932, "The Brotherhood of Blood" by Hugh B. Cave
Sept. 1932, "The Phantom Hand" by Victor Rousseau
(Source: The Collector's Index to Weird Tales by Sheldon R. Jaffery and Fred Cook, 1985)

Interior Illustrations
Apr. 1927, "Explorers Into Infinity" part 1 by Ray Cummings
May 1927
June 1927
July 1927
Mar. 1929
Apr. 1929
May 1929
July 1929
Aug. 1929
Sept. 1929
Oct. 1929
Nov. 1929
Jan. 1930
Mar. 1930
Apr. 1930
May 1930
July 1930
Aug. 1930
Sept. 1930
Oct. 1930
Nov. 1930
Jan. 1931
Feb.-Mar. 1931
Apr.-May 1931
June-July 1931
Aug. 1931
Sept. 1931
Oct. 1931
Nov. 1931
Dec. 1931
Jan. 1932
Mar. 1932
Apr. 1932
June 1932, "Birch Trees" (poem) by Marvin Luter Hill

Further Reading
Field Guide To Wild American Pulp Artists by David Saunders.

C.C. Senf's first cover for Weird Tales, March 1927.

And his last, September 1932. Note the difference in style, from a somewhat antiquated style, like a nineteenth-century fairy tale, to a more contemporary style, like a 1930s movie magazine or love pulp.

A few days ago I wrote about swipes. Well sometimes an artist swipes from himself. The top image is from January 1932. Just five months later, Weird Tales treated its readers to an almost identical composition.

I have been harping on Senf's old-fashioned style. This cover (May 1928) is old-fashioned in its way, but it's still effective. The woman is a little stiff, considering what is being done to her, but the monsters are good, that is to say, bad. They remind me of Ray Harryhausen's animated creatures.

Believe it or not, this picture was drawn by a fifty-seven-year-old and probably a respected man in his neighborhood, yet it has a primitive power and a certain unseemliness that doesn't quite fit the artist. This cover came along at about the beginning of the weird menace craze. It has all that and more: bondage, torture, a scantily clad woman, a reaching hand, a pistol shot ringing out, a green ghoul, and a bald-headed guy with mean eyes and a meaner whip. Snoopy could write a novel about a picture like this. In any case, Senf's technique had changed in the four years he had been creating covers for Weird Tales. There is less fussiness and more pulpishness. The hero's hand looks good, and the figure of the woman is beautifully done. I have begun to see that Senf was good with female form, face, and hair.

Here is an odd composition by C.C. Senf. It reminds me of a Biblical epic from the early days of Hollywood. Intolerance (1916) might be the movie I'm thinking of. I call it odd, but I have to say it works.

In comparison, here's an illustration by Hugh Rankin from December 1927. Another odd composition, but still a workable picture. C.C. Senf (1873-1949) and Hugh Rankin (1878-1956) were close to the same age, yet they could hardly have been different as artists. Senf was of course born in Germany and worked in a European or nineteenth-century style and technique. Rankin on the other hand was American and very modern. He first worked as a cartoonist and newspaper artist. In that capacity, he would have been forced to reduce things to their essences. As an illustrator, he seems to have been influenced by the art nouveau and art deco styles. The lettering on the cover looks like his hand lettering. Rankin was the son of an artist. His mother was Ellen Rankin Copp, a sculptress and a student of Lorado Taft at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1888-1890. It seems pretty likely to me that Senf and Rankin would have been acquainted before they worked for Weird Tales. But there are certain things we will probably never know.

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John Giunta (ca. 1920-1970)-Part 1

February 5, 2014, 10:28 am

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Aka Jay Gee
Illustrator, Comic Book Artist, Science Fiction Fan, Author, Editor, Publisher, Art Director, Reviewer
Born ca. 1920, New York
Died November 6, 1970

John Giunta was born in about 1920 in New York, probably in Brooklyn or Queens. His parents were Italian immigrants. (The surname Giunta is the Italian equivalent of the Spanish word junta.) Giunta's mother was named Jenny, perhaps a nickname for Giovanna. His father may have been Thomas G. Giunta. I think both worked in the garment industry. In 1940, John Giunta was at home in Brooklyn with his mother. He was nineteen years old and already working as a commercial artist by then. If Thomas G. Giunta was indeed the father of John Giunta, then there were other Giunta children, Anna, Antonio, and Marie E. Giunta. I haven't found John Giunta in any other census except 1940, nor in any other public records. I don't even know his date of birth.

If John Giunta has any measure of fame today, it's mostly for his collaboration with Frank Frazetta on Frazetta's first published comic book story, "Snowman," from Tally Ho #1 (Dec. 1944). Frazetta was of course a teenaged prodigy and would go on to great fame in the 1960s and beyond. Giunta, by then in his mid-twenties, was already a comic book veteran, having started in the business in the late 1930s. But if you look for biographical information on him in any of the histories of comic books, you will come up empty. On the other hand, if you begin with two sources on science fiction fandom, you will find some interesting tidbits on Giunta's early career as an artist, editor, and publisher.

Science fiction fandom began in the late 1920s with the letters column of Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories. During the next decade or so, fans began corresponding with each other, organizing clubs, and issuing their own hectographed and mimeographed magazines. New York City was an epicenter of fandom, Brooklyn and Queens in particular. Much of what we know of early fandom comes from the men who were there and who in later years recounted their experiences. The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom by Sam Moskowitz (1954) and All Our Yesterdays by Harry Warner, Jr. (1969) are two invaluable sources about a kind of golden age that slipped away as youth slips away.

Like other artists and writers in his field, John Giunta gained entry into comic books because of his interest in science fiction and fantasy and because of his activity in fandom. (1) According to Sam Moskowitz, Cosmic Tales, issued by New York fans James V. Taurasi, Jack Gillespie, and Robert G. Thompson beginning in 1937, "was the magazine which introduced artists John Giunta and Jack Agnew to the field." (2) Giunta would have been just sixteen or seventeen years old at the time. Taurasi passed editorship on to the sister-and-brother team of Gertrude and Louis Kuslan with the September 1938 issue of Cosmic Tales. John Giunta took over for one issue, dated 1940 (Vol. 1, No. 2). By then Giunta had already published his own fanzine, Amazing Wonder Tales, the one-and-only issue of which was dated August 1938.

Earlier that summer--on June 5, 1938, to be exact--Giunta had attended the first meeting of the newly reorganized Greater New York Chapter of the Science Fiction League. Sixteen fans were present, including, in the words of Sam Moskowitz, "two amateur artists, John Giunta and Daniel C. Burford." (3) Jack Rubinson and William Sykora were also there. The next event in a chronicle of Giunta's fan activity was the publication of the first mimeographed edition of Fantascience Digest, edited by Robert A. Madle, in January 1939. Staff writers on the magazine included two historians of fandom, Harry Warner, Jr., and Sam Moskowitz. The list of contributors to Fantascience Digest is nothing to sniff at: Henry Kuttner, Ray Bradbury, Ralph Milne Farley, Donald A. Wollheim, and the young John Giunta. (4) That same month, Giunta had his first published credit in a professional science fiction magazine (prozine), a letter in Startling Stories.

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster for example, were keen fans of science fiction and published their own fanzines, Cosmic Stories (1929) and Science Fiction (1933). They also created Superman, a character that had originated in pulp-fictional form. Other science fiction fan artists included Ronald Clyne and Hannes Bok, both of whom contributed to Weird Tales. See All Our Yesterdays by Harry Warner, Jr. (1969), p. 91
(2) The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom by Sam Moskowitz (1954), p. 135.
(3) Moskowitz, p. 171.
(4) Moskowitz, p. 200.

Amazing Wonder Tales #1, August 1938, a science fiction fanzine with cover art by John Giunta.

Cosmic Tales, July 1941 (Vol. 1, No. 4), with cover art by Giunta.

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John Giunta (ca. 1920-1970)-Part 2

February 6, 2014, 3:00 am

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Science fiction fandom of the 1930s culminated in the First World Science Fiction Convention, held July 2 to July 4, 1939, at Caravan Hall, in New York City. Science fiction fans, artists, and writers from all over the country flocked to the convention. Forrest J Ackerman and Ray Bradbury came in from Los Angeles, Jack Williamson from New Mexico. Ray Cummings, Manly Wade Wellman, Edmond Hamilton, L. Sprague de Camp, Isaac Asimov, and the esteemed Frank R. Paul also showed up. The convention also boasted the attendance of magazine editors John W. Campbell, Jr., Leo Margulies, Mort Weisinger, Charles D. Hornig, and Farnsworth Wright, the last of Weird Tales. Giunta and Wright may have met. Who at this point can say. But by the time Giunta's first illustration appeared in Weird Tales in November 1942, Wright was gone from his post as editor. He was in fact in his grave.

John Giunta was a part of the crowd and in front of the crowd at the First World Science Fiction Convention. Giunta, James V. Taurasi, and Sam Moskowitz auctioned off, among other gems, original art by Virgil Finlay that went for as little as two dollars per piece. (1) In a softball game between the Queens Science Fiction League Cometeers and the Philadelphia Science Fantasy Society Panthers, Giunta replaced the Queens pitcher, A. Langley Searles, in the fourth inning and finished the game despite being pounded by the Panthers. The final score was Queens 23, Philadelphia 11. (2)

Science fiction conventions continue today, but that First World Science Fiction Convention came at the beginning of a fateful summer, for two months later, war began again in Europe. American involvement was still two years off, but science fiction fandom of the 1930s was reaching not only a chronological end but also a sort of spiritual end. As Isaac Asimov wrote:

Beginning with the third decade [of life], after [age] twenty, life becomes filled with adult responsibility and turns to lead. But that second decade, from ten to twenty, is gold; it is in those years that we remember bliss. (3)

Asimov turned twenty in 1940. If John Giunta was born in 1920, then he, too, entered his own age of lead that year. Nevertheless, Taurasi and Moskowitz organized a new science fiction fan club, The Cometeers, on October 14, 1940, at Giunta's home. Other members included Ray Van Houten, John Peterson, Elliott Dold, and F. Orlin Tremaine. According to Harry Warner, Jr.:

Membership was by invitation only, and eventually the group either became so exclusive that it lost all contact with civilization, or it disintegrated; the last positive evidence of its survival is at the start of 1944. (4)

I don't know whether Giunta was still a member in 1944, but by then he was well on his way as a comic book artist and magazine illustrator, the career that would carry him through to the end of his brief life.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom by Sam Moskowitz (1954), p. 221.

(2) Moskowitz, p. 222.

(3) From "Introduction" by Isaac Asimov in Before the Golden Age: A Science Fiction Anthology of the 1930s (1974), p. xiii.

(4) All Our Yesterdays by Harry Warner, Jr. (1969), p. 220.

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John Giunta (ca. 1920-1970)-Part 3

February 6, 2014, 1:56 pm

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According to the book The T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents Companion (2005), John Giunta began working in comic books in 1939. As a beginning artist he did lettering and coloring for the Harry "A" Chesler comic book shop. He also reviewed science fiction fanzines in Amazing Mystery Funnies #12 (Dec. 1939). According to the online Comic Book Database, Giunta's earliest credited work as a comic book artist appeared in Spitfire Comics #1, from August 1941. He continued working in comic books for the rest of his life and is credited with published work in all but four years between 1941 and 1970, the year of his death. In addition to Spitfire Comics, he worked on Joker Comics, Suspense Comics, Treasure Comics, Spook Comics, The Mad Hatter, All-Star Comics, All-American Western, Boy Commandoes, Badmen of Tombstone, Strange Worlds, Man Comics, Chamber of Chills, Weird Thrillers, Big Town, Strange Adventures, Mystery in Space, Lost Worlds, Phantom Stranger, Tomb of Terror, Thrills of Tomorrow, Superboy, Journey into Mystery, Two Gun Western, World of Suspense, Strange Tales, World of Fantasy, Eerie, The Fly, Adventures of the Fly, Tales of the Unexpected, Laugh, Pep, House of Mystery, Tales to Astonish, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, Undersea Agents, Noman, Batman, and Detective Comics. That means that in his lifetime, John Giunta worked for Harvey, Timely, Continental Magazines, Prize Publications, Baily Publishing, O.W. Comics, DC, Avon, Ziff-Davis, Standard/Nedor, Atlas, I.W. Enterprises, Archie Comics, Marvel, and Tower Comics. His work has also been reprinted since his death.

According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, John Giunta's first published work in a professional science fiction magazine was an illustration for "Bratton's Idea" by Manly Wade Wellman in the December 1940 issue of Comet, edited by F. Orlin Tremaine. Giunta's second credited illustration was for "The Hound" by Fritz Leiber, Jr., published in Weird Tales in November 1942. For the next eight years, his illustrations in the genres of science fiction and fantasy appeared only in Weird Tales. That changed in December 1950 with his illustrations for Out of This World Adventures. From the early 1950s to the late 1960s, Giunta contributed to Fantastic Adventures, Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader, Fantastic, Infinity Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Science Fiction Adventures, Venture Science Fiction Magazine, Saturn, Fantastic Universe, If, Galaxy Magazine, and Worlds of Tomorrow. He was also art director for Original Science Fiction Stories and Saturn. And again, his work has been reprinted since his death in 1970.

Those are some long lists for a blog posting, but I have compiled them for a reason. John Giunta was both a comic book artist and a science fiction illustrator. You would hardly know that to look at sources in print or on the Internet. The science fiction sources pretty well ignore his work in comic books, and the comic book sources tell very little about his work as an illustrator. Why is that? Why should there be this unbridged gap between a genre (science fiction) and a form (comic books) that so naturally go together?

To be concluded . . .

"The Magician from Mars," a comic book character and series created by John Giunta, Malcolm Kildale, and Michael Mirando in Amazing Man Comics (Centaur, 1940-1941). Giunta's interest in science fiction shows through pretty clearly here. If you remember my posting from the other day, Malcolm Kildale was the artist from whom Frank Frazetta seems to have borrowed an image or two.

Roly-Poly Comics #10 (Green Publishing Company, Jan. 1946). "Jay Gee," the artist, was John Giunta.

Fantasy, a fanzine dated November 15, 1948, with cover art by John Giunta, evidence that he was involved in fandom even after having become a professional artist.

A somewhat muddy interior illustration for "The Moonrakers," Giunta's own story from If (Jan. 1966).

The cover of Fantasy-Times: The Science-Fiction Newspaper (Sept. 1956), with a small photograph of John Giunta in the upper right. Bill Blackbeard is in the lower center. Giunta illustrated his story (with James O. Causey) "Hammer of Cain" for Weird Tales in November 1943.

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John Giunta (ca. 1920-1970)-Part 4

February 8, 2014, 7:40 am

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I'm not sure that anyone knows when John Giunta was born. One source after another gives his birth year as 1920 without citing a source for that information. (I have based the date given here--circa 1920--on the assumptions that the birth year of 1920 is correct and that Giunta turned twenty sometime after the enumerator of the 1940 census visited his home on April 13, 1940.) As for his death date--I have used the date given by what I take to be a reliable source, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. The ISFDb has the date--November 6, 1970--but not the place of Giunta's death. I presume it to have been in New York City or somewhere close-by.

* * *

Victor Gorelick, an editor for Archie Comics, remembers John Giunta:

I liked John Giunta. He was a nice guy who lived by himself and was a big smoker. He was usually on time with his work, but he was a pretty nervous guy, very insecure, but a very nice man. (1)

If Giunta lived alone, he may very well have died alone, in which case he can be added to a list that includes Hannes Bok and Hugh Rankin, two artists who also contributed to Weird Tales. Giunta's relatively young age at his death and the fact that he was "a big smoker" suggest that he died of cancer.

* * *

John Giunta is remembered as the artist who got Frank Frazetta started in comic books.

When I was about sixteen [Frazetta recalled] someone in my family introduced me to John Giunta. He was a professional artist who was working for Bernard Bailey's comics publishing company and he really wasn't a very personable guy. He was very aloof and self-conscious and hard for me to talk to, but he was really very talented. He had an exceptional ability, but it was coupled with a total lack of self-confidence and an inability to communicate with people. Being around him really opened up my eyes, though, because he was really that good. He had an interesting style, a good sense of spotting and his blacks worked well. You can see a lot of his influence even today in some of my ink work. (2)

Frazetta, then sixteen, had earlier drawn a homemade comic book called Snowman. "Giunta liked [it] and persuaded Bernard Bailey to publish a revised version in Tally Ho #1 in 1944." (3) Frazetta penciled the story, and Giunta inked it and drew the cover for Tally-Ho Comics #1. Frazetta may or may not have been credited for his work. The Comic Book Database suggests that his first credited comic book art was as a penciler and inker in Exciting Comics #59 from January 1948. At age nineteen, Frank Frazetta was a professional artist, thanks in part to John Giunta.

* * *

Victor Gorelick called Giunta "a nice guy," while Frazetta remembered that "he wasn't really a very personable guy." To be fair to Giunta, we should note that Frazetta was a teenager when he met Giunta, and that Giunta was only in his mid-twenties. Presumably, Gorelick knew Giunta--then in his forties--in the early 1960s. Frazetta may have been sensitive to perceived slights in a man who was--by both accounts--insecure and lacking in self-confidence. Upon reading those accounts, I couldn't help but think of Roy G. Krenkel, another of Frank Frazetta's mentors and an artist who lacked confidence in his work.

* * *

I think it pretty safe to say that Robert E. Howard created the genre of heroic fantasy, at least as we know it today. After Howard died by his own hand in 1936, the mantle of heroic fantasy was taken up by Henry Kuttner, Fritz Leiber, Jr., and others. Unlike other pulp genres, heroic fantasy did not easily make the transition to comic books. That changed with the debut of Crom the Barbarian in the first issue of Out of This World, from June 1950 (4). Gardner Fox, an old hand at comic books and pulp fiction, wrote the script. John Giunta, with one foot in the pulps and one in comic books, was the artist. Both had also contributed to Weird Tales, home of Howard's Conan the Cimmerian. They were probably the perfect combination to revive Conan under the name of Conan's god, Crom. There were other similarities between Crom and Conan. (Swipes might be a better word.) I'm not sure that Crom's yellow hair would have thrown anybody off. (5) In any case, Crom appeared in two issues each of Out of This World (6) and Strange Worlds in 1950-1951. Heroic fantasy returned to the comics with a vengeance in 1970 with Marvel Comics'Conan the Barbarian.

* * *

John Giunta drew interior illustrations for Weird Tales beginning with the November 1942 issue and ending with the May 1950 issue. He also created three covers for "The Unique Magazine" from 1944 to 1949. His last was for "The Damp Man Again" by Allison V. Harding. The Damp Man is a comic-book-like villain (also a weird menace kind of villain). John Giunta would have been well qualified to draw the character.

John Giunta's Covers for Weird Tales

Mar. 1944, "The Trail of Cthulhu" by August Derleth

Nov. 1948

May 1949, "The Damp Man Again" by Allison V. Harding

John Giunta's Interior Illustrations in Weird Tales

Nov. 1942

Jan. 1943

Mar. 1943

July 1943

Sept. 1943

Nov. 1943

Mar. 1944

July 1944

Sept. 1944

May 1947

July 1947

Sept. 1947

Jan. 1948

Mar. 1948

May 1948

July 1948

Nov. 1948

May 1949

July 1949

Sept. 1949

Jan. 1950

May 1950

Notes

(1) Quoted in The T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents Companion, edited by Jon B. Cooke (2005), p. 74.

(2) Quoted in Icon: A Retrospective by the Grand Master of Fantastic Art, edited by Arnie Fenner and Cathy Fenner (1998), p. 4.

(3) Fenner and Fenner, p. 4. The actual title is Tally-Ho Comics. The date was December 1944.

(4) Fourteen years to the month after the death of Robert E. Howard.

(5) John Jakes' Conan-like character, Brak the Barbarian, also has yellow hair.

(6) Out of This World was called Out of This World Adventures with issue number two.

Tally-Ho Comics #1 (Dec. 1944) with cover art by John Giunta and probably an uncredited Frank Frazetta.

"Crom the Barbarian" by Gardner Fox and John Giunta from Out of This World #1, June 1950.

Weird Tales, March 1944, with cover art by John Giunta.

Weird Tales, November 1948. Giunta was again the artist. By the mid to late 1940s, Weird Tales was in a science fiction phase. Giunta's art anticipated that of Richard Powers, John Schoenherr, and Jack Gaughan from the 1950s and '60s.

Weird Tales, May 1949, with cover art by John Giunta. There were three stories of The Damp Man in Weird Tales. John Giunta illustrated them all and created a cover for the last, "The Damp Man Again."

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Conan and The Lancer Artists

February 9, 2014, 3:00 am

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If Robert E. Howard created a genre in heroic fantasy, then he also created the most well known character in that genre, Conan of Cimmeria. Howard's original stories of Conan came to an end in June 1936 with the author's death. Since then, Conan has served as a model for countless characters, from Henry Kuttner's Elak of Atlantis (1938-1941), to Crom the Barbarian by Gardner Fox and John Giunta (1950-1951), to John Jakes' Brak the Barbarian (1963 and after), to imitations of the present day. Conan has been drawn by many artists over the years, including Hugh Rankin and Margaret Brundage of Weird Tales. I would hazard a guess that in the minds of most readers, especially of a certain age, Conan is as Frank Frazetta depicted him on the covers of eight Lancer paperbacks from the 1960s and '70s.

Conan the Adventurer (1966), "volume one of the complete Conan" published by Lancer Books. I can't imagine that readers of fantasy and science fiction would have been prepared for a cover like this one in 1966. After years of Buck Rogers comic book covers, Li'l Abner women, J. Allen St. John- (and Roy Krenkel-) inspired Burroughs covers, and comic movie posters, Frazetta--in all his muscularity, violence, mystery, and eroticism--arrived.

Conan the Warrior (1967). Frazetta's sophomore effort was less inspired, though no disappointment. I have always found the figure of Conan here to be a little stiff and flat. The four figures on the right are more skillfully done. The action on this cover looks like it would have taken place before that in the first cover. When my brothers and I were drawing as kids, we would call this a "blood pile."

Conan the Conqueror (1970). I'm not going to try to sort out the various re-printings of the Lancer Conan books. This printing says that it's volume five. The first printing, from 1967, calls it number three. In any case, I find this cover to be extraordinary, like a vision from a nightmare. A lesser artist might have failed here. I think Frazetta's success depends in a large part on the look on Conan's face. Based on the cover illustration, this book could easily have been called Conan the Berserker.

Conan the Usurper (1967), volume four in the series. You can easily make jokes about this cover, but you can't really dismiss it, if only for the expression of power in the back and arms of the main character who--contrary to common practice in composition--has his back turned to the viewer. I suppose readers would have known Conan well enough by then that they didn't care that they couldn't see his face.

Conan (1967), volume five in the series. Frazetta's first three covers for the series showed exterior scenes. The next three take place in murky interiors. This one gives you the best look yet at Conan's face. The pose and the use of the red cloak and its brilliant sheen are unconventional, but then Frazetta was not a conventional artist. This is an eye-catching cover and one of the most powerful in the series.

Conan the Avenger (1968), in order of publication, Frazetta's sixth cover in the series and the first with a clearly defined female figure--and what a figure. I suppose it is a man's fantasy to rescue a beautiful woman and a woman's to be rescued. A cover like this one offered plenty of room for fantasy, not in a lewd or lascivious sense, but in the kind of fantasy that has drawn men to the Conan stories from the very beginning. Incidentally, the wizard must be pretty small in stature. Conan is as large as he is while still on the other side of the table.

Frazetta revised his painting in 1980. I doubt that the original exists in its original form. The revised version has its merits, but I think the original is better, its parts more harmonious.

Conan of Cimmeria (1969), by date of publication, Frazetta's last cover for the series drawn from Howard's original stories and I think one of the strongest. While the others are gloomy, this one is bright, despite the violence and blood. I didn't quite understand this illustration when I was young. It takes a moment to realize that Conan has cut the throat of one of the Frost Giants. The scene is fantastic, but the violence is real: instead of vivisection and extreme gore, we realize the mortally wounded Frost Giant is drawing his last breath because, with his hand at his throat, he stumbles, his helmet askew, his eyes with a dazed, unseeing look; because his axe is dropping in a weakening hand, his blood is reddening the tip of his adversary's sword, and two tell-tale drops have fallen into the pristine snow.

Conan the Buccaneer (1971), a Conan novel written not by Robert E. Howard, but by his successors. I didn't see this illustration until many years after I had seen the others. I was struck by the oddness of it. Conan looks like he is made of bubbles. I wonder if musculature and a pose like that are possible or if Frazetta's imagination carried him away into another realm.

Frazetta revised this painting as well. The revision appears to be limited to the figure of Conan. Maybe Frazetta wasn't happy with the first go-around. I think both versions have their strong points. The strangeness of the first version gives it a certain power. The second version is more conventional, but it probably works better as a composition and as a narrative.

There were eleven books in the complete Lancer Conan. Everyone remembers the Frazetta covers. Less well known are the covers by "the other Lancer artist," John Duillo.

Elmo John Duillo was born on January 4, 1928, less than a month before Frank Frazetta and probably not far from him. Like Frazetta, Duillo was an Italian-American. His father, James Duillo, was born in Cosenza, Italy, and came to the United States in 1922. He brought his wife, Beatrice Perciasepe Duillo, and his son, Ettore, over in 1926. A second son, Edward, was born in New York that same year, and a third, Elmo John, two years later.

Elmo Duillo was barely old enough to serve, but he was a veteran of World War II. While in the U.S. Navy, he learned aerial photography. In civilian life Duillo studied art with the painter and printmaker Adja Junkers (1900-1983) and photography with Berenice Abbott (1898-1991). Duillo ran his own commercial photography business for a time. He began painting covers for books and magazines in 1960. Many of his five hundred cover illustrations were for Westerns by authors such as Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Louis L'Amour. In the 1970s, Duillo turned to graphic art and fine art, but not before he completed three covers for the Lancer Conan series.

Conan of the Isles (1968) with cover art by (Elmo) John Duillo. Judging from the number (73-800), this was the seventh book in the Lancer series. Strangely, Conan has a beard and gray hair. That snake that earlier crawled between his legs has gotten bigger and more dragon-like.

Conan the Freebooter (1968) with cover art by John Duillo. In Duillo's second cover, Conan looks more like Conan. The cover is needlessly gruesome. It reminds me of a scene from a Conan comic book from Mexico, reprinted in The Savage Sword of Conan many years ago.

Conan the Wanderer (1968) with cover art by John Duillo. Duillo's third cover is probably his strongest. The brushwork reminds me a little of Earl Norem (b. 1924), a later Conan artist.

Elmo John Duillo, who called himself John Duillo, did other work in the genres of science fiction and fantasy. Here are two magazine covers from 1960:

Fantastic Science Fiction Stories (May 1960) with cover art by John Duillo. (The moiré effects are not in the original.) The cover blurb reads: "The Challenge from Beyond--A Long-Lost Story by H.P. Lovecraft." However, Lovecraft was not the only author, for "The Challenge of Beyond," from 1935, was actually a round-robin story in five parts, each part by a different author: C.L. Moore, A. Merritt, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long, Jr.

Fantastic Science Fiction Stories (Sept. 1960) with cover art by John Duillo.

As I said, John Duillo also did paperback covers. Here's one for Evil in the Family by Grace Corren, a Lancer book from 1972. Sorry for the poor quality image.

You wouldn't know it to read anything on this lousy Internet we have to deal with every day, but John Duillo's wife is also an illustrator. Elaine Duillo was born on July 28, 1928, in Brooklyn. (1) She attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and studied under the cartoonist and illustrator Charles Mazoujian (1917-2011) at the Pratt Institute. She and her future husband met when they were teenagers and were married in 1949. Their two daughters are also artists. Elaine Duillo's first published work as an illustrator was for Seventeen magazine. She also contributed to Good Housekeeping before becoming an illustrator of paperback romances and Gothic romances. That part of her career began in 1959. Eventually she would earn the title "Queen of Romance Cover Art" for her five hundred or more cover illustrations. Among her accomplishments is the discovery of the Italian male model Fabio. Elaine Duillo was elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2003. You will find an entry on her in The Illustrator in America: 1860-2000 by Walt Reed (2001). You can also read an article about her from People Magazine, May 15, 1989, online.

Elmo John Duillo died on April 5, 2003, and was buried at Long Island National Cemetery under a stone that reads in part: "Through Art He Found God." Frank Frazetta died on May 10, 2010. It is in observance of his birthday--February 9, 1928--that I write today. Happy Birthday to Frank Frazetta, and Happy Belated Birthday to Elmo John Duillo, the two Lancer Conan artists.

Notes
(1) Frank Frazetta's wife, Eleanor Kelly Frazetta, was also an artist. She was born on June 15, 1935, in Middleborough, Massachusetts. She and Frazetta were married in 1956 and spent the next fifty-three years together. Ellie Frazetta died on July 17, 2009. Her husband survived her by less than a year.

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Weird Tales Cover Artists

February 10, 2014, 3:00 am

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I have been writing about Weird Tales covers and cover artists. It might help to look at the big picture:

Weird Tales ran for 279 issues, from March 1923 to September 1954. If I count correctly, there were thirty-seven cover artists in all. Their rank by the number of covers each created (some covers were reprints):

1. Margaret Brundage--67 covers

2. Curtis C. Senf--45 covers

3. Virgil Finlay--20 covers

4. Andrew Brosnatch--15 covers (tie)

4. Hugh Rankin--15 covers (tie)

5. Matt Fox--11 covers

6. A.R. Tilburne--10 covers (tie)

6. Lee Brown Coye--10 covers (tie)

7. R.M. Mally--9 covers (tie)

7. J. Allen St. John--9 covers (tie)

8. Hannes Bok--7 covers

9. C. Barker Petrie, Jr.--6 covers

10. Harold S. De Lay--5 covers (tie)

10. Boris Dolgov--5 covers (tie)

10. E.M. Stevenson--5 covers (tie)

11. Six tied with three covers each: Jon Arfstrom, Frank Kelly Freas, John Giunta, Peter Kuhlhoff, Ray Quigley, and W.H. Silvey

12. Six tied with two covers each: Joseph Doolin, Joseph R. Eberle, William F. Heitman, Charles A. Kennedy, Bill Wayne, Edgar Franklin Wittmack

13. Ten tied with one cover each: Richard Bennett, Andrew Bensen, Ronald Clyne, Anthony Di Giannurio, Richard R. Epperly, Gretta (Joseph C. Gretter), Michael Labonski, T. Wyatt Nelson, Evan Singer, Washburn

I have divided Weird Tales into several periods based on changes in the staff or ownership of the magazine and on trends in the artists who created the covers. These divisions are not written in stone.

Mar. 1923-May/June/July 1924

13 Issues

Richard R. Epperly (1 cover)

William F. Heitman (2 covers)

R.M. Mally (9 covers)

Washburn (1 cover)

Weird Tales began in March 1923 with Richard R. Epperly's one and only cover for the magazine. Only four artists created covers during the magazine's first year under editor Edwin M. Baird. R.M. Mally did the majority of those. None of the artists returned after Farnsworth Wright took over as editor in November 1924.

Nov. 1924-Feb. 1927

28 Issues

Andrew Benson (1 cover)

Andrew Brosnatch (15 covers)

Joseph Doolin (2 covers)

C. Barker Petrie, Jr. (5 covers)

E.M. Stevenson (5 covers)

After a gap of four months, Weird Tales returned in November 1924. Five new artists combined to create the next twenty-eight covers. Andrew Brosnatch was responsible for more than half of those, including thirteen in a row between November 1924 and November 1925. After February 1927, only C. Barker Petrie, Jr., returned, and then only for one cover.

Mar. 1927-Aug. 1932

63 Issues

T. Wyatt Nelson (1 cover)

C. Barker Petrie, Jr. (1 cover)

Hugh Rankin (15 covers)

J. Allen St. John (1 cover)

Curtis C. Senf (45 covers)

From March 1927 to August 1932, two artists--Curtis C. Senf and Hugh Rankin--created sixty out of sixty-three covers for Weird Tales. Senf's forty-five designs land him in second place (after Margaret Brundage) for the most covers for Weird Tales. J. Allen St. John made his debut in June 1932. Out of the five artists for this period, only he returned after August 1932.

Sept. 1932-Oct. 1938

73 Issues

Margaret Brundage (58 covers)

Virgil Finlay (7 covers)

J. Allen St. John (8 covers)

The 1930s were dominated by three artists, Margaret Brundage, J. Allen St. John, and Virgil Finlay. Margaret Brundage's first cover was in September 1932. For the next six years, she was responsible for fifty-eight covers or almost four-fifths of the total for this period. That includes an astonishing run of thirty-nine issues in a row, from June 1933 to August/September 1936. J. Allen St. John dropped out of the picture after this. Margaret Brundage and Virgil Finlay returned.

Nov. 1938-Jan. 1945

44 Issues

Richard Bennett (1 cover)

Hannes Bok (7 covers)

Margaret Brundage (8 covers)

Harold S. De Lay (4 covers)

Virgil Finlay (9 covers)

Matt Fox (1 cover)

John Giunta (1 cover)

Gretta (Joseph C. Gretter) (1 cover)

Ray Quigley (3 covers)

A.R. Tilburne (7 covers)

Edgar Franklin Wittmack (2 covers)

Weird Tales changed hands in November 1938, and although Farnsworth Wright continued as editor, the magazine was published out of New York City instead of Chicago. A.R. Tilburne, a cover illustrator for Short Stories (the new owner of the magazine), created the first cover of Weird Tales under new ownership. Margaret Brundage and Virgil Finlay returned during this period. The other nine artists were new to Weird Tales. Hannes Bok, a fan turned pro, was a major discovery. Richard Bennett, Matt Fox, and John Giunta were fairly new to illustration. Harold S. De Lay, Gretta, Ray Quigley, and Edgar Franklin Wittmack were by then veterans. Only Finlay, Fox, Giunta, and Tilburne returned after January 1945.

Mar. 1945-July 1950

33 Issues

Lee Brown Coye (8 covers)

Ronald Clyne (1 cover)

Boris Dolgov (5 covers)

Matt Fox (10 covers)

John Giunta (2 covers)

Peter Kuhlhoff (3 covers)

Michael Labonski (1 cover)

A.R. Tilburne (3 covers)

The next five years were dominated by three new artists, Lee Brown Coye, Boris Dolgov, and Matt Fox. Each had a style that helped Weird Tales maintain its reputation as "The Unique Magazine." Of the artists listed here, only Coye would return after July 1950.

Sept. 1950-Sept 1954

25 Issues

Jon Arfstrom (3 covers)

Margaret Brundage (1 cover--reprint)

Lee Brown Coye (2 covers)

Harold S. De Lay (1 cover--reprint)

Anthony Di Giannurio (1 cover)

Joseph R. Eberle (2 covers)

Virgil Finlay (4 covers, one of which was a reprint)

Frank Kelly Freas (3 covers)

Charles A. Kennedy (2 covers)

W.H. Silvey (3 covers)

Evan Singer (1 cover)

Bill Wayne (2 covers)

The covers after July 1950 were spread pretty evenly among a dozen artists. For the first time, Weird Tales used reprints on its covers. One of those reprints--the last cover of the magazine--was by Virgil Finlay. Finlay also created three original covers, making him the only artist with an original cover in each of three different decades. Frank Kelly Freas was a major discovery during this period. Sadly, after thirty-one years, Weird Tales gave up the ghost in September 1954.

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Trees and Other Plants on the Cover of Weird Tales

February 11, 2014, 7:27 pm

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Plants make human life possible, yet writers of science fiction and fantasy have often shown them to be strange and menacing. For instance, the title character in The Thing from Another World (1951) is a plant, a kind of super carrot. The aliens from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and the plague species in The Day of the Triffids (1962) are also plants. Then there was The Happening from 2008. Science fiction and fantasy artists often let us know that something is strange or alien by painting it green. So why should plants be scary or threatening? They may be alien to us, and they may be green, but they are mostly harmless. There are of course plants to stay away from: poison-ivy and giant hogweed for their toxins, briars and brambles for their thorns. Maybe those plants remind us of wild beasts with their poisoned fangs and their claws that catch. More disturbing are plants that move, like the Venus flytrap. Maybe we imagine that plants might want to devour us. After all, we have been devouring them since the beginning. (A moving plant large enough to devour a human is a staple of fantasy, science fiction, and horror stories.) I can think of a couple of other reasons why plants might be seen as strange or menacing. Both have something to do with weird fiction. First, the dense, dark, overgrown forest or jungle can seem frightening or oppressive. Wild animals lurk there. So might witches and demons and even the devil himself. The Puritans are supposed to have been frightened of the forest. Young Goodman Brown was stripped of his illusions after a night in the darkened woods. Second, if weird fiction is about the past and about decadence, then the image of a tree or a jungle overtaking or growing up among a ruined house or a ruined city becomes symbolic. It may just be too much for us to consider, for we, too, shall be overtaken as all things are by the passage of time.

Who says a weird story can't be told in the form of a gag cartoon? Charles Addams did it. So does Sam Gross. George Price (1901-1995), the creator of this drawing and one of my favorite New Yorker cartoonists, did it on occasion, too.

The great James Flora (1914-1998) told weird stories for children. I would highly recommend Grandpa's Ghost Stories (1978) and The Great Green Turkey Creek Monster (1976), about a plant that takes over a town. But then what would you expect from an artist named Flora? By the way, we just passed the one hundredth anniversary of Flora's birth--January 25, 1914. So Happy Birthday, Jim Flora!

Now let the covers begin.

Weird Tales, August 1926. Cover story: "The Woman of the Wood" by A. Merritt. Cover art by C. Barker Petrie, Jr. The tree on Petrie's cover is the most man-like of plants in this category. It would almost qualify as a monster except that it appears to be the woman's friend. When I first saw this illustration, I thought of the mythological story of Daphne and the laurel.

Here's one example among many from the art world, "Daphne and Apollo" by the British Pre-Raphaelite artist John William Waterhouse (1849-1917).

Weird Tales, September 1928. Cover story: "The Devil Plant" by John Murray Reynolds. Cover art by C.C. Senf. We have seen this cover before in the category of man, woman, and monster. The sexual symbolism here is unavoidable except that the woman is being engulfed by the plant--an obvious symbol of the woman--while the man endeavors to cut her loose. If you would like to see more explicit sexual symbolism in the depiction of flora, look no farther than the art of Georgia O'Keeffe.

Weird Tales, April 1938. Cover story: "The Garden of Adompha" by Clark Ashton Smith. Cover art by Virgil Finlay. I pointed out before that there is a lot of looking in fantasy art, maybe in art in general. That's true in this image as well. Finlay had a talent for covering key parts of female anatomy with bubbles, stars, and other things. Here he used leaves and flowers such that we can look but not see. The plant isn't quite a monster, but it is moving.

Finlay's cover reminds me of "Persephone," a painting by Thomas Hart Benton from 1938-1939. I wonder if Benton would have seen Finlay's illustration before beginning his own composition.

Weird Tales, March 1952. Cover story: "Morne Perdu" by Alice Drayton Farnham. Cover art by Joseph R. Eberle. This is more or less a conventional haunted house picture of a kind we all drew as children, but of three monstrous trees (this image and the two to follow), I like this one the best.

Weird Tales, May 1953. Cover story: "Whisper Water" by Leah Bodine Drake. Cover art by Joseph R. Eberle. I guess nobody said, "We used a tree-monster on the cover last year. We'd better not do it again so soon," because here is another tree-monster. It looks like the white box is covering up a key part of the picture, but where else were they supposed to put the blurb?

Weird Tales, January 1954. Cover story: "Effie's Pets" by Suzanne Pickett. Cover art by W.H. Silvey. The illustration here is mostly about a Morlock-like woman and an unlucky guy, but there is also a monstrous tree in the lower right corner. Of all the plants shown here, this one reminds me most of . . .

The apple trees from The Wizard of Oz (1939), one of the creepiest parts of that movie.

Frank Frazetta got in on the act in 1970 with his own version of a monster-tree.

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Machines on the Cover of Weird Tales

February 15, 2014, 9:02 am

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Machines fit well with science fiction and not so well with weird fiction, yet machines figured prominently on four covers of Weird Tales. I can see the influence not only of science fiction but also popular science on these covers. I don't think it's any coincidence that two of them are the work of Ray Quigley, who worked as a draftsman at United Aircraft Corporation during World War II and who, after the war, launched into a long-running cartoon feature, "The Model Garage," in Popular Science Magazine. Another influence was in the world at large, for all of these covers came during the years of World War II.

Weird Tales, September 1940. Cover story: "Seven Seconds of Eternity" by Robert H. Leitfred. Cover art by Ray Quigley. If you're making a list of the most bizarre covers of Weird Tales, this one would probably be near the top.

Weird Tales, July 1941. Cover story: "The Robot God" by Ray Cummings. Cover art by Hannes Bok.

Weird Tales, May 1942. Cover story: "Vengeance in Her Bones" by Malcolm Jameson. Cover art by Ray Quigley. Another bizarre cover by Ray Quigley.

Weird Tales, January 1943. Cover story: "Quest of a Noble Tiger" by Frank Owen. Cover art by A.R. Tilburne.

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Is Science Fiction Dying?

March 9, 2014, 1:08 pm

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A couple of weeks ago, I heard someone ask a question that I had never before heard anyone ask: Is science fiction dying? So I did what we all do in this age of digidiocy: I Googled it. Even before I finished typing out my search words, Google had the question for me, ready and waiting. Evidently I wasn't the first person to pose it. Today I asked Google again and got back 21,000 results. So, no, I'm not the first.

I had never before thought to ask: Is science fiction dying? I didn't even know it was sick. After all, we live in a science fiction world. Everybody and his brother is carrying around a communicator, like Captain Kirk. (The difference is that Captain Kirk put his communicator away occasionally. He had plenty of outer-space babes in sparkling outfits to look at--he didn't need an electronic binky to keep him happy.) And, like on Star Trek, we're all enslaved--or at least made mindless--by our computers. We could probably use some rescuing from our machines in the same way the captain and his crew saved so many extraterrestrial civilizations from theirs. And how can science fiction be dying when every movie and every TV show is science fiction or has science-fictional elements? Some people are even asking: Is science fiction dead? Not just dying, but already dead. So I guess these are serious questions, and people have reason to address them. I guess I'll weigh in, too.

So I asked the question and read through a few articles addressing whether science fiction is dying. The oldest article was from 1993, so if science fiction is dying, it has been at it for a long time. My first thought was that nothing could take twenty years to die, but then I have to remember that some things, the Roman Empire for example, hang on for decades or centuries before giving up the ghost. Most people who have asked themselves this question seem to think the answer is: Yes, science fiction is dying. Not being an expert, I can't say. But even before I heard the question, I was thinking of the flying saucer phenomenon, which is of course an outgrowth of science fiction, and I realized that flying saucers are not only dying, they are dead, dead, dead. At one time, some serious and respectable people were willing to believe in them, perhaps for good reason. No more. That's not to say that people have come to their senses; instead, they have simply transferred their belief in flying saucers to wacky beliefs in other things. I won't give any examples.

The problem with this question and with similar questions from fans of science fiction and fantasy is that they have separated the question from the wider culture. What I mean is that, if you're going to ask the question, "Is science fiction dying?", then you should understand that dying is a part of the history of every living thing, every organization, every institution. Although science fiction originated before World War II, it flourished only after the war when science-fictional ideas seemed ready to leap out of the pulps and into real life. I think the war helped in that. After all, we suddenly had atomic bombs, rockets, radar, jet power, pressurized cabins and suits, faster-than-sound travel, and on and on. In a few short years, there would be hydrogen bombs, atomic power, artificial satellites, and men in space. Science fiction became real in the postwar world. For people other than fans, science fiction was new.

Other things were new in the postwar world, too--and a lot of them are dead, dying, or pretty darned sick. If science fiction is dying, it may be only because so many aspects of postwar culture are at or near their end. Here I will give some examples: men's adventure magazines; paperback books of a certain type; the Golden Age of Heterosexuality; youth culture; the culture of hot rods, custom wheels, drag racing, and muscle cars; homogeneous habits of watching television (three networks have given way to a gazillion); bebop and cool jazz; the culture of the road, of traveling, camping, hitchhiking, and so on. And what about rock-and-roll, soul, and rhythm-and-blues? If these things are not dead yet, they seem to have one foot in the grave and maybe the other on a banana peel. The larger question it seems to me is not, "Is science fiction dying?", but this: Are postwar culture and all of its great and wonderful aspects dying? And if so, how soon will it be before they are in their graves?

I don't like the likely answers.

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Undersea Scenes on the Cover of Weird Tales

March 13, 2014, 4:55 pm

≫ Next: Matt Fox (1906-1988)-Part 1

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Weird Tales, November 1946. Cover story: "Spawn of the Green Abyss" by C. Hall Thompson. Cover art by Boris Dolgov. Only two covers of Weird Tales showed underwater scenes. Both were by Boris Dolgov. This was the first. It was also Dolgov's first cover for the magazine and no easy feat at that. If I guess correctly, the original art was a pencil drawing tinted with watercolors. It must have been delicate and not easily reproduced.

Weird Tales, January 1948. Cover story: "Serpent Princess" by Edmond Hamilton. Cover art by Boris Dolgov. Another delicate and not easily reproducible drawing by Dolgov. Note the red decorations in both scenes.

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Matt Fox (1906-1988)-Part 1

March 14, 2014, 8:00 am

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Matthew Fox

Illustrator, Cartoonist, Comic Book Artist, Advertising Artist, Graphic Artist, Painter

Born November 8, 1906, New York, New York

Died February 20, 1988, West Haven, Connecticut

Little is known of Matt Fox. Most of what you'll find on the Internet is recycled from one or two sources. The Wikipedia entry is cribbed from Art in Time: Unknown Comic Book Adventures, 1940-1980 by Dan Nodel (2010). To its credit, The Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists Fox's birthdate, birthplace, and death date. At least somebody somewhere did some original research. The Connecticut Death Index says he never married. If that's the case, it's unlikely that he had children. Matt Fox may very well have died alone, as is the fate of so many artists, including Hugh Rankin, Hannes Bok, and Wally Wood. There may not have been anyone to carry on his memory. Fortunately, we are beginning to remember him now.

I know this much: Matt Fox was born on November 8, 1906, in New York City. I'm afraid I can't confirm the names of his parents, although I have candidates. The best candidates I have found were residents of Atlantic City, New Jersey. On a blog called Potrzebie, the author, named Bhob, recalls meeting Matt Fox in North Bergen, New Jersey, at the home of Calvin Beck, publisher of the magazine Castle of Frankenstein. That was in the mid-1960s. If North Bergen was close to home for Matt Fox, then maybe he was the same Matt Fox enumerated in the U.S. Census in Atlantic City in 1910, 1930, and 1940. If they were one in the same, then Matt Fox the artist was the son of Matthew Fox, Sr., a bricklayer, and his wife, named Fannie. And, if the same Matt Fox was living in Atlantic City in 1940 and working as a painter, then he was married after all. His wife was named Kathleen.

That's a lot of speculation. I'll continue with some facts from an entry, written by Fox himself, in The Who's Who of American Comic Books, edited by Jerry Bails (1971):

*MATTHEW (MATT) FOX (1906- ) Artist. Major influence: Alex Raymond; Cartoons; Adv art; Lithographs; Pulp illus; Covers of Weird Tales (oils), Color woodcuts; Water colors; Oil paintings; Etchings, Comic book credits: (p) & (i). Youthful: (1952-3) fantasy; Marvel: (1952-6) horror, s-f; (1962-3) s-f, fantasy.

The asterisk indicates that Fox wrote the entry himself. (P = pencils, i = inks, s-f = science fiction.) That may be as much as what is generally known of Matt Fox.

So Fox was a cartoonist, illustrator, comic book artist, advertising artist, watercolorist, painter, and graphic artist, with lithographs, woodcuts, and etchings to his credit. He worked in those fields from the early 1940s into the 1960s. I don't know of any original art published after the 1960s, unless his work for Marvel Comics in the 1970s was original rather than reprinted. (Fox's work was reprinted as early as the 1970s and as recently as this decade.) There isn't any mention of schooling. I suspect that Matt Fox was self taught, for his work is primitive, not in a crude way, but with real primitive power. (Jack Kirby, another artist of great power, was also more or less a primitive artist.) Although he claimed Alex Raymond as an influence, the look and technique of his art is far removed from the slick, dry-brush (Flash Gordon) or pen-and-ink (Rip Kirby) style of Raymond. Fox's art reminds me of no one's so much as that of Basil Wolverton (1909-1978). Fletcher Hanks (1887-1976) might also be put in the same category of uncategorizable artists. (1)

Matt Fox served eleven months in the U.S. Army, from January 13 to December 13, 1943. According to The Internet Speculative Fiction Database, Fox's first drawings in the genres of fantasy and science fiction were published during those eleven months. They included his first interior illustration for Weird Tales, in March 1943. His first cover followed a year and a half later, in November 1944, just in time for Fox's thirty-eighth birthday.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Like so many artists before him, Fletcher Hanks died alone. His frozen body was found on a park bench in New York City.

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Lucille Webster Holling (1900-1989)

March 30, 2014, 5:27 pm

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Illustrator, Advertising Artist, Commercial Artist, Fashion Designer and Illustrator, Set Designer, Teacher

Born December 8, 1900, Valparaiso, Indiana

Died December 31, 1989, Verdugo City, California

Lucille Webster was born on December 8, 1900, in Valparaiso, Indiana. Her father, George A. Webster (1854-1924), was a Canadian-born photographer. Her mother was Nellie Carpenter Webster (1862-1951). As a child, Lucille lived with her parents and her older sister in Bloomfield, Indiana, and in Chicago. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and shared a studio with her sister, Mildred. Lucille Webster married another artist, Holling Clancy Holling (1900-1973), in 1925, the same year in which he legally acquired his new name. Born Holling Allison Clancy in Holling Corners, Michigan, Holling graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago and worked in taxidermy at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He also studied with anthropologist Ralph Linton. Together Holling Clancy Holling and his new wife Lucille Holling set out on an adventure in 1926-1927 with the first University World Cruise, sponsored by New York University. Lucille designed scenery and costumes for the drama department while her husband served as a shipboard instructor of art. There would be many more travels to come.

Lucille Holling and her husband worked in advertising and as commercial artists and illustrators. In addition to drawing fashion illustrations, Lucille Webster Holling illustrated Kimo: The Whistling Boy by Alice Cooper Bailey (1928), Wedding of the Paper Dolls (a coloring book, 1935), and Songs from Around a Toadstool Table by Rowena Bastin Bennett (1937). She also contributed a cover illustration--one of the finest--to the pulp magazine Oriental Stories (later called The Magic Carpet Magazine) in Autumn 1931. Holling Clancy Holling is renowned for his many beautifully illustrated children's books. Less well known is the fact that his wife assisted him on several of them, including Roll Away Twins (1927), Choo-Me-Shoo the Eskimo (1928), The Book of Indians (1935), The Book of Cowboys (1936), Little Buffalo Boy (1939), and Pagoo (1957). The couple also illustrated Road in Storyland (1932) and The Magic Story Tree (1964).

The Hollings lived in southern California as early as 1930. In 1951, Lucille Holling designed and oversaw the construction of their home and studio in Pasadena. Holling Clancy Holling, a jack-of-all-trades and a man well worthy of his own written biography, died on September 7, 1973. His wife survived him by more than a decade. Lucille Webster Holling died on December 31, 1989, in Verdugo City, California, at age eighty-nine.

Lucille Webster Holling's Cover for Oriental Stories

Autumn 1931

Further Reading

For further reading, see the blog devoted to Holling Clancy Holling, called, conveniently enough, "Holling Clancy Holling," here. There is or was also a museum devoted to him in Leslie, Michigan. The Hollings' papers are at UCLA and the University of Oregon.

Two illustrations by Lucille Webster Holling from Kimo: The Whistling Boy by Alice Cooper Bailey (1928). Incidentally, an illustration I posted previously on this blog, drawn by Lucille and showing a biplane over a tropical coastline (at this link), is also from this book. It may or may not have been used as a travel poster.

Lucille Holling's lone cover for Oriental Stories (Autumn 1931) and perhaps her only pulp magazine cover. She would very likely have outclassed many in that field.

Finally, the cover of Songs from Around a Toadstool Table by Rowena Bastin Bennett (1937), drawn by Lucille Webster Holling.

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True Detective and Robert W. Chambers

March 30, 2014, 5:59 pm

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It isn't often that an obscure collection of stories from the nineteenth century draws the attention of twenty-first century television viewers, but such a thing has happened. The collection is The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, from 1895. The television viewers are the people who watched the HBO series True Detective, which premiered on January 12, 2014, and ended its first run on March 9. I say "obscure," but fans of fantasy fiction and weird fiction are and have been well acquainted with The King in Yellow for a long, long time, since H.P. Lovecraft wrote about it in his seminal study, "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927), if not before. I regret to say that I haven't seen the show, but I would like to have a look.

The creator of True Detective is Nic Pizzolatto, a writer and teacher from New Orleans. I'm happy to say that Mr. Pizzolatto has a connection to my home state of Indiana, for he taught at DePauw University in Greencastle, only a few blocks away from where I used to live. DePauw also gave us John Jakes, creator of Brak the Barbarian and countless other genre characters.

Nic Pizzolatto seems to be pretty familiar with genre fiction himself. His TV show is named after a pulp magazine first published by Bernarr Macfadden in 1924--ninety years ago this year. He has drawn on The King in Yellow in his plotting and writing for his show, which is set in the author's native Louisiana, the same country haunted by the cult of Cthulhu in Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulhu." One of the characters in that story is--like Mr. Pizzolatto's protagonists--a Louisiana detective, John Raymond Lagrasse. Lovecraft's fictional grimoire, The Necronomicon, doesn't make an appearance in "The Call of Cthulhu," but Lovecraft may very well have based the idea of a book that drives men mad upon reading it on Robert W. Chambers' fictional drama "The King in Yellow." In any case, I wish Mr. Pizzolatto and the makers of his show further success.

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Weird Tales Books

March 30, 2014, 6:58 pm

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Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard by L. Sprague de Camp, Catherine Crook de Camp, and Jane Whittington Griffin

When I was a child, I read the Childhood of Famous Americans series published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company. I owned just one volume in the series, Patrick Henry: Boy Spokesman by Thomas Frank Barton (1960). It's here in front of me as I write. Bobbs-Merrill was based in Indianapolis; several of the authors and artists who contributed to the series were Hoosiers, including Augusta Stevenson, Guernsey Van Riper, Jr., Clotilde Embree Funk, and Jean Brown Wagoner, who was the grandmother of my classmate Mary. (Our local branch of the Indianapolis Public Library was named for Jean Wagoner's father, Hilton U. Brown.) I have always loved history and biography. The connection between the Childhood of Famous Americans series and my home city may have enforced those feelings, and the connection may have been a source of some small pride to me as a Hoosier and an Indianapolitan.

So I read the series, especially the books on soldiers, explorers, and our founding fathers. I also remember the biographies of Annie Oakley and Lou Gehrig. But even as a child, I wondered, "How did the authors know what the characters in their books did and said as children?" The answer didn't come to me until later. Maybe childhood ends in these small increments. In any case, I came to know the answer to my question: The authors didn't know. They made it up, their stories perhaps based in fact, but still mostly made up. That's one thing for a fictionalized biography for children. It's quite another for a supposedly scholarly work for adults. But that's what L. Spague de Camp and his co-authors did in Dark Valley Destiny, a limited-edition biography of Robert E. Howard published in 1983: They made it up.

I read de Camp's earlier biography of H.P. Lovecraft, and though we got a little too much of how de Camp would have lived Lovecraft's life, I found that earlier book informative. Dark Valley Destiny on the other hand is almost unreadable, at least for the first third of the book, which covers Howard's childhood, in other words, where information is scarce, and where the authors would not resist the temptation to make stuff up in an attempt to fill in the many blank years of Howard's life. Instead of telling the facts and letting the reader infer from them what he or she might, de Camp and company decided to engage in psychobabble, to wander off in discussions of history in which their subject's name is absent for page after page, and to draw conclusions on his life without supporting evidence or documentation. An example:

In Robert's bleak view of the world, the earth and its creatures are locked in an endless war of extermination among individuals, races, species, climates, and terrains. A man must either fight or flee, be master or slave. If the universe is a matter of blind accident, thought Howard, a mindless contraption in which man is trapped, then man's only major goal is to win freedom from it. (p. 120)

And not a single quote or note to support any of it. I'm reminded of an elementary lesson in composition: Don't tell it, show it.

De Camp and company are guilty of other sins and omissions, a chief one being that they don't tell about the reaction to Howard's suicide among his correspondent-friends, especially H. P. Lovecraft, and his many admiring readers. Another is that Howard's friend, Novalyne Price, simply wanders out of the story, never to return. The book picks up the pace after getting Howard through his childhood, but by then it's too late. It has become a lost cause. I bought it and will keep it, but it's a book only for the completist, I think. I'm sure there are better biographies of Robert E. Howard, and if not, one might easily be written.

The cover of Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard by L. Sprague de Camp, Catherine Crook de Camp, and Jane Whittington Griffin, published by Blue Jay Books in 1983 in an admittedly fine edition, with a slipcase, dust jacket, illustrated endpapers, and bound-in bookmark. The cover illustration is by Kevin Eugene Johnson.

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Fire and Rain

March 31, 2014, 3:00 am

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I have been keeping track of weird news stories. My contention is that life is essentially weird. And the weird stuff that actually happens is sometimes weirder than what you would read in a story. I also wrote the other day about this question: Is science fiction dying? One possible answer: How can science fiction be dying when we quite obviously live in a science fiction world? (I know I answered a question with a question, but that comes naturally to the Irish.) Unfortunately, the science fiction world in which we live is too often a dystopia. A case in point: this week, a news story came out reporting that British hospitals have incinerated aborted and miscarried fetuses, in part to help heat their buildings. We all knew we were headed in this direction, but I didn't think it would happen so soon. Writers of science fiction and fantasy have anticipated developments like this, of course. It's equal parts "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift and Soylent Green, based on Harry Harrison's novel. It reminds me also of a cartoon by Andy Singer from his syndicated comic panel, No Exit, in which a man dashes through the background at a filling station shouting, "Soylent gas is made of people," while in the foreground, a man, who is gassing up his car, says, without even turning around, "Yeah, so what."

So the story comes out about human fetuses being burned for heat, and the world says, "So what." I suppose such a thing is acceptable, even desirable, in our science fiction world. You might think at first that it would be unacceptable inasmuch as it contributes to global warming. We should all realize however that it is acceptable to burn human fetuses for heat because they have not yet reached the threshold of carbon neutrality. In other words, they are carbon negative, so burn, baby, burn. Disposing of them in any way is also acceptable because then we can help head off the sin of overpopulation, or in the words of Ebenezer Scrooge, "decrease the surplus population." Great! A twofer!

There was record flooding in Great Britain this winter. That story came out first, so we can't place the two in a relationship of cause and effect. In any case, the last time we did stuff like this, the rains came and washed everything away--except Noah and the animals. So the British who endured inundation this winter get to relive it in a new science fiction movie called Noah. I know that the story of Noah and the flood comes from the Bible, but the movie bears little resemblance to that book. It is in no way biblical. Yeah, there is Noah and his family and a big boat full of animals and a worldwide flood, but otherwise Noah is on its own--pure Hollywood, if not Wormwood. Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly reprise their roles from A Beautiful Mind, only, instead of seeing mathematical equations in the sky, Noah sees visions of doom (some of which are drug-induced). She's still the devoted wife of a man who's trying to discover the meaning of existence. (She did the same thing as Charles Darwin's wife in Creation.) Anthony Hopkins plays Gandalf/Hannibal Lecter/Timothy Leary, but in this movie, he trades a taste for entrails for an obsession with red berries (no doubt slang for his favorite recreational drug). Oh, and there are Transformers, too.

I can only assume that Noah is set in a dystopian future with some elements of an imagined past, a sort of Lord of the Rings meets Mad Max. Humanity once again gets wiped out for its wickedness, but there doesn't seem to be much wickedness going on except for eating of cute little animals. And for being a bunch of hungry people, they sure look well fed. Maybe they have been drinking too many Big Gulp sodas. In any case, the suggestion seems to be that it has all come about because of that pesky global warming and overpopulation, you know, the only two sins left in the world. (I guess you can add a third when Tubal-Cain, the Bob Hoskins character, partakes of some salamander sushi, thereby rendering a species extinct.) In the end, everybody learns a lesson, Noah puts his drunkenness behind him through a twelve-step program, and the world goes on. So I wouldn't lose any sleep over Noah. But before you turn in, make sure you turn off your carbon-neutral, fetus-powered, non-incandescent electric light, and if necessary, take a red berry for a nice, dreamless sleep.

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E. Irvine Haines (1877-1959)

April 5, 2014, 7:31 am

≫ Next: Andre Linville (1888-1963?)

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Edwin Irvine Haines
Editor, Author, Historian, Correspondent, Businessman
Born October 21, 1877, New York
Died August 1959, Pinellas County, Florida

Edwin Irvine Haines was born on October 21, 1877, in New York, probably in New York City. He was an editor of newspapers and magazines and an author of feature articles, stories, a play, and a novel. Haines also wrote lengthy letters to several publications, including the New York Times. He specialized in the history of Colonial times and the American Revolution and was a member of the American Scenic, Historic and Preservation Society. In the 1930s, Haines authored a series of historical articles for The New York Times Magazine. His research culminated in a play, Peggy Shippen: A Drama of the American Revolution in Three Acts (1935), moreover in a well received historical novel, The Exquisite Siren: The Romance of Peggy Shippen and Major John Andre, published in 1938. Haines contributed stories, articles, and letters of comment to a number of magazines, including All-Story Weekly, American Banker, Coronet, The Editor, Ghost Stories, Mill Supplies, The Mining American, San Francisco Call, Soldiers of Fortune, Weird Tales, and Woman's Home Companion. His pulp magazine credits are short enough to list here. This list may or may not be complete:

Letter in All-Story Weekly (July 3, 1920)
"Is Bear Mountain Haunted?" in Ghost Stories (July 1931)
"The Spy of the Neutral Ground" in Soldiers of Fortune (May 1932)
Plus his letters and story for Weird Tales, listed below

Early in his career, Haines was the editor of American Banker. In 1909 he took a position with the C.O. Burns Company, a manufacturer of coin banks and home safes. Haines later worked for Burnet L. Clark, editor of El Comercio, a newspaper on Latin American trade. Haines' wife was Ruth M. Haines, a librarian. Haines lived in New Rochelle, Manhattan, and Queens Village, New York. He died in August 1959 in Pinellas County, Florida, at age eighty-one.

E. Irvine Haines' Story and Letters in Weird Tales

"The Hand of the Invisible" (May 1928)

Letters to "The Eyrie"

May 1929

Feb. 1932

Mar. 1932

Feb. 1933

Oct. 1933

Apr. 1934

Further Reading

There are tidbits on E. Irvine Haines on the Internet, mostly to do with his book, The Exquisite Siren.

Ghost Stories, July 1931, with the title of E. Irvine Haines' story but without his byline on the cover.

Haines had a story or article in this issue of Soldiers of Fortune (May 1932) but no credit on the cover. I thought I would show it anyway because of a nicely done cover illustration and because I had never before heard of this magazine. By the way, Lawrence D'Orsay and Victor Rousseau also contributed to Weird Tales.

An illustration for a "true" ghost story by E. Irvine Haines published in the San Francisco Call, March 1, 1908. The illustration is signed, but I can't read the signature.

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Andre Linville (1888-1963?)

April 6, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Welcome, Readers of Weird Tales

≪ Previous: E. Irvine Haines (1877-1959)

Pseudonym of André L'Heureux
Author, Journalist, Editor
Born 1888, presumably in France
Died 1963?

I know very little of André Linville, and what I write here comes from several different sources, most of which are in French. I hope that what I write is correct. Maybe a French reader of this posting can offer something more.

André Linville was the nom de plume of André L'Heureux, a French author, journalist, and editor born in 1888. Under that nom de plume, L'Heureux coauthored a book called La Boxe, traité pratique et complet with Jacques Mortane, published in 1908. In 1914, an utterly disastrous war came to Europe. Like every one of his countrymen, Linville played his part, although I can't say that he was a combatant. In 1916, however, he founded and became editor of Journal des Combattants et des mutilés, a title that I translate as Journal of Combatants and the Mutilated. I believe Linville ran for political office after the war. He also created a patriotic association called Flamme de la Nation in 1934. It was probably not by coincidence that Adolf Hitler had risen to power in Germany in the previous year. In 1935, Editions Chantel of Paris issued André Linville's collection La Dernière Traversée et Autres Récits (The Last Crossing and Other Stories). There are seven stories in the collection. The last, if I read it correctly, is called "TSF." That story was translated and reprinted in Weird Tales as "Dead Man's Schooner" in December 1939, only three months after Europe had once again gone to war.

I found a source indicating that André Linville died in 1963, but I can't confirm that as the year of his death.

Andre Linville's Story in Weird Tales

"Dead Man's Schooner" (Dec. 1939)

Further Reading

If you search the Internet, you're likely to find the same sources I found. Even the French version of Wikipedia seems to be lacking in information on Linville.

I believe this to be the author, editor, and journalist André Linville. The caption for the photo reads: "[Portrait de] M. [André] Linville [candidat aux élections législatives sur la liste Union des gauches et des anciens combattants de Seine et Oise]: [photographie de presse]/[Agence Rol]." Translation: "[Portrait of] Mr. [André] Linville [parliamentary candidate on the ticket of the Union of the Left and Veterans of the Seine and Oise]: [press photograph]/[Agence Rol]." I have modified the Google translation and hope I have done it correctly. Linville's membership in the Veterans of the Seine and Oise suggests that he was in fact a combatant during World War I.

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