{pulp} – { feuilleton }

The art of Hannes Bok, 1914–1964

Altars of Patagonia (1946)

Like the huge cache of Virgil Finlay art that turned up at the Internet Archive a couple of years ago, the pictures here are from a two-volume collection made by an enthusiast gathering together yet more illustrations from the pulp magazines of the 1940s and 50s. Hannes Bok (real name Wayne Francis Woodard) wasn’t as prolific as Virgil Finlay, but the careers of the two men intersected in the pages of Weird Tales where they both used stipple shading to compensate for the poor reproduction of pulp paper. Bok’s work tended to be more stylised than Finlay’s, with a quirkiness that makes his art easy to spot once you’ve seen a few examples.

Boomerang (1947)

The two volumes contain a total of over 300 illustrations so any selection will only be a small sampling. Many of the drawings were new to me. The first volume is mostly work from magazines such as Weird Tales and the minor SF mags; the second includes book covers, calendar illustrations and other work. As with the Finlay collections, both volumes are available in a range of file formats which include cbz files, a format I prefer to pdf for browsing image-heavy documents. For more about cbr/cbz files, see the end of this post.

Cross of Mercrux (1942)

Daughter of Darkness (1941)

Dimensional Doors (1944)

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Weekend links 661

Zephyr (1970), a blacklight poster by Jupiter Rubin. Via.

• I wouldn’t usually expect Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique to be mentioned at Literary Hub for any reason, but there it is. Emily Temple recommends some of the best stories from a century of Weird Tales that you can read online.

• Mixes of the week: A mix for The Wire by Gamut Inc, and The Last of Us, “a non-stop mix of ambient soundscapes, experimental electronics and modern classical music”.

• “…Yaggy believed that wonder was the helpmate of learning.” Sasha Archibald on Levi Walter Yaggy’s Geographical Maps and Charts (1887/93).

Stylistically, Beardsley’s pictures for Salome are among his most derivative and original. In the sharpness of their lines and great swaths of black and white, we see the well-documented influences of Japanese woodcuts and Ancient Greek vase-painting. And yet, Beardsley’s work bridges these grand traditions of East and West with such fresh dynamism and taboo as to be undeniably, and ultimately definitionally, Nouveau.

Mirror and Window Both: The Brief Superabundance of Aubrey Beardsley by A. Natasha Joukovsky

• New music: Rhinog Fawr by Somatic Responses, and Sargo/Posidonia by Sleep Research Facility/Llyn Y Cwn.

• “Why is there such a voracious consumer appetite for miniature things?” asks Steven Heller.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Julio Cortázar Blow Up and other Stories (1967).

• At Unquiet Things: The Prolific Pioneering Pulp Art Of Ed Emshwiller.

• Random images from DJ Food’s desktop.

• Miniature Sun (1989) by XTC | Adventures In A Miniature Landscape (2009) by Belbury Poly | Miniature Magic (2020) by Plone

Old Marvel versus Sherlock Holmes

Arriving in the post this week, one of the books whose covers I was creating late last year. Work-wise, the past year has been busier than usual which means I’ve fallen behind with the logging of recent commissions. In the past few months I’ve created several album designs, more book covers, an entire book design (cover plus interior), and also been working on two bigger projects at the same time. Things have calmed down a little now so updates will be forthcoming.

Old Marvel: The Scientific Detective is another design for Mark Williams’ Dark Lantern Tales imprint which once again resurrects a forgotten detective from pulp obscurity, and in a larger format than before. The new volume is significant for presenting a Sherlock Holmes-like character—credited to the pseudonymous “Grip”—who predates Holmes’ first appearance by three years, thereby suggesting a possible inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes collector Joe Rainone provides the details of publication and sets out the available evidence in an informative foreword. The Old Marvel character not only pre-empts Holmes by using his scientific knowledge to solve mysteries but he also pre-empts subsequent generations of spies and investigators with the various gadgets he uses, including what may be the first fictional deployment of an Edison voice recorder. My brief for the cover was to combine the illustration of the character with a vignette showing a shipping disaster from the story plus some of the contents of the detective’s tool kit.

The book is actually two stories in one volume, with the second half being a reprint of the very first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet. Both stories are presented as semi-facsimiles of their original US printings, together with reproductions of title pages and so on. The Holmes story is reproduced from its appearance in The Illustrated Home Guest in 1892, and includes rare illustrations one of which appears on the cover. Doyle’s first Holmes novel is the most controversial of all his stories—at least if you’re a Mormon—since this is the one where the inhabitants of Salt Lake City are depicted as a murderous religious cult. I filled out the cover with panels showing the two main story locations: a view of London via Ludgate Circus and a canyon in Utah. Finding a period engraving of St Paul’s Cathedral that remained visually interesting when narrowed down in this way took some time.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• More detectives
• The Joe Phenix Detective Series
• Illustrating Sherlock Holmes

Figures of Mortality: Lawrence versus Dalí

Famous Fantastic Mysteries (August, 1946).

Salvador Dalí and Philippe Halsman popularised the image of a human skull created by an arrangement of bodies in Halsman’s 1951 photo-portrait of the artist, In Voluptas Mors. The assemblage, which was based on a sketch by Dalí, has been imitated by photographers and poster designers but I’ve yet to see any mention of this painted precursor by illustrator Lawrence Sterne Stevens (or “Lawrence” as he was always credited) for Famous Fantastic Mysteries in August, 1946. I’d assume the similarity is a coincidence. The subliminal skull in painting and drawing goes back at least as far as the 1890s (see this post), while Dalí was always very adept at finding and creating visual rhymes. Variations on the skull-from-figures motif appear in paintings throughout his career, one of the earliest being a minor work, Dancer – Skull, from the 1930s. Another painting, a commission for a wartime poster warning US soldiers about the hazards of venereal disease, features a pair of women, and predates Lawrence’s cover by four years.

In Voluptas Mors (1951).

Lawrence deserves credit, however, for having created a more successful arrangement of bodies than Halsman and Dalí managed, although it’s easier to do this in a painting than it is to arrange a group of women in a studio. Some of the limbs of Lawrence’s figures are extended or foreshortened, while the contrast between light and shade has been reduced to aid the composition. Lawrence painted a further variation on the subliminal skull in a cover for Famous Fantastic Mysteries the year after the Dalí/Halsman portrait, while Dalí himself returned to the theme with Skull of Zurbarán in 1956.

Famous Fantastic Mysteries (June, 1952).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Être Dieu: Dalí versus Wakhévitch
• Chance encounters on the dissecting table
• Salvador Dalí’s Maze
• Dalí in New York
• Dalí’s discography
• Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí
• Mongolian impressions
• Hello Dali!
• Dirty Dalí
• The skull beneath the skin
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited

The Cthulhu Mythos in the pulps

The Nameless City: First published in The Wolverine, November 1921. Reprinted in Weird Tales, November 1928. Illustration by Joseph Doolin.

This would have been “The Cthulhu Mythos in Weird Tales” if some of HP Lovecraft’s more substantial stories hadn’t been published elsewhere. To prevent sprawl I’ve limited the list to Lovecraft’s own stories even though the Mythos takes in the work of contemporaries such as Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, Zealia Bishop, August Derleth and others. I like seeing the first appearance in print of familiar tales, and I like seeing their accompanying illustrations even if the drawings are inferior pieces, which they often were for the first decade of Weird Tales. These are the short-story equivalent of first editions, and in the case of The Call of Cthulhu you get to see the first printing anywhere of that mysterious name.

The Hound: Weird Tales, February 1924. Illustration by William Fred Heitman.

This issue is also notable for a story by Burton Peter Thom which shares a title with a Mythos-derived song by Metallica, The Thing That Should Not Be.

The Festival: Weird Tales, January 1925. Illustration by Andrew Brosnatch.

The Colour Out of Space: Amazing Stories, September 1927. Illustration by JM de Aragon.

Lovecraft didn’t think that Weird Tales would appreciate this one even though it’s more horror than science fiction so he sent it to Amazing Stories instead.

The Call of Cthulhu: Weird Tales, February 1928. Illustration by Hugh Rankin.

It’s doubtful that Rankin, Senf and co. would have been up to the task of depicting Great Cthulhu or the non-Euclidean nightmare of R’lyeh, but this hardly excuses editor Farnsworth Wright’s decision to give the cover to Elliott O’Donnell’s ridiculous ghost table.

Continue reading “The Cthulhu Mythos in the pulps”