Jayem Wilcox – { feuilleton }

Illustrating Hyperborea

The Book of Hyperborea (1996). Cover art by Robert H. Knox.

“My Hyperborean tales, it seems to me, with their primordial, prehuman and sometimes premundane background and figures, are the closest to the Cthulhu Mythos, but most of them are written in a vein of grotesque humor that differentiates them vastly.” — Clark Ashton Smith

Since re-reading Clark Ashton Smith’s The Tale of Satampra Zeiros I’ve been revisiting more of Smith’s stories set in the lost world of Hyperborea. And having put together a post some years ago that gathered all the original illustrations for Smith’s Zothique cycle, I thought I’d try and do the same for another of his story series. As I noted in the earlier post, we’re fortunate today that it’s so easy to see illustrations that in the past would have been impossible to find unless you owned (or had access to) a huge collection of pulp magazines. Pulp illustrations aren’t always very good—in the case of the early issues of Weird Tales, they’re frequently amateurish—but those that illustrate new fiction for the first time are historically important if nothing else.

Lost Worlds: Volume 1 (1974). Cover art by Bruce Pennington. Lost Worlds was a single-volume collection published by Arkham House (USA) and Neville Spearman (UK). The Panther paperback covers by Bruce Pennington could easily be used on other books but these were the first Smith volumes I owned.

The first Hyperborea stories were among Smith’s earliest prose fantasies, owing something to Lord Dunsany on the one hand (HP Lovecraft detected a Dunsanian quality), and the writers of antiquity on the other, the name “Hyperborea” (“Behind the North Wind”) being borrowed from the Greeks. The northern location is about the only feature of the continent that the Greek writers would recognise, Smith’s world being a temperate pre-Ice Age realm of mountains and verdant jungles. Dinosaurs and megafauna share the lands with human inhabitants for whom sorcery is a common practice. As with Zothique, the cycle was an influential one. Lin Carter in the introduction to his Ballantine collection, Hyperborea (1971), suggests that the name of the continent might have prompted Robert E. Howard to set his Conan stories in “the Hyborean Age”. This could be the case: Howard and Smith were writing for the same publications, and the first Conan story was published in Weird Tales shortly after The Tale of Satampra Zeiros; but Howard was also reading the Greeks as well. A more substantial influence may be found in Fritz Leiber’s Nehwon, a world in which aspects of Hyperborea and Zothique are combined. Sword and sorcery begins “behind the North Wind”, in other words, although there’s very little sword-play in Smith’s fiction, that was Leiber and Howard’s department.

Lost Worlds: Volume 2 (1974). Cover art by Bruce Pennington.

The original Hyperborea illustrations are fewer than those for Zothique. As with the later cycle, several of the stories are unillustrated, while others were given lacklustre artwork. In the earlier post I followed the story order chosen by Lin Carter which attempted to contrive an internal chronology for the cycle. Carter did the same with his Hyperborea collection so I’ve followed his example once again. Later collections, like Will Murray’s Book of Hyperborea, tend to order the stories by publication date.

The Seven Geases, Weird Tales, October 1934.

An illustration of Tsathoggua by Smith himself. The toad-god turns up in person in this story.

The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan, Weird Tales, June 1932.

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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.

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Illustrating Zothique

Cover art by George Barr, 1970.

A few years ago I wrote a short piece about Virgil Finlay’s illustrations for a Zothique story by Clark Ashton Smith, The Garden of Adompha, so this post may be regarded as a more substantial sequel. If Smith remains something of a cult author then Zothique is the pre-eminent cult creation from his career as a writer of weird fiction. Most of Smith’s stories can be grouped together according to their location: Atlantis, Hyperborea, Averoigne in medieval France, the planet Mars, and so on. Zothique was a more original conception than his other worlds, being the last continent on Earth in the final years of the planet, an idea which had precedents in earlier novels such as William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land but which hadn’t been used before as a setting for a cycle of stories. The distant future suggests science fiction but, as with the Zothique-influenced Dying Earth of Jack Vance, science and technology is long-forgotten and sorcery rules the day. The poetry that Smith wrote before he took to writing short stories had a distinctly Decadent quality—”like a verbal Gustave Moreau painting“—and Zothique is a richly Decadent world, with the entire planet in a state of decay along with its barbarous, demon-worshipping peoples.

Weird Tales, September 1932. Art by T. Wyatt Nelson.

All the Zothique stories had their first printings in Weird Tales, a magazine that ran illustrations with most contributions, but unless you’re a pulp collector many of the illustrations have been difficult to see until very recently. One of the pleasures of looking through fiction magazines is seeing how their stories might have been illustrated when they were first published. Popular tales eventually find their way into book collections but their illustrations tend to be marooned in the titles where they first appeared unless the artist is of sufficient merit to warrant a collection of their own.

Weird Tales, March 1933. Art by Jayem Wilcox.

The examples here are all from recent uploads at the Internet Archive which now has a complete run of Weird Tales from 1923 to 1954. The illustrations also run in order of publication with links to the relevant issues, although I agree with Lin Carter’s ordering of the stories. Smith never organised them himself, and the later reprints from Arkham House and others tend to scatter them through separate volumes. When Lin Carter edited the Zothique collection in 1970 he put the stories into an order that follows the very loose chronology running through the cycle.

Weird Tales, January 1934. Art by Clark Ashton Smith.

One surprise of this search was discovering that Smith himself had provided illustrations for several of the stories. Some Smith enthusiasts like his drawings and paintings but I’m afraid I’m not among them, his sculpture work is better. It’s doubtful that these would have been printed at all if they weren’t the work of the author.

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