A white woman somehow menaced by a sinister-looking Oriental is one of the more unfortunate tropes common in the pulp era, but Margaret Brundage did make use of it in an early Weird Tales cover (December 1933). I suppose I’m fair game for reproducing it here, but I hold to the view that we don’t make ourselves wiser in the present by blotting out parts of our past.
(I confess to be unusually pleased at seeing the little blue NRA eagle in the upper left-hand corner of the cover. We do our part!
In the interior, Hugh Rankin (1878-1956) provides a little tasty cheesecake to go along with Frank Owen’s story “The Ox-Cart.”
A biographical detail which caught my eye and which I’ll probably post more on tomorrow is that Hugh Rankin was the son of Ellen Rankin Copp (1853-1901), a pioneering American woman sculptor.
This issue of Weird Tales is available to read and download at the Internet Archive.
The Oriental doesn’t look very sinister and the woman doesn’t look very menaced though: a little worried or puzzled, perhaps, but no hysterics. The picture doesn’t seem to connect to any of the actual stories in the book, though, so we can’t tell what effect Margaret Brundage was aiming for.
Ming is simply explaining that by agreeing to become his wife, Dale can not only become queen of the universe, but save Flash’s life as well.