“Stop squirming and be sacrificed, young lady!”

“You know how tiring it is for me to keep my left arm strategically positioned in the viewer’s line of sight like this?” Margaret Brundage illustrating Robert E. Howard on the July 1936 cover of Weird Tales. Virgil Finlay’s pencil was also busy, providing a noble profile and a pair of shapely buttocks for C.L. Moore’s story “Lost Paradise.”

“From a world like a jewel we come.”

This issue of Weird Tales is available to read and download at the Internet Archive.

Maiden, crone, and fishmen

I’m pretty sure that Margaret Brundage is illustrating Edmond Hamilton’s story here. In interior art Jack Binder definitely is, and boy-howdy does the illustration have a made science feel.

“He transferred the brain into the body of the blind old man.”

Jack Blinder does extra duty on this issue baking some cheescake to illustrate another of C.L. Moore’s Jirel stories.

“She stared with the dazed incredulity of one who knows herself to be in a nightmare.”

This isse of Weird Tales is available to read and download at the Internet Archive.

Short and clingy lingerie is de rigueur when worshipping the Black God

C.L. Moore drew the long straw and got her story “The Black God’s Kiss” illustrated by Margaret Brundage on the October 1934 cover of Weird Tales. The site Galactic Central has a version of the cover in an alternate and brighter color scheme.

This issue also has one of Robert E. Howard’s early Conan stories, “The People of the Black Circle,” complete with an interior illustration by our friend Hugh Rankin.

“He heard Yasmina scream.”

This issue of Weird Tales is available to read and download at the Internet Archive.

In the coils

A dramatic cover of a girl in peril by Margaret Brundage for the February 1936 Weird Tales. Vampirism or mad science or both? I can’t account for the curious spelling “eery” on this cover, but I do suspect that Brundage’s illustration is an ancestor of a whole trove of interesting fetish art.

As she so often did, C.L. Moore has a story in this issue, “Yvala.” “Yvala was a gloriously beautiful woman — Lilith, Circe, and Helen combined into one — yet she was cruel and dangerous as a flame from hell.” (There’s always a catch…) Vincent Napoli did his best within the limits of his medium to bring her to life.

“He stood bathed in the light that permeated the very atoms of his soul.”

Atoms of the soul are an interesting concept.

This issue of Weird Tales is available to read or download from the Internet Archive.