Tag Archives: Florence Magarian

Women creators

As long as we’re doing some role reversals here…

A lady scientist (mad I hope!) graces the October 1943 cover of Fantastic Adventures. She was painted by Robert Gibson Jones (1889-1969). The story which I believe it is illustrating, Frank Patton’s “Jewels of the Toad,” has an interior illustration by Virgil Finaly, which is typically exquisite.

Women creating seems to have been a theme for this issue. Florence Magarian was called upon to do an illustration for Don Wilcox’s “World of Paper Dolls,” about a girl who makes people. (The image below is my composite across two pages).

Mrs. Magarian also illustrated William P. McGiven’s “Tink fights the Gremlins,” a story that has (apparently) painting fairies.

This issue is available for reading and download at the Internet Archive.

Be warned, however, that this issue contains a story titled “Mystery of the Creeping Underwear.” No joke.

Liquid Man

We’ve done a lot of liquid girls here at Erotic Mad Science, so why not some liquid man? Especially if there’s some imperiled dame tied up in the background? This cover of the September 1941 issue is by Robert Fuqua. Interior art could be a bit thin in some issues of Fantastic Adventures, but this illustration to John Broome’s story “The Pulsating Planet” is pretty dynamic:

This is work (probably) by Albert Magarian (unk.-1991), the husband of the unfortunate Florence Magarian whom we met a few posts back. My “probably” in attribution is because husband and wife were very close collaborators, so this work might reflect contributions by Florence as well. (And I must reflect that Albert lived on for 31 years after Florence died in a mental institution. I…)

This issue is available to be read and downloaded at the Internet Archive.

Produced in the ring

The cover illustration to the April 1943 edition of Fantastic Adventures is classic erotic mad science and was executed by the great Malcolm Smith (1910-1960), who some readers here might remember as the creator of one of the best early tube-girl images.

This issue has its share of decent interior art images, such as this one, sadly uncredited, to Harold Lawley’s story “Daughters of Darkness.”

But a favorite is this one by Florence Magarian (1912-1960), illustrating E.K. Jarvis’s novelette “The Curse of Many Hands.”

It’s decent supernatural femme peril, but what really struck me was the short biographical paragraph offered to Mrs. Magarian at the ISFDB.

Florence Lillian See graduated Polytechnic High School in Los Angeles and attended the Otis Art Institute, where she met and married Albert Ararat Magarian on May 25, 1937, in Los Angeles. During the 1940s the Magarians worked as interior artists for magazines published by Ziff-Davis Productions in Chicago. Constant fear of losing her husband to service in World War II and the demanding workload of their career caused Florence to suffer a nervous breakdown. She spent the rest of her life in and out of the mental institution at Alton, Illinois, where she passed away in 1960.

Many artists have sad life stories, but this one struck me as unusually poignant.

This issue is available to be read or downloaded at the Internet Archive.