Red menace

A C.C. Senf cover for Weird Tales, July 1928. A redhead is meanced by a man in a red costume.

Another early (July 1928) Weird Tales cover, this one by C.C. Senf. The issue is a good one for fans of the H.P. Lovecraft circle, as it contains stories by August Derleth and Frank Belknap Long, Jr. as well as a poem (!) by Robert E. Howard. It also contains a reprint of a famous story by Arthur Machen, “The Bowmen.” And of course, it has interesting interior art, of which the most memorably weird is this head-of-story piece by sometime Weird Tales cover artist Hugh Rankin.

A story illustration by Hugh Rankin for Bertram Russell's "The Bat-Men of Thorium," which appeared in the July 1928 issue of Weird Tales. — “Stranger kisses have never been given.”

I confess I am at a bit of a loss to understand what is going on here. Doesn’t this dude understand that kissing is more fun if you take your diving helmet off first? Perhaps all that Thorium has corroded his bat-intellect.

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

The Dust of Egypt

Hugh Rankin gives us an Egyptian princess in a filmy gown and some other weird stuff for the the April 1930 cover of Weird Tales. He did a fair amount of interior illustration duty as well that seems equally strange, such as the one below for David H. Keller’s story “Creation Unforgiveable.” Two female figures, one being menaced by what looks like an ape man and another by a…Centrosaurus maybe?

“Once again came the whistling, piercing scream.”

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

A bit more on that October issue

We covered the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales a bit yesterday, but it’s a bit of a rich issue for me and so I thought I’d give it a second post. For one thing, one of Hugh Rankin’s interior illustrations, this one to E. Hoffman Price’s story “Saladin’s Throne-Rug,” deserves a place of honor as a very early example of a tube girl:

In the glowing, rosy-amber jar was the shapely form of Djeanne Hanoum!”

This particular issue also marked the first-ever publication of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “Pickman’s Model,” and Rankin would do his best to bring the product of Lovecraft’s imagination to visual life:

“He had painted a monstrous being on that awful canvas.”

But by God, Eliot, it was a photograph from life!”

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

Home of Dark Lore

Another early Weird Tales, this one from October 1927. Te cover painting was executed in this case by Chicago-based German-American artist Curtis C. Senf (1873-1949), who achieves an almost pre-Raphaelite look here.

Hugh Rankin was busy doing interior illustrations on this one. One quick example is this weird bacchanal illustrating Nictzin Dyalhis’s “The Dark Lore.”

“They burst into song — the most dreadful song in all the universe.”

I should perhaps note that “Nictzin Dyalhis” appears not to have been someone’s over-clever attempt at a pulp pseudonym, but the real name of a reclusive writer, whose dates are 1873-1942.

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

Fire can be a menace

And metal garments are more conductive than cloth, so that young lady is definitely in an uncomfortable situation in Margaret Brundage’s illustration of the February 1934 cover of Weird Tales. Hugh Rankin makes an appearance in the interior with an almost ethereally-beautiful illustration for E. Hoffman Price’s story “Tarbis of the Lake.”

“She was one flight below and centuries away.”

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

Perhaps Hugh Rankin liked this sort of thing

Here we have a rare pre-Brundage Weird Tales cover, this one done by Hugh Rankin, a pulp artist we’ve discussed here recently. Our discussion got picked up in a post at BondageBlog, who liked the languid girl chained up in a cave Rankin drew before. Thanks for taking note, Rope Guy!

The interior illustration, also done by Rankin for Seabury Quinn’s story “The House of the Golden Masks,” suggests that perhaps Hugh Rankin liked ’em tied up. (This image is a cross-page composite I put together to try to show the whole thing. I admit it’s not perfect.)

The original, which you can click through to see, shows more detail that can be included in the space available to this blog.

This edition of Weird Tales is

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.

A bit more on Hugh Rankin

(N.B. that I am indebted for this post to David Saunders’s post on Hugh Rankin at The Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists. The article contains its own small trove of Hugh Rankin’s art (see the links on the left-hand side of the page, and for both that and the article I recommend your visiting.)

Our boy Hugh (officially named Hugh Dearborn Copp) did his share of sexy covers for Weird Tales, many of them somewhat earlier than Margaret Brundage’s run. This one, for example, from August 1929:

As noted in yesterday’s post, Hugh’s mother Ellen Rankin Copp was a distinguished American sculptor, and herself the granddaughter prominent abolitionists and Underground Railroad “conductors” Jean (1795-1877) and John Rankin (1793-1886). Quite the American family! Mrs. Copp designed a 25-foot tall sculpture of the Hawaiian fire goddess Pele for the Hawaii pavilion at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition.

Though only fourteen himself, Hugh ” sculpted a charming panel of Pixies and Brownies in a hurdle race, which was accepted by the Board of Lady Managers of the World’s Fair and exhibited in the Childrens’ Pavilion.” Mother and son were, in their way, nationally celebrated figures.

Dig even a little and history becomes more fascinating than we have a right to.

That unfortunate trope again

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.”

“Her glowing silver body was a gem of rarest worth.”

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.