Whatever instructions Margaret Brundage got for the monster on the cover of the August 1937 issue of Weird Tales must have been pleasingly vague. Virgil Finlay is busy on the interior providing a bit of bonus cheesecake, this time illustrating Frank Owen’s story “The Mandarin’s Ear.”
This issue of Weird Tales is available to read and download at the Internet Archive.
“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.”
This issue of Weird Tales is available to read and download at the Internet Archive.
This is another Virgil Finlay Weird Tales cover, for the July 1938 issue. Finlay was kept busy on this issue with a number of interior illustrations as well, such as this one for Seabury Quinn’s story “Fortune’s Fools.”
This issue of Weird Tales is available to read and download at the Internet Archive.
February 1938 an unusual example of a cover of Weird Tales done by Virgil Finlay, and the result is predictably exquisite, which is why I am posting it here even though (1) I posted it before early in this site’s history and (2) time and the chemistry of cheap paper have been very unkind to the Internet Archive version of this issue, and I have no interior art I think worth recovering.
This issue marked a publication of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “From Beyond.” It wasn’t the first publication, but that first publication was in a pretty obscure place — a magazine called the Fantasy Fan in 1934, so this publication might have been the first chance for a significant, if not exactly large, audience to read the story. I’ll note also that this story would be made into a rare example of a successful Lovecraft movie by Stuart Gordon. It starred Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton (yum!) and was also a subject of my early blogging efforts. Wheels within wheels.
Terribly yellowed pages and all, this issue of Weird Tales is available for reading and downloading at the Internet Archive.
Never one to be outdone in the tying-up-pretty-girls department, Margaret Brundage ties one to wheel on the June 1938 cover of Weird Tales to illustrate Seabury Quinn’s “Suicide Chapel.” Virgil Finlay has an interior illustration to the same story which shows off greater emotional intensity.
Our heroine’s antagonist is meant to be a giant ape. by the way.
This issue of Weird Tales is available to read and download at the Internet Archive.
Some more orientalism on the cover of the November 1937 Weird Tales by Margaret Brundage. Virgil Finlay did a lot of interior illustration on this issue as well. The interior illustration he did for Seabury Quinn’s “Living Buddhess” cover story has perhaps not aged well, and not just in the sense that the paper on which it was printed did not age well.
This issue of Weird Tales is available to read or download at the Internet Archive.
The “strange tale of the future” Margaret Brundage was illustrating for this May 1938 issue of Weird Tales appears to be Seabury Quinn’s “Goetterdaemmerung.” (In 1938 umlauts were scarce, apparently.) Virgil Finlay did a lot of interior work on this issue, including this illustration for the title story:
Finaly also illustrated what looks to my eyes like a bit of the old ultraviolence about to happen for Edmond Hamilton’s “The Isle of the Sleeper.”
This issue of Weird Tales is available to read and download at the Internet Archive.
Between approaching Mr. Creepy behind and the Flames of the Pit below, our scantily-clad heroine’s future isn’t looking all that bright. Advice to pretty women: do not inhabit a Margaret Brundage Weird Tales cover painting like this one from May 1937.
This issue gives us another more-explicit-than-expected Virgil Finlay illustration, this one for Clifford Ball’s novelette Duar the Accursed.
This issue of Weird Tales is available to read and download at the Internet Archive.
This Margaret Brundage cover is from the March 1938 issue. Is our unclad cutie being evoked or dissolved by death? Either way, she looks surprised. She illustrates a Seabury Quinn story in another star-studded (as future generations would reckon it) cast of authors in Weird Tales. Virgil Finlay has an interior illustration to the cover story which, somewhat unusually for Finlay’s art in this period, presents exposed female nipples — Finlay would usually artfully conceal them.
(Sorry about the severe yellowing of the page, but the medium was called “pulp” for a reason.)
This issue of Weird Tales is available to read or download from the Internet Archive.
Here we present the first of a what is likely a series of covers for Weird Tales. This little magazine, the October 1937 cover of which we reproduce above, was where many of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft first saw the light of publication, and in those days its principal cover artist was Margaret Brundage (1900-1976), she of the ballooning breasts and, incidentally, an art-school classmate of Walt Disney.
The scan quality on most old issues of Weird Tales is unfortunately pretty low, but we shouldn’t keep that from appreciating an interior artwork contribution by the ubiquitous Virgil Finlay.
This issue of Weird Tales is available to read or download from the Internet Archive.