The art of the pulp magazines

An area that I haven’t gotten into yet with this blog is the artwork used for pulp magazines. Over the decades that the pulps existed, a great deal of artwork — good and bad — was produced.

The covers were the main means for selling the magazines, and the pulps also had interior black and white artwork. When I was reading about science fiction as a kid, I remember seeing a lot of covers of pulp sf magazines, including works by Frank R. Paul, Virgil Finley, and others. They always captured my imagination, with crazy aliens, weird scenes, and strange aircraft or spaceships.

In recent years, I’ve seen not just general works on pulp artwork, but more volumes focusing on individual artists. One big source for some of this is Illustration magazine, which has run articles on various pulp artists in its issues.

Among the artists featured in Illustration are Frederick Blakeslee, Allen Anderson, Graves Gladney, Rudolph Belarski, Tom Lovell, John Newton Howitt, and others. There are several I would love to see covered. And there has been works from others on artists such as Margaret Brundage.

Illustration Press has also published volumes on several artists, including Walter Baumhofer, H.J. Ward, Norman Saunders, and Rafael DeSoto.

As noted, the pulps had cover artwork, but also interior artwork, which is sometimes done by the cover artists, sometimes other artists.

I should be fair and note that there are also artists who have done cover artwork for the pulp reprints who have also made an impact, such as James Bama, Robert Bonfiles, George Gross (he also did pulp artwork), Peter Caras, Lee Brown Coye, Jim Steranko, Frank Hamilton, and many others.

So I hope over to do more postings on some of the pulp artwork books that I’ve been able to obtain. I would love to see more attention paid to some of these artists who have been somewhat over looked.