When it comes to pulp covers of The Spider, the artist I think of is Rafael DeSoto (1904-92). In particular, the cover from October 1941, which he did reproductions of.
DeSoto was from Puerto Rico, and his poor command of English actually hindered him at first.
During his career, he did pulp covers from 1930 to 1954. When he tried doing covers initially, things didn’t go well with Street & Smith. Instead, they hired him for the pen & ink department, where he worked for two years, honing his craft. His first pulp covers would be for other publishers, like Dell. He finally got S&S to take a couple of covers for Top-Notch, but his pulp cover career would be for other publishers.
He mostly did covers for Popular Publications, as well as Thrilling, mainly in the shudder and crime pulps. But he also did pulp heroes, sports, science fiction, and adventure. Some of the titles he worked on were Adventure, Thrilling Adventure and Thrilling Detective, Dime Detective, Dime Mystery, Flynn’s Detective Weekly, and Black Mask.
Interestingly, in addition to doing The Spider covers, taking over from John Newton Howitt with the October 1939 issue, DeSoto did the seven covers that more correctly show The Spider.
I thought it interesting that The Spider cover from May 1941, with The Spider fighting the villain on the torch of the Statue of Liberty, might have inspired director Alfred Hitchcock when he was developing his remake of Saboteur for American audiences, and added a similar scene as a climax for the film.
He also did covers for Black Book (Black Bat), The Phantom Detective, Secret Agent X, Operator #5, Ghost Super-Detective, and Captain Zero (all three issues).
After the pulps, like many other pulp illustrators, he moved into doing covers for the slicks and men’s adventure magazines and later paperback books. Another interesting fact learned is when he did the cover for a paperback book in 1958 about the explorer Hernando De Soto, who landed near Tampa Bay, a local mayor reached out to see if the cover artist was related to De Soto. DeSoto researched it, and found that he was the only documented descendant. This lead him to be involved for many years with the local Hernando De Soto festival in Tampa, doing artwork for it.
In 2014, Illustration magazine did a cover feature on DeSoto in #10 by David Saunders, son of pulp artist Norm Saunders. This 40-page article gave a bio and career overview, along with a selection of artwork. This lead to a hardcover book from Illustrated Press in 2019, over 200 pages. The book devotes most of its space to reproducing a lot of artwork. We also get a checklist of his pulp covers. It appears to still be available from the publisher for a reasonable price, and would encourage folks to get it before it’s gone.
This is another excellent work from Illustrated Press. They have done similar books on a few more pulp artists that I hope to review at some point. And they have run articles on several in Illustration magazine.
