Today we introduce a new feature here on Yellowed Perils. This ongoing feature will showcase a piece of great pulp art, so I’m cleverly calling it Great Pulp Art.
Kicking off is a great meta-cover by Graves Gladney for The Shadow story “The Wasp Returns” (Feb. 1, 1940). What makes it interesting is the self-referencing magazine stand that The Shadow takes cover behind. I’m not sure how well protected you would be by the two or three stacked pulps when the bullets fly.
A newsstand does figure into the plot of “The Wasp Returns,” but there’s no gun battle next to it.
That’s the cover from the July 15, 1940, number of The Shadow on the stand. (Another piece of Great Pulp Art, by the way.) I’m not sure what issue the Love Story Magazine is, though it appears to say September on it.
What issue the Astounding Science-Fiction cover depicts is even less evident. Based on the colors, there are a number of different covers in 1939 and 1940 that it could be. (It would be nice to think Gladney was using one of the handful of Astounding covers he did in 1939 as a reference.)
It’s possible that the fourth pulp is a Doc Savage one. On the issue I’ve posted, there’s not much left of that corner. But on other scans on the web, it looks as if the letters are the small “DOC” that appeared in the logo on those covers. Again, the colors don’t really match up with a specific issue from 1939 or 1940.
We used this painting on the cover of last year’s issue of The Pulpster #20 when PulpFest marked the 80th anniversary of The Shadow magazine.
Stay tuned for more Great Pulp Art.
If you put a gun to my head and forced me to pick a favorite Shadow artist, I’d probably go with George Rozen. But Gladney was a wonderful artist as well. I don’t think I’d seen this particular cover before–it’s a great one.
George Rozen did some fantastic covers for The Shadow. But this one has been one of my favorites for a long time. It’s not one of the usual Shadow covers that you frequently see. That’s why I wanted to feature it.