Today’s installment of Great Pulp Art is a Halloween one.
Having spent a lot of time watching TV while growing up, I had a regular dose of horror and science fiction movies from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. This cover for the October 1949 number of Amazing Stories always makes me think of those films.
The cover is by Harold W. McCauley, who was a regular, but not frequent, contributor to Amazing Stories. His paintings reflect a realism, particularly in the human form, that only a skilled artist can achieve. A black-and-white illustration of his also accompanies the story inside.
We like to think of pulp magazine covers as colorful and vivid, but, truthfully, they often printed the covers with less detail and color than were in the original artwork. That’s shown clearly when comparing the Amazing Stories cover and McCauley’s original art.
Move your cursor over the cover above to see the original, much more colorful and detailed painting. You’ll notice that the production department at Ziff-Davis, the publisher, removed the painted background and replaced it with a graduated orange-red tone. It’s evident by red line outlining the top of the Tiger Woman’s right arm and by the notable lack of feathering of her hair against the background.
Berkeley Livingston‘s “Tiger Woman of Shadow Valley” isn’t really a story fitting of Halloween. It’s a run-of-the-mill SF short story about two expeditions on Venus racing to stake claim to an ore called Holium — “lighter than aluminum, stronger than the strongest steel alloy, impervious to heat, impregnable to wear, it was the perfect metal.” The two teams come face-to-face with the masked Tiger Woman of the title.
But, it’s the cover artwork that, to me, recalls such horror/SF classic movies as “Curse of the Cat People” and the like, and makes it Great Pulp Art, Halloween edition.
