Potrzebie
Sunday, February 05, 2012
Chris Marshall of Collected Comics Library compares Gemstone's EC Archives The Vault of Horror with GC's EC Archives The Vault of Horror.
Chris calls EC's GhouLunatics "witches", but the Vault-Keeper was a ghoul and the Crypt-Keeper was the son of a living mummy and a two-headed corpse. Another EC horror host was Drusilla, drawn by Johnny Craig as the Vault-Keeper's companion in the Vault, but she made so few appearances we never knew if she had supernatural abilities.
A bafflement about "A Stitch in Time!" is that Craig said he scripted the story but also said he was unfamiliar with the Triangle Factory fire. Yet the story parallels events of the fire. My notes for the EC Archives Vault of Horror cover the influence of Ray Bradbury, Weird Tales and other sources. Here's are excerpts:
The Triangle fire reportedly began in a scrap bin, the focus of the final pages in the story. The sweatshop owner is named Lasch, and the Triangle fire took place in the ten-story Asch Building place at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place. In the last panel, the Vault-Keeper’s concluding pun is a direct reference: “…don’t asch Lasch.” Although polished in both script and art, the story has an obvious flaw, since the fire begins for no apparent reason other than to heighten the finale with flames. What started this fire? We are never told.
“The Jellyfish!” in The Vault of Horror 19 was suggested by Bradbury’s “Skeleton”. The idea for “Skeleton” came to Bradbury when a “strangely sore larynx” prompted him to visit his family doctor, who said, “That’s all perfectly normal. You’ve just never bothered to feel the tissues, muscles, or tendons in your neck or, for that matter, your body. Consider the medulla oblongata.” Recalling the incident, Bradbury wrote, “Consider the medulla oblongata! Migawd, I could hardly pronounce it! I went home feeling my bones—my kneecaps, my floating ribs, my elbows, all those hidden Gothic symbols of darkness—and wrote 'Skeleton'.” It was published in the September 1945 issue of Weird Tales and reprinted in Dark Carnival.
Chris calls EC's GhouLunatics "witches", but the Vault-Keeper was a ghoul and the Crypt-Keeper was the son of a living mummy and a two-headed corpse. Another EC horror host was Drusilla, drawn by Johnny Craig as the Vault-Keeper's companion in the Vault, but she made so few appearances we never knew if she had supernatural abilities.
The Triangle fire reportedly began in a scrap bin, the focus of the final pages in the story. The sweatshop owner is named Lasch, and the Triangle fire took place in the ten-story Asch Building place at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place. In the last panel, the Vault-Keeper’s concluding pun is a direct reference: “…don’t asch Lasch.” Although polished in both script and art, the story has an obvious flaw, since the fire begins for no apparent reason other than to heighten the finale with flames. What started this fire? We are never told.
“The Jellyfish!” in The Vault of Horror 19 was suggested by Bradbury’s “Skeleton”. The idea for “Skeleton” came to Bradbury when a “strangely sore larynx” prompted him to visit his family doctor, who said, “That’s all perfectly normal. You’ve just never bothered to feel the tissues, muscles, or tendons in your neck or, for that matter, your body. Consider the medulla oblongata.” Recalling the incident, Bradbury wrote, “Consider the medulla oblongata! Migawd, I could hardly pronounce it! I went home feeling my bones—my kneecaps, my floating ribs, my elbows, all those hidden Gothic symbols of darkness—and wrote 'Skeleton'.” It was published in the September 1945 issue of Weird Tales and reprinted in Dark Carnival.
Joe Mugnaini's illustration for Ray Bradbury's "Skeleton" in The October Country. Mugnaini did the Ballantine edition cover and interiors.
Labels: ec, mugnaini, ray bradbury, weird tales
¶ 8:23 AM 0 comments
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Edd Cartier (1914-2008)
Art ©2009 Edd Cartier Estate
The imaginative illustrator Edd Cartier, 94, died Christmas Day. Everything about the gifted Cartier was unusual. He did serious illustration but also whimsical drawings, and he sometimes managed to incorporate both into a single picture. He was a pack leader in science fiction illustration, but his work vanished from magazines when he was at his peak. Even his name was unique; "Edd Cartier" evoked artwork with the precision of cut jewelry. The odd "Edd" signature seemed to herald the approach of alien beings, yet it was simply an askew display of his middle initial.
Here is his superb cover for the October 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. I started reading Astounding that year and marveled at Cartier's tightly rendered, sometimes humorous b/w interior illustrations. But looking at this cover's beautiful color design and perfectly balanced layout, bringing de Camp's characters to life, one has to wonder why Cartier didn't get dozens of Astounding cover assignments through the 1940s and 1950s. Did John W. Campbell think it did not have the proper "look" for his magazine? Or was he misled by letters praising Cartier's b/w interiors? Whatever the reason, this was his only cover for Astounding.
Cartier grew up in North Bergen, New Jersey, where his father ran Cartier's Saloon. While in grade school, he was allowed to paint Christmas pictures on the tavern's large plate glass windows. Since many of his childhood drawings were humorous, his friends and family suggested to him that he should plan a career as a cartoonist, and years later Cartier commented, "In fact, I have been accused of putting too much humor in my illustrations." In his teens, he designed costumes for school plays and illustrated his 1933 high school yearbook. Listening to cowboy music, he practiced lasso tricks. Fascinated by the paintings of Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, the young Cartier decided to become an illustrator specializing in Western art.
In 1933, he began attending Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he became close friends with a fellow student, future pulp illustrator Earl Mayan. Cartier majored in illustration, studying with Western pulp illustrator Harold Winfield Scott (1898-1977) and Maitland Graves, author of The Art of Color and Design (1941). In his essay, "The Shadows of My Past" (a foreword to Volume 16 of Anthony Tollin's Shadow trade paperbacks), Cartier wrote, "Graves taught figure drawing and was instrumental in my ability to depict anatomy, both human—and not so human. Scott taught pictorial illustration, and through him I feel privileged to trace an unbroken chain of art instruction back to Howard Pyle, the father of American illustration. The links are fairly close: Scott had studied under Dean Cornwell, a student of Harvey Dunn, who in turn studied with Pyle. Harold Scott became my mentor and advisor."
Pratt instructor William James was a Street & Smith art director, and he opened the door that enabled Cartier to begin his professional career: "I began by doing a single illustration per week for Street & Smith pulps like Wild West Weekly, Movie Action and Detective Story Magazine while still attending Pratt, and was paid eight dollars for each drawing. But they soon began giving me more assignments. When I graduated in 1936, James offered me a steady assignment illustrating The Shadow’s adventures. The regular artist, Tom Lovell, was moving on to pursue a painting career, so I alternated with him illustrating the twice-monthly novels."
Graduating from Pratt, Cartier and Earl Mayan leased a Manhattan studio on the fourth floor of an Upper West Side brownstone, but a lack of assignments prompted Mayan to move out within a year. Six months later, Cartier moved back to North Bergen where he set up his studio on the floor above Cartier’s Saloon, collecting scrap lumber to construct a drawing table which he used the rest of his life.
As an advisor, Scott may not have always given the best advice. Norman Rockwell liked what he saw in Cartier's Shadow illustrations and wrote a letter offering him a job as an assistant. Cartier recalled, "I went to Harold and asked his opinion. 'If you study with Norman Rockwell, you’re just going to become another Norman Rockwell,' Scott advised. 'You’ll be influenced entirely by him. You should remain on your own.' So I turned down Rockwell’s job offer, though I have regretted doing so ever since." The regret, one can speculate, is that contact with Rockwell could have catapulted Cartier into the pages of The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's. The notion that Cartier could have become some kind of Rockwell clone doesn't wash, if that is indeed what Scott was suggesting.
He continued to illustrate for Street & Smith pulps, mainly focusing on The Shadow. As he recalled, "My illustrations evolved with each new issue. I abandoned pen-and-ink, preferring to use a combination of brush, ink, tempera and lithographic pencil. I worked almost exclusively on the lightly-textured surface of illustration board, usually Bainbridge #80, roughing in my Shadow drawings on the board with a pencil, then outlining the illustration with brush and ink. Next came brush and tempera, combined with ink for the darker areas. Finally, I would erase my original penciling and finish up by adding shading with a lithographic pencil. Sometimes I added a bit of red ink to my originals, usually in the eyes or as dripping blood, the red ink reproducing as black on the printed page. A typical drawing was usually one by one-and-a-half feet in size, or one-and-a-half by two feet, or sometimes larger, even though it might be reduced in the pulps to as small as a quarter of a page—or smaller still, as a spot illustration."
He illustrated for other Street & Smith mystery magazines, including The Whisperer, The Wizard and Detective Story Magazine, and then expanded into fantasy and science fiction, as he recalled: "In 1939, the editor of Street & Smith’s Astounding Science-Fiction offered me the opportunity to illustrate an extraordinary new magazine he was launching to be titled Unknown. John W. Campbell, Jr., thought I would be ideally suited to illustrating fantasy. I always enjoyed drawing the weird and fantastic nature of The Shadow’s adventures. And John said he had often admired that quality in my illustrations before he asked me to illustrate Unknown. After I illustrated the lead story in the first issue of Unknown—with my former instructor Harold Scott providing the cover painting—William James asked me if I would mind having someone else take over The Shadow so I could concentrate on science fiction and fantasy. I said it was okay with me, since I also liked science fiction.
Dave Kyle recalled launching Gnome Press with Marty Greenberg and working with Cartier on the 1951 book, Travelers of Space: "When the first books were printed in my family printing shop in Monticello, I had little practical experience but a lot of enthusiasm and energy. Courses at Columbia University helped immensely in steering me along the way. Using my artistic talent and training, I designed the original colophon or special identifying design for Gnome Press -- a gnome sitting under a toadstool reading a book, inspired by the design used by my father for Merriewold, a mountain residential park. The early books were designed by me and the quality was kept very high. I believe that the little touches which cost a bit more, such as my little symbol embossed in the cover of Asimov's I, Robot, the chain design for the title page of Heinlein's Sixth Column, and the split binding and special embossed rocketship on anthologies, made Gnome books distinctive.
"I designed and wrote all the copy for the early books, drawing designs when appropriate. Professional book printers were used, especially Colonial Press in Massachusetts which had an office on 42nd Street opposite the New York Public Library. I collaborated with Edd Cartier in several ways, the best being the illustrations for my story of the "Interplanetary Zoo"; this was an interesting project because the full color signature or folio in the anthology Travelers of Space was actually done from black-and-white drawings. All color was laid in by a talented printing plant technician who worked with me for the final results. He had done similar work for Lloyd A. Eshbach in the production of some of Lloyd's Fantasy Press books."
Cartier attended Pratt again on the G.I. Bill, receiving a fine arts degree in 1953. Supporting a family on the low pay of freelance science fiction art (at a time pulp magazines were coming to an end) prompted Cartier to seek employment in a different field, and he found a position as a draftsman for an engineering firm during the 1950s. Living in Ramsey, New Jersey, Cartier worked for more than 25 years as an art director with Mosstype, a Waldwick, New Jersey, manufacturer specializing in printing machinery. In Ramsey, he joined the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 682 in 1960 and became captain of the VFW Color Guard, leading parades for 26 years and organizing Veterans Day ceremonies. He was a member of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer and the Ramsey Historical Association.
In 1992 he was given the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1996 and 2001 he was nominated for Retro Hugo Awards for artwork published in 1945 and 1951. His work was collected in Edd Cartier: The Known and the Unknown, published in a 2000-copy limited edition hardcover by Gerry de la Ree in 1977, and his illustrations of L. Ron Hubbard's fiction were reprinted in Master Storyteller: An Illustrated Tour of the Fiction of L. Ron Hubbard by William J. Widder (Galaxy Press, 2003.).
The imaginative illustrator Edd Cartier, 94, died Christmas Day. Everything about the gifted Cartier was unusual. He did serious illustration but also whimsical drawings, and he sometimes managed to incorporate both into a single picture. He was a pack leader in science fiction illustration, but his work vanished from magazines when he was at his peak. Even his name was unique; "Edd Cartier" evoked artwork with the precision of cut jewelry. The odd "Edd" signature seemed to herald the approach of alien beings, yet it was simply an askew display of his middle initial.Here is his superb cover for the October 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. I started reading Astounding that year and marveled at Cartier's tightly rendered, sometimes humorous b/w interior illustrations. But looking at this cover's beautiful color design and perfectly balanced layout, bringing de Camp's characters to life, one has to wonder why Cartier didn't get dozens of Astounding cover assignments through the 1940s and 1950s. Did John W. Campbell think it did not have the proper "look" for his magazine? Or was he misled by letters praising Cartier's b/w interiors? Whatever the reason, this was his only cover for Astounding.
Cartier grew up in North Bergen, New Jersey, where his father ran Cartier's Saloon. While in grade school, he was allowed to paint Christmas pictures on the tavern's large plate glass windows. Since many of his childhood drawings were humorous, his friends and family suggested to him that he should plan a career as a cartoonist, and years later Cartier commented, "In fact, I have been accused of putting too much humor in my illustrations." In his teens, he designed costumes for school plays and illustrated his 1933 high school yearbook. Listening to cowboy music, he practiced lasso tricks. Fascinated by the paintings of Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, the young Cartier decided to become an illustrator specializing in Western art.
In 1933, he began attending Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he became close friends with a fellow student, future pulp illustrator Earl Mayan. Cartier majored in illustration, studying with Western pulp illustrator Harold Winfield Scott (1898-1977) and Maitland Graves, author of The Art of Color and Design (1941). In his essay, "The Shadows of My Past" (a foreword to Volume 16 of Anthony Tollin's Shadow trade paperbacks), Cartier wrote, "Graves taught figure drawing and was instrumental in my ability to depict anatomy, both human—and not so human. Scott taught pictorial illustration, and through him I feel privileged to trace an unbroken chain of art instruction back to Howard Pyle, the father of American illustration. The links are fairly close: Scott had studied under Dean Cornwell, a student of Harvey Dunn, who in turn studied with Pyle. Harold Scott became my mentor and advisor."
Pratt instructor William James was a Street & Smith art director, and he opened the door that enabled Cartier to begin his professional career: "I began by doing a single illustration per week for Street & Smith pulps like Wild West Weekly, Movie Action and Detective Story Magazine while still attending Pratt, and was paid eight dollars for each drawing. But they soon began giving me more assignments. When I graduated in 1936, James offered me a steady assignment illustrating The Shadow’s adventures. The regular artist, Tom Lovell, was moving on to pursue a painting career, so I alternated with him illustrating the twice-monthly novels."Graduating from Pratt, Cartier and Earl Mayan leased a Manhattan studio on the fourth floor of an Upper West Side brownstone, but a lack of assignments prompted Mayan to move out within a year. Six months later, Cartier moved back to North Bergen where he set up his studio on the floor above Cartier’s Saloon, collecting scrap lumber to construct a drawing table which he used the rest of his life.
As an advisor, Scott may not have always given the best advice. Norman Rockwell liked what he saw in Cartier's Shadow illustrations and wrote a letter offering him a job as an assistant. Cartier recalled, "I went to Harold and asked his opinion. 'If you study with Norman Rockwell, you’re just going to become another Norman Rockwell,' Scott advised. 'You’ll be influenced entirely by him. You should remain on your own.' So I turned down Rockwell’s job offer, though I have regretted doing so ever since." The regret, one can speculate, is that contact with Rockwell could have catapulted Cartier into the pages of The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's. The notion that Cartier could have become some kind of Rockwell clone doesn't wash, if that is indeed what Scott was suggesting.
He continued to illustrate for Street & Smith pulps, mainly focusing on The Shadow. As he recalled, "My illustrations evolved with each new issue. I abandoned pen-and-ink, preferring to use a combination of brush, ink, tempera and lithographic pencil. I worked almost exclusively on the lightly-textured surface of illustration board, usually Bainbridge #80, roughing in my Shadow drawings on the board with a pencil, then outlining the illustration with brush and ink. Next came brush and tempera, combined with ink for the darker areas. Finally, I would erase my original penciling and finish up by adding shading with a lithographic pencil. Sometimes I added a bit of red ink to my originals, usually in the eyes or as dripping blood, the red ink reproducing as black on the printed page. A typical drawing was usually one by one-and-a-half feet in size, or one-and-a-half by two feet, or sometimes larger, even though it might be reduced in the pulps to as small as a quarter of a page—or smaller still, as a spot illustration." 
He illustrated for other Street & Smith mystery magazines, including The Whisperer, The Wizard and Detective Story Magazine, and then expanded into fantasy and science fiction, as he recalled: "In 1939, the editor of Street & Smith’s Astounding Science-Fiction offered me the opportunity to illustrate an extraordinary new magazine he was launching to be titled Unknown. John W. Campbell, Jr., thought I would be ideally suited to illustrating fantasy. I always enjoyed drawing the weird and fantastic nature of The Shadow’s adventures. And John said he had often admired that quality in my illustrations before he asked me to illustrate Unknown. After I illustrated the lead story in the first issue of Unknown—with my former instructor Harold Scott providing the cover painting—William James asked me if I would mind having someone else take over The Shadow so I could concentrate on science fiction and fantasy. I said it was okay with me, since I also liked science fiction.
"When I was a kid, my brothers Alfred and Vincent read as much science fiction as they could get their hands on. They had Hugo Gernsback’s magazines, and shared them with me. At first, I thought the stories were too fantastic. But I was soon hooked on the genre. After I became an illustrator, I knew it would be fascinating to do science fiction art, and I was pleased to move on to Unknown and also Astounding Science Fiction. I gave up illustrating The Shadow’s adventures in 1940, and the work was turned over to my former roommate Earl Mayan." For those two magazines Cartier did many interior illustrations. However, he only did four covers for Unknown, a magazine which sent him into strange new realms, as noted by Robert Weinberg (The Biographical Dictionary of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists), “That's where he really shined. He had a deft caricature style, and he was able to draw not just very expressive people but expressive creatures like fairies, gnomes and gods... He really excelled at monsters. There was one, a puddle of slime that could assume different forms, and he showed it as an icky, drippy humanoid rising from the ooze. It was fantastic.”
Cartier married his wife Georgina in 1943. During World War II, he enlisted in the Army in 1941 and, after drawing maps in Britain, he fought as an infantryman and a machine gunner with a tank battalion located in France and Germany. After he was severely wounded in Bastogne, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge and his hospital train was blown apart, he received a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.
Returning to the United States, he illustrated the final year of The Shadow as a digest magazine, continued with Astounding and entered the field of comic books with both covers and stories for Street & Smith's Red Dragon. While creating attractive book jackets for Gnome Press and Fantasy Press, he also produced the memorable 1949-50 Gnome Press Calendars, drawing gnomes, fantasy and science fiction into strange seasonal situations. Also in 1949 he did a series of illustrations for King Features Syndicate newspaper serials.
Cartier married his wife Georgina in 1943. During World War II, he enlisted in the Army in 1941 and, after drawing maps in Britain, he fought as an infantryman and a machine gunner with a tank battalion located in France and Germany. After he was severely wounded in Bastogne, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge and his hospital train was blown apart, he received a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.
Returning to the United States, he illustrated the final year of The Shadow as a digest magazine, continued with Astounding and entered the field of comic books with both covers and stories for Street & Smith's Red Dragon. While creating attractive book jackets for Gnome Press and Fantasy Press, he also produced the memorable 1949-50 Gnome Press Calendars, drawing gnomes, fantasy and science fiction into strange seasonal situations. Also in 1949 he did a series of illustrations for King Features Syndicate newspaper serials.
Dave Kyle recalled launching Gnome Press with Marty Greenberg and working with Cartier on the 1951 book, Travelers of Space: "When the first books were printed in my family printing shop in Monticello, I had little practical experience but a lot of enthusiasm and energy. Courses at Columbia University helped immensely in steering me along the way. Using my artistic talent and training, I designed the original colophon or special identifying design for Gnome Press -- a gnome sitting under a toadstool reading a book, inspired by the design used by my father for Merriewold, a mountain residential park. The early books were designed by me and the quality was kept very high. I believe that the little touches which cost a bit more, such as my little symbol embossed in the cover of Asimov's I, Robot, the chain design for the title page of Heinlein's Sixth Column, and the split binding and special embossed rocketship on anthologies, made Gnome books distinctive. 
"I designed and wrote all the copy for the early books, drawing designs when appropriate. Professional book printers were used, especially Colonial Press in Massachusetts which had an office on 42nd Street opposite the New York Public Library. I collaborated with Edd Cartier in several ways, the best being the illustrations for my story of the "Interplanetary Zoo"; this was an interesting project because the full color signature or folio in the anthology Travelers of Space was actually done from black-and-white drawings. All color was laid in by a talented printing plant technician who worked with me for the final results. He had done similar work for Lloyd A. Eshbach in the production of some of Lloyd's Fantasy Press books."Cartier attended Pratt again on the G.I. Bill, receiving a fine arts degree in 1953. Supporting a family on the low pay of freelance science fiction art (at a time pulp magazines were coming to an end) prompted Cartier to seek employment in a different field, and he found a position as a draftsman for an engineering firm during the 1950s. Living in Ramsey, New Jersey, Cartier worked for more than 25 years as an art director with Mosstype, a Waldwick, New Jersey, manufacturer specializing in printing machinery. In Ramsey, he joined the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 682 in 1960 and became captain of the VFW Color Guard, leading parades for 26 years and organizing Veterans Day ceremonies. He was a member of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer and the Ramsey Historical Association.
In 1992 he was given the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1996 and 2001 he was nominated for Retro Hugo Awards for artwork published in 1945 and 1951. His work was collected in Edd Cartier: The Known and the Unknown, published in a 2000-copy limited edition hardcover by Gerry de la Ree in 1977, and his illustrations of L. Ron Hubbard's fiction were reprinted in Master Storyteller: An Illustrated Tour of the Fiction of L. Ron Hubbard by William J. Widder (Galaxy Press, 2003.).
Labels: astounding, cartier, hubbard, pratt, science fiction, street and smith, the shadow, unknown, weird tales
¶ 3:32 PM 10 comments
Friday, January 04, 2008
What a Long, Weird Trip It's Been
By Bhob Stewart
Much like the white stuff in the middle of an Oreo cookie, the magazine Weird Tales lies strangely sandwiched between cartoon magazines and comic books. To probe exactly what this odd statement means, one must pay attention to the men behind the curtain, notably Jacob Clark Henneberger and William J. Delaney, Sr., who kept Weird Tales racked on newsstands over many decades.
The life of Bill Delaney (1892-1986), publisher of Weird Tales, Short Stories and World Astrology, parallels the history of popular fiction during the 20th Century. During the years Delaney published Weird Tales (1938-54), with Farnsworth Wright and Dorothy McIlwraith as his editors, the magazine introduced the highly stylized cover illustrations of Hannes Bok and published the earliest stories of Fritz Leiber and Ray Bradbury. Six of the Bradbury stories published by Delaney later became memorable adaptations in EC Comics, illustrated by Jack Davis, George Evans, Graham Ingels, Jack Kamen and Joe Orlando: "There Was an Old Woman" (Tales from the Crypt 34 from the July 1944 issue of Weird Tales); "The Lake" (Vault of Horror 31 from the May 1944 Weird Tales); "Let's Play Poison" (Vault 29 from Weird Tales, November 1946); "The Handler" (Crypt 36 from Weird Tales, January 1947); "The October Game" (Shock SuspenStories 9 from Weird Tales, March 1948); "The Black Ferris" (Haunt of Fear 18 from Weird Tales, May 1948).
During the early 1950s, when the 279-issue continuous run of Weird Tales was winding down, a glance at a newsstand revealed the magazine's strong influence on comic books. In a 1980 paperback revival of Weird Tales, Lin Carter wrote, "I can think of no other magazine in history which exerted quite the same sort of influence which Weird Tales exerted over the genre it shaped and perfected, and the authors who contributed to it so devotedly over the years... And there can have been very few fiction magazines in the history of publishing which have had as many of their stories dramatized on radio, television and in the movies."
In addition to the EC adaptations, the magazine provided a source for other graphic story adaptations, such as Robert Bloch's "The Shambler from the Stars" (Weird Tales, June 1935), illustrated by Jim Starlin and Tom Palmer for Marvel's Journey into Mystery 3 (February 1973). Only occasionally did periodical publishers put the word "weird" into magazine mastheads, yet within the comic book field, Weird Tales spawned a seemingly endless parade of weirdness: Weird (1966), Weird Adventures (1951), Weird Chills (1954), Weird Comics (1940), Weird Fantasy (1950), Weird Horrors (1952), Weird Mysteries (1952), Weird Mystery Tales (1972), Weird Science (1950), Weird Science-Fantasy (1954), Weird Science-Fantasy Annual (1953-54), Weird SuspenStories (the Canadian reprint of Crime SuspenStories), Weird Suspense (1975), Weird Tales of the Future (1952), Weird Tales of the Macabre (1975), Weird Terror (1952), Weird Thrillers (1951), Weird War Tales (1971), Weird Western Tales (1972), Weird Wonder Tales (1973) and Weird Worlds (1970).
Pinpointing Delaney's role in all this, one must back-pedal to publications of the 19th Century. With a focus on reprints, translations and classics, Short Stories was launched in 1890. After it was purchased in 1910 by Doubleday, it was converted into a 160-page all-fiction pulp adventure magazine featuring stories by Max Brand, Talbot Mundy, Sax Rohmer, Edgar Wallace and others. Born in Brooklyn two years after the first issue of Short Stories, Delaney served during World War I in France with the United States Marine Corps, returned to New York after the war and entered the advertising field as a salesman. In 1937, Delaney bought Short Stories from Doubleday, and the magazine's base of operations moved to his office at 9 Rockefeller Plaza.
When Delaney acquired Short Stories, he also acquired its editor, Dorothy McIlwraith, who had worked for Doubleday for 20 years. A native of Canada, McIlwraith became one of the higher paid pulp editors while working for Delaney. Leo Margulies, at Standard Magazines, ranked highest with $250 a week, but most pulp editors took home weekly salaries of $50 to $75. Delaney employed McIlwraith at $100 a week.
Frank Gruber, in The Pulp Jungle, described his 1937 encounter with McIlwraith: "I knew that Short Stories was virtually a closed market, but I took the Argosy reject in to Short Stories. I met Dorothy McIlwraith for the first time. She was cool, formal, not too encouraging, as she had a stable of excellent, regular writers. I gave her one of my finest sales pitches, told her I had to have two cents a word, that the editors of Argosy and Adventure were laying siege at my door, but I liked Short Stories so much that I preferred to have my work in it. I later became so well acquainted with Dorothy McIlwraith that we frequently discussed this first meeting of ours. I would guess that Dorothy was 52 or 53 years of age at this time... She was a heavy-set woman who had never married. She lived in a small house on Long Island with another spinster. She was an excellent editor. The day after my all-out sales pitch, Dorothy telephoned me. She agreed with all that I had told her and was buying the story at my price of two cents a word! I promptly wrote a second story for Dorothy, which she also bought for two cents a word. Then I plunged into the novelettes that dominated the magazine for the next several years."
In 1938, Delaney's company, Short Stories Inc., also began to publish Weird Tales from the 9 Rockefeller Plaza office. The magazine had been published previously for 15 years in Indianapolis and Chicago before it was bought by Delaney. The origin of Weird Tales is curiously linked with cartoon humor magazines, including the Fawcett publication, Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang, a title which served as a springboard in 1940 for key Fawcett names and titles -- Captain Marvel, Billy Batson, Whiz Comics and Slam Bang Comics.
The founder and original publisher of Weird Tales was Jacob Clark Henneberger. In 1916, Henneberger was a student at a Virginia military academy where he attended English literature classes taught by Captain Stevens. Each semester Stevens gave an hour-long lecture, "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque," covering various writers influenced by Poe. What Henneberger learned in that class stayed with him as he entered publishing with The Collegiate World. The magazine attracted few advertisers until Henneberger decided to expand "The Area of Good Feelings," a section of excerpts from college humor magazines. When these pages were developed into an entire publication, College Humor was born. In 1920, College Humor sold out its first print run of 50,000 and went back to press for another 15,000.
Henneberger was acquainted with Wilford H. "Captain Billy" Fawcett, who had returned from WWI to Robbinsdale, Minnesota, where he began producing a small mimeographed newsletter of military banter and jokes, circulated among the disabled at the local veterans' hospital in 1920. After distribution by a wholesaler to drugstores and hotel lobbies, the cartoon-joke publication increased its circulation and upgraded to a saddle-stitched, digest-size format. By 1923, it had a circulation of 425,000 with $500,000 annual profits. The title Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, combining Fawcett's name with the nickname of a destructive WWI artillery shell, is immortalized in the lyrics to the song "Trouble" from Meredith Willson's The Music Man (1962): "Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger? A dime novel hidden in the corncrib? Is he starting to memorize jokes from Captain Billy's Whiz Bang?" However, this is an anachronistic reference, since The Music Man is set in River City, Iowa during 1912, which was seven years before the first issue was published. The humor magazine often featured a picture of Wilford Fawcett in uniform along with the caption, "This magazine is edited by a Spanish-American and World War veteran and is dedicated to the Fighting Forces of the United States and Canada."
In 1922, Wilford Fawcett's brother, Harvey Fawcett, began publishing a similar gag book when he acquired rights to do the American edition of Calgary Eye-Opener in Minneapolis. This was the publication that launched Carl Barks as a cartoonist in 1928, enabling him to leave the railroad gang and go freelance. Calgary Eye-Opener was taken over by contractor Henry Meyer. Barks recalled, "Meyer was enough of a businessman to see things weren't being run right around there. There was too much drinking and playing around, and not enough production. So he looked over the list of gag men and decided that hell, I was a hard-working son-of-a-gun. So he sent a telegram to me, asking if I would come back there. I had enough money to send a telegram saying I didn't have enough money to get back there. He sent me money, and I closed my affairs very rapidly and gave away the big stack of joke magazines I had. What I could carry in a valise, I carried with me. I got into Minneapolis in November of 1931." Banking $110 a month at his new job, Barks and editor Ed Sumner also attempted to launch another humor magazine, Coo-Coo, in 1932, but it only lasted one issue. In 1935, Barks left for Hollywood and his long association with Walt Disney.
Other small-scale periodicals of the early 1920s were Jim Jam Jems, the saucy Smokehouse Monthly and George Julian Houtain's Home Brew. When the monthly sales of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang reached half a million, Henneberger took note of the rising revenue, imitating Whiz-Bang with The Magazine of Fun. "Soon," wrote Henneberger, "there were a number of these small magazines on the stands, and a number of them provided the capital for further venture. One of them, Home Brew, introduced me to Howard Lovecraft." Lovecraft's "Herbert West – Reanimator" appeared in Home Brew in 1922, the year Henneberger first saw the publication.
Henneberger also published romance pulps, girlie magazines and Detective Tales. In 1922, Henneberger and J.M. Lassinger started their Rural Publishing Corp. and launched the first issue of Weird Tales, dated March 1923. Edited by the Chicago newspaperman and mystery writer Edwin Baird, the magazine had financial problems during its first year. Baird was replaced by Farnsworth Wright after the first 14 issues. "Farnsworth Wright was the second editor of Weird Tales and the man responsible for its longevity," wrote Henneberger. "He was a rare human being who combined a sense of humor with a knowledge of literature and his fellow man. The previous editor, Edwin Baird, assumed the duties of getting out a companion magazine, Detective Tales, as well as Weird Tales." Under Baird, the magazine published such authors as Lovecraft (who appeared in the October 1923 issue with "Dagon"), Clark Ashton Smith and Seabury Quinn. Today, it is Lovecraft who is most strongly identified with Weird Tales, but it was Quinn who was the magazine's most popular writer, with his series about psychic detective Jules de Grandin.
From Home Brew, Henneberger learned that Lovecraft lived in Brooklyn, and he went to see him. "Meeting Lovecraft in Brooklyn was a rare experience," he wrote to Sam Moskowitz, "despite the fact that he was weighted down with marriage problems. He was married to a beautiful White Russian girl, and it seems his work of reviewing and an occasional editing job did not provide the means to support her as she desired. The union was short lived. I tried in vain to get Lovecraft to come to Chicago, but he was tradition bound to New England, especially Rhode Island in which state I called on him a few months before his death. The first story I bought from Howard was 'The Rats in the Walls,' and I think it was one of his finest. However, I sat down with Howard and Harry Houdini one evening while Houdini recounted an experience in Egypt or rather the Giza plateau. A few weeks later Howard submitted the manuscript 'Imprisoned with the Pharaohs.' It was published at my insistence, although Baird did not like it and Wright was not then at the helm of Weird Tales. During this time I was publishing College Humor and The Magazine of Fun successfully... I never made any money with Weird Tales, but the few headaches it caused were compensated by the association with men like William Sprenger (business manager), Farnsworth Wright, Frank Belknap Long, Seabury Quinn (who ran an undertakers' magazine) and many prominent men like Harry Houdini who swore by the publication."
Subtitled "The Unique Magazine" and "a magazine of the bizarre and the unusual," the "early issues were undistinguished," according to The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. After Baird's first 13 issues, a friend of Henneberger's, the songwriter Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946), who had written Weird Tales' first serial ("The Thing of a Thousand Shapes"), served briefly as editor (May-July 1924) on the issue planned as the last. "Problems with the printer," wrote Moskowitz, "more than lack of circulation, plunged the early Weird Tales into debt. In order to pay it off, Henneberger sold his profitable Detective Tales."
When the magazine reappeared (November 1924), it had both a new publisher, Popular Fiction Publishing Company, and a new editor, Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940). Born in San Francisco, the musicologist Wright had published an amateur magazine in high school, lived through the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fought in the infantry during WWI before joining Baird as an editorial assistant, beginning with Weird Tales' first issue. For the next 16 years, Wright, who suffered from Parkinson's disease, guided Weird Tales through its peak years, although even at its peak, Weird Tales had no more than 50,000 or so readers.
Between 1930 and 1934 Wright also edited Weird Tales' companion magazine, Oriental Stories (retitled Magic Carpet in January 1933), and his love of Shakespeare prompted an edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream with art by the Weird Tales illustrator Virgil Finlay. Other Weird Tales illustrators of the 1930s included Margaret Brundage, J. Allen St. John, Frank Utpatel, Vincent Napoli (who drew for DS Comics in the late 1940s) and Harold De Lay (artist on 1940-47 comics for Novelty and other companies). Working with pastel chalks, Brundage created a series of controversial, erotic covers.
Wright discovered and nurtured a lengthy list of Weird Tales writers – the poet Leah Bodine Drake, the teenage Tennessee Williams, film producer Val Lewton (Cat People), Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Nictzin Dyalhis, Robert E. Howard, Edmond Hamilton (who scripted for DC Comics from 1945 to 1966), Manly Wade Wellman (who scripted for at least eight comics publishers between 1939 and 1951), Catherine L. Moore, Carl Jacobi, Frank Belknap Long, E. Hoffman Price, H. Warner Munn and Donald Wandrei, while also attracting such authors as Gaston Leroux (Phantom of the Opera), Gustave Meyrink (The Golem), Jack Williamson, Murray Leinster, E.F. Benson, A. Merritt and Algernon Blackwood. Weird Tales first published Robert E. Howard in 1925, and his Conan stories began in WT with "The Phoenix on the Sword" (1932). The 1960s revival of interest in Conan and other Howard characters led to numerous Howard-inspired Marvel Comics.
When Delaney purchased Weird Tales in 1938, he followed the same procedure as he had with McIlwraith and Short Stories, and Wright relocated in New York to continue as the Weird Tales editor. The following summer, the 25-year-old Ray Bradbury showed Wright work by Hannes Bok, cover artist of Bradbury's fanzine, Futuria Fantasia (1939-40). "Long before my appearance in Weird Tales," wrote Bradbury, "I had influenced its artistic makeup. In June 1939, I had traveled across the United States on a Greyhound bus, bringing with me a dozen or so Hannes Bok drawings and paintings. I visited Farnsworth Wright in his offices, and he immediately commissioned Bok to paint a cover for Weird. I returned home on the bus in triumph, delighted that I had brought Bok and my favorite magazine together." The painting illustrated David H. Keller's "Lords of the Ice" (December 1939), and other distinctive Bok covers fronted Weird Tales until 1942. During the 1930s and 1940s, pulp magazine illustrators were usually paid between $50 to $75 for a cover painting.
The issue introducing Bok was one of Wright's last; he died in Jackson Heights, Queens, in June 1940. Delaney chose McIlwraith as Wright's successor, and she continued as Weird Tales' editor for the next 14 years. Bloch had praise for McIlwraith's editorial abilities: "I met Dorothy McIlwraith only once, in late 1939. She seemed pleasant, but I recall little about her, and her letters of acceptance, together with those of associate Lamont Buchanan, don't linger in my memory. Actually, I think she's far too neglected. I can't dismiss anyone who published Bradbury, Sturgeon, Brown and other top talents. I think that she would have published more, had she been given the budget to compete with Unknown Worlds, F&SF and other comparable markets. But that lousy one cent a word – and sometimes bimonthly publication – induced few writers to remain in Weird Tales once better rates were obtainable elsewhere. I lasted longer than most, because I was always a bit stupid. (Still am, writing short stories today when I should be knocking out TV episodes at roughly 100 times the fee, plus an additional 100 times for reruns over the years.) But Weird Tales was my first market, my favorite reading as a young fan, and I felt, and feel, that I owed it a lot."
Delaney and McIlwraith continued to fill the pages of Weird Tales with Derleth, Bloch, Wellman, Hamilton and Quinn, while also introducing Leiber, Bradbury, the now-neglected female fantasist Alison V. Harding, Joseph Payne Brennan and others. In addition to Bok, other illustrators for the Delaney/McIlwraith issues included Lee Brown Coye, Matt Fox (who also illustrated for 1952-63 Marvel Comics and 1967-69 issues of Castle of Frankenstein), Charles A. Kennedy, Boris Dolgov, Fred Humiston, Harold Rayner, Henry del Campo, A.R. Tilburne, John Giunta (who illustrated many comic books from 1938 on), Bill Wayne, Jon Arfstrom and Joseph Krucher.
Frank Gruber (1904-1969), who knocked out some 800,000 words for pulps in 1940, worked just as hard in 1941, but still found time to drop by for weekly chats with McIlwraith and Delaney, as he detailed in The Pulp Jungle: "I don't think I missed an issue of Short Stories that year. If I did not have a serial running in the magazine, I had a long novelette. Bill Delaney, the owner of Short Stories, had become one of my best friends... On Mondays I always went into town... I made a call or two, then about eleven o'clock I would go to the offices of Short Stories. Bill Delaney and I talked awhile, or played a rubber or two of gin rummy, had lunch and returned and played some more gin rummy. About four or four thirty I went home."
When Gruber went home it was to Scarsdale, but in January 1942 he moved to Manhasset, Long Island, where Bill Delaney lived with his wife Margaret (whom he had married in 1923). The Delaney/Gruber friendship was interrupted when Gruber swung a Hollywood deal only weeks after moving to Manhasset. Delaney helped him make his exit. "We decided to close up the house, leave everything in it and take the train to Hollywood, carrying only our suitcases –- and Bob, who was then 22 months of age. I completed The Gift Horse the day before we were due to leave. Bill Delaney came down to the train to see us off, and I gave him the last chapters and asked him to have them retyped and send the manuscript to Farrar & Rinehart. I wrote Farrar & Rinehart on the train. I told them I would be back in six weeks, that I needed a vacation. I did not see New York again until 1946."
In the midst of the 1950s wave of "weird" comics and competition from a new wave of magazines, such as Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the Weird Tales readership began to fall away. Following the death of Margaret Delaney in 1952, Weird Tales was reduced to a digest-size format (September 1953), and then it closed up shop a few months later (March 1954).
In 1956, Bill Delaney married Regina Cogan. He did not continue in publishing; one of his later business ventures was a Manhattan greeting card shop. After Regina Delaney's death in a 1970 auto accident, he took up residence in the New York Athletic Club. He died March 15 in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, after a long illness, survived by three children, 19 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Complete runs of the 279 issues of Weird Tales are highly valued by collectors, with complete runs being sold in the 1980s for prices between $20,000 and $25,000. After Weird Tales folded in 1954, the word "weird" surfaced immediately on several short-lived 1955 publications – the British Weird and Occult Library paperback magazine, the British pulp Weird World and True Weird. Edited by Calvin Beck for publisher Joe Weider, True Weird later changed its name to True Strange in order to kill a persistent office joke about True Weider magazine.
All rights to Weird Tales were next acquired by editor-publisher Leo Margulies. It was Margulies who gave Mort Weisinger his first editorial job, earning $15 a week, at Standard (Thrilling Wonder Stories). In the back of the hall during the First World Science Fiction Convention (1939), Margulies and Weisinger concocted the character of Captain Future, with Margulies plotting the magazine on the spot to the convention attendees. The following year the character debuted in both magazine form (Captain Future) and comics (Startling Stories, America's Best). Margulies was also instrumental in Weisinger's switch to DC as Superman editor-writer, advising him that pulps had less of a future than comics. "On the honor roll of great fiction magazines of all time, Weird Tales rates very high," wrote Margulies. "Among devotees of the weird, fantastic, science fiction and off-trail, the magazine was considered a classic." With the backlog of Weird Tales material, Margulies packaged two Pyramid anthologies -- Weird Tales (1964) and Worlds of Weird (1965).
On November 14, 1969, Weird Tales founder Jacob Clark Henneberger died. The legendary magazine Henneberger created reappeared in time for its 50th anniversary when Margulies revived Weird Tales for four pulp-sized issues (1973-74), edited by Sam Moscowitz. After Margulies died in 1975, the WT logo and title rights were acquired by Robert Weinberg, editor of WT50 (1974) and The Weird Tales Story (1977). In the UK, Peter Haining edited two Weird Tales collections for Sphere in 1978.
In 1981, Zebra Books presented WT as a new "paperback magazine" series, four issues edited by Lin Carter. Brian Forbes' Bellerophon Network brought the magazine back for two issues in 1984 and 1985. George H. Scithers revived the title in 1988 for the Terminus Publishing Company with assistant editors Darrell Schweitzer and John Gregory Bettancourt. In 1991, Schweitzer took full editorship, but the license to use the Weird Tales title was revoked with the Spring 1994, and the magazine changed its name to Worlds of Fantasy & Horror. The Weird Tales title was licensed to DNA Publications, the publisher of Absolute Magnitude and Dreams of Decadence, in March 1998.
Robert Bloch, who fashioned almost half a million words for Weird Tales (spread over 70 stories), once wrote: "Throughout the years, working with or for Weird Tales was largely a labor of love for all concerned. The magazine was never a moneymaker; it attracted few advertisers, and its rates of payment to contributors was low, even by Depression standards. Yet, in a strange sort of way, it was probably the Depression of the Thirties which enabled the magazine to continue. Today's publishers and distributors would never bother with such a trivial source of revenue; today's printing houses would hardly continue a magazine which went so consistently into the red on so small a circulation; today's writers couldn't afford to aim their output directly at so non-lucrative an outlet for their work. That Weird Tales managed to survive as long as it did is probably the weirdest tale of all."
By Bhob Stewart
Much like the white stuff in the middle of an Oreo cookie, the magazine Weird Tales lies strangely sandwiched between cartoon magazines and comic books. To probe exactly what this odd statement means, one must pay attention to the men behind the curtain, notably Jacob Clark Henneberger and William J. Delaney, Sr., who kept Weird Tales racked on newsstands over many decades.
The life of Bill Delaney (1892-1986), publisher of Weird Tales, Short Stories and World Astrology, parallels the history of popular fiction during the 20th Century. During the years Delaney published Weird Tales (1938-54), with Farnsworth Wright and Dorothy McIlwraith as his editors, the magazine introduced the highly stylized cover illustrations of Hannes Bok and published the earliest stories of Fritz Leiber and Ray Bradbury. Six of the Bradbury stories published by Delaney later became memorable adaptations in EC Comics, illustrated by Jack Davis, George Evans, Graham Ingels, Jack Kamen and Joe Orlando: "There Was an Old Woman" (Tales from the Crypt 34 from the July 1944 issue of Weird Tales); "The Lake" (Vault of Horror 31 from the May 1944 Weird Tales); "Let's Play Poison" (Vault 29 from Weird Tales, November 1946); "The Handler" (Crypt 36 from Weird Tales, January 1947); "The October Game" (Shock SuspenStories 9 from Weird Tales, March 1948); "The Black Ferris" (Haunt of Fear 18 from Weird Tales, May 1948).
During the early 1950s, when the 279-issue continuous run of Weird Tales was winding down, a glance at a newsstand revealed the magazine's strong influence on comic books. In a 1980 paperback revival of Weird Tales, Lin Carter wrote, "I can think of no other magazine in history which exerted quite the same sort of influence which Weird Tales exerted over the genre it shaped and perfected, and the authors who contributed to it so devotedly over the years... And there can have been very few fiction magazines in the history of publishing which have had as many of their stories dramatized on radio, television and in the movies."In addition to the EC adaptations, the magazine provided a source for other graphic story adaptations, such as Robert Bloch's "The Shambler from the Stars" (Weird Tales, June 1935), illustrated by Jim Starlin and Tom Palmer for Marvel's Journey into Mystery 3 (February 1973). Only occasionally did periodical publishers put the word "weird" into magazine mastheads, yet within the comic book field, Weird Tales spawned a seemingly endless parade of weirdness: Weird (1966), Weird Adventures (1951), Weird Chills (1954), Weird Comics (1940), Weird Fantasy (1950), Weird Horrors (1952), Weird Mysteries (1952), Weird Mystery Tales (1972), Weird Science (1950), Weird Science-Fantasy (1954), Weird Science-Fantasy Annual (1953-54), Weird SuspenStories (the Canadian reprint of Crime SuspenStories), Weird Suspense (1975), Weird Tales of the Future (1952), Weird Tales of the Macabre (1975), Weird Terror (1952), Weird Thrillers (1951), Weird War Tales (1971), Weird Western Tales (1972), Weird Wonder Tales (1973) and Weird Worlds (1970).
"Nightmare World" by Basil Wolverton in Weird Tales of the Future 3 (September 1952).
Pinpointing Delaney's role in all this, one must back-pedal to publications of the 19th Century. With a focus on reprints, translations and classics, Short Stories was launched in 1890. After it was purchased in 1910 by Doubleday, it was converted into a 160-page all-fiction pulp adventure magazine featuring stories by Max Brand, Talbot Mundy, Sax Rohmer, Edgar Wallace and others. Born in Brooklyn two years after the first issue of Short Stories, Delaney served during World War I in France with the United States Marine Corps, returned to New York after the war and entered the advertising field as a salesman. In 1937, Delaney bought Short Stories from Doubleday, and the magazine's base of operations moved to his office at 9 Rockefeller Plaza.
When Delaney acquired Short Stories, he also acquired its editor, Dorothy McIlwraith, who had worked for Doubleday for 20 years. A native of Canada, McIlwraith became one of the higher paid pulp editors while working for Delaney. Leo Margulies, at Standard Magazines, ranked highest with $250 a week, but most pulp editors took home weekly salaries of $50 to $75. Delaney employed McIlwraith at $100 a week.
Frank Gruber, in The Pulp Jungle, described his 1937 encounter with McIlwraith: "I knew that Short Stories was virtually a closed market, but I took the Argosy reject in to Short Stories. I met Dorothy McIlwraith for the first time. She was cool, formal, not too encouraging, as she had a stable of excellent, regular writers. I gave her one of my finest sales pitches, told her I had to have two cents a word, that the editors of Argosy and Adventure were laying siege at my door, but I liked Short Stories so much that I preferred to have my work in it. I later became so well acquainted with Dorothy McIlwraith that we frequently discussed this first meeting of ours. I would guess that Dorothy was 52 or 53 years of age at this time... She was a heavy-set woman who had never married. She lived in a small house on Long Island with another spinster. She was an excellent editor. The day after my all-out sales pitch, Dorothy telephoned me. She agreed with all that I had told her and was buying the story at my price of two cents a word! I promptly wrote a second story for Dorothy, which she also bought for two cents a word. Then I plunged into the novelettes that dominated the magazine for the next several years."
In 1938, Delaney's company, Short Stories Inc., also began to publish Weird Tales from the 9 Rockefeller Plaza office. The magazine had been published previously for 15 years in Indianapolis and Chicago before it was bought by Delaney. The origin of Weird Tales is curiously linked with cartoon humor magazines, including the Fawcett publication, Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang, a title which served as a springboard in 1940 for key Fawcett names and titles -- Captain Marvel, Billy Batson, Whiz Comics and Slam Bang Comics.The founder and original publisher of Weird Tales was Jacob Clark Henneberger. In 1916, Henneberger was a student at a Virginia military academy where he attended English literature classes taught by Captain Stevens. Each semester Stevens gave an hour-long lecture, "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque," covering various writers influenced by Poe. What Henneberger learned in that class stayed with him as he entered publishing with The Collegiate World. The magazine attracted few advertisers until Henneberger decided to expand "The Area of Good Feelings," a section of excerpts from college humor magazines. When these pages were developed into an entire publication, College Humor was born. In 1920, College Humor sold out its first print run of 50,000 and went back to press for another 15,000.
Henneberger was acquainted with Wilford H. "Captain Billy" Fawcett, who had returned from WWI to Robbinsdale, Minnesota, where he began producing a small mimeographed newsletter of military banter and jokes, circulated among the disabled at the local veterans' hospital in 1920. After distribution by a wholesaler to drugstores and hotel lobbies, the cartoon-joke publication increased its circulation and upgraded to a saddle-stitched, digest-size format. By 1923, it had a circulation of 425,000 with $500,000 annual profits. The title Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, combining Fawcett's name with the nickname of a destructive WWI artillery shell, is immortalized in the lyrics to the song "Trouble" from Meredith Willson's The Music Man (1962): "Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger? A dime novel hidden in the corncrib? Is he starting to memorize jokes from Captain Billy's Whiz Bang?" However, this is an anachronistic reference, since The Music Man is set in River City, Iowa during 1912, which was seven years before the first issue was published. The humor magazine often featured a picture of Wilford Fawcett in uniform along with the caption, "This magazine is edited by a Spanish-American and World War veteran and is dedicated to the Fighting Forces of the United States and Canada." 
In 1922, Wilford Fawcett's brother, Harvey Fawcett, began publishing a similar gag book when he acquired rights to do the American edition of Calgary Eye-Opener in Minneapolis. This was the publication that launched Carl Barks as a cartoonist in 1928, enabling him to leave the railroad gang and go freelance. Calgary Eye-Opener was taken over by contractor Henry Meyer. Barks recalled, "Meyer was enough of a businessman to see things weren't being run right around there. There was too much drinking and playing around, and not enough production. So he looked over the list of gag men and decided that hell, I was a hard-working son-of-a-gun. So he sent a telegram to me, asking if I would come back there. I had enough money to send a telegram saying I didn't have enough money to get back there. He sent me money, and I closed my affairs very rapidly and gave away the big stack of joke magazines I had. What I could carry in a valise, I carried with me. I got into Minneapolis in November of 1931." Banking $110 a month at his new job, Barks and editor Ed Sumner also attempted to launch another humor magazine, Coo-Coo, in 1932, but it only lasted one issue. In 1935, Barks left for Hollywood and his long association with Walt Disney.
Other small-scale periodicals of the early 1920s were Jim Jam Jems, the saucy Smokehouse Monthly and George Julian Houtain's Home Brew. When the monthly sales of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang reached half a million, Henneberger took note of the rising revenue, imitating Whiz-Bang with The Magazine of Fun. "Soon," wrote Henneberger, "there were a number of these small magazines on the stands, and a number of them provided the capital for further venture. One of them, Home Brew, introduced me to Howard Lovecraft." Lovecraft's "Herbert West – Reanimator" appeared in Home Brew in 1922, the year Henneberger first saw the publication.Henneberger also published romance pulps, girlie magazines and Detective Tales. In 1922, Henneberger and J.M. Lassinger started their Rural Publishing Corp. and launched the first issue of Weird Tales, dated March 1923. Edited by the Chicago newspaperman and mystery writer Edwin Baird, the magazine had financial problems during its first year. Baird was replaced by Farnsworth Wright after the first 14 issues. "Farnsworth Wright was the second editor of Weird Tales and the man responsible for its longevity," wrote Henneberger. "He was a rare human being who combined a sense of humor with a knowledge of literature and his fellow man. The previous editor, Edwin Baird, assumed the duties of getting out a companion magazine, Detective Tales, as well as Weird Tales." Under Baird, the magazine published such authors as Lovecraft (who appeared in the October 1923 issue with "Dagon"), Clark Ashton Smith and Seabury Quinn. Today, it is Lovecraft who is most strongly identified with Weird Tales, but it was Quinn who was the magazine's most popular writer, with his series about psychic detective Jules de Grandin.
From Home Brew, Henneberger learned that Lovecraft lived in Brooklyn, and he went to see him. "Meeting Lovecraft in Brooklyn was a rare experience," he wrote to Sam Moskowitz, "despite the fact that he was weighted down with marriage problems. He was married to a beautiful White Russian girl, and it seems his work of reviewing and an occasional editing job did not provide the means to support her as she desired. The union was short lived. I tried in vain to get Lovecraft to come to Chicago, but he was tradition bound to New England, especially Rhode Island in which state I called on him a few months before his death. The first story I bought from Howard was 'The Rats in the Walls,' and I think it was one of his finest. However, I sat down with Howard and Harry Houdini one evening while Houdini recounted an experience in Egypt or rather the Giza plateau. A few weeks later Howard submitted the manuscript 'Imprisoned with the Pharaohs.' It was published at my insistence, although Baird did not like it and Wright was not then at the helm of Weird Tales. During this time I was publishing College Humor and The Magazine of Fun successfully... I never made any money with Weird Tales, but the few headaches it caused were compensated by the association with men like William Sprenger (business manager), Farnsworth Wright, Frank Belknap Long, Seabury Quinn (who ran an undertakers' magazine) and many prominent men like Harry Houdini who swore by the publication."
Subtitled "The Unique Magazine" and "a magazine of the bizarre and the unusual," the "early issues were undistinguished," according to The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. After Baird's first 13 issues, a friend of Henneberger's, the songwriter Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946), who had written Weird Tales' first serial ("The Thing of a Thousand Shapes"), served briefly as editor (May-July 1924) on the issue planned as the last. "Problems with the printer," wrote Moskowitz, "more than lack of circulation, plunged the early Weird Tales into debt. In order to pay it off, Henneberger sold his profitable Detective Tales."
When the magazine reappeared (November 1924), it had both a new publisher, Popular Fiction Publishing Company, and a new editor, Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940). Born in San Francisco, the musicologist Wright had published an amateur magazine in high school, lived through the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fought in the infantry during WWI before joining Baird as an editorial assistant, beginning with Weird Tales' first issue. For the next 16 years, Wright, who suffered from Parkinson's disease, guided Weird Tales through its peak years, although even at its peak, Weird Tales had no more than 50,000 or so readers.
Between 1930 and 1934 Wright also edited Weird Tales' companion magazine, Oriental Stories (retitled Magic Carpet in January 1933), and his love of Shakespeare prompted an edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream with art by the Weird Tales illustrator Virgil Finlay. Other Weird Tales illustrators of the 1930s included Margaret Brundage, J. Allen St. John, Frank Utpatel, Vincent Napoli (who drew for DS Comics in the late 1940s) and Harold De Lay (artist on 1940-47 comics for Novelty and other companies). Working with pastel chalks, Brundage created a series of controversial, erotic covers.
Wright discovered and nurtured a lengthy list of Weird Tales writers – the poet Leah Bodine Drake, the teenage Tennessee Williams, film producer Val Lewton (Cat People), Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Nictzin Dyalhis, Robert E. Howard, Edmond Hamilton (who scripted for DC Comics from 1945 to 1966), Manly Wade Wellman (who scripted for at least eight comics publishers between 1939 and 1951), Catherine L. Moore, Carl Jacobi, Frank Belknap Long, E. Hoffman Price, H. Warner Munn and Donald Wandrei, while also attracting such authors as Gaston Leroux (Phantom of the Opera), Gustave Meyrink (The Golem), Jack Williamson, Murray Leinster, E.F. Benson, A. Merritt and Algernon Blackwood. Weird Tales first published Robert E. Howard in 1925, and his Conan stories began in WT with "The Phoenix on the Sword" (1932). The 1960s revival of interest in Conan and other Howard characters led to numerous Howard-inspired Marvel Comics.
When Delaney purchased Weird Tales in 1938, he followed the same procedure as he had with McIlwraith and Short Stories, and Wright relocated in New York to continue as the Weird Tales editor. The following summer, the 25-year-old Ray Bradbury showed Wright work by Hannes Bok, cover artist of Bradbury's fanzine, Futuria Fantasia (1939-40). "Long before my appearance in Weird Tales," wrote Bradbury, "I had influenced its artistic makeup. In June 1939, I had traveled across the United States on a Greyhound bus, bringing with me a dozen or so Hannes Bok drawings and paintings. I visited Farnsworth Wright in his offices, and he immediately commissioned Bok to paint a cover for Weird. I returned home on the bus in triumph, delighted that I had brought Bok and my favorite magazine together." The painting illustrated David H. Keller's "Lords of the Ice" (December 1939), and other distinctive Bok covers fronted Weird Tales until 1942. During the 1930s and 1940s, pulp magazine illustrators were usually paid between $50 to $75 for a cover painting.
The issue introducing Bok was one of Wright's last; he died in Jackson Heights, Queens, in June 1940. Delaney chose McIlwraith as Wright's successor, and she continued as Weird Tales' editor for the next 14 years. Bloch had praise for McIlwraith's editorial abilities: "I met Dorothy McIlwraith only once, in late 1939. She seemed pleasant, but I recall little about her, and her letters of acceptance, together with those of associate Lamont Buchanan, don't linger in my memory. Actually, I think she's far too neglected. I can't dismiss anyone who published Bradbury, Sturgeon, Brown and other top talents. I think that she would have published more, had she been given the budget to compete with Unknown Worlds, F&SF and other comparable markets. But that lousy one cent a word – and sometimes bimonthly publication – induced few writers to remain in Weird Tales once better rates were obtainable elsewhere. I lasted longer than most, because I was always a bit stupid. (Still am, writing short stories today when I should be knocking out TV episodes at roughly 100 times the fee, plus an additional 100 times for reruns over the years.) But Weird Tales was my first market, my favorite reading as a young fan, and I felt, and feel, that I owed it a lot."
Delaney and McIlwraith continued to fill the pages of Weird Tales with Derleth, Bloch, Wellman, Hamilton and Quinn, while also introducing Leiber, Bradbury, the now-neglected female fantasist Alison V. Harding, Joseph Payne Brennan and others. In addition to Bok, other illustrators for the Delaney/McIlwraith issues included Lee Brown Coye, Matt Fox (who also illustrated for 1952-63 Marvel Comics and 1967-69 issues of Castle of Frankenstein), Charles A. Kennedy, Boris Dolgov, Fred Humiston, Harold Rayner, Henry del Campo, A.R. Tilburne, John Giunta (who illustrated many comic books from 1938 on), Bill Wayne, Jon Arfstrom and Joseph Krucher.
Frank Gruber (1904-1969), who knocked out some 800,000 words for pulps in 1940, worked just as hard in 1941, but still found time to drop by for weekly chats with McIlwraith and Delaney, as he detailed in The Pulp Jungle: "I don't think I missed an issue of Short Stories that year. If I did not have a serial running in the magazine, I had a long novelette. Bill Delaney, the owner of Short Stories, had become one of my best friends... On Mondays I always went into town... I made a call or two, then about eleven o'clock I would go to the offices of Short Stories. Bill Delaney and I talked awhile, or played a rubber or two of gin rummy, had lunch and returned and played some more gin rummy. About four or four thirty I went home."
When Gruber went home it was to Scarsdale, but in January 1942 he moved to Manhasset, Long Island, where Bill Delaney lived with his wife Margaret (whom he had married in 1923). The Delaney/Gruber friendship was interrupted when Gruber swung a Hollywood deal only weeks after moving to Manhasset. Delaney helped him make his exit. "We decided to close up the house, leave everything in it and take the train to Hollywood, carrying only our suitcases –- and Bob, who was then 22 months of age. I completed The Gift Horse the day before we were due to leave. Bill Delaney came down to the train to see us off, and I gave him the last chapters and asked him to have them retyped and send the manuscript to Farrar & Rinehart. I wrote Farrar & Rinehart on the train. I told them I would be back in six weeks, that I needed a vacation. I did not see New York again until 1946."
In the midst of the 1950s wave of "weird" comics and competition from a new wave of magazines, such as Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the Weird Tales readership began to fall away. Following the death of Margaret Delaney in 1952, Weird Tales was reduced to a digest-size format (September 1953), and then it closed up shop a few months later (March 1954).
In 1956, Bill Delaney married Regina Cogan. He did not continue in publishing; one of his later business ventures was a Manhattan greeting card shop. After Regina Delaney's death in a 1970 auto accident, he took up residence in the New York Athletic Club. He died March 15 in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, after a long illness, survived by three children, 19 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Complete runs of the 279 issues of Weird Tales are highly valued by collectors, with complete runs being sold in the 1980s for prices between $20,000 and $25,000. After Weird Tales folded in 1954, the word "weird" surfaced immediately on several short-lived 1955 publications – the British Weird and Occult Library paperback magazine, the British pulp Weird World and True Weird. Edited by Calvin Beck for publisher Joe Weider, True Weird later changed its name to True Strange in order to kill a persistent office joke about True Weider magazine.
All rights to Weird Tales were next acquired by editor-publisher Leo Margulies. It was Margulies who gave Mort Weisinger his first editorial job, earning $15 a week, at Standard (Thrilling Wonder Stories). In the back of the hall during the First World Science Fiction Convention (1939), Margulies and Weisinger concocted the character of Captain Future, with Margulies plotting the magazine on the spot to the convention attendees. The following year the character debuted in both magazine form (Captain Future) and comics (Startling Stories, America's Best). Margulies was also instrumental in Weisinger's switch to DC as Superman editor-writer, advising him that pulps had less of a future than comics. "On the honor roll of great fiction magazines of all time, Weird Tales rates very high," wrote Margulies. "Among devotees of the weird, fantastic, science fiction and off-trail, the magazine was considered a classic." With the backlog of Weird Tales material, Margulies packaged two Pyramid anthologies -- Weird Tales (1964) and Worlds of Weird (1965).
On November 14, 1969, Weird Tales founder Jacob Clark Henneberger died. The legendary magazine Henneberger created reappeared in time for its 50th anniversary when Margulies revived Weird Tales for four pulp-sized issues (1973-74), edited by Sam Moscowitz. After Margulies died in 1975, the WT logo and title rights were acquired by Robert Weinberg, editor of WT50 (1974) and The Weird Tales Story (1977). In the UK, Peter Haining edited two Weird Tales collections for Sphere in 1978.
In 1981, Zebra Books presented WT as a new "paperback magazine" series, four issues edited by Lin Carter. Brian Forbes' Bellerophon Network brought the magazine back for two issues in 1984 and 1985. George H. Scithers revived the title in 1988 for the Terminus Publishing Company with assistant editors Darrell Schweitzer and John Gregory Bettancourt. In 1991, Schweitzer took full editorship, but the license to use the Weird Tales title was revoked with the Spring 1994, and the magazine changed its name to Worlds of Fantasy & Horror. The Weird Tales title was licensed to DNA Publications, the publisher of Absolute Magnitude and Dreams of Decadence, in March 1998.
Robert Bloch, who fashioned almost half a million words for Weird Tales (spread over 70 stories), once wrote: "Throughout the years, working with or for Weird Tales was largely a labor of love for all concerned. The magazine was never a moneymaker; it attracted few advertisers, and its rates of payment to contributors was low, even by Depression standards. Yet, in a strange sort of way, it was probably the Depression of the Thirties which enabled the magazine to continue. Today's publishers and distributors would never bother with such a trivial source of revenue; today's printing houses would hardly continue a magazine which went so consistently into the red on so small a circulation; today's writers couldn't afford to aim their output directly at so non-lucrative an outlet for their work. That Weird Tales managed to survive as long as it did is probably the weirdest tale of all."
Labels: bill delaney, bok, bradbury, carl barks, fawcett, george evans, gruber, henneberger, kamen, margulies, matt fox, mcilwraith ingels, orlando, robert bloch, weird tales, wolverton
¶ 9:11 AM 2 comments
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Weird Tales of Matt Fox
Matt Fox cover for July 1948 Weird Tales.
The illustrator Matt Fox was listed in The Who's Who of American Comic Books (1971). Below is the entry exactly as it appeared. The asterisk means he wrote it himself. The parenthetical (p) and (i) indicate pencil art and inks.
*MATTHEW (MATT) FOX (1906- ) Artist. Major influence: Alex Raymond; Cartoons; Adv art; Lithographs; Pulp illus; Covers of Weird Tales (oils), Color woodcuts; Water colors; Oil paintings; Etchings, Comic book credits: (p) & (i). Youthful: (1952-3) fantasy; Marvel: (1952-6) horror, s-f; (1962-3) s-f, fantasy.
Updated and more extensive credits for Matt Fox can be found at Who's Who of American Comic Books: 1928-1999.
The year of birth means he would have been 60 years old when I met him in during the mid-1960s. This is odd, since I recall him looking much younger, very slim and fit. Attempting to reconstruct the meeting, I'm certain it must have been in the spring of 1966. Back then, on Friday evenings, I left the Port Authority in New York City and headed for New Jersey. In North Bergen, I got off the bus at North Hudson Park, where, according to UFO researcher Budd Hopkins, the owner of a Manhattan liquor store had a close encounter with "grey beings" in September 1979. From North Hudson Park, I walked half a block on Palisade Avenue to the house of Calvin Beck, publisher of Castle of Frankenstein.
As the magazine's editor, I spent my weekends desperately trying to put together that publication with its zero budget and keep it on a quarterly schedule. The one year I almost succeeded, Calvin claimed the quarterly was a bi-monthly. It was like a race I could never win, a treadmill to oblivion.
During the 1960s, as a staff of one, I wrote and edited copy, proofread, selected photos, designed layouts and pasted up pages in Cal's downstairs workroom. The downstairs area had three rooms, a bathroom, a large closet, a countertop with a kitchen sink and many file cabinets filled with movie stills and manuscripts. However, it wasn't a basement, since it was on ground level with a door opening into the backyard. While Cal watched television upstairs, I usually worked downstairs while listening to jazz on the radio.
There were seldom any visitors, but one Saturday afternoon, I heard two sets of footsteps descending the narrow staircase. Cal squeezed past the water heater in the tiny hallway at the bottom of the stairs, entered the room with a big smile and introduced me to Matt Fox, whom I knew as one of the Weird Tales illustrators.
Fox came across as a straight-arrow, no-nonsense sort of a guy, and after a brief conversation about Weird Tales, he quickly got to the point. He was selling glow-in-the-dark posters, and he wanted to run an ad in Castle of Frankenstein. With that, he unfurled his glowing poster depicting demons and banshees dancing in the pale moonlight. We took it into a dark corner of the room, and yes, indeed, it did emit an eerie green glow.
He next produced an ad for the posters. He had made a negative photostat of his ink drawing, so the reversal of black to white simulated glowing monsters coming out of the darkness toward the reader. Clever hand-lettering effects added a subtle suggestion of glowing letters seen at night, not unlike the moment when Marion Crane first spots the Bates Motel sign through her car's rain-covered windshield.
The style Fox had used on this half-page ad fit in very nicely with the type of art that we occasionally ran in the magazine. I showed Fox how department headings were not permanent but alternated artwork by different artists. Then I suggested that he create some similar headings. He said, "Sure, I'll do those." Calvin was grinning and nodding enthusiastically. The idea of having a few contributions by a Weird Tales illustrator was a nice addition, but in retrospect, I have to wonder why Cal didn't have Fox create a series of Castle of Frankenstein covers as outre as the ones he had painted for Weird Tales. If Cal felt that Fox's art was not in keeping with a film magazine, then he could have given him space on the back cover as we had done with Hannes Bok. Given several odd incidents that ended with artists being underpaid by Cal, I can speculate that perhaps Cal offered Fox so little money that he refused to do a painting.
The cover of issue #8 was the magazine's third photographic cover. We had previously used color transparencies supplied by Columbia Pictures and American-International Pictures, but that cover of the eighth issue, showing a blood-covered Christopher Lee as Dracula, had a unique grainy and grisly look because it was an enlargement from an actual frame of film given to us by Russ Jones. Inside, the Matt Fox ad ran on the bottom of the last interior page. Fox's neatly rendered hand-lettered ad copy read, "Weird and monster fans... Something new... Demons or Banshees... See astonishing monsters that will glow in the dark (in weird green light)... A lot of fun, shock and surprise..." In the lower right corner was the signature "Matt.Fox," very tiny with a period inserted in the middle. Additional copy, written by Calvin, had been typeset and pasted into the ad:
No one but Calvin Beck could ever have devised advertising copy with such a non sequitur notion as "Monsters From The Wall." Was he thinking of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892)?
The ad ran again in the 1967 Castle of Frankenstein Monster Annual Fearbook which displayed Russ Jones paintings on both the front and back covers. Along with the ad and the "Ghostal Mail" heading, that issue also had another Fox illustration, much larger, showing a demon chasing a terrified man across a cemetery where one of the tombstones carries the words, "Rest in Peace Matt Fox," That illustration had no display lettering, but I added large display type beneath it to make it work as a heading for the fanzine review column, "CoFanaddicts."
On the Saturday Fox arrived to drop off that cemetery illustration, it was the second time I saw him. I admired his tight rendering in ink and crayon on pebbleboard. Then I casually asked, "So how many orders did you get for the glow-in-the-dark posters?" He responded bitterly, "None." After that day, I never saw him and his demonic entourage again. He became the Phantom Artist, whereabouts unknown. Fox died in 1988, as noted by Marty Jukovsky in one of the comments below.
The illustrator Matt Fox was listed in The Who's Who of American Comic Books (1971). Below is the entry exactly as it appeared. The asterisk means he wrote it himself. The parenthetical (p) and (i) indicate pencil art and inks.
*MATTHEW (MATT) FOX (1906- ) Artist. Major influence: Alex Raymond; Cartoons; Adv art; Lithographs; Pulp illus; Covers of Weird Tales (oils), Color woodcuts; Water colors; Oil paintings; Etchings, Comic book credits: (p) & (i). Youthful: (1952-3) fantasy; Marvel: (1952-6) horror, s-f; (1962-3) s-f, fantasy.
Updated and more extensive credits for Matt Fox can be found at Who's Who of American Comic Books: 1928-1999.
The year of birth means he would have been 60 years old when I met him in during the mid-1960s. This is odd, since I recall him looking much younger, very slim and fit. Attempting to reconstruct the meeting, I'm certain it must have been in the spring of 1966. Back then, on Friday evenings, I left the Port Authority in New York City and headed for New Jersey. In North Bergen, I got off the bus at North Hudson Park, where, according to UFO researcher Budd Hopkins, the owner of a Manhattan liquor store had a close encounter with "grey beings" in September 1979. From North Hudson Park, I walked half a block on Palisade Avenue to the house of Calvin Beck, publisher of Castle of Frankenstein.
As the magazine's editor, I spent my weekends desperately trying to put together that publication with its zero budget and keep it on a quarterly schedule. The one year I almost succeeded, Calvin claimed the quarterly was a bi-monthly. It was like a race I could never win, a treadmill to oblivion.
During the 1960s, as a staff of one, I wrote and edited copy, proofread, selected photos, designed layouts and pasted up pages in Cal's downstairs workroom. The downstairs area had three rooms, a bathroom, a large closet, a countertop with a kitchen sink and many file cabinets filled with movie stills and manuscripts. However, it wasn't a basement, since it was on ground level with a door opening into the backyard. While Cal watched television upstairs, I usually worked downstairs while listening to jazz on the radio.
There were seldom any visitors, but one Saturday afternoon, I heard two sets of footsteps descending the narrow staircase. Cal squeezed past the water heater in the tiny hallway at the bottom of the stairs, entered the room with a big smile and introduced me to Matt Fox, whom I knew as one of the Weird Tales illustrators.Fox came across as a straight-arrow, no-nonsense sort of a guy, and after a brief conversation about Weird Tales, he quickly got to the point. He was selling glow-in-the-dark posters, and he wanted to run an ad in Castle of Frankenstein. With that, he unfurled his glowing poster depicting demons and banshees dancing in the pale moonlight. We took it into a dark corner of the room, and yes, indeed, it did emit an eerie green glow.
He next produced an ad for the posters. He had made a negative photostat of his ink drawing, so the reversal of black to white simulated glowing monsters coming out of the darkness toward the reader. Clever hand-lettering effects added a subtle suggestion of glowing letters seen at night, not unlike the moment when Marion Crane first spots the Bates Motel sign through her car's rain-covered windshield.
The style Fox had used on this half-page ad fit in very nicely with the type of art that we occasionally ran in the magazine. I showed Fox how department headings were not permanent but alternated artwork by different artists. Then I suggested that he create some similar headings. He said, "Sure, I'll do those." Calvin was grinning and nodding enthusiastically. The idea of having a few contributions by a Weird Tales illustrator was a nice addition, but in retrospect, I have to wonder why Cal didn't have Fox create a series of Castle of Frankenstein covers as outre as the ones he had painted for Weird Tales. If Cal felt that Fox's art was not in keeping with a film magazine, then he could have given him space on the back cover as we had done with Hannes Bok. Given several odd incidents that ended with artists being underpaid by Cal, I can speculate that perhaps Cal offered Fox so little money that he refused to do a painting.The cover of issue #8 was the magazine's third photographic cover. We had previously used color transparencies supplied by Columbia Pictures and American-International Pictures, but that cover of the eighth issue, showing a blood-covered Christopher Lee as Dracula, had a unique grainy and grisly look because it was an enlargement from an actual frame of film given to us by Russ Jones. Inside, the Matt Fox ad ran on the bottom of the last interior page. Fox's neatly rendered hand-lettered ad copy read, "Weird and monster fans... Something new... Demons or Banshees... See astonishing monsters that will glow in the dark (in weird green light)... A lot of fun, shock and surprise..." In the lower right corner was the signature "Matt.Fox," very tiny with a period inserted in the middle. Additional copy, written by Calvin, had been typeset and pasted into the ad:
It's monsteriffic! It's pop art! These impressive phantasmagoric reproductions are the personal creations of famous horror-fantasy artist and cartoonist Matt Fox whose work has appeared in the Marvel Comics Group, Planet Stories, Weird Tales and many other magazines... Yes, they come horribly alive in the dark in Monsterama! They'll glow at you in Spookdracular weird green light! Bring friends (or "others") into a pitch-black room –- Then watch their reaction when they meet the Monsters From The Wall!!... Each monsterpiece is $1.98 (plus 25 cents for post & handling). Save charges by ordering 2 for only $3.98 plus only 25 cents for all postage and handling. (Please state if you want the Demons or Banshees when ordering only one.) Mail checks, cash or money orders to: Gothic Castle – Box 43 – Hudson Hts. – North Bergen, N.J. 07048.
No one but Calvin Beck could ever have devised advertising copy with such a non sequitur notion as "Monsters From The Wall." Was he thinking of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892)?
That same issue featured Fox's ink and pebbleboard heading for "Ghostal Mail," showing a variety of demon onlookers as Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster peruse letters from readers. Curiously, he did this in two sections, so the lettering of the heading has a different background from the illustration and is separated from it by a thin white line. That heading and the ad were repeated in issue #9 (November, 1966).
The ad ran again in the 1967 Castle of Frankenstein Monster Annual Fearbook which displayed Russ Jones paintings on both the front and back covers. Along with the ad and the "Ghostal Mail" heading, that issue also had another Fox illustration, much larger, showing a demon chasing a terrified man across a cemetery where one of the tombstones carries the words, "Rest in Peace Matt Fox," That illustration had no display lettering, but I added large display type beneath it to make it work as a heading for the fanzine review column, "CoFanaddicts."
On the Saturday Fox arrived to drop off that cemetery illustration, it was the second time I saw him. I admired his tight rendering in ink and crayon on pebbleboard. Then I casually asked, "So how many orders did you get for the glow-in-the-dark posters?" He responded bitterly, "None." After that day, I never saw him and his demonic entourage again. He became the Phantom Artist, whereabouts unknown. Fox died in 1988, as noted by Marty Jukovsky in one of the comments below.
Labels: beck, castle of frankenstein, matt fox, russ jones, weird tales
¶ 11:03 PM 5 comments
