Thursday, June 16, 2016

THE PULP CALENDAR: June 17


Another dynamic 1939 Street & Smith cover: again it's H. W. Scott, the publisher's most prolific artist, on western covers at least. I wonder whether an editor fed ideas to Scott or if he and his fellow artists came up with these often-striking compositions on their own.  Inside the contents are the same as they were when the cover art was less ambitious. The lead novelette is by Ed Earl Repp, a writer who transitioned from science fiction to westerns in the early Thirties and kept at into the twilight of pulp in the mid-Fifties. William F. Bragg, apparently a lifetime westerner, continues a six-part serial, while favorite characters like T. W. Ford's Silver Kid and J. Allan Dunn's Bud Jones make their expected reappearances. I can't judge any of the contents but the packaging is nice.

1 comment:

  1. Though there were exceptions every now and then, for the most part the editors or the art director told the artist what they wanted. A busy artist like Scott did not have the time to read the stories and decide what scene to illustrate or to even think about a different idea for each weekly cover. There were exception like when Walter Baumhofer submitted his first western cover to Street & Smith on approval. They liked it so much that they signed him up for several more covers.

    I once asked artist Raphael Desoto why he changed his style around the early 1940's. Instead of busy action filled covers like on the Suicide Squad covers for ACE G-MAN he switched to close up portraits like on BLACK MASK. He simply said the art director or editors told him to change.

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