I have nothing special to say about the contents and authors of this 1941 Wild West Weekly. There are some familiar names (Walker Tompkins, Lee Bond, Chuck Martin) and apparently only one series character story (the final appearance of Sleepy Sloane by John B. Strong aka J. Allen Dunn). I just want to point out just how ugly this cover is, two years after Street & Smith covers were things of beauty on nearly a weekly basis. It'd be a shame if someone at the company thought that a cover like this would sell the magazine better than the often-brilliant 1939 cover designs. I'm not sure what's worse about this cover: the inert looking copy at the bottom or that hideous floating price box, which seems to have been placed where white space permits. And is that a recycled cover painting, perhaps? The overall slapped-together impression this cover creates makes me think so. Pulp covers are often admired today as works of art, but this one proves that not all of them were.
I was wondering why you are adding the red borders around the covers. I collect cover scans and also send over bigger, better versions to Phil Stephensen-Payne, at Galactic Central for his database of magazines. If you want a red border (which I think detracts from the original intent) you can add the border in HTML very easily.
ReplyDeleteThe borders are a side effect of my using a snipping tool to harvest covers instead of saving or downloading them the usual way. You'll probably notice the difference when I scan my own covers, which won't have the red border. To be honest, I hadn't even paid attention to the borders, which are unintentional, but as you raise a valid aesthetic objection, and covers like the one above are ugly enough on their own, I'll take your advice under consideration.
ReplyDeleteIf anything the red border on this cover makes it uglier. I did a bit of a search and couldn't find out if the cover art was reused or not.The blue reflections on the horse make it look like a background was cut out, but it's hard to tell without being able to look closer. Seeing as how the style for this era of WWW was to have a stark white background it seems unlikely that they would want to spend the extra time (money) cropping out backgrounds from old paintings.
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