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.
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.
ReplyDeleteI 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.