We are still, like most other poetry publications, under the continuous necessity of reminding our poet-subscribers that unless the poets themselves support their last remaining mediums by their own subscriptions and by telling their friends, their literary groups, and the general public about such magazines, unless the publisher owns his own press, we will be forced to go down before the rising tide of postal rate increases. Magazines like Different, in the general interest category and hence with a subscriptions list reaching into the prose field, may sometime get tired of priming the pump for un-appreciative poets. For many could secure national newsstand distribution by the simple act of increasing their prose content, giving it a general appeal, keeping their long-established datelines, and cutting their poetry content to five or ten poems per issue. Naturally every editor with the interest of poetry at heart, and realizing that when a nation’s poetry dies it is the beginning of the end, would hesitate a long time before taking such a step. But there are many who may not be able to afford not to take it, unless poets and poetry groups make an immediate, supreme, and concerted effort to do something about their own survival as poets.

  Since this brief history of Different is written with utter frankness, it should be admitted that your editor has not been immune to deep spiritual shock when confronted by a certain cheapness of soul and smallness of mind that prevails among a few to whom we have given unstintingly of our time and services. We also admit another unfortunate human trait (why do editors have to be human beings?), that just two or three spiritually obscene revelations of the depths of cheapness and cunning to which human nature can descend tend temporarily to obscure the shining radiance of the goodness and nobility of the great majority of Earth’s children.

  Perhaps in our case such revelations of spiritual dwarfishness come as a shock because among poets it is least expected, for we certainly have had our share of beholding the subhuman characteristics in our newspaper experience. However, there is always the illuminating fact that during our entire time of publication not one single act of smallness, cheapness, deliberate distortion of editorial statements or motives, name-calling or outright lying has ever been indulged in by a poet or poet-editor whose own work exemplified what is universally acknowledged to be in the best tradition of poetry in its noblest sense. There is something about the consecrated poet that endows him with a wholeness of vision that enables him to understand motives, to cooperate with sincerity, to give and accept constructive comments, and to work harmoniously with his fellow men.

  Like all others, we have had to face venom of certain authors whose work we have had to reject, than which Hell hath no comparable fury, the cheapness of the penny-pinchers who resort to the most unbelievable antics to make the world safe for a one-cent stamp, the spiritual pauperism of the “copy-panhandlers” who believe that their work is of such supreme importance to us that we should immediately send them free sample copies that they may “study our requirements,” the petty arrogance of writers who, because for a few times in their lives they may have hit the top publications, believe that they should be exempted from sending us a stamped return envelope, and the intellectual vacuity of professional leftists, rightists, atheists, orthodox religionists, cultists, faddists, capitalists, labor unionists, and a lunatic fringe of readers who from time to time give us to understand that no poem, article, comment, or implication should ever appear in our pages which conflicts in the minutest detail with their particular “party line.” This same “you-can’t-change-me” contingency is also ready to obliterate from the memory of man at the drop of a hat the totality of the efforts, services, articles, poems, and productions of any person or publication if some one line or word departs from its specialized indoctrinations or is expressed in a manner that is either not understandable to it or in a way that it deliberately chooses to misinterpret for some purpose of its own.

  It is useless to reason with one who indulges in these idiocies. It is useless to point out that an editor’s duty is to all of his subscribers, so long as he can present all sides of their varying hopes, ideals, and ideas in a public forum which sincerely attempts to find the grain of truth in everything worth discussing, to discard the chaff of falsity, and through it all be true to his own conscience and to the responsibilities which he has assumed.

  We are not, as an independent magazine, in the false position of the advertiser-controlled publication which must please everybody and hence end up by publishing nothing which will have other than dubious entertainment value to a people confronted with vast and terrible problems and who are desperately seeking for guidance in history’s darkest hour. We have had the opportunity to become such an advertiser-controlled magazine. We have been taken to the mountaintop and been shown the kingdoms of this world and, confidentially, the odor wasn’t good, or at least it didn’t blend well with the rarefied atmosphere. In view of this, we shall continue to give you an all-round picture of life as we saw it from the mountaintop, where, thanks to the Tempter, we at least got a good fourth-dimensional view.

  We are entering our sixth year in the same spirit with which we entered our first. Everything that we expected has happened, for we did not enter the field unprepared. Practically everything that we predicted editorially has happened in the world at large, and the worst is yet to come … unless … the Sleepers wake. The best is yet to come also, for we have the assurance that Peace on Earth is the exclusive heritage of all men of goodwill. Therefore with malice toward none, and with charity to all, with faith that in whatever darkness may descend upon the world, the poets will light a candle, and that in whatever Ark may be launched on the waters of the soul’s final cataclysms, the poets will be the ultimate survivors, we invite you to voyage with us through the Phoenix Gate to a happy landing on the shore of Avalon.

  5

  ARTISTS

  Visual art by women played an important role in both the aesthetics and economic viability of magazines that published SF. Visual art was also important to fans of the genre: from the 1920s to the 1940s, the letters pages of magazines that featured SF regularly included comments about the relative merits of the art in previous issues.1 Most women artists who contributed to magazines that published SF were trained in commercial art and fashion illustration, which revolved around the figure of the modern, active woman. In the context of magazine SF, this training provided a way for female artists to literally paint women into stories. Fusing the Gothic traditions of art that emerged from the nineteenth century and her fashion illustration training, Margaret Brundage depicted women as actively engaged in terrifying and titillating activities that undermined the Enlightenment belief in a predictably clockwork universe. At the same time, women such as Dolly Donnell and Dorothy Les Tina contributed to an emerging technophilic tradition of SF art, depicting women as equal participants in the exploration and conquest of the universe. These artists emphasized female characters in a way that would be expanded upon by feminist authors working in the genre in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as by later fantasy and SF artists such as Rowena Morrill, Victoria Poyser-Lisi, and Julie Bell (Heller).2

  One reason that fashion illustration had such an impact on women’s magazine art in the early twentieth century was that many jobs in design, illustration, and fashion during this period were open to women because they “were considered within women’s natural sphere” (Chalmers 238). Women came to dominate a number of lower-level jobs in the fashion industry by the 1920s, and even made an impact at the highest levels of the industry.3 Early genre magazines such as the Black Cat hired women artists with training in fashion illustration to appeal to women readers, who were believed to be the primary purchasers of most magazines during this period.4 The Black Cat emphasized stories of fantasy, weird mystery, and SF from its first publication in 1895 until its demise in 1922. Olivette Bourgeois contributed covers in the late 1910s that were attuned to changing images of women but had little to do with the contents of its stories. The covers she produced expanded the Black Cat’s aesthetic appeal by depicting scenes of sophisticated modern young women engaged in a variety of activities (see plate 5.1). During this period, much graphic design tended “to focus on the lives and leisure time of young women” (Eskilson 53), and these covers showed the influence of Bourgeois’s training as a fashion illustrator and the impact of new fashion magazines for women on the design of seemingly unrelated publications.5

  The work of Lucille Holling for Oriental Stories exemplifies how fashion illustration began to influence genre magazines in the 1930s. Holling, who began her career in the 1920s, was trained in fashion illustration and worked as a freelance artist. She also collaborated with her husband, with whom she wrote and illustrated a variety of works during a forty-year career. Her work often focused on Asian and Native American women wearing traditional textiles. Unlike the Black Cat, Oriental Stories covers generally depicted a scene from a story in the issue, and Holling’s work on Asian fashion is likely what landed her the commission for the cover of the Autumn 1931 issue. That cover depicts a scene from the Warren Hastings Miller story “A Thrilling Tale of Burma,” focusing on a partially nude Burmese woman in brightly colored clothing (see plate 5.2). The emphasis on textiles, fashion, and the graceful female form shows the kinship of Holling’s cover with the fashion-oriented covers produced by Bourgeois. However, where Bourgeois’s covers were designed to appeal to female readers, Holling’s cover demonstrates the new orientation toward male readers that took place in magazine cover art with the success of the “adventure and action stories” of Edgar Rice Burroughs during the 1910s (Weinberg, Biographical 3–4). While Holling’s piece for Oriental Stories reinforces the stereotype of the passive exotic beauty who puts her body on display for, but does not meet the gaze of, her (presumably male) audience, this cover departs from the usual Oriental Stories covers in that Holling emphasizes the patterned textiles and jewelry worn by her female subject as much as she emphasizes that subject’s body, and she refuses all suggestion that this woman is in any way threatened by (racially other) men.

  Margaret Brundage used her fashion illustration skills to transform the covers of Weird Tales in a similar manner. Brundage began her career in the 1920s doing fashion illustration for newspapers before taking on work at Oriental Stories. Her covers featuring scantily clad women became popular instantly, and the editor, Farnsworth Wright, quickly made her the main cover artist for his flagship publication, Weird Tales. Brundage’s appeal stemmed from her unique fusion of fashion illustration with the American Gothic tradition of painting. American Gothic art of the nineteenth century was dominated by men such as Thomas Cole, whose work celebrated masculine rationality’s conquest of unruly and horrifying nature and was characterized by “a dark vision of the American landscape as a place of mystery and terror” haunted by wild Indians (Mulvey-Roberts 9). Cole’s work also made use of the damsel in distress to highlight this theme: his painting The Death of Cora (1927), which depicts a scene from James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans (1926), shows a dark-skinned “savage” ready to use his knife on a kneeling white women in a white gown. The cover art for Weird Tales initially fused this colonial American Gothic imagery with emerging twentieth-century fears of “yellow and black perils” (Franklin 133).6 Instead of the wild “savages” of nineteenth-century Gothic painters, Weird Tales covers depicted stereotyped men from Asia, Africa, or the Middle East threatening white heroes and damsels in distress. Wright had also learned in the mid-1920s to make the damsels in distress scantily clad: issues with a partially clothed or nude woman on their covers sold better than those without one, showing the growing importance of the heterosexual male gaze in the magazine marketplace. This is also one reason Wright began to hire women with backgrounds in fashion illustration: they were much better at drawing women than were the male artists who worked for pulp magazines, men who tended to be trained “in the classical mode of representational painting” (Lesser 6).7

  In Brundage’s hands, the Gothic covers of Weird Tales began to focus even more on women’s bodies in ways that pulled the art of the magazine in a different direction. In keeping with the magazine’s American Gothic style, Brundage occasionally depicted women as helpless damsels threatened by non-white men. While these images sexualized women and catered to a male gaze, they also endowed their female subjects with personality, using their subjects’ reactions to the situations at hand to critically assess masculine behavior. For example, the cover of the March 1937 issue depicts a scene from Dorothy Quick’s “Strange Orchids” that shows the heroine in a revealing blue gown reeling from the shadow of an evil scientist (see plate 5.5).8 Like Quick’s story, Brundage’s image evokes the tradition of the female Gothic, where “the male transgressor becomes the villain” and threatens the heroine with death or worse (Milbank 121).9 Many of Brundage’s women were powerful and mysterious, taking the stage by themselves. For instance, her cover for the October 1934 issue shows C. L. Moore’s heroine, Jirel of Joiry, embracing a passive black statue with no men in the frame (see plate 5.3). Brundage’s “ladies of the weird” challenged conventional, Enlightenment-based ideas about the rational nature of the universe and the good woman’s place within it. At the same time, her commercial sensibility led her to create alluring women who appealed to the male gaze so successfully that she was largely responsible for pulling the magazine out of financial trouble.

  In the early 1940s, women artists such as Dorothy Les Tina and Dolly Donnell began to produce interior artwork for SF specialist magazines that employed the technophilic style of art. The technophilic style was a branch of the American Gothic tradition that emerged in the late 1920s with the work of Frank R. Paul for Hugo Gernsback’s magazines. The technophilic work of Paul, like the nineteenth-century Gothic paintings of Cole, represented men dwarfed by wild landscapes and menaced by the denizens of the wilderness. However, in the work of Paul, the landscapes were often extraterrestrial and populated by bug-eyed monsters, bizarre aliens, and “outrageous machines” (Aldiss 4–6). The technophilic style also celebrated scientific rationality’s conquest of nature, emphasizing “colorful and imaginative” art that served a pedagogical purpose with its “painstakingly accurate and precisely designed” buildings, ships, and gadgets (Westfahl, “Artists” 22). In the late 1930s, SF specialist magazines began to include more images of women in their cover art. However, the women were usually depicted as helpless and hysterical, and thus the covers remained safely within the style of the traditional American Gothic.

  Like Brundage, the women who contributed interior art in the technophilic style took the opportunity to portray women very differently from their male counterparts. The art of Les Tina and Donnell demonstrated that women could depict the Gothic dangers of alien landscapes as well as men. Les Tina contributed interior art to magazines such as Science Fiction Quarterly and Future Fantasy and Science Fiction in the early 1940s. Her art for the Carol Grey (a pseudonym of Robert A. W. Lowndes) story “The Leapers” (see plate 5.7) shows a group of humans who are being swept up in an extraterrestrial event. While the men look around blankly in awkward poses with negative expressions, the women gaze directly toward outer space, and the one in the lead is smiling. This motif of women confronting the future while men blanch in the face of progress is repeated in Les Tina’s art for the John B. Michel story “Claggett’s Folly” (see plate 5.8). In this image, the man is looking away from the technologies represented in the illustration, covering his ears in apparent pain, while the woman and the child—SF’s unlikeliest subjects—look at them excitedly.

  Donnell also placed women in active roles in her art. Donnell was a trained graphic artist whose work appeared in Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories from 1943 to 1945. In an illustration for the Summer 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Donnell’s female character is posed so that she is facing danger with her male counterpart (see plate 5.9). The woman does not hold a gun like her companion, but neither is she the traditional victim cringing in distress. Moreover, her pose reflects Donnell’s training in commercial illustration: it highlights the woman’s body as active while allowing viewers to see her clothes. Both Les Tina and Donnell depicted women as active subjects more frequently than their male counterparts, placing female characters at the center of the stories they illustrated.10

  The aesthetic conventions forged by female artists during the 1930s and 1940s continue to serve as inspiration for women SF artists. Rowena Morrill, whose popular SF and fantasy art began to appear in the late 1970s, helped extend this sensibility to the covers of paperback books.11 Morrill’s art often focuses on women who are both powerful and sensual, a popular combination pioneered by Brundage.12 Victoria Poyser-Lisi, winner of the 1986 Frank R. Paul Award for SF and fantasy art, also began working in the late 1970s. Mentored by Morrill, Poyser-Lisi creates art that bears the stamp of this same tradition: her work—which includes a number of novel covers for the legendary author and Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master André Alice Norton—regularly put women at the center of the story’s action. In the 1990s, the bodybuilder and artist Julie Bell extended this tradition. Bell’s muscular amazons adorn magazine, book, and video game covers as well as comic book trading cards. Bell has also published several collections of her work, including Hard Curves (1995) and Soft as Steel (1999).13 As these titles suggest, women artists have continued to illustrate women’s bodies as infused with power. They are “neither lurid nor lewd”: like Brundage’s “Ladies of the Weird,” they “stand or move with power” and have an interior strength that is undiminished by the threats posed by patriarchy (Guran 23, 26).