OLIVETTE BOURGEOIS (1892–1983) was an artist whose work appeared on sixteen covers of the Black Cat between 1916 and 1918. Bourgeois trained at the New School in Boston, where she received a scholarship for “first-year design” in 1915 (“New School” 13). The New School emphasized “practical training” in “fine or applied art” and offered classes in cartooning, commercial art, fashion illustration, and book design (New School 19). The fact that one of her “decorative design” pieces was featured on the back cover of the 1916–17 school catalog when she was just a second-year student indicates the strength of Bourgeois’s work from an early age (New School). In addition to the Black Cat, her art appeared in Massachusetts-based children’s magazines such as the Youth’s Companion and Little Folks Magazine.

  From its inception in 1895 until 1913, the Black Cat had covers consisting of either festively dressed anthropomorphic black cats or the face of a black cat surrounded by decorative designs. The Black Cat changed hands in 1913, but continued this style of cover until late 1916. The covers Bourgeois produced beginning in December 1916 reflected a clear shift of emphasis for the magazine. Referred to by one contemporary reviewer as “the aristocrat of artists,” Bourgeois created covers featuring smiling, stylish people dressed for an outing or engaging in some kind of amusing activity (“Reviews” 4). In particular, the covers produced by Bourgeois emphasized happy, short-haired modern women engaged in such pursuits as exercising with dumbbells, reclining on swings, and, as in the illustration reprinted here, attending fancy-dress parties.

  The fashion illustration training Bourgeois received at the New School was evident in covers like that of the Black Cat’s January 1917 issue, which depicts a couple out on New Year’s Eve (see plate 5.1). This issue memorialized Jack London’s death by reprinting “A Thousand Deaths,” a Frankenstein-inspired tale of mad science originally published in 1899. The cover produced by Bourgeois had nothing to do with London’s story or with any other SF story published in the issue. This was standard for the Black Cat: Bourgeois’s covers were designed to hail the women readers who were the magazine’s target audience, not to depict scenes from the fiction included therein. The outfits and hairstyles of her female subjects were consistent with changing images of women during the 1910s, when fashion magazines such as Vogue featured women in bright colors and everyday settings, and marketed a progressive and active lifestyle for modern women.14 As such, Bourgeois infused the covers of the Black Cat with a sensibility characteristic of the New Woman. Moreover, the emphasis she placed on active female bodies anticipated that of later genre artists, including Margaret Brundage, Dorothy Les Tina, and Dolly Donnell.

  LUCILLE WEBSTER HOLLING (1900–89) was an artist who contributed one cover to Oriental Stories, the sister magazine of Weird Tales. Holling was born on December 8, 1900, in Valparaiso, Indiana. Before she turned twenty she moved to Chicago to pursue her interest in art. She attended the Art Institute, where she met fellow student and artist Holling Clancy Holling. They married in 1925, and in 1926 they began teaching art and working with the drama department on costume design for New York University’s first University World Cruise. Over the next few decades, Lucille Holling and her husband collaborated on more than fifteen illustrated children’s books. Though her husband received most of the credit for these books, Holling was a major contributor to the research, writing, and art. The couple won many awards and made several appearances at universities and on radio and television. In 1980, their work was the subject of a special exhibition at the UCLA Library, where their papers now reside.

  Like most of the other women who contributed art to magazines that published SF, Lucille Holling’s training included fashion illustration. Her work extended far beyond her collaborations with her husband, as she produced art for a number of advertisements, magazines, and books. Her work included fashion drawings for Marshall Field department stores in the 1920s, three covers for Child Life magazine in the early 1930s, and the cover of a 1932 book entitled Successful Farming. Holling was particularly interested in ethnic fashion, and her portfolio included pictures created during her travels of Japanese dancers, Native American dancers, and traditional Russian costumes.

  This emphasis on exotic fashion is likely what caught the eye of Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Oriental Stories. In 1931, Wright was struggling to help his Chicago-based magazines recover from financial disaster (Weinberg, “Weird Tales” 6). Wright began to offer more money to artists and found new talent to help elevate the sales of his magazines. Holling was hired to produce the cover for the Autumn 1931 issue of Oriental Stories. Her illustration emphasizes the body of a beautiful woman dressed stylishly (see plate 5.2). The cover is based on the Warren Hastings Miller story “The White Sawbwa of Möng Nam,” and the woman’s clothing and jewelry are, appropriately, based on Burmese designs. Keeping with Wright’s established policy, the woman’s clothing does not cover one of her breasts: Wright knew the importance of sex in increasing the sales of his magazines to male readers. Moreover, Holling’s cover diverges from the previous Oriental Stories covers that invoked the colonial American Gothic imagination by depicting sinister non-white men threatening white heroes and white women. Holling’s cover signaled a shift in emphasis for Wright’s magazines, where female characters began to take center stage in a way that would affect SF magazine art for the next two decades.

  MARGARET JOHNSON BRUNDAGE (1900–76) was one of the most popular, influential, and celebrated artists to ever work in magazines that published SF. She was born Margaret Hedda Johnson in Chicago, where she lived and worked for her entire life. Her art career started early, when the teenaged Johnson became involved with the Voice newspaper at McKinley High School, where she got to know her fellow student Walt Disney (Everts 25; Spurlock 129). Johnson later attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, an institution that specialized in “commercial and applied art,” including “fashion illustration” (Spurlock 133–134). She worked part time at a restaurant called the Dil Pickle, a hangout for members of the International Workers of the World. There, she met the union organizer and hobo activist Slim Brundage, whom she married in 1927. Though she shared her husband’s political views, his low-paying work and freewheeling lifestyle did not suit Brundage, and the two divorced in 1939. Brundage had to support herself, her son, and her disabled mother with the income she made from her art. She did freelance fashion illustration during the 1920s, turning to magazine work when the Great Depression undermined the fashion industry. While working for Weird Tales, Brundage maintained her commitment to progressive politics by working with the African American arts movement centered in the south side of Chicago. Brundage helped found the South Side Community Art Center and served on its board in the 1940s and 1950s, thus playing a critical role in establishing an important center of African American culture that exists to this day.

  During her career in SF, Brundage produced dozens of covers in a revamped Gothic style that emphasized beautiful and powerful women. Brundage’s SF career began when she walked into the offices of Weird Tales in 1932 looking for magazine work, dropping off her portfolio with the “only magazine she had been able to find with offices in the city” (Weinberg, “Weird Tales” 65). Editor Farnsworth Wright was impressed with one of her pastel pieces and commissioned her to do similar work for the cover of his new magazine, Oriental Stories. The popularity of the cover led to more work with Wright, including many covers for Weird Tales. At the time, Wright’s magazines were struggling because the “bank where much of the firm’s money was kept” collapsed during the financial disasters of the Depression (Weinberg, “Weird Tales” 6). Brundage once said in an interview that she usually submitted “several sketches to Wright” and his business manager, William Sprenger, and “they always wanted the ones with the scantiest clad girls” (Weinberg, “Weird Tales” 68). Authors soon figured out the game and wrote stories with scenes in which a woman would become unclothed, thinking that Wright would deem it a more likely candidate for Brundage’s cover art. This strategy paid off handsomely, and Brundage’s art played a major role in pulling Weird Tales out of financial trouble.

  Brundage used her fashion training to elevate Weird Tales’ version of the American Gothic style, focusing her compositions on the female form in ways that were subtly subversive. The American Gothic style was originally developed by male artists in the nineteenth century and depicted strange colonial landscapes populated by hostile alien men. Brundage’s pastel creations during her first two years at Weird Tales often followed this style, showing white women who were helpless, bound, and threatened by dark-skinned men. However, the longer she worked on the magazine, the more Brundage represented women characters by themselves, without any men in the frame. She often associated the women on her covers with supernatural powers, depicting them in ways that questioned Enlightenment notions of masculine order and rationality. Brundage’s illustrations had little or no gore, and her women always had “a unique sense of dignity” even when frightened (Spurlock 148). When a female character was written as “more of a victim than a heroine,” Brundage would still render her in such a way that there seemed “nothing powerless or weak about the woman” (Guran 21).

  Responses to Brundage’s art were mixed, but her work clearly struck a chord with Weird Tales readers. Each issue featuring a Brundage cover seemed to spark a new and entertaining controversy. Initially, Brundage used the gender-neutral name “M. Brundage” for the work commissioned by Wright. In the October 1934 issue, Wright attempted to settle the ongoing complaints about the nude women on the covers by revealing her gender. Brundage’s cover for that October 1934 issue depicts a scene from the first Jirel of Joiry story entitled “Black God’s Kiss” by another legendary woman of that period, C. L. Moore (see plate 5.3). Despite exchanging the heroine’s chain mail, greaves, and sword for “clingy blue fabric,” Brundage “tells the story … quite well” with her image (Guran 27). Brundage uses Moore’s story to get away from the threatened-damsel motif, representing Jirel as active and independent: she freely embraces the passive male statue of a black god in a way that dramatizes both female desire and miscegenation. This subversive bent became more pronounced in Brundage’s work as the 1930s progressed.

  One notable exception to Brundage’s standard style came with the April 1935 issue of Weird Tales, which is based on A. W. Bernal’s SF story “The Man Who Was Two Men” (see plate 5.4). For that cover Brundage depicts a mad scientist, a complicated machine, two men in tubes, and no women at all. In this way, Brundage is consistent with the tradition of Gothic SF emphasizing the dangers of science and questioning the benefits of progress. However, the lack of any female characters on the cover sent up “the loudest howls” from readers and served as evidence that most fans liked Brundage’s women (Weinberg, “Weird Tales” 71). Brundage quickly returned to her more standard covers with the compositions focused on alluring women. When Wright later gave her Dorothy Quick’s mad scientist story “Strange Orchids” to illustrate for the March 1937 cover, she kept the mad scientist out of the picture (except for a menacing shadow) and centered her work on strong women in a weird situation (see plate 5.5). Just as in Quick’s story (which is reprinted in chapter 1, “Authors,” of this anthology), Brundage keeps the reader focused on the female protagonist’s negative reaction to a misogynist mode of science that has dire consequences for women. This exemplified her approach to SF: carrying on Gothic traditions and catering to the heterosexual male gaze while depicting women as strong and fearless, even in harrowing situations.

  By the early 1940s, the influence of Brundage on other SF magazines was widespread. For example, the art for Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories regularly featured a mixture of the technophilic and Gothic styles popularized by Frank R. Paul and Brundage. A typical cover included a scantily clad woman in the foreground who either was a powerful alien (like Brundage) or was being harassed by giant machines or monsters (like Paul). Brundage continued to produce covers for Weird Tales until 1945, long after the magazine had been sold and moved its operations to New York City. The new publishers stipulated that there be no more nudes on the covers, in part because of newsstand censorship in New York City. They also cut the amount of money they paid artists, which forced Brundage to begin looking for other work. Drawing clothed women posed no problem for the former fashion illustrator, but Brundage had to pick up interior art jobs from magazines such as Fantastic Adventures to make ends meet (see plate 5.6). Brundage’s work inspired generations of women writers and artists, and her influence is still apparent in the art of well-known women such as Rowena Morill, Victoria Poyser-Lisi, and Julie Bell. Their strong and sexy amazons are modern versions of Brundage’s alluring women, a legacy that has contributed to Brundage’s status as the “queen” of pulp-era magazine art (Heller; Korshak 11; Roberts 43–45).

  DOROTHY LOUISE LES TINA (1917–2003) worked in SF magazines as an author and artist in the 1940s and 1950s (for details about her personal life, see the entry on Les Tina in Chapter 1, “Authors,” of this anthology). Les Tina worked as an assistant at Popular Publications in the early 1940s, where she met Frederik Pohl and other authors and editors associated with the Futurian fan group. During that period, she produced several pieces of artwork for Futurian Robert A. W. Lowndes’s genre publications. After a decade of military service, she returned briefly to SF, contributing interior art to several issues of Hugo Gernsback’s Science Fiction Plus in the 1950s before moving on to other, non-genre writing projects.

  Like Margaret Brundage at Weird Tales, Les Tina combined the characteristics of her chosen genre’s art traditions with images of strong women. Her illustrations included rockets, buildings, and planets in the background, which was consistent with the technophilic style of art favored by most SF specialist magazines of the day. This can be seen in her two pieces of interior art for the December 1942 issue of Future Fantasy and Science Fiction. For that issue, Les Tina illustrated editor Robert A. W. Lowndes’s novelette “The Leapers” (published under the pseudonym Carol Grey) and John B. Michel’s short story “Claggett’s Folly.” In “The Leapers” illustration, the most prominent figure is a woman who—in direct contrast to the awkward, fearful-looking men around her—is joyfully rising from a building toward the moon (see plate 5.7).

  In “Claggett’s Folly,” Les Tina depicts a montage of a rocket, a record, a man, a child, and a woman. While the man seems to recoil from the rocket and the record and the child looks at them in with curiosity, the woman gazes upon them with a smile (see plate 5.8). Neither woman is a damsel in distress who needs rescuing by a man. Instead, both seem to lead the people around them with their eager curiosity in the face of technological marvels and adventure. As such, Les Tina adapted the technophilic style of SF art to suggest that women will lead humanity to truly new and different futures.

  DOLLY RACKLEY DONNELL (1906–94) was a Missouri-born illustrator who contributed interior art to Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories from 1943 to 1945. Her illustrations proved immediately popular with readers, several of whom wrote letters that lavished praise on her work and recommended that she do cover art for future issues. Fans initially assumed Donnell was a man, but in the Summer 1944 issue of Thrilling the editor, Oscar J. Friend, explained, “She is a gal illustrator” (106). Friend mistakenly referred to Donnell as “A. J. Donnelly” but in the Fall 1944 issue printed a letter from Donnell in which she gave her name as “D. Donnell” and noted that Friend had confused her name with that of her husband, A.J., who was on active duty “in the Army Air Forces in England” (Donnell, “Abject,” 99). After the war, A.J. followed in his wife’s footsteps and contributed covers to a number of SF novels produced by Fantasy Press.

  Dolly Donnell worked for magazines whose editors preferred artwork in the technophilic style of Frank R. Paul. Donnell contributed to this style by depicting women as active partners in the exploration of the universe rather than as damsels in distress. This is most apparent in the Summer 1944 issue of Thrilling, where her interior artwork directly contrasts with Earle Bergey’s cover. The full-color Bergey cover portrays a scene from Albert De Pina’s “The Priestess of Pakmari” with a woman swooning into the arms of a man who is firing a gun at a tentacled, bug-eyed monster. The woman’s see-through outfit barely conceals her buttocks, which are facing the reader. Donnell’s interior art for the story depicts the same scene, but in her version Nereida, the priestess of the title, is wearing the “beryllium-mesh suit” described in the story and is in an active pose beside the man (see plate 5.9). While she is not holding the “atomo-pistol,” she is the guide of Phillip Varon, the action hero of the story, and is depicted by Donnell as standing up to the creature instead of swooning in fear. One fan seemed to be confused by her representation of the active woman, complaining that “Miss Donnell is a good artist, but she doesn’t know how to draw humans correctly and she puts them into such peculiar positions” (Schick 99). However, Donnell’s techniques were consistent with fashion magazines of the day, where active women were depicted in poses that highlighted their clothing. Donnell’s approach seemed preferable to the many fans who cited her work as superior to that of men such as Bergey (Hamil, “That Screaming” 100; Harmon 100; Hesson 103). Donnell’s vision of women who actively confront the Gothic horrors of space anticipated both the move toward stronger women on midcentury SF magazine covers and the proliferation of women as amazons popularized by modern SF artists such as Julie Bell.