PULP COVER FRIDAY AND THE TRIUMPHANT RETURN OF THE MASTER OF MEN!
Due to the overwhelming crush of popular demand (Okay. One person demanded it. But see, this is what happens when you speak up. Come on, people, let your voices be heard!) and also because these covers are just so awesomely awesome (I have run out of words), here’s another bunch of Spider covers.
I’ve largely let the images speak for themselves this time around since, as I’ve already said, I’m flat out of words to describe them. Last PCF I got to early 1937 in the Spider ouevre. This time I didn’t get out of 1938. Either I’ve become completely indecisive or the late 1930s was a Golden Age of bat-guano crazy in the Spider’s life. I’d never looked at the covers this closely before, and I’ve got to say I’m completely blown away by the deranged awesomeness of both titles and images. Excuse me while I geek out.
There. Better now. I think I’ll go and read some Spiders.
My favorite!
No, wait!
I don’t want to go to the well too often, but I think I’ll come back for a third installment of these covers.
More nifty covers. Seems the Spider went with “Women on Meat Hooks” rather than “Girls in Glass Tubes.”
Machine guns over the WH has an interesting cover. Is this what happens when you dis the Dalai Lama? And “The Grey Horde Creeps” might be something of a pun. Is the grey horde creeping or are there creeps in the grey horde? Ah, deliciousness!
Yes, although, in all fairness, he does not seem to discriminate when it comes to meathooks and sex.
Love these titles. And as for the Grey Horde, at least we finally get to see cultists in something other than crimson. Makes for a nice change.
Love the 1930′s undies! And the giant skeleton in the surgeon’s mask. (Is he afraid of breathing on someone and spreading germs?)
Those cultists in gasmasks (?) on WHEN THOUSANDS SLEPT IN HELL remind me of the guy that is spying on Han Solo and rats him out to Jabba in Star Wars IV. Inspiration, perhaps?
Good catch. Maybe. But the cultist’s masks/noses are based on masks physicians used to ward off plagues in the Middle Ages. They stuffed them full of supposedly virtuous herbs to help ward off the evil effluviums, or whatever. (The skull wearing the surgical mask would also suggest something plaguey going on.) Too bad they hadn’t heard of germs.
Wow! I never knew that. Thanks for the education. I searched for ‘plague doctor masks’ and found a slew of pictures. Most look more like beaks then snouts. I’d seen these before but never knew what they were. Can you imagine your doctor coming to visit you wearing one of these?!?
By the way, John I twittered this to the Cheese Magnet account a while back but never received any response: ever since the reformating of the sight, I can’t click on the pictures in your posts to see the larger version. Instead I get an error message. Posts from the other contributors don’t seem to have this problem.
I’ll pass that comment on to Tanzi, in case he doesn’t see it here. He’s the tech guru. I have no idea why that would be happening.
And no, I can’t imagine that. Well, yes, I guess I can. I just saw my doctor Wednesday, and if he’d come into the examining room wearing one of those masks, I would have been out the window. Nevermind that there was no window in the room. I would have made one.
If you want to see some cool images of hellish medival landscapes with all sorts of weird guys (including ones so masked), check out some Bosch paintings. Maybe Bruegal, too, though I may be mixing him up with someone else.
The full error for reference: “Catchable fatal error: Object of class WP_Error could not be converted to string in /home/threads/cheese-magnet.com/wp-content/themes/continuum/single.php on line 120″
This occurs on both my home and work computers so I don’t think I’m the problem.
That’s funny…on multiple levels. When I saw the bird-like plague masks, I immediately thought of the bird-like creature with the funnel on his head from Bosch’s “Last Temptation of Saint Anthony” – a poster of which I had hanging in my dorm at university a million years ago. I’m a fan of Bosch’s work and have a book of his collected paintings. And how did I become a fan of Bosch? When that same funnel wearing creature was referred to as a penguin and took the role of Bloat’s conscience/inner voice made corporeal in the Wild Cards series. One of the contributors to the Wild Card series is…well I think we all know the answer to that one.
It’s the circle of life…or something less sappy sounding.
“It’s a small world afterall, it’s a small world –”
Well, enough of that. True, though. I’m a big Bosch fan myself.
Not to mention Wild Cards….
Steve will be guest of honor at the NM con this year. It will be good to see him again.
Didn’t it ever occurr to anyone that those dorky little domino masks -don’t actually disguise you-? Anyone who knows your face will still recognize you.
Except in “Miracle Men”.
You saw GREEN LANTERN, right?
That was one of the movie’s best moments.
“Hal???!!!!????”
Replying to myself.
Actually, funny you should say that about the masks, Steve, because I just realized for the first time this very minute that the artist has gotten it all wrong. In the books they make a big deal about how Richard Wentworth is a master of disguise (as were all 1930s vigilantes) and he went around in basically a fright wig and gobs of make-up that made him look like like a hideous old man.
Huh. Wonder why they never depicted that on the covers.
I think they did once or twice, but the editors liked the domino mask cover look because it was more kid-friendly (the target audience was kids in spite of what the interior ads seemed to indicate).
Here’s a sample http://home.cogeco.ca/~jkoomen/spider-jun.jpg
He still looks too young, but the long hair and the older face are supposed to make him look like some criminal (can’t remember the name) that all the other crooks feared.
Hey Joe — good to hear from you.
Kids must have been hardier in those days. And thanks for the link. Yeah — the face still doesn’t quite square with the descriptions. Coincidentally — I think I used that very cover when I put up some miscellaneous hero pulp covers in a CM post some months ago.