Leonard Dworkins, ‘Adventures of Buck Rogers December 1938: Cover Art’ (British edition)

 


American artist Leonard Dworkins (?1905-1983) took over from Zack Mosley (1906-93), the original artist on the popular Buck Rogers magazine (which ran continuously from 1929 to 1967), in the mid-1930s. He continued Mosley's style: a simplified, vigorous cartoon idiom of strong outlines, simple colouration, scenes of action or character rendered foresquare, without foreshortening or exaggerated perspective. It is a rather stiff, winningly dated visual idiom. Here, Buck (a 20th-century pilot whom, trapped in a strange mine, sleeps for five centuries and awakes to a science-fictional world of adventure and romance) and 25th-century Wilma Deering fly rather stubby-looking rockets through a sky that, for some reason, includes a prominent ringed planet. Given their evident altitude, Wilma's unclothed legs must be really feeling the cold, though they are at least wearing helmets, which would surely protect them if they were to fall off their precarious rocket-mounts and tumble the, say, three miles between them and the ground. On the other hand Buck's holster is empty, which presumably means his laser-pistol (or similar) has fallen out, coneceivably braining some innocent ground-based pedestrian.

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