Golden Age Pick and Mix



The cover illustrates Ray Cummings’ ‘The Man on the Meteor’ in Future (October 1941). The artist is Hannes Bok, pseudonym of American artist Wayne Woodard (1914 –1964). His teachnique involved glazing his colour-work as he built up his work, and the shimmering, textural effects of this are evident in this image. The story concerns a human astronaut who crash-lands on a meteor. Despite there being no air (‘Air, you say! Air on a meteor like that! Do you call yourself an astronomer? If so, you show your ignorance by such questioning! Yet at least something that served my purposes of breathing was there and that I am here alive to tell it must be your proof.’) He survives, mates with a local woman, starts a family, and experiences various garish and improbable adventures, which Bok's art well captures.
 

Here is one of the many covers from DC Comics' Mystery in Space series, that ran from 1951 to 1966 (this is issue 40, November 1957). Art by Murphy Anderson (1926–2015). The space lifeboat is overloaded and the sole human aboard is sacrificing himself, like Captain Oates, that the others might live. In the background the rocket ship, ripped and crumpled, drifts against a plum-coloured vacuum. The escape pod contains three differentiated alien beings. How the large figure of the human ever fitted in is hard, visually, to parse; as is the nature of the foreshortened airlock (there doesn't seem to be any way a chamber large enough). The composition is a tangle, all three elements colliding messily off-centre, expressive of the collision that has necessitated the lifeboat in the first place.


This 1953 Bantam paperback reprint of Huxley’s famous 1932 novel carries an illustration by Charles Ashford Binger (1907-1974) who began his career in his native England but moved to America after the war. Here he seems to have taken his brief from the frankly mendacious cover-blurb: Huxley’s celebrated utopia-dystopia at no point includes a sexy young couple slipping through a gap in a wall to escape their world. The woman’s dress appears to be made of smoke, a tendril of which is conveniently covering the man’s genital area, thereby sparing our pudeur. She is looking back at the city they are leaving, like Lot’s wife; or perhaps she is merely admiring her own armpit.




British artist Frank Hampson created the lantern-jawed, pipe-smoking, uniformed space hero Dan Dare for Eagle, a UK comic specifically aimed at boys in the age range, 8-12. Hampson’s bright, intricate designs were made in the knowledge that his audience pore over the images, and examine all the details of the futuristic technology. The magazine sold 900,000 copies weekly, audiences in dour, depressed postwar Britain delighting in the technological optimism, colour and fast-paced adventure. This is the cover of the 2nd issue of the Eagle (5th May 1950), with Dan Dare en route for his first adventure on the planet Venus, where he will meet the nefarious bald, megacephalic Venusian villain, the Mekon.

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