Space Ark

The animals march, two-by-two, into an Apollo-era rocket, as the skies grey and pour behind. The image is cover art by Alex Schomburg for Fantastic (October 1961), illustrating Robert Young's novella of a new Flood, Deluge II. Schomburg, born Alejandro Schomburg y Rosa (1905-1998), was a Puerto Rican commercial artist of remarkable precision and fineness of line; and his artwork here entirely encapsulates Young's tale, cutting through the early sections (‘the ancient stresses were ready to tear the earth apart, and only Anton Burke was ready. He planned to choose his passenger-list with care. But when the time came, his space-ship Ark was empty—save for the strangest friends a man could have on a journey to the stars’) to the Noahic revelation at the story's end, that Burke will be accompanied to safety and the stars by Earth's beasts rather than its human population. By angling the scene ten degrees to the right, Burke adds dynamism and verve to what might have been a rather static image; but its strength is in its clarity of representation and its implied storytelling.

The idea of a ‘space ark’, reproducing the Biblical boat and carrying paired sets of all the Earth's animals, is a common one, an immediately recognisable visual rebus: almost one might call it a meme. Here is the cover of the Strange Adventures DC comic for August 1955 (number 59 of a series that ran from 1950 to 1973). The artist is uncredited, but may have been Carmine Infantino (1925-2013).        The composition of this image is less linear and more alive than Schomburg's, although the styling, with its cruder colouring and quasi-fauvist purples, pinks, reds, lime-greens and yellows, is arrestingly, even queasily direct. As with the Schomburg image, it's not clear why the animals, unyoked and unharnessed, are so placidly filing into the rather poky-looking rocket. The unidentified individual in the crowd, being held-back by a line of policeman, asks what seems a perfectly valid question.