#space walrus

One giant leap for walrus-kind.

                                 Alien Alligator-Men and Space Walruses!   

What does a monster look like?  This question has certainly been asked many times over the years.  If you’re a writer, you can be as specific or non-specific as you like, the reader will fill in the blanks. The Beast in Revelation 13:1-10 has “seven heads and ten horns...like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion.”  H.P. Lovecraft described Cthlulu as “a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubber-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.”

While some science-fiction, fantasy and horror-fiction authors—particularly in the first half of the 20th century—resorted to such chimerical monsters, perhaps taking the lead from the Bible and from Greek mythology (think, the Minotaur), others did attempt to describe their other-worldly (either literally not of Earth or supernatural) menaces in imaginative terms. Sewell Peaslee Wright, whose story “The Ghost World” appears in the issue of Astounding Stories shown above, said his alien creatures “were pale, and almost completely transparent. What their forms might be, I could not even guess. I could make out writhing, tentacle-like arms, and wrinkled, flabby excrudescences and that was all.”

If you’re an artist charged with representing (for exploitation/promotional/sales purposes) a monster from a work of fiction—be it a print story, a comic story, or a movie--you probably should be at least somewhat faithful to the source work, although not slavishly so. Although “The Call of Cthulhu” was not referenced on the cover of Weird Tales February 1928, if it had been, and the artist had depicted Cthulhu as a giant ladybug or something, readers might have complained.  The famous poster for The Wasp Woman (1959) features a gigantic wasp with a woman’s face, grasping a screaming, shirtless man standing on a pile of skulls.  Amazing!  I’ll buy a ticket!  But in the movie itself, the Wasp Woman is an actress or stunt-person dressed in a green velour dress and high heels, wearing a furry mask with two ping-pong ball eyes and cute little antenna-horns.  Hyperbole, thy name is film poster.

However, if your magazine, paperback, pulp, or comic book cover is not related to a specific story, the sky’s the limit. Go nuts!  Admittedly, I haven’t done a lot (alright, any) research into this—that’s a project for someone with more free time than I—so I don’t know what percentage of comic, magazine, pulp, and paperback “monster” covers directly correlated with the contents of the particular publication.  A quick glance at some 1950s horror comics suggests the cover subjects tended towards generic monsters rather than illustrations of interior stories.  On the other hand, the first few years (at least) of the Astounding Stories pulp covers seem to be largely linked to featured stories in those issues.  If I had to guess, I’d imagine story-related covers became somewhat less prevalent in the waning years of the pulps, but again, that’s just a guess.  Paperback books tended towards fairly literal representations until the late 1960s, when things got more abstract and symbolic. To reiterate, I’m pulling all of these suppositions out of my...back pocket, so spare my your angry, fact-based rebuttals.

Some artists (and writers) did exercise more imagination than others, but—particularly in the 1920s-1950s period—the tendency seems to have been to draw or paint monsters which were moderately conventional.  That is, they were recognisably adapted from actual creatures (in some cases, just extra-large versions of insects, animals, and so forth) and/or (as Lovecraft might put it) a “vaguely anthropoid outline” with “monstrous” features and/or modifications.  This is not definitive: the monster on the cover of Astounding Stories September 1932 (painted by Wesso), is extremely unusual in form, and there were other examples. 

This conventionality is understandable in the context of movie-monster design, as opposed to print or graphic media.  The vast majority of film monsters prior to the advent of CGI in the 1980s were constrained as much by the technology of the period as by the imagination of the designers: your monster was either going to be portrayed on-screen by a man-in-a-suit-and-makeup, or would be an actual creature (with occasional minor additions, such as the dorsal fin glued to an alligator in One Million B.C.) optically-enlarged.  Your options were thus limited, and odd results such as the space-helmeted gorilla-suited alien in Robot Monster and the soapsuds-covered monster in The Unknown Terror were the result.  Exceptions (such as the blobs in The Blob and Caltiki, the Immortal Monster) were rare.

Even the relatively small number of stop-motion animated creatures, which were theoretically freed from these restrictions, were mostly conventional in form (e.g., King Kong, the dinosaurish-Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, etc.).

Artists working on paintings or drawings had more freedom—as long as they weren’t shackeled to a pre-existing source, as noted above—but it took a while for them to utilise it.  Some never got away from humanoid-shaped monsters or embiggened versions of real creatures, others took advantage of the fact that you can easily draw a monster that would be technically difficult (if not impossible) to represent in a pre-CGI motion picture.

The two pulp magazine covers examined in this essay are from the period when monsters tended to look like familiar things.  Furthermore, the artists were assigned to illustrate stories from the current issue of that magazine, and in both cases the authors were fairly diligent about describing the alien menaces, which descriptions the artists followed, more or less.

“Monsters of Mars” by Edmond Hamilton, appeared in Astounding Stories, April 1931 (which can be read in facsimile form online, here).  Hamilton was a prolific science fiction author, perhaps best-known today for his “Captain Future” series. The cover was “Painted in Water-Colors” by H.W. Wesso. Hans Waldemar Wessolowski was a German immigrant who entered the pulp magazine field in the 1920s.  Astounding Stories used his artwork on the covers of its first 34 issues (1930-38); he also drew interior illustrations for this publication.

Edmond Hamilton’s story goes into considerable detail about the evil denizens of Mars:

"Crocodile-men! It was only so that he could think of them in that moment. For they were terribly like great crocodile shapes that had learned in some way to carry themselves erect upon their hinder limbs. The bodies were not covered with skin, but with green bony plates. The limbs, thick and taloned at their paw-ends, seemed greater in size and stronger, the upper two great arms and the lower two the legs upon which each walked, while there was but the suggestion of a tail. But the flat head set on the neckless body was most crocodilian of all, with great fanged, hinged jaws projecting forward, and with dark unwinking eyes set back in bony sockets. Each of the creatures wore on his torso a gleaming garment like a coat of metal scales, with metal belts in which some had shining tubes.”

Comparing Hamilton’s prose with Wesso’s cover art shows an extremely close correlation between the two.  Perhaps the only “error” in the painting is that Wesso merges the Martians’ torso garment with their skin: Hamilton seems to indicate that the Martians wear something like a chain-mail vest, but there’s no distinction in the art between the clothing and the body, no demarcation around the neck or on the wrist between the “sleeve” and the “hand” (or, if the garment is sleeveless, no armholes are visible).  Indeed, the only indication that the Martians are supposed to be wearing clothing at all is the fact that the bottom of the “garment” is evident below the belt.

Interestingly enough, Wesso's cover art contains additional details from Hamilton's story.  The conical shapes in the background are Martian buildings:

“About them lay a Martian city, seen by their eager eyes for the first time. It was a city whose structures were giant metal cones like that from which they had just come, though none seemed as large as that titanic one.”

The story involves 3 men from Earth who journey to Mars via a Star Trekian transporter device. Once there, they discover the reptilian Martians intend to go back to Earth via the transporter and conquer our planet.  Two of the Earthmen flee through the Martian city, a scene reproduced on the cover. The rather silly mid-air poses of the men—they appear to be jumping over invisible hurdles--are explained in the story:

“There's but one way," Milton whispered swiftly. "Our earthly muscles would enable us, I think, to get through this window-opening above us in a leap, if we had a moment's chance.”

Obviously, Wesso read the story and did his honest best to recreate Hamilton's word-imagery in watercolor format.  Is this painting too dependent on the story?  Could the cover have been more effective if the artist had chosen a different scene to illustrate, or had concocted one which, even if not literally described in the story, was still faithful to the overall tone, accurate in its depiction of the Martians, and yet somewhat more dramatic?  Well, yes, I suppose so, but if my bubbe had balls she'd be my zaide.  It is what it is, and Wesso's artwork is fine, the little thing about the Martians' "coats" aside.

Two final notes about this cover.  The Earthmen are wearing lace-up leather boots, the kind associated with hunters in this era.  Any time I see images of people wearing these boots, my first thought is: "how time-consuming it must have been to put these boots on and to take them off."

The second thing that immediately comes to mind is the resemblance between the Martians and the titular menace of The Alligator People (1959).   This is surely a coincidence--bipedal alligator/crocodile imagery dates back to ancient Egypt and their god Sobek--but it just goes to show you, a good idea is a good idea.

The second pulp cover discussed today is another Earle Bergey painting (see more Bergey-relevant posts here  and here).

This is a nice, glossy “space opera” cover by Bergey, complete with a damsel in distress (wearing a metal bra, as they so often did), and a Flash Gordon-esque hero ray-blasting some monsters.  What makes this stand out from other, similar science-fiction pulp covers of the era (including others by Bergey), are the alien monsters, which—even before I read the associated story—I immediately recognised as space walruses.  Believe me, once you’ve seen a space walrus, you’ll never mistake them for anything else.

As with Hans Wesso and “Monsters of Mars,” Bergey had clearly read Charles W. Harbaugh’s “Star of Treasure”—the featured “scientifiction novel” in this issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories--before painting his cover.  Unfortunately for Bergey, he had to slog through a considerable amount of futuristic political intrigue before his protagonist,  “Lance Crosse of Xanadu, Mars” reaches the star Sirius to recover a treasure hidden by his space pirate grandfather.  Lance is “fighting a rotten, archaic Earth government” called the Ninth Diktor (and its secret police, the Stapo—are you getting the idea that this 1944 story was influenced by the current world war?).  On Sirius, Lance, his companions, and the pursuing Stapo are attacked by “mud beasts”--

“A vast, shapeless creature threw itself at her, and a slit opened in its head, baring a ghastly white mouth with double rows of yellow fangs...The more agile of them were already at the edge of the bog, leaping at the bank and snarling. Their bodies were vast sacks of muscles. In general shape, they resembled the walrus of Earth, although their blunt heads were much larger and their mouths vast caverns of destruction... One managed to cast itself up out of the bog. Crosse saw that it had four pairs of fleshy flippers on the underpart of its body and a powerful tail. Awkwardly, it lumbered toward him, mouth agape, but its progress on hard land was slow. Crosse shot it quickly.”

Charles W. Harbaugh does not seem to have written a lot of science fiction (in fact, “Star of Treasure” is the only credit for him at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (isfdb.org).  The mud beasts only appear in the last few pages of this longish story (hardly a “novel” by any standards except those of pulp magazines), which is otherwise structured as a series of repeated narrow escapes (on Earth, on Mars) by Lance as he tries reach Sirius.  Bergey’s cover art rather accurately depicts the mud beasts as (a) walrus-like in appearance, (b) living in mud, (c) ill-tempered, and (d) numerous.  The mud beasts—unlike the Martian crocodile-men—are not intelligent aliens.  They are, literally, dumb beasts who attack the Earth visitors to eat them, who pursue this goal inexorably (not even, Harbaugh points out, flinching when their companions are ray-blasted), and who overcome the Stapo men by dint of sheet numbers.

[As an aside, I’d like to be able to describe my body as a “vast sack of muscles.”]

Curiously, Bergey had painted a somewhat similar cover for the April 1943 Thrilling Wonder Stories, also featuring a horde of squat, flippered creatures emerging from a swamp to attack humans.  This atmospheric cover is, from a strictly artistic standpoint, superior to his “Star of Treasure” painting (although the monsters resemble space-seals or space Kewpie dolls rather than space-walruses, and are consequently not quite as ironically amusing).

A couple of final, mostly trivial points.  Note that this issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, despite being published 13 years after the Astounding Stories analysed here, actually cost less ($.15 versus $.20); in fact, in 1942 Astounding Stories (which was now a more “serious” science-fiction magazine, as opposed to the space-operatic Thrilling Wonder Stories) had raised its price to $.25.  Thrilling Wonder Stories, as with most of Ned Pines’ pulps and comics of the war years, has a “Buy War Bonds and Stamps for Victory” plug on the cover.