Oh, i’m sorry i don’t think you heard me…ROCKET SKIS!!
Artist Earle Bergey can take much of the credit for the *Miniskirts on the Moon* style of portraying female characters in classic pulp science fiction, which i think is what makes this cover so notable.
Not only is it’s female protagonist showing little skin, but she’s front & centre, armed & blasting monsters with her square-jawed male counterpart, tastefully doing the same in the background. Oddly progressive for 1946.
Though seemingly to compensate, the interiors are wall-to-wall miniskirts:)
As Earle Bergey is to Barbarella, Allan Anderson is to Xena Warrior-Princess.
While Bergey’s cover girls were all cutesy miniskirts & ray guns, Anderson’s were chain-mail & badass battle-axes. And none more so than his Black Amazon of Mars.
Planet Stories, March 1951.
And Leigh Brackett, Leigh. Eff-ing. Brackett. Known as the “Queen of Space Opera”, one of the best and most prolific of all the women pulp writers, she wrote dozens of short stories & novelettes for Planet Stories, Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories throughout the forties & fifties before starting a jaw dropping screenwriting career.
Her first hollywood gig? Co-writing the adaptation of The Big Sleep…with William Faulkner. She then wrote a series of westerns for John Wayne before returning to the works of Raymond Chandler with Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye.
Her Final hollywood work? A little flick called Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.
To be sure, Norman Saunders is known for his crime pulps. Dime Detective, Spicy Mystery, and some of the best covers for the genre defining Black Mask magazine. But in truth Saunders had a remarkably diverse body of work ranging from westerns to jungle adventures to what we see here, Science Fiction.
Anyone familiar with Bela Lugosi’s classic 1930s serial The Phantom Creeps might see a similarity with it’s central ghoul-faced monster, sadly an exaggerated stylish beastie who’s type would soon fall out of fashion in the pulps and paperbacks in favour of a more realistic approach.
And don’t skim over the interiors here, some absolutely amazing stuff from Vergil Finley, Lawrence & Hannes Bok.
