Four short months after the appearance of his cover illustration for the June, 1962, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Edmund Emshwiller – “Emsh” – created cover art for the magazine’s November issue that was utterly different in style and mood. Though this painting, too, depicted an astronaut, this space explorer seems to be a person quite different from “George”, the intergalactic dispenser of unknown elixers!
Taken at first (and second?) glance, the viewer might be hard-pressed to think that the two illustrations were products of the same hand. November’s astronaut is painted in bold, rough-edged, unrefined strokes. His spacesuit is odd: His visor is a little confining, if it is a visor: It iincorporates a set of vertical bars. His helmet is decorated with two cylindrical, mechanical protrusions: While they could be thrusters for maneuvering in space, they look all the world like something a little more earthbound: Spigots. Beer spigots, that is. Well, there is lots of ambiguity going on here, which is reflected in the astronaut’s pensive countenance.
The sky behind provides an interesting contrast: Rather than appearing as gradations of a particular shade of color, or a series of colors gradually blending into and away from one another, the sky appears as distinctly-edged waves of green, purplish-brown, medium blue, and dark blue, with a few small stars floating just above the horizon: The feel is vaguely reminiscent; lightly akin, to Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, albeit spacecraft were not known to have existed during van Gogh’s lifetime. At least, as far as is known. At least, on earth.
Something else; a tiny detail: Ed Emshwiller typically signed his art with the four-letter moniker “EMSH” tiny in capital letters, often “hiding” his diminutively-written signature somewhere within the details of his finished work, whether painting or black & white interior illustration. For example, in the June, 1962 issue of TMFandSF, “EMSH” appears on the sole of the astronaut’s left boot.
But, November’s cover is anonymous: EMSH is nowhere to be found. And, another similarity with June: This, too, is a “stand-alone” illustration: The painting pertains to none of the stories within the issue, and, is un-named in the table of contents.
Perhaps we’re supposed to supply the story?
