Illustrator Leo R. Summers – Literary Art and Illustration

Good Lord, what is going on here?!

The cover of the Summer, 1952 issue of Fantastic – the combined effort of Bayre Phillips and L.R. Summers for the magazine’s first issue – is obviously intended to set up an air; an atmosphere; a mood … to interest readers in the magazine, for it’s unrelated to any of the essays, novelettes, or short stories within the pulp. The central element is the green-skinned woman (she’s emphatically not an Orion slave-girl), who’s holding a goblet filled with a red liquid of an undefined nature, which – port wine? – cherry daiquiri? – tomato juice? – something darkly else entirely? – ! – is fortunately left to the reader’s imagination. Is she about to partake of this drink? Or, is this an offering to the unwary reader? And, that look upon her face; the forceful gaze of her eyes… Threat or submission? (I think the former.) Demanding or beckoning? (The former I think.) What about that head-dress? At passing first, from a distance, a mere mass of intertwined feathers. At focused second, closely, a melange of intertwined writhing bodies.

The cover’s ultimate message, enhanced by a bright, yellow, featureless background, is not “Danger – stay away!”

It is, “Danger – come closer. If you dare!”

Illustration by Virgil W. Finlay for “Six and Ten are Johnny”, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. This story has never been anthologized.
(page 31)

The back cover features Pierre Roy’s oil on canvas painting of 1927 or 1928, “Danger on the Stairs”, which is in the holdings of the Museum of Modern Art, on 53rd Street in Manhattan.

This is the pulp’s rear cover…