No one defined the look of Weird Tales like its premier cover artist, Margaret Brundage. This talented woman, who dressed (and undressed) countless Seabury Quinn, Robert E. Howard, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, Paul Ernst, and C. L. Moore characters, was born in Chicago on December 9, 1900.
After high school, Margaret studied fashion design at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. In 1925, she began drawing for the local fashion industry and newspapers, supplementing her income by working for a Prohibition-era speakeasy. There, she met and married Slim Brundage.
A bouncer and bartender, self-professed hobo, labor organizer, house painter, alcoholic womanizer, and avowed leftist, Slim Brundage was by no means a consistent breadwinner. His commitment to radical causes led to a chaotic home life and, at times, imprisonment. Forced to support herself, her young son, and her sickly mother, Margaret found work as a cover artist for Oriental Stories, Magic Carpet, and Weird Tales, beginning in 1932. Farnsworth Wright – the editor of these Chicago-based magazines – paid her $90 for her cover paintings, most done in pastel on illustration board.
Brundage’s first cover for “The Unique Magazine” was for the September 1932 issue of Weird Tales. Her pastels graced the cover again the next month, then again in March 1933. Beginning in June 1933 — and for the next 39 covers — Weird Tales featured her luscious artwork exclusively. Her last cover completed for Weird Tales appeared on the January 1945 number, capping a run of 66 covers for the magazine, with Brundage receiving no more than $90 for a cover.
Brundage always enjoyed illustrating Robert E. Howard’s stories. It was Weird Tales‘ editor Farnsworth Wright who passed along news of Howard’s suicide to the artist in 1936.
“When I learned of Robert Howard’s death, I was very upset … (Wright and I) both just sat around and cried for most of the day. He was always my personal favorite.”
As detailed in The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage, published by Vanguard Publishing in 2013, she told Chicago author and pulp fan Robert Weinberg that her cover illustration for Howard’s “Black Colossus” generated the most mail for any Weird Tales cover.
In an interview with R. Alain Everts in 1973, Brundage recalled her most controversial Weird Tales cover:
“We had one issue (the September 1933 number) that sold out! It was the story of a very vicious female, getting ahold of the heroine and tying her up and beating her. Well, the public apparently thought it was flagellation, and the entire issue sold out. They could have used a couple of thousand extra (copies).”
In 1938, Short Stories, Inc. bought Weird Tales and moved the magazine’s editorial headquarters from Brundage’s hometown of Chicago to New York City. Wright went east with the magazine, but he was suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, and by 1940 he was dead. Brundage stayed in Chicago, but the difficulty of shipping her fragile chalk illustrations by train to New York and a reduction in Weird Tales‘ cover rates to $50 ended her pulp career just five years later.
Her final magazine cover was a reprint, featured on the November 1953 issue of the digest-sized Weird Tales.
Following her pulp career, Brundage continued to paint. She exhibited and sold her work at art fairs and science fiction conventions. She also worked for social justice causes, primarily in Chicago’s Black community on the South Side. She died in poverty on April 9, 1976, at age 75.
Even today, Margaret Brundage’s work remains popular, iconic, and inspirational. It continues to define popular conceptions of pulp fiction, sword & sorcery, and weird fantasy.
Our lead and featured image, Margaret Brundage’s pastel cover for the June 1933 issue of Weird Tales, illustrates Robert E. Howard’s Conan story, “Black Colossus.”
Although remembered primarily for her Weird Tales covers – including, our final image, the November 1953 number – Margaret Brundage painted covers for other Popular Fiction Publishing magazines. She contributed two covers to Oriental Stories and twice that number to The Magic Carpet Magazine. Brundage also created two covers for Golden Fleece, a short-lived pulp magazine published by Chicago-based Sun Publications.
You’ll find a more detailed discussion of Margaret Brundage’s life and art in Stephen D. Korshak’s and J. David Spurlock’s The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage. You can purchase a copy directly from the publisher — Vanguard Publications — by visiting http://www.vanguardpublishing.com/.
Watch for more on Margaret Brundage at pulpfest.com in the months ahead.
