Margaret Brundage was one of the most prolific cover artists for the pulp magazines; for Weird Tales specifically, she created 66 original pieces of cover art. Like many of the contemporary readers of the pulp, I was not aware that a woman created much of its cover art. Naively, I just assumed that men drew the beautiful, scantily clad women on these covers. In a similar vein as Frazetta’s Vampirella cover, these images were meant to attract the reader’s attention, to draw him in, to get him to purchase the magazine. But on further reflection, something does come across through Brundage’s work that does not (for me, anyway) happen when I view Frazetta’s paintings.
The characteristic that is most telling of Brundage’s work is its inherent movement. To look at this particular image, I am struck by its apparent natural fluidity. Like Frazetta’s work, Brundage’s females are curvy, seductive, and seem to embody great power. Unlike Frazetta’s work, though, all of Brundage’s paintings seem ready to burst forth from the page. Their power is highly charged, active.
This image of the Vampire Master (I can only assume that that was what Brundage’s was illustrating as it’s the only story title printed with the image) shows her posed unusually. The angle of her arms, the placement of her hands, give the impression that she was caught in mid-action. Perhaps she is getting ready to extend her arms outward from her body; perhaps she will extend them in front of her. She may even be in the process of dropping her arms by the sides of her body. The viewer does not know, exactly, what’s she doing, but her movement transcends the page. She actually seems to embody more power than Vampirella does because of Brundage’s ability to give her paintings such life.
What also intrigues me about Brundage’s choice of images is that she typically did not illustrate scenes from the stories. Often, she would just create images that showed what she believed to be the essence of a story, her impression. The vampire master, then, may look nothing like this; she might not even be a woman. So, while still succumbing to the commodity nature of the publication, and the fact that images of beautiful women probably sold more issues, Brundage may be inverting this trend.
By choosing to present so many images of women on the cover (and many of her covers show only women, no men) even when the female characters may not have played a major role in the stories or even had been in the stories to begin with, she was instead reserving this space for images of powerful, active women.
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