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A LOOK AT THE PULPS
PART 5:
FRANK R. PAUL
Pulp covers, printed in color on higher-quality (slick) paper, were famous for their half-dressed damsels in distress, usually awaiting a rescuing hero. Cover art played a major part in the marketing of pulp magazines, and a number of the most successful cover artists became as popular as the authors featured on the interior pages. Among the most famous pulp artists were Frank R. Paul, Virgil Finlay, Edd Cartier, Margaret Brundage and Norman Saunders. Covers were important enough to sales that sometimes they would be designed first; authors would then be shown the cover art and asked to write a story to match.
Frank Rudolph Paul (April 18, 1884 - June 29, 1963) was an illustrator of US pulp magazines in the science fiction field. He was born in Vienna, Austria and died in Teaneck, New Jersey.
A discovery of Hugo Gernsback (himself an immigrant from Luxembourg), Frank R. Paul was influential in defining what both cover art and interior illustrations in the nascent science fiction pulps of the 1920s looked like.[1]
Paul's work is characterized by dramatic compositions (often involving enormous machines, robots or spaceships), bright or even garish colors, and a limited ability to depict human faces, especially the female ones. His early architectural training is also evident in his work.
Among his credits, Paul painted 38 covers for Amazing Stories from April 1926 to June 1929 and 7 for the Amazing Stories Annual and Quarterly; with several dozen additional issues featuring his art on the back cover (May 1939 to July 1946), and several issues from April 1961 to September 1968 featuring new or reproduced art. After Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories in 1929, Paul followed him to the magazines Air Wonder Stories, Science Wonder Stories, and Wonder Stories and the associated quarterlies, which published 103 of his color covers from June 1929 to April 1936. Paul also painted covers for Planet Stories, Superworld Comics, Science Fiction magazine, and the first issue (October-November, 1939) of Marvel Comics. This last item featured the debuts of Human Torch and Sub-Mariner, and good copies sell at auction for twenty to thirty thousand dollars. All totaled, his magazine covers exceed 220.
His most famous Amazing Stories cover is probably that from August 1927, illustrating a reprint of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds
More from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_magazine
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has this to say about Frank R. Paul: "FRP is the best candidate for 'Father of Modern SF illustration', at least in the form it took in the pulp magazines. He received much of his education in Vienna, and studied also in Paris and New York. Trained as an architect, he was discovered by [editor] Hugo Gernsback in 1914 while working for a rural newspaper. Their names have been virtually inseparable ever since the days of Electrical Experimenter. ... For #1 of Amazing Stories in Apr 1926 FRP not only painted the cover illustration but did all the interior black-and-white artwork as well, and continued to do [all the covers and many of the interiors] until Gernsback lost control of the magazine in 1929. When Gernsback started publishing again later that year, FRP was once more his primary illustrator, on Science Wonder Stories, Air Wonder Stories and then Wonder Stories; indeed, his association with Gernsback lasted until the short-lived Science Fiction Plus in 1953 [and beyond, if you consider Gernsback's Forecast magazines - FW]; he painted more than 150 covers for Gernsback in all [closer to 190 if you count Science & Invention and Forecast - FW]. He worked elsewhere, too, with a further 28 front covers for various non-Gernsback SF magazines, including all 12 for Charles D. Hornig's Science Fiction, and also a series of full colour back-cover paintings for the Ziff-Davis Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures (1939-1946). He also did all the illustration [correction, all the covers and some comix - FW] for Superworld Comics, a Gernsback experiment of 1939. --Frank Wu
Learn more about Frank R. Paul at: http://www.frankwu.com/paul1.html
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