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I have posted before on New Texture’s art books. Their latest is George Gross Covered. George Gross (1909-2003) was one of the premier cover artists for the men’s adventure magazines that flourished in the 1950s through the early 1970s.

In the 1990s, it seemed a new book on pulp art or lavishly illustrated books on the pulp magazines came out every year. Lee Server’s Danger is My Business was a great introduction to various pulp magazine genres with lots of color reproductions of pulp magazine covers. Robert E. Howard in the Pulps Vol. One […]

For four years, I have been blogging on sword & sorcery artists. Some are forgotten, obscure, a few are classic. Art has been important to sword & sorcery fiction going back to Hugh Rankin in Weird Tales. A recent artist and one of my favorites is Samuel Dillon. I think I first became aware of […]

Last week’s post on 1980s sword-and-sorcery movie posters proved to be very popular. I received some images of more movies and dug up more looking at the Tubi sword-and-sorcery movie list. Ator, the Fighting Eagle (1983): The son of Torren learns of his heritage, goes to avenge the deaths of his fellow villagers, and rescue his […]

The streaming service Tubi has a sword-and-sorcery movie section. Some of the movies I have never heard of. Others were prominent in the old video rental stores that sprang up in the middle and late 1980s. I have been watching some that I never caught the first time around while I get on the hamster […]

The period from the early 1960s to around 1980 was the golden age for mass market paperback illustration. I covered the fantasy side of things last year with the “Sword and Sorcery Artist” entries. An entertaining historical series are the “Flashman Papers” by George MacDonald Fraser (1925-2008).  Fraser served in the British Army from 1943-1947 […]

                                      New Texture has a new art book out. Pollen’s Action is the follow up and companion to Pollen’s Women. I have written before the men’s adventure magazines of the 1950s to the 1970s were a high […]

A few weeks back, I did a post on artist Ezra Tucker. A friend of mine was able to identify two more non-attributed paperback covers by him.  One was the cover for Andrew J. Offutt’s The Sword of the Gael, Ace edition. This is one of Offutt’s “Cormac MacArt” pastiches of the Robert E. Howard […]

Today is the 93rd birthday for Robert McGinnis. Robert McGinnis is one of the great American paperback book cover artists during the heyday of paperbacks in the 1960s and 70s. If you have any interest in vintage paperbacks, you have probably seen his art. He is possibly best known for his work on the James […]

Someone happened to post the cover to the Ace edition of David C. Smith & Richard L. Tierney’s For the Witch of the Mists (1981). I have seen the book before but never thought about the cover artist. I did not recognize him and did a little searching. The cover artist is Ezra Tucker (b. […]

The men’s adventure magazines that flourished from the early 1950s to the middle 1970s put an emphasis on art. The quality of both cover and interior art is superior to the average pulp magazine of 20 years earlier. Norman Saunders, Mort Kunstler, and Raphael DeSoto are among the better known artists who produced covers for […]

Jeff Jones (1944-2011) was one of the most important illustrators of sword and sorcery fiction. He started out with Canaveral Press’ I am a Barbarian by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1967. Donald Wollheim (again) jumped on the new talent for paperback covers. Jones provided art for two of Jack Vance’s “Planet of Adventure” series and […]