The Devil's Bride

THE DEVIL'S BRIDE - An acrylic painting on a 16 x 20 size canvas board. It appears on the cover of, "Fantastic Stories, Dec.1977."

Sometimes an assignment bothers me because the subject goes against my better nature, and in this case what bothered me was being asked to do a "bondage" cover painting. During the Golden Age of the pulp magazines, among the many titles were some that are referred to today as "The Shudder Pulps." They usually featured "bondage" scenes on their covers that were meant to appeal to the worst part of human nature; women were typically shown in all manner of sadistic situations, usually bound in ropes or chains by some sort of maniac, and dangled over a buzz-saw or a huge vat of boiling oil. They had titles like; Eerie Stories, Horror Stories, and Weird Tales, and they had lots of readers. I did this painting after I concluded that if I didn't do it the editor would probably not send me any more commissions in the future. I learned very early in my career that editors did not like their decisions criticized, or their requests turned down.

Most Golden Age pulp magazines however, were kinder to women, many being created specifically for them; Titles like "Love Stories," and "Romantic Western Stories". Actually, in their zeal to sell magazines the publishers created titles on almost every subject imaginable; "Wall Street Stories," "Civil War Tales," "Wild Game Stories," even "Zeppelin Stories". Whatever your interests were they had a title for you to buy. I was at a Barnes & Noble book store recently, looking at lots of book and magazine covers and I did not see any "bondage" type covers typical of those "Shudder Pulps". No doubt it's because women have come a long way since those early pulp days, women are now major heads of business and industry, as well as major leaders in government. But actually, women never were helpless creatures in need of rescue, history shows that.