Classifying Pulp Magazine Cover Art
31. Dec, 2009 
6 Comments
I do a lot of different things with SF pulp magazine covers – list them on my website for collecting purposes, find themes and collect them for ‘top 10′ posts on the blog, look at them endlessly – I’ve even recently begun to feature not only the covers but the insides of selected magazines on my new Electro-Pulp Video Magazine.
I’ve got a pretty good memory for this art (and related subjects – SF titles, authors, plots – my mother would say I’ve got a good memory for the things that interest me, lol), but after a while they tend to blur together. It’s not always easy to remember which cover(s) of what magazines featured giant houseflies.
There was also a recent compilation by (I think) Tor (corrections appreciated) into what the common elements of fantasy book title cover art were: swords, brawny men and brassiered women (dragons too) featured prominently.
I decided that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to apply the same kind of catalogingto the pulp mag cover art (add it to the compilation pile – book collection database, A Bertram Chandler Concordance, etc., etc) and I’ve put together a preliminary list of elements that I’ve found that are fairly common. I figured I’d share it here. It’s actually kind of humorous when you think about these elements as icons and realize that many, if not most of them, have been combined at one time or another, somewhere on the cover of a pulp magazine.
spaceships
giant
one person
taking off
exploding
colliding
landed on barren/craggy/icebound/harsh terrain
landed on lush/jungly/marshy/tropical/wooded terrain
abandoned
flying through space
women
SCWIPs (Scantily Clad Women In Peril)
SCWICs (Scantily Clad Women In Control)
BBs (beautiful blondes)
aliens
tiny
giant
reptiloid
bem
humanoid
insectoid
plant creatures
multi-armed
tentacled
cockaroaches
shrimp
jellyfish
creatures
giant
insects
dinosaurs
snakes/serpents
planets
exploding
colliding
earth
moon
saturn
Jupiter
asteroid
barren/craggy/icebound/harsh terrain
swampy/jungly/foresty/lush terrain
caverns
weapons
mega
big
exploding
rays
flames
raygun pistols (futuristic hand weapons)
electric rifles (futuristic shoulder weapons)
mushroom clouds
robots
giant
humanoid
military
spherical
floating
tracked
men in spacesuits
firing weapons
exploring
jumping about
floating in space
walking on spaceships (EVA)
dead (and/or skeletonized)
descending through an atmosphere
people
giant
tiny
invisible
disembodied heads
big brainy heads
being tortured/subjected to medical/scientific experimentation
captured
fiendishly gloating
thinking very hard
floating (in air/in zero gravity)
sleeping/dreaming/in suspended animation
cities
destroyed
decayed
giant
exploding
under attack
floating in the air/in space
laboratories
bubbling
electrified
abstract things
plants
people
landscapes
buildings
machines
space
galaxies
nebulosities
star fields
This is by no means exhaustive, but there are an awful lot of covers that could be adequately cataloged using just the above descriptions.
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You should bring your idea to fruition over at Flickr. Basically, you can create a database of magazine covers with various tags/subjects, so when someone types in “insects,” they get a gallery of magazines with insects on the cover.
That would be nice, but the majority of the covers are either not scanned or are under copyright or the scans are under copyright, etc., etc.
It doesn’t need the images though – just the issue date/volume and number, plus the tags.
Right now I’m more interested in seeing what the tags I might need are.
I think you’ve just created a new academic discipline. Expect courses in Pulp Magazine Cover Taxonomy to be offered before the decade is out.
lol.
I wonder if anyone wants to help me set up a sql database and data entry forms online. Once we get the “classes” selected (and say, 90% of the tags refined), anyone could go on there, enter the name and issue of a pulp mag and then click boxes that tag the cover image. kind of a poor mans distributed processing….
hi Steve,
If you need cover images, check out Phil Stephensen-Payne’s “Galactic Central”
http://www.philsp.com/
Just look under Image Gallery and the title of the pulp!
Of course, I considered descriptive taxonomies like you suggest for my own little database, which is in PHP/mySQL, http://www.dbr.nu/sf/artists/
…but I’d have to agree with Paul that the open tagging method works best. Enjoyed looking over your set of terms, though! Much fun!
Following up on your idea, ideally just write a script that loads the thumbnails from Galactic Central and allows anyone to add tags to particular images. In this way, only the tags need be stored, not the images.
I’m at Phil’s site all the time. I game me permission to use some of his images on my volume 1 number 1 gallery