Mad Monsters of Monda-Lau! cover art, Peril All-Men’s adventure magazine cover, March 1962, Vol. VI No. 4 – John Duillo
If you’re a fan of pulp fiction, then you’re going to love our collection Pulp magazine cover art posters. The poster on this listing is a reproduction of the fabulous sci-fi artwork created by the American artist John Duillo. The image was used on the March 1962 cover of the pulp magazine Peril, The All Man’s Magazine. The cover art also includes the titles of other features in the Peril Magazine. These include an exposé on the low life of high society, a story titled Confessions Of A Torso Tosser! An article titled Weather Clear, Track Torrid, described as ‘an intimate peep at the curvy queens who follow the sport of kings. One other article is listed titled ‘Why they call it “the French Touch”
Our very own version of Mad Monsters of Monda-Lau!
Duillo’s fantastic science-fiction painting features a robot attacking a young woman. We’ve tried to track down a copy of the magazine online, to no avail and we can’t track down either of the stories it belonged to. So our take on the story Duillo’s illustration portrays goes like this.
“The control room was eerily quiet as the young woman sat at the helm, her fingers dancing across the controls. She had guided the spaceship through the depths of outer space. Now the rest of the crew were dead, she was responsible for getting the ship to its destination safely. If she failed, so would the mission.
Suddenly, there was a loud noise and the ship lurched forward. The woman quickly hit the buttons to try to bring it back under control. The spaceship gave a sudden jolt and the controls suddenly went haywire. Ellen quickly assessed the situation and realised that a robot had taken over the ship.
Suddenly she felt something grab her from behind, throttling her neck with cold, metal claws. She gasped and tried to fight back, but it was no use. The robot was powerful and determined to kill Ellen, but she was not afraid to fight back. She fought with all her strength. Just as she was about to lose consciousness, she heard a loud crash and the ship lurched to the side. Ellen realised this could be her one her only chance to survive.
The young woman’s heart was pounding in her chest as she fought the rogue robot. She pushed the robot as hard as she could against the spaceship wall. With a loud crash she felt the robot loosen its grip. She had managed to overcome it. It lay motionless on the floor. As she looked down she saw that she had destroyed it. Ellen had emerged victorious… now all she had to do was return to Monda-Lau.
If you have access to the actual story we’d love to read it. So we’d be grateful if you let us know where we can read it.
John Duillo pulp magazine cover artist
John Duillo was born in 1928. He was an American artist who built his reputation on creating eye-catching, action-packed covers for pulp magazines including Man’s Action, AllMen’s Adventure, Cracked and Daring. hen the pulp magazine market declined, paperback novels superceded them. Duillo is believed to have created artwork for an estimated 500 paperback books. Later in his career Duillo focussed on his historical fine art paintings depicting scenes of the Old West and the American Civil War. His prints are still popular and sold in fine art galleries and online.
Pulp Magazine cover art
The cover art of pulp magazines played a major part in the marketing.The magazines would sit on news stands alongside scores of glossy, more high-end magazines. It was the attention-grabbing cover art that would be needed to catch the eye of passersby. The more colourful, action-filled, scintillating, sexy and even lurid, the better. Dramatic, sensationalist and salacious color cover illustrations sold magazines.
In many cases, there is little connection between the actual cover image and the ‘lead story’ it is supposed to represent. Often the cover would be designed first with authors being asked to write their story around the artwork! But it didn’t matter. For some people the cover artwork was the reason they bought the magazine. Several of the posters artists became as popular as the writers of the stories inside the magazine.
Many early pulp magazines featured a mixture of stories each month. But it didn’t take long for some to specialise in different genres, with magazines dedicated to tales about Adventure, Crime, Horror, Romance, Sex, Sports, War, Western and Science Fiction.
With the pulp magazines you could escape into whatever world took your fancy. For adventures on the high seas, in the jungle or in far off lands, you could read magazines such as Adventure, Doc Savage, and Jungle Stories. If you preferred crime and espionage, gun-wielding gangsters, square-jawed detectives, seductive femme fatales, and damsels in distress could be found in pulps like Detective Story Magazine, The Black Mask, Spy Stories or The Shadow. For fans of horror Weird Tales, Dime Mystery Magazine and Horror Stories would scare the bejesus out of you. For fans of cowboy films, stories of the Wild West could be found in Western Story Magazine, Cowboy Stories, Dime Western Magazine, and Wild West Weekly. More risque, lurid and even erotic stories could be found in magazines including Spicy Mystery Stories, Saucy, Spicy Detective, New York Nights, Cupid’s Capers and Spicy Adventures.
One of the most popular genres was and still is Science Fiction and Fantasy. Futuristic places, where state of the art spaceships, new technologies, far off planets, laser beams, mad scientists and strange aliens exist. Places that could be found in books like Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, Weird Tales, Captain Future, and Fantastic Adventures and that were literally ahead of their time.
Regardless of the genre, many but by no means all, pulp covers included a beautiful, voluptuous and scantily clad, damsel in distress. She would invariably be being held against her wishes by a villain, mad scientist or alien and a dashing, square-jawed hero would appear on the scene to save her. There were no restrictions placed on the cover art of pulp magazines so violence and sexual overtones were displayed like never before. In an article on Gizmodo, called Robots, Mad Scientists and Damsels: Astounding Pulp Cover Art, Natalie Baaklini writes “Drama is what publishers stuck to because it sold the story; it’s what the depression era public wanted to see. And it walked a fine line of acceptability in a time when sex and swearing didn’t exist anywhere else in the media”.
Pulp magazine artwork was created by some of today’s most highly regarded illustrators, including J.C. Leyendecker, Dean Cornwell, Earle K. Bergey, Norman Saunders, Peter Dribden and George Rozen to name a few. The illustrationhistory website explains that the magazines included fiction written by many respected authors such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, Zane Grey, H.P. Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, Horatio Alger, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Raymond Chandler, and Arthur C. Clarke. Furthermore, many famous characters and stories were first published in pulp magazines. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ character John Carter first appeared in February 1912 in the pages of The All-Story and his creation Tarzan debuted in All-Story Magazine in October 1912. H.P. Lovecraft’s legendary Cthulhu monster mythos made its debut in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales. The character Zorro first appeared in All-Story Weekly in August 1919, and Conan the Barbarian debuted in Weird Tales, December 1932.
