Black Gate

The fifth issue of Weird Tales was cover-dated July-August 1923, meaning for practical purposes that the magazine had skipped publishing in the month of July. With the skipped month the first volume of Weird Tales came to an end after four issues; the fifth issue began Volume 2, which would last for four months. Then the magazine skipped the month of December, and the January 1924 issue began Volume 3, which would run for another four issues. Things got a little confusing at that point, as we will eventually see.

The second volume doesn’t have any major differences in format from the first, which is to say the July-August issue physically resembles the June one. It’s the same size, with the same logo. The cover illustration’s black-and-white instead of colour, but is a definite step up in craftsmanship. The image is signed ‘Mally’ above the initials ‘RLM’ in a circle, and is likely the work of George William Mally, perhaps in collaboration with his wife Ruth Lena Mikelson Mally. It’s solid draughtsmanship and looks reasonably dramatic, though it’s unclear what story it’s meant to be illustrating.

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This is the sixth post in a series reflecting on the world of the 1920s as a background to early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in a big city in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things might you see? What do those things suggest about ways people think? Or about the stories they tell?

Perhaps, just possibly, you’ll walk past a hotel or other building with a display of flags of the world. In which case you might see a flag representing Canada. You won’t find a Canadian consulate or legation, as Canada doesn’t have any of those in 1923. The reason why not will be hinted at by the Canadian flag you’ll see. Officially, the national flag of Canada in 1923 is the Royal Union Flag, also known as the Union Jack. But there is another flag more specifically associated with Canada: the Canadian Red Ensign. The original Red Ensign, flown by British merchantmen, is a field of red with the Union Jack in the upper left corner. The Canadian Red Ensign formerly added the coat of arms of the nine provinces to the red field; in 1922 when King George V granted Canada a coat of arms the new heraldry replaced the provincial insignia. The Red Ensign’s not an official flag, and in fact will only be formally authorised for use on Canadian government buildings outside Canada in 1924, but it’s widely-used nevertheless and during the Great War was a common symbol of Canadian identity. You will certainly not see a red-bordered flag with a red maple leaf against a white background; in 1923, you’re more than 40 years too early for that.

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This is the sixth post in a series reflecting on the world of the 1920s as a background to early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in a big city in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things might you see? What do those things suggest about ways people think? Or about the stories they tell?

Perhaps you’ll see a bank. Bank architecture in the 1920s typically follows traditions going back to the 18th century, in terms of what the architecture is supposed to convey and how. Neo-classical buildings speak of power and security. You can leave your money in one of these temple-like structures, and feel safe. The bank will not disappear, it will not collapse, it will not fall before the bombs of a robber or a revolutionary. That matters; in an age before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation the collapse of a bank can wipe out a depositor’s savings. And certainly this is an age that has recently seen many panics and controversies revolving around money and the economy; therefore often also revolving around politics, and around labour.

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The fourth issue of Weird Tales, dated June 1923, keeps the same format as the issue previous — starting with the large bedsheet size, about 9 inches by 12. The trade dress of the cover is the same, with the same logo. The design of the cover, with a splash of red in which one story is advertised in black writing, is the same. Unfortunately, the actual cover art, by regular Weird Tales artist William Heitman, isn’t very good.

There’s a lady, there’s an ape, and the latter seems to have surprised the former in her room. The majority of Weird Tales readers were likely able to place the image at once as a scene from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders In the Rue Morgue,” which is reprinted this issue. The problem is that it’s not a particularly evocative image, and the poses of the characters seem odd at first glance and make less sense the more you look at them.

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The new format Weird Tales adopted for its third issue reached right into the table of contents, which dropped from two pages to one, with of necessity a more cramped layout. One extremely short story isn’t listed, but the magazine makes sure to promote “Nineteen Thrilling Short Stories” along with “Two Complete Novelettes.” That’s actually an increase over the last issue, which had sixteen short stories and two novelettes. So, having discussed the format in a previous post, let’s now look closely at this issue’s fiction.

And it is necessary with this issue to talk about race in Weird Tales, starting with the first story in the magazine (so this post will include quotations and mentions of period racism). “The Moon Terror,” by A.G. Birch, is promoted by a cover blurb; it’s 30,000 words long, 20,000 of which appear in this issue, with the conclusion in the next month’s magazine. It’s a textbook example of Yellow Peril racism, in which sinister East Asians menace white people and the Western world. In this case, the villains are a secret Chinese society who threaten the planet as a whole with increasingly powerful earthquakes.

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This is the fifth post in a series reflecting on the world of the 1920s as a background for discussing the early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in a big city in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things might you see? What do those things suggest about ways people think? What do they say about the stories they tell?

Let’s say you get hungry as you walk along, and think about getting some food later. Maybe you see a restaurant, and a grocery store near it. What kind of food will you be able to buy in the store? And what sort of a restaurant are you looking at? There are a lot of potential answers to that second question, but I want to focus on one admittedly unusual possibility. If you’re in the right city, especially New York or Philadelphia, maybe you have the chance to pop into an automat. And in New York, you might even spot a future Weird Tales writer drinking the hot chocolate.

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The third issue of Weird Tales saw the magazine experiment with a significant change in presentation. The first two issues had been a standard pulp size, about 6 inches by 9; the May 1923 issue went to the bedsheet format, a bit more than 9 inches by 12, while cutting the number of pages from 192 to 120. Open the issue, or look through a pdf file, and further changes become apparent.

The layout’s gone to three columns of text instead of two. There are two reprints in the issue, one of them printed at a reduced type size, presumably to fit the space available. And the magazine boasts interior artwork for the first time, with nine stories getting uncredited illustrations; black-and-white line drawings, usually with heavy hatching and cross-hatching.

The artist was presumably this issue’s cover artist, William Heitman, who seems to have done all the interior artwork in Weird Tales’ first year. Heitman’s two-colour cover image is simple, bordering on crude, but conveys a mood. The blurb on the cover is for A. G. Birch’s “The Moon Terror,” though there’s nothing in the story like the picture, for reasons which we’ll come to later on in this post. The colour scheme of the cover’s similar to the last issue, with solid red and black, but the logo’s the third in three issues — though the magazine’s subhead, “The Unique Magazine,” has remained consistent.

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