Frank Tinsley: Illustrator of the "Gee Whiz!"

Frank Tinsley (1899-1965) was an illustrator who specialized in machines. Aircraft, usually, but also ships, trains, cars, space ships and any other speculative technology that pulp and semi-pulp magazine editors tossed his way. By the 1950s he was often called upon to write the articles that he was illustrating. So he had a nice little niche and filled it well.

Here is biographical information, and links with plenty of examples of his work are here and here.

Tinsley worked in color when doing magazine covers, but much of his article illustrations were two-color, the norm for the likes of Mechanix Illustrated, where he did a good deal of illustration following World War 2.

During the 1930s his drawing wasn't always accurate, but he improved somewhat as time went on. Apparently his editors and fans weren't troubled.

Gallery

Bill Barnes magazine cover - October 1934 or 1935
This seems to be a Curtiss BF2C or something like it. The fuselage is too large, too long, if we use the pilot as a scale reference. The upper and lower wings are out of perspective, seeming too close together.

Bill Barnes magazine cover - January 1936
Shown here is the Boeing model 299, or XB-17 Flying Fortress that first flew in 1935. Although Tinsley got the various parts in roughly the correct shapes, they are out of scale. The perspective is off -- the axes of the wings and horizontal stabilizers on the tail diverge with distance, whereas the opposite would be correct. Also, the 299 was never painted, nor were other 1930s B-17s, yet Tinsley gave it current Army Air Corps colors (sort of -- the green is wrong and the orange should be more yellow).

Air Trails magazine cover - April 1937
This is a Fokker G I two-place fighter that flew for the first time in March of 1937, about the time the magazine hit the news stands. Therefore, Tinsley must have been working from other drawings and perhaps photos of the plane on the ground. As usual, details are wrong. For instance, the unit housing the pilot and gunner is too small relative to the rest of the aircraft. Further, for some reason the plane doesn't carry actual Dutch insignia.

Air Trails magazine cover - August 1938
Featured here are two Junkers Ju 86 bombers, but they are carrying civilian rather than military markings.

Air Trails magazine cover - April 1948
That's a Northrop YB-49 flying wing bomber. I'm not sure why rocket-like flames are spewing out behind its jet engines. The escort fighters are purely Tinsley's imagination. Their fuselages resemble that of the Bell XS-1 that broke the sound barrier the previous October. The wings and tail are swept back, unlike the XS-1. On the other hand, Tinsley's fighters seem to have rocket motors like the XS-1, but are shut off, a jet engine being in use. Yet I don't notice any air intake for a jet engine. Oh well....

Mechanix Illustrated magazine illustration - 1948
Here we see what the McDonnell XP-85 (later XF-85) Goblin "parasite fighter" might have looked like had it entered service. The B-36 bomber shown in the image supposedly had a 10,000 mile range, far in excess of any potential escort fighter, so one idea was to have them carry tiny escort fighters for deployment as necessary. Two prototypes were actually built and a few test drops were made from a specially modified B-29, but the project was cancelled due to its impracticality. As usual, Tinsley's drawing is off: the XF-85 fuselage was actually shorter and chunkier, and the tail units were closer together. The B-36 is poorly drawn as well, the wings seemingly drooping and the cockpit glazing pulled too far around the side of the aircraft.

Magazine illustration - 1950
This is the left-hand part of a two-page spread. The helicopters are conjectural, so I can't criticize how they are drawn. I include this because it embodies the "gee-whiz" sort of speculative future technology that Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Mechanix Illustrated and perhaps other magazines featured for many years. The idea of ordinary people replacing their automobiles with personal helicopters is clearly insane for a number of good reasons, including what would happen in inevitable collisions and engine/rotor failures.

Mechanix Illustrated magazine illustration - August 1955
The U.S. Air Force funded development of an atomic reactor powered bomber, but the project was cancelled for reasons of practicality. Here Tinsley (who wrote the article) came up with a speculative design of a delta-wing flying boat bomber that used hydro-skis like those on the Navy's XF2Y Sea Dart fighter that first flew in 1953, but never saw service.

Moon base illustration - 1959
Finally, an atomic-powered rocket ship seen blasting off (or landing, maybe), and a base on the moon.

Other Savage Illustrators

Fictional heroes can come and go. A few come and stay. One such hero with staying power is Doc Savage, whose stories were written by "Kenneth Robeson," the pen name of several writers, but predominantly Lester Dent. I previously posted about Doc Savage here.

I would imagine that readers familiar with Doc Savage visualize him in terms of James Bama's depictions such as on the book cover shown above. Bama's first Savage cover appeared in 1964 and was followed by 61 others over the next 30 or so years. Subsequent images of Savage by other artists in other media retained Bama's concept of Savage's appearance.

The original Doc Savage illustrator was Walter Baumhofer who did the cover art for the Doc Savage pulp magazine series from 1933 until he began moving from pulp to "slick" magazines around 1936-37. Background information on Baumhofer can be found here, here and here.

The image above is a typical Baumhofer Doc Savage cover, this for May 1934. Since Savage was described as the "man of bronze" in the stories, referring to his coloration, Baumhofer indulged in a degree of artistic license by introducing violet shaded areas in his paintings to contrast with the bronze hues required by his subject.

For what it's worth, I consider Bama and Baumhofer (and not necessarily in that order where Doc Savage is concerned) as the best of the lot over the first half century of the character's existence. Which implies that other brushes were in the game.

The best of these was Robert G. Harris, a talented illustrator who had little choice but to follow Baumhofer's Doc Savage characterization and style, as can be seen in the two covers above. Biographical links for Harris are here and here.

Quality began to noticeably slide to my eyes when Emery Clarke became the main cover artist. His images are a little less distinct, lacking the punch Baumhofer and Harris delivered.  One source contends that the figure in glasses in the upper image is a self-portrait of the artist.

Last and least among the Savage illustrators I located (and I must have missed some others) was former (almost bomb-throwing) anarchist Modest Stein, whose colorful career is described here. Whereas Baumhofer's images were classy (especially considering their pulp magazine locale) and Bama's were monumental (and not much like the physial description of Savage in the stories), Stein's strike me as little better than smudges in many cases, a step down from Clarke's work.

Edd Cartier: Wry Sci-Fi Art

Edward D. Cartier (1914-2008) was an illustrator who specialized in science-fiction. I saw his work fairly often as a budding teenager during the era when sci-fi magazines had largely abandoned their pulp heritage and were appearing in digest or semi-digest format with better quality paper. By the time I reached my twenties I'd drifted from short-story sci-fi in magazines to paperback novels and Cartier faded from my view. That was quite a while ago.

So it surprised me to learn recently while exploring the Internet that Edd (he combined the "Ed" from his given name with his middle initial to derive his professional monicker) died fairly recently after attaining an old age riper than most of us can expect. He rated an obituary in The New York Times that provides a decent amount of detail regarding his life (link here).

As the obit notes, Cartier saw combat in Europe. He was badly wounded in the Battle of the Bulge (earning a Bronze Star along with the Purple Heart) and further wounded during medical evacuation. This didn't affect his wryly humorous take on bedrock components of science fiction illustrations of the day: spaceships, alien monsters, gorgeous women and the heroic men who save them from whatever fate authors could dream up.

Contrast this with illustrator Gilbert Bundy who, I as mentioned here, could not shake off his combat zone experiences and eventually killed himself.

The market for science fiction was not large when Cartier was active in the field, so he eventually found himself day jobs and, so far as I know, continued sci-fi on the side. Very sensible.

Below are examples of Edd Cartier's work beginning with one of his pulp mag illustrations for a Shadow story before World War 2.

Gallery

Illustration (cropped) for Shadow pulp magazine story, 1930s.

Magazine cover, 1940.

An example of Cartier's alien species.

Girl meets alien.

Mad scientist? Or just an old techie slaving over an even older adding machine?

Space explorer babe from 1952.

I really should do a comparative analysis, but for now I'll go with my gut feeling that Cartier had more ability than almost any other sci-fi magazine illustrator active in the 1950s.

Savage Adventures

The well-used expression "timing is everything" usually refers to something relatively short-term. But sometimes timing can be a matter of generations, as is the case with the subject of this post -- the pulp fiction hero Doc Savage.

Doc Savage paperback book cover by James Bama

Back in the 1970s and 80s I noticed a steady flow of Doc Savage paperbacks sporting James Bama covers such as the one shown above. I assumed it was some new sci-fi series and paid it no attention other than to wonder about the odd hairstyle Bama created for Doc. At any rate, I never bothered to buy any of the books. Such is the bliss of ignorance.

What I didn't know was that the Doc Savage character first appeared in the early 1930s in a pulp magazine series that ran till the end of the 1940s. When the series ended I was still reading comic books, never considered buying any kind of pulp (though the crime oriented ones with scantily-clad babes on their cover began to fascinate), and on the cusp of discovering science-fiction.

So timing-induced ignorance it was -- born too late to experience Doc in the original and too late to discover him in re-release (to do the latter, ideally I should have been a teenager).

Doc Savage pulp cover by Walter Baumhofer

I began my discovery of Doc Savage through my interest in Baumhofer's work even though I was familiar with Bama's career and Doc Savage covers. In the last few years I noticed a new series of reprints featuring the Baumhofer covers. When some of these trickled down to $2 remainder status items at a local cut-rate bookstore I bought a few to find out what this Doc Savage stuff was all about.

The "author" of the Doc Savage series was "Kenneth Robeson," a pseudonym created by the original publisher as cover for a number of ghost-writers who might be needed over time if the pulp series became successful. As it turned out, most Doc Savage adventures were either written by or under the scrutiny of Lester Dent, who offered yarn-spinning advice here.

Doc Savage is a highly improbable version of a human being. Trained by his father to grow into a large muscle-machine with instant reflexes and five senses that operate at near-ultimate capabilities, he holds a medical doctorate degree and invents lots of keen stuff to assist him in his crusade for justice in particularly bloodthirsty corners of the world including New York City. He has offices on the 86th floor of an anonymous NYC skyscraper and a nearby warehouse stuffed with a submarine, other water craft, a variety of special cars and trucks, several high-speed amphibious aircraft and other goodies I've yet to read about. This is funded via a precious metal mine in what once was the Mayan empire. From time to time Doc radios a request (speaking a Mayan dialect) and the locals collect and caravan out enough to keep Doc's operation humming.

Naturally Doc is too busy solving crimes, inventing things, doing his daily two-hour regimen of exercise and sense-enhancement training to pay much attention to women. But he doesn't chase after guys either. That's the way heroes of literature operated back in those days. Adventure readers -- especially teenage ones -- wanted lots of action and heroics; smoochy stuff was for the romance pulps that gals read. Also, Doc was pretty short on introspection, again unlike how a 21st century hero might be concocted.

Therefore, to my eyes Doc Savage is unbelievable as a real person. To most 1935 readers older than 18 or 20, he probably seemed off the charts as well. But the whole point of Savage and similar characters is that push beyond all reasonable limits of reality. Just sit back, relax and wipe out the cares of the day with a dose of Savage and his improbable adventures.