The artwork from Weird Tales was often as engrossing and unusual as the fiction it illustrated. Names like Virgil Finlay, Boris Dolgov, Lee Brown Coye, Hannes Bok, Vincent Napoli and Matt Fox have reputations as big as H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. Do other horror magazines have similar lists of famous artists? In my experience, not many. H. W. Wesso did artwork for Strange Tales but he is better remembered for Science Fiction illustrations. Here are some other illustrators from magazines that may have paid better than Weird Tales, but time has forgotten them and the stories they accompanied.
One of the first horror magazines was The Thrill Book, which was a mix of genres but with more fantastic material than other magazines. Published by Harold Hersey, it ran for 13 issues, march to October 1919. Hersey would appear again with Ghost Stories.
Ghost Stories was a competitor for Weird Tales, appearing in July 1926. It ran for 57 issues until January 1932. Ghost Stories was narrowly focused on what the title implies. Because of this it never had the breadth of Weird Tales, which included Science Fiction, Shudder Pulp style mysteries and other forms of imaginative fiction.
Claire Angelly illustrated entire issues of Ghost Stories towards the end of its run. The initial issues had used photographs.
The most profitable horror magazines were the Shudder Pulps that flourished for ten short years between 1934 and 1944. Horror Stories and Terror Tales were two of these magazines that presented fantastic and weird situations but always found a logical explanation at the end. The Shudder Pulps had grown out of a lackluster Mystery magazine and its interior artwork looks more like that of Mystery mags than Weird Tales. The covers started with women in peril and ended up as bizarre torture porn. Imagine someone reading one of these on the subway!
Amos Sewell (1901-1983) started in the Pulps but went on to do 57 covers for The Saturday Evening Post.
H. W. Wesso (1894-1948) was really Hans Waldemar Wessolowski. As the cover artist (and interiors) for the Clayton Astounding, he is one of the artists who created “the bug-eyed monster” of Science Fiction. Strange Tales was Clayton’s attempt to steal away Weird Tales‘ gang of writers, paying two cent on acceptance instead of one cent on publication. Since Wesso did Astounding he also got Strange Tales.
Strange Stories was produced by the same people who did Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories. It ran 14 issues from 1939 to 1941. Another competitor to Weird Tales, it featured some really great artists like a young Alex Schomberg who would become a famous SF and comics artist.
Not ever issue, every illustration in Weird Tales was a masterpiece. Short schedules and low pay should have made them worse than they were. Many by A. R. Tilburne are less than memorable, but collectively the illustrators of WT presented a visual feast that no other magazine can match.
