Hugo Gernsback began his all-Science Fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, with a lot of reprints. This was because of several reasons. First, there wasn’t much SF to choose from. The reprints of the early issues were a template to inspire new stories. Because of this, many of the first Amazing Stories pieces read like Jules Verne or H. G. Wells. The second reason was money. Reprints were cheaper than new stories.
Hugo’s faults aside as paymaster (his slow or lack of payment), he did know good material when he saw it. So it is no suprise that he chose to reprint Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “The Land That Time Forgot” (February 1927), “The People That Time Forgot” (March 1927) and “Out of Time’s Abyss” (April 1927), collectively known as The Land That Time Forgot. These three short novels had appeared in The Blue Book in August, September and December of 1918. Each installment received an illustration by Frank R. Paul as well as one cover. These images, unlike any that might have existed in Blue Book (the covers all show rosy cheeked beauties), were influential in imagining Caspak, Burroughs’ island where evolution has its own rules.
Frank Rudolph Paul (1884-1963) was born in Austria and emigrated to the US in 1906. This was one thing he shared with Hugo Gernsback, who had emigrated himself, from Belgium. They also shared a love of the futuristic and the fantastic. When Hugo sold Amazing Stories and started Science Wonder, Paul went with him, keeping the look of Gernsback magazines the same for a decade. Trained for drawing architecture, Paul shows off his talents well in his designs for machines and buildings. It was this as well as his striking color choices that made him perfect for the early SF Pulps. He has a long list of firsts in his career: the first artist to paint a space station, one of the first to draw a flying saucer (decades before actual sightings), the first cover artist at Marvel Comics. He was famous for creating some of the most memorable and striking SF art ever.
The cover above shows the U-Boat, the U-33, entering Caspak through its secret, underwater entrance. The dinosaur life of the island wasn’t quite that avid, but this cover certainly had an influence on the dinosaur attack scene in the 1975 film. The illustration for the first installment show the cavemen attacking the lost shipmates, another important part of the movie version.
The second installment features what may be the most impressive images of the Caspak stories, the pterodon attacking the biplane. Later artist J. Allen St. John also drew this scene.
The forgotten scenes, but in my opinion the best, feature the Wieroos. The film The People That Time Forgot (1977), changed the flying humans into green-skinned savages. Much less interesting, if more affordable to film.
For Amazing Stories, The Land That Time Forgot was only one of many serialized novels, but for Burroughs fans these images are some of the first and best for imagining Caspak and its blend of dinosaurs and cavemen. Frank R. Paul is sometimes criticized for his poor human figures but praised for his spaceships and other imaginings. With these four images he began a long list of artists to follow including J. Allen St. John, Roy G. Krenkel and Frank Frazetta.
Frank R. Paul also illustrated The Mastermind of Mars for Hugo Gernsback
in 1927.
Marvel Comics did a comic book version of The Land That Time Forgot (1977) in Marvel Preview #1.
