| Creator J. Allen St. John (1872-1957) |
| Profession Painter |
| Total Entries 15 |
| Articles J. Allen St. John – Wikipedia J. Allen St. John – Pulp Artists |
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Probably the most beloved and admired of all the pulp artists was J. Allen St. John. Still another old-timer, he started illustrating covers for books in 1912 for A. C. McClurg, a book publisher in his hometown of Chicago. His first Burroughs book was The Return of Tarzan–the second book in what was to become a phenomenal series. (The original version of Tarzan of the Apes appeared complete in Munsey’s All-Story for October of 1912. For reasons largely unknown, the editor rejected the sequel. The novel subsequently appeared in Street & Smith’s New Story magazine, whose editor was delighted to get the story and gave Burroughs a raise). St. John later painted many covers for Blue Book, also published in Chicago at the time. The only painting for a magazine that St. John did of Tarzan was for the January 1928 issue, the second installment of “Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle.” St. John was later to do some covers for Weird Tales–another Chicago publication–and with the October 1940 issue of Fantastic Adventures returned to one of his favorite themes, painting a cave man on the back of a tyrannosaur shooting arrows at a pterodactyl. Originally scheduled to be discontinued with that issue, Fantastic Adventures suddenly doubled its circulation–readers hadn’t bought the issue for the story, they’d bought it because of the cover. Within a few issues, and more covers by St. John, the magazine became a popular monthly. It could be argued whether Burroughs had made St. John or whether St. John’s evocative covers of life on Mars and Venus and in the center of the Earth with primitive men wearing animal skin Speedos and fighting dinosaurs had made Burroughs. St. John was the inspiration for Frank Frazetta and other paperback adventure illustrators. ~ Savage Art: 20th Century Genre and the Artists That Defined It (2010)
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