Starting in 1932, Margaret Brundage, wife of leftist revolutionary Slim Brundage -- who she met at the wildly-bohemian Dil Pickle Club during the Chicago Renaissance -- forever changed the look of Fantasy and Horror with her alluring, sensationalistic covers for the legendary pulp magazine, Weird Tales. Brundage, whose art contemporaries include Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok, is unique as she was the first female cover artist of the pulp era. Decades before the gothic fetish craze, Brundage's lush, provocative paintings, which frequently featured smoldering, semi-nude young women bearing whips, became a focus of acute attention and controversy. At the very peak of the notorious pulp's classic run, the magazine's appeal was due as much to Brundage's covers as to the stories inside by famous authors H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch and Conan creator, Robert E. Howard. Long before Frazetta, it was Brundage who was the very 1st Conan cover artist. The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage is the premier book devoted to this noted artist and features all of her Weird Tales and Conan covers.
Authors Stephen D. Korshak and J. David Spurlock follow their seminal collaboration, The Paintings of J. Allen St. John -- Grand Master of Fantasy, with The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage which, also features essays by noted artist Rowena, Weird Tales historian Robert Weinberg, First-Fandom member / Shasta publisher Melvin Korshak, and Men's Adventure Magazines: In Postwar America co-author George Hagenauer. THE VILLAGE VOICE said 12-11-2013: "Brundage's menaced damsels were sleek eye candy, but this book reveals politics --advocating for gender and racial equality as well as labor rights at a time when activism led to blacklisting -- that prove that the 'Queen of the Pulps' was as brave as any of her titillating heroines."