The Cloud Forest

John Schoenherr’s one, slim connection to author Peter Matthiessen, who died yesterday, was his cover for the paperback version of The Cloud Forest, published by Pyramid Books in August 1966. The original gouache painting was marred somewhat by the art director, who - with paints of his own - lightened a patch of sky, ostensibly to make the display type “pop” more. Still, it’s a handsome, dramatic piece.

Undersea Suburbs

Not long ago I posted John Schoenherr’s cover for City Under the Sea. Well, now, here are some suburbs under the sea. My father painted this one for the article “Underwater [sic] Suburbs” by Captain Lewis Byron Melson, USN (retired), in the the December 1969 issue of Science & Mechanics magazine. The original painting has yet to bubble to the surface, but I’d sure like to see how it looks without all the display type splashed all over it.

Tales From The Tomb

According to John Schoenherr’s work log, job #226 came along on February 7, 1962: it was from Dell, a cover for “Tales From A Tomb” [sic] and he was paid $200 for it on April 17.

But did this particular project wind up as the cover for “Tales From The Tomb” issued in October 1962 by Dell Comics? I think so.

The painting, however, has been attributed (here and here and here) to the master comic book artist L. B. Cole, who was an editor and art director at Dell at this time. I haven’t yet learned if the various attributors have any hard evidence that Cole actually painted this - and I readily admit that I’m not too familiar with Cole’s work. Even so, this painting is very different from Cole’s wild, bright, and wonderful work that can be seen here and here and here, for example.

The cover does, however, have many similarities with Schoenherr’s illustrations from the early 1960s: particularly in the handling of the sky, trees, branches, grass, and headstones (and it almost looks like the stone on the left is engraved with his initials, J.C.S.). It’s also worth comparing this cover with that for the Dell comic book “Space Man” which I discussed here and which would have been painted at the same time. So unless I find evidence to the contrary - and with all due respect to L. B. Cole and his many fans - I’ll go ahead and claim that this one really is another “long lost” illustration by John Schoenherr.

Pulp Fiction: Trapped

Like many young illustrators of his generation, John Schoenherr did whatever hack work he could find after leaving art school. So, while his science fiction and natural history output gradually gained steam, dozens of his early pieces wound up in obscure, lurid “men’s magazines”. Often uncredited or pseudonymous, these pictures were typical of the genre: violent, bloody, and bosomy. Such as this cover from Trapped Detective Story Magazine for October 1959.

Feature Publications’ Trapped lasted for all of 34 issues. Its partner in crime was Guilty Detective Story Magazine and, according to Galactic Central, “Both determined to show that the spirit of the 1940s detective pulp magazines was still alive and well in the 1950s, albeit in a digest format.”

Schoenherr’s files for this phase of his career are far from complete, so there must be more illustrations out there, waiting to be identified. His reference photos might provide some clues, however: it’s just a matter of matching poses to magazine pictures. The following set, for example, was taken on March 19, 1959, for the Trapped cover.