Moon Crawler

Although I knew that some of Dad’s pictures inspired certain other things, I didn’t realize that one of his early science fiction covers seems to have inspired a toy or two. So I was happy to share some background information and sketches with the blogger who alerted me. Now, prepare for liftoff to Moonbase Central.

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.

One Day on Beetle Rock

I’m embarrassed to say that, until yesterday, I’d never before seen this paperback cover for Sally Carrighar’s One Day at Beetle Rock. Dad’s scanty records show that it was either commissioned or delivered on May 25, 1965, and that Pyramid Books paid him $300 for it. I assume the original is gouache on illustration board.

Rascal Ephemera

Here is an obscure piece of Rascal ephemera, which used Dad’s frontispiece illustration from the book. I think it was a promotional print, sent out by the publisher sometime in the late 1960s, as it came with a flier titled, “Honors for Sterling North’s RASCAL, Winner of the Dutton Animal Book Award, 1963.” It notes:

The fame of the Raccoon from Wisconsin has spread throughout the world to capture the hearts of young and old. RASCAL has been distributed by the Book-of-the-Month Club and by two other book clubs. It will soon be made into a Walt Disney film. A nationwide bestseller for six months, RASCAL numbers more than 115,000 copies in print.

It was also a flat-fee job that netted all of $1000 for Dad. But the “Raccoon from Wisconsin” helped put him on the children’s book map.

Jacket for The Golden Eagle

Dad’s jacket art for Robert Murphy’s The Golden Eagle, published by Dutton in 1965. I assume the original painting was gouache on illustration board.

From Incident at Hawk’s Hill

I keep looking and looking, but I just can’t find the reference photo that Dad used in making this illustration for Allan W. Eckert’s Incident at Hawk’s Hill. He and I posed for it - and that’s pretty much me (or a scrawnier version of me) and although the father’s head isn’t Dad’s, the strong forearms definitely are.


UPDATE of April 12, 2011!

I found the photo - it was hiding in plain sight. And, yes, Dad’s arms are much like the dad’s in the illustration. Also, I am indeed plumper than the boy in the book. If only I had been raised by a badger on the Manitoban prairies!

On the left in the background is Dad’s jacket illustration for “The Jezebel Wolf” by F. N. Monjo.

Sherlock Holmes and John Schoenherr

Note: This post was significantly expanded on April 8, 2014

My father introduced me to Sherlock Holmes when I was 11. I’d already been watching the Basil Rathbone movies and drawing pictures of the character, so, technically, the introduction had been made years before, but it was then that ever-logical Dad suggested that I read the original stories so I'd know who Holmes and Watson really were.

Before long, I’d become an absolute fanatic and, besides collecting everything Sherlock Holmes-related I could get my hands on, I appropriated the original art for Dad’s sole Sherlockian illustration. He made it for Mack Reynolds’s science fiction story, “The Adventure of the Extraterrestrial,” which appeared in Analog magazine for July 1965. It was job #303 in his work-log, commissioned on March 29, 1964, and it was either one of the last jobs he did in his Long Island City studio, or one of the first ones his did in the small bedroom workspace in his new, old house in rural New Jersey. The ink-on-scratchboard drawing netted him $150.00. By the way, for copyright reasons, the aged Holmes seen in the picture was only referred to as “The Great Detective” in the text.

I always thought Dad’s Watson resembled his own father, though my Grandpa Schoenherr never had a walrus mustache like that (he did have his own copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes, however). I remember, too, Dad pointing out that he’d deliberately updated Holmes’s unanswered-correspondence-tranfixing-jack-knife with a more modern switch-blade.

My father was definitely a Sherlock Holmes fan (though never a crazed one) and he attended scion society meetings with me before I could drive. He also enjoyed Arthur Conan Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard tales and it was a long-time wish of his to illustrate The Lost World - featuring Professor Challenger, who my father resembled somewhat. (Dad never got the chance - though this painting hints at what could have been - but, evidently, his one-time brother-in-law, Ray Sternbergh, painted the cover for the Pyramid Books edition of the novel.)

I should note that a few months before making this illustration, my father received the following letter from the Little Green Man Science Fiction Awards Society of Kansas City, Missouri.

Devoted Sherlockians will recognize one of the names on the letterhead. Here, too, is the April 1963 cover mentioned in the letter - and still more devoted Sherlockians should note that the author of the cover story, Winston P. Sanders, was the sometime-nom-de-plume of Poul Anderson.

“...And a red fox in a kangaroo’s pouch...”

A 1966 (or 1967?) Christmas card featuring a menagerie of animals from a few years’ worth of John Schoenherr’s children’s books. He made the original drawing in ink on scratchboard, but later scratched out the pine bough and ornaments (I’m not sure why).

eagle.........The Golden Eagle by Robert Murphy
kangaroo.........Kangaroo Red by Bernice Freschet
opossum.........Mississippi Possum by Miska Miles
fox.........Fox and the Fire by Miska Miles
skunk.........The Dangerous Year by Era Zistel
auk.........A Vanishing Thunder by Adrien Stoutenburg
rabbit.........Rabbit Garden by Miska Miles
bear.........Gentle Ben by Walt Morey

The Fox and the Hound and John Schoenherr

Most people know of The Fox and the Hound because of the cutesy Disney animated movie of 1981. But it was first a novel by Daniel P. Mannix, published by Dutton in 1967 and illustrated by John Schoenherr. I was scanning spreads from my copy of the book today and was struck by this one in particular.

“George Lucas Stole Chewbacca, But...”

I highly recommend this article about how Chewbacca came to be - and my father's role in that process. But what troubles me - and has troubled me and my family and many of my father's friends in the Science Fiction world since 1977 - is that he was the unwitting, uncredited, and uncompensated “collaborator” in this creative endeavor. And is that really okay?

The Illustrated Dune via SKI-FFY

The blog SKI-FFY posted scans of John Schoenherr's pictures for The Illustrated Dune. And he quotes the back cover copy...

"I can envision no more perfect visual representation of my Dune world than John Schoenherr's careful and accurate illustrations." - FRANK HERBERT

Hear, hear, Mr. Herbert!

As far as I know, Dad made the full-color paintings featured here for the 1978 Dune calendar, and then the publisher decided to use them in an illustrated paperback edition of the novel and asked Dad to flesh out the book with black and white illustrations. He made these using his dry brush technique where he would load a brush with india ink, wipe much of it off on a paper towel, then apply the brush to the rough textured watercolor paper. Once the basic composition was laid in, he would work out the finer details with a steel nib dip pen.

Map of the Bronx Zoo

John Schoenherr (a.k.a. Dad) had a long association with the Bronx Zoo. He started visiting back in the 1940s and kept at it until he moved to New Jersey in 1964. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, my mother sometimes accompanied him to help provoke the animals while he gathered photographic reference of aggressive beasts - mostly for illustrations in “men’s magazines,” featuring vicious animals attacking Great White Hunters and other hapless, but rugged stereotypes.

Dad had his first one-man show at the zoo in 1968 and as a family we would visit sometimes: we especially liked the hyena, named Pug, who lived in the “Big Cat House,” which, in my memory, resembled the lobby of a neoclassical post office or bank with the cats and Pug as ersatz tellers.

Dad made this particular picture sometime in the early 1960s by scratching out the white lines and textures on black scratchboard - a rare variation on his usual method, where he applied ink where he wanted it on and then scratched away on white scratchboard.

Uncalculated Risk

I ran the Queens Half-Marathon with my friend Charlie Nix today and this illustration pretty much sums up how it felt. The runners - or crawlers - even resemble us a little (I'm on the left and Charlie, as usual, is in the lead). Dad made this (while living on 39th Avenue in Queens, I might add) for Christopher Anvil's short story “Uncalculated Risk" in the March 1962 issue of Analog.

Big Cat, Little Study

Dad isn't very well known for his cat paintings, but he did a lot of them in the 1960s and at one point hoped to collect them in a book or a portfolio of prints. He even wrote a text to accompany the pictures, but the project never materialized.

This study of...a jaguar? (please correct me if I'm wrong)...is the same size, medium, and vintage as "Moonlight at Midday" below (i.e. gouache on illustration board, 4.375 x 7.5"). I don't think a more finished version was ever painted or published, unless it's in a lost issue of Reader's Digest - and since Dad did paint an entirely different jaguar for that magazine in 1969, maybe this was a rejected concept. It's nice, though - and the tree branches are so "him."

Moonlight at Midday

I've always liked this small gouache painting on bristol board, but it only just dawned on me that it could have been a study for one of Dad's many paperback covers. He labeled the back "Moonlight at Midday," so I searched for a book of that title and easily found Moonlight at Midday by Sally Carrighar, published by Pyramid in 1967. Dad didn't have a copy of the book, nor a proof of the cover in his files, so I'm happy to add something new to his bibliography.

News From Bear Alley

A piece by author and editor Steve Holland on his blog, Bear Alley:

John Schoenherr, one of the finest SF magazine cover artists of the 1960s and a writer and illustrator of children's books for many decades, died in New Jersey [sic: Pennsylvania, actually] on 8 April, aged 74. Below is what I wrote about Schoenherr for Sci-Fi Art: A Graphic Historywith a couple of minor additions:

The artist who dominated Analog (as Astounding SF became in 1960) was John Schoenherr, of whom Vincent Di Fate has said, "Once in a while an artist comes along with so much innate ability that he instantly gains the respect of his peers and becomes known as an 'artist's artist' ... Schoenherr possesses just such a talent and, to put a finer point on the matter, he is one of the best compositionalists who ever worked in the field of commercial art."...

Read more

Early Risers

"Early Risers" (oil on canvas, 1994) by John Schoenherr

Before plagues of them spread across the United States, Canada Geese were rare, magical, dinosaur-looking things that came and went in small numbers. We tended to see only airborne flocks, not huge armies permanently encamped on soccer fields. In the late 1970s, Dad had a half-acre pond carved out of a scrubby field on our property, largely to lure in geese, so he could study them up close. Almost every year a pair would settle on the tiny island, build a nest, raise a family - and then leave with goslings in tow. For almost two decades, Canada Geese were one of Dad's primary subjects, culminating in the last children's book he wrote and illustrated, originally titled Gone Goose, but published as Rebel by Philomel in 1995. Much of its setting is based on the pond out back.

The Impossibles, 1963

Great color, concept, and composition. This was used on the paperback cover of The Impossibles by Mark Phillips (Pyramid Publications, June 1963). I'm pretty sure it's gouache and casein white on illustration board, but I haven't seen the original in person. Love, love, love it.

Mission of Gravity

Centauri Dreams - The News Forum of the Tau Zero Foundation has a post which features Dad's cover art for Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity (Pyramid Publications, August 1969) and asks: "Could anyone capture the essence of a story better than the remarkable Schoenherr?"

A Tribute From Sci Fi Wire

Sci Fi Wire printed this a while back. See the original post for some key science fiction illustrations - and some nice comments...

John Schoenherr, one of the finest science-fiction illustrators of the 1960s and 1970s—and the first artist to draw Frank Herbert's Dune and Anne McCaffrey's Pern—died Thursday at age 74. Herbert was so taken with Schoenherr's images that he referred to the artist as "the only man who has ever visited Dune."

Schoenherr was perhaps best known for his illustrations for Dune, which was first published in two parts as "Dune World" and "The Prophet of Dune" in the science fiction magazine Analog in 1963 and 1965, respectively, and for which he won the 1965 Hugo Award for Best Artist. Beginning in the late 1950s and continuing through the late 1970s, Schoenherr contributed hundreds of distinctive and memorable illustrations for various science fiction magazines and books.

For those of us who discovered science fiction in the 1960s, John Schoenherr was one of a handful of artists who helped create our visual memory of the classic science fiction of that era. His interior illustrations, especially those in scratchboard, were iconic in their dark precision. His full-color cover paintings often made use of bright, glowing colors to create dramatically alien landscapes, artifacts and creatures. In addition to Dune, he did illustrations in 1967 for Anne McCaffrey's first Pern story, "Weyr Search." He thereby contributed to the genesis of two of the most popular science fiction series of the past 50 years.

In 1978, he returned to the world of Dune with new art for The Illustrated Dune, after which he worked only occasionally in SF but continued his prolific and award-winning work in children's book and wildlife art. But for 20 years, John Schoenherr played a seminal role in helping visualize the sense of wonder of SF, and in his passing we have lost another of our greatest artists.