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Virgil Finlay's Strange Science
Book by Finlay, Virgil
149 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
About the author
Virgil Finlay
140 books12 followersAn American pulp fantasy, science fiction and horror illustrator. While he worked in a range of media, from gouache to oils, Finlay specialized in, and became famous for, detailed pen-and-ink drawings accomplished with abundant stippling, cross-hatching, and scratchboard techniques. Despite the very labor-intensive and time-consuming nature of his specialty, Finlay created more than 2600 works of graphic art in his 35-year career. His father, woodworker Warden Hugh Finlay, died at age 40 in the midst of the Great Depression, leaving his family (widow Ruth and two children, Jean and Virgil) in straitened circumstances. By his high school years, Virgil Finlay exercised his passions for art and poetry, and discovered his lifelong subject matter through the pulp magazines of the era--science fiction, via Amazing Stories (1927), and fantasy and horror, via Weird Tales (1928), beginning to exhibit at the age of 16. By age 21 he was confident enough in his art to send six pieces, unsolicited, to editor Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales. Once Wright determined that such detailed work would transfer successfully to relatively rough paper the magazine used (they were called "pulps" for a reason), he began buying Finlay's work. Finlay's illustrations debuted in the December 1935 issue of WT, and appeared in a total of 62 issues of the magazine, down to the last issue of the classic pulp in Sept. 1954. He also executed 19 color covers for WT, for issues from Feb. 1937 to March 1953.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 24, 2023
Good stuff
July 4, 2014
Virgil Finlay is one of my favourite illustrators from the Pulp era. The book collects all the weird and wonderful interior illustrations from those magazines of the 1940s and 1950s. Each of the 149 pages features the impressively detailed black and white illustrations of Finlay, from horror, to Sci-fi and fantasy. If you've only ever seen his art on websites, seeing the level of detail in every illustration up close in print is well worth it. If you love the sometime surreal interior art of the Pulp magazines then I can totally recommend getting this book.
February 15, 2008
A fantastic book of incredible black and white illustrations. Finlay was an outstanding illustrator. Only the fact that he worked in the fantasy/science fiction genre during a time when it was related to the minor pulps kept him unkown to the world at large. It is the world's loss that more people didn't know this fantastic artist.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews