Adventure is often called the greatest of the pulp magazines because of its excellent fiction. Time magazine dubbed it the “No. 1 pulp” in 1935, upon Adventure‘s 25th anniversary.
Adventure first appeared in November 1910 and continued as a pulp for 753 issues, until March 1953. (After that, it segued into a run-of-the-mill men’s adventure magazine.)
In addition to its acclaimed stories, Adventure also featured Great Pulp Art on many of its covers.
Today’s installment features the September 1913 number of Adventure. It’s not your typical pulp cover.
The painting lacks the usual action, replacing it with subtle humor. It also lacks the billboard of blurbs for the stories inside. The cover is a nice respite from the lurid, with the face on the simple, white canvas jumping out at you from the newsstand.
Gerrit A. Benecker painted it. A few years later, he would become well known for inspirational posters during World War I. (His most famous, “Sure! We’ll Finish the Job,” for the war bond effort sold more than 3 million copies.)
Benecker produced over 150 covers for magazines as diverse as Adventure, Scientific American and Harper’s Weekly, and another 500 fine art paintings (he excelled in portraits) during his career. He died at age 52 in 1934.
He painted at least one other Adventure cover for the Sept. 1, 1917, number — a similarly circular image.
I may have to revisit Adventure in a future installment of Great Pulp Art.
I agree about the cover art that appeared on ADVENTURE. For many years they also used different illustrators for each issue and the artist would do all the interior art for the stories in the issue.