Margaret Brundage

Margaret Brundage (born Margaret Hedda Johnson; December 9, 1900 – April 9, 1976), was an American illustrator and painter who is remembered chiefly for having illustrated the pulp magazine Weird Tales. Working in pastels on illustration board, she created most of the covers for Weird Tales between 1933 and 1938.

Early life Brundage was born in Chicago, Illinois, of Swedish and Irish ancestry. Her father, Jonathan Emanuel Johnson, died when she was eight years old; she was raised by her mother Margaret Jane (Loutit) Johnson and grandmother Margaret (Houston) Loutit, for whom she was named, in a Christian Science household.

In 1927, she married Brundage in Chicago. He was a former hobo, and later the founder of the College of Complexes. They had one son, Kerlyn Byrd Brundage (born August 27, 1927; died 1972), always called "Byrd". Brundage also did illustrations for Oriental Stories in the early 1930s. L. Sprague de Camp is often quoted as claiming she used her daughters as models, but Brundage had no daughters. The claim had previously been refuted by Robert Weinberg, an authority on pulp magazines, who wrote in the letters page for Savage Tales magazine, No.5 (July 1974), "much as I hate to discredit a good story, WT cover artist Margaret Brundage did not have a daughter who posed for her. As Mrs. Brundage lives in Chicago and I have interviewed her, this is straight from the artist's mouth."

L. Sprague de Camp described the typical subject of her pictures as "naked heroines being tortured, raped, and disemboweled"; Forrest J. Ackerman similarly wrote of "Margaret Brundage, with her titillating pulchrinudes on the covers of Weird Tales: naked ladies being sacrificed, semi-clad heroines being menaced by all manner of monstrous beings."

Clark Ashton Smith was sharply critical of her illustrations. In December 1933 he wrote to H. P. Lovecraft: "The current W.T. design, though pleasing enough in color, is curiously suggestive of a Christmas card! [...] Mrs. Brundage [...] has about as much genuine feeling for the weird as a Jersey cow is likely to possess. The best angles in this picture (the hands of the Chinaman, etc) seem to have been swiped by unconscious cerebration from Utpatel's drawing for 'The Star-Spawn' by Derleth and Schorer." On September 9, 1937, he wrote to R. H. Barlow: "Query: why does Brundage try to make all her women look like wet-nurses? It's a funny, not to say tiresome, complex."