We don’t know exactly when we became aware that Robert McGinnis had died, but it was sometime during our long trip to Mexico. Someone e-mailed us about it. We’ve mentioned numerous times that we don’t like Pulp Intl. to be a death roll, and we never interrupt our intermissions, but some deaths are more significant than others. Yet we couldn’t make time to write about McGinnis because we were away from our primary computers and art files, and because immediately after Mexico PSGP had two subdural hematomas drained from his brain. Wait! What? Did we hold back details about the trip? Perhaps, but it doesn’t matter because he’s fine now.
In any case, we’re backposting about McGinnis. We’ve placed a small collection here—though we actually did it around a month after the event—so that the many thousands of visitors who come here will find a tribute near the actual day he died. Most vintage cover art aficionados will say McGinnis was the very best. That’s a matter of taste. But there’s no dispute he was indispensable, and his work will always be a reminder of what is lost when art is sidelined in favor of capital. Modern paperback publishers cannot make the anonymous cover designs they produce ever have the impact of a McGinnis, or rationally view them as significant by comparison.
McGinnis is credited with more than twelve hundred book covers and forty or so movie posters. You’ve seen much of his best work on Pulp Intl: his posters for Live and Let Die and Cotton Comes to Harlem, a spectrum of art for Casino Royale, awesome paperback covers for The Girl Who Cried Wolf, If the Shoe Fits, and Death Deep Down, mock-up covers for modern movies, and rare sketches sold at auction. He was even the subject of a documentary. Today we’re looking at his original paintings, clean, with no graphics. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1926, dead in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, today. The man will be missed.
