Virgil Finlay space-war illustration, Startling Stories, March 1939. Extracted, cleaned, and with a new colourisation.

I generally like his sci-fi work much better than the macabre and girlie work, but there doesn’t seem to a comprehensive catalogue/artbook of such work. Virgil Finlay’s Strange Science seems to come closest to a book collection of his sci-fi work, and even though it’s from 1993 it can still be had for reasonable prices.

Worlds of Tomorrow magazine had a well-researched short biographical appreciation of Finlay in 1965, when people still remembered the 1930s with some clarity.

Here’s the Lovecraft poem it opens with, in full and read by Wayne June (sans studio-boosting)… .MP3.

Surprisingly, it appears no-one has yet made a documentary about him. Perhaps the difficulty of placing the work on a small screen was offputting. But in the age of the 8k screen and huge monitors with reasonable crispness and greyscale response, the fine detail of the work might now be presentable on the screen.