Finlay’s cover for the May 1952 issue of Weird Tales Master of exquisitely detailed images that often combined the sexual and the scary, Virgil Finlay was born in Rochester, New York in 1914. He was a highly prolific commercial artist in the midcentury years — one commentator went so far as to call Finlay “the most famous fantasy illustrator of mid-twentieth century.” In his youth during the 1920s, Finlay discovered the magazines Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, which focused on sci-fi and horror, respectively. Once he reached adulthood in the mid-1930s he felt confident enough in his artistic prowess to try to get a position at those journals. Finlay’s mastery of stippling was so advanced that it nearly cost him a job at Weird Tales because his employers weren’t sure that their printing process could reproduce his fine detail, but it turned out that it could. Finlay in 1969 A key medium of Finlay’s was scratchboard, a method that incorporates a white clay coating covered in black ink—the artist scratches the black ink away with a scribe or knife, and the resultant effect is similar to a wood engraving. The technique is called “working from black...