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They Also Served: Robert E. McGinnis

kevinburtonsmith

Illustrator
(1926-2025)

“I wish I looked half as good as his painting of me!”
— Raquel Welch

One of the all-time greats and one of the most influential and prolific illustrators of the 20th century and a relatively late starter (he was born in 1926), Ohio born-and-bred ROBERT E.MCGINNIS painted well over 1,500 paperback covers since the 1950s.

Although most of his work (mostly done in egg tempera) was published well after the heyday of the  other mass-market paperback artists mentioned on these pages, McGinnis’ style and subject matter certainly fit in; a sort of illustrative passing of the torch —his covers, typically rendered in  bold colors and stark backgrounds,  became some of  the most beloved  paperback covers of the sixties and seventies.

McGinnis was celebrated for his crime, detective and mystery paperback covers, and his unsurpassed depictions of tall, glamourous, elegant women (no disrespect here, or anything, but these women were generally just drop-dead gorgeous — you could eat some of these covers with a spoon). Often they were the sole subject of his covers, although men—often carrying a gun and a very serious expression, managed to intrude.

But McGinnis did far more than pulp cheesecake. He has also painted a considerable number of covers for several other genres (one estimate is that he did over 1200 of them), including westerns, gothics, romance, historicals, movie and television tie-ins, as well as over forty movie posters (many of them iconic), including Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Odd Couple, Barbarella and a slew of James Bond flicks (which—surprise, surprise) have been known to feature beautiful women. He even managed to sneak some of his work onto covers by other artists: that’s his portrait of Mike Shayne that was used as a logo in the upper right corner of approximately 5 zillion Shayne covers for Dell.

Meanwhile, his illustrative work has appeared in magazines as diverse as Playboy, The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Reader’s Digest and Guideposts, and his celebrated paintings have shown up in major museums and collections around the world.

Still very much in demand well into the 21st century, McGinnis did covers for the Hard Case Crime paperback series, and several  covers for Neil Gaiman reissues.

He passed away on March 10, 2025, at the age of 99, in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, having been married for 75 years to his wife Ferne, who died in 2023, leaving behind three children. As The Stiletto Gumshoe noted, “His passing… marks the end of an era, McGinnis among the very last of the mid-twentieth century’s great commercial illustrators who visually recorded but also defined those times in the book covers, film posters, glossy magazine editorial illustrations, ad work and even their more lurid work for the pulps and sweats.”

Substantial tributes ran in The Washington Post, London Telegraph and  Variety (the latter zeroing in on his movie work, no surprise), and our pal J. Kingston Pierce’s Killer Covers had ran a monthlong feature on his covers to previous month to mark  his 99th birthday.

LOOK FOR

“Provocative, seductive, elegant women” is how McGinnis himself describes his favorite subject. Long-legged beauties are the focal point, and often almost the only element on the cover. And check out some of those expressions on some of those women. It’s enough to make a old man itch and a young man faint.

   

WORKS INCLUDE

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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