You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief.

I'm Eric Malinsky.

These machines haven't changed a whole lot in their construction since 1891 when they were

invented the electric tattoo machine.

It is early in the morning at Ed Hardy's Tattoo City in San Francisco.

Actually, it's not really that early, but it's early for a tattoo parlor where people don't

usually show up to the afternoon. Mary Joy Scott is showing me her tattooing equipment,

and she's a big deal in the world of tattoo art.

But I was not there to get a tattoo. I wanted to talk with her about her craft,

because one of the artists that she's really inspired by is Margaret Brundage.

And if you haven't heard of Margaret Brundage, don't worry, most people haven't.

In the 1930s, Margaret Brundage drew the covers for a Pulp Fiction magazine called Weird Tales.

Now Pulp Fiction's usually thought of as sort of hard-boiled detective stories.

But Weird Tales specialized in fantasy and horror stories, written by very famous people,

like H.B. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, and the covers that Margaret Brundage drew for the

magazines were just as iconic. They're just so beautifully rendered. They have such an inner

life more so than some Pulp illustrations that I've seen.

They're in the most well-known Brundage illustration. He has a woman alone on the cover.

She's wearing a black sleeveless top. Her arms are raised with a back of her palms against her

cheeks. And she's wearing basically a Bat Girl Cowell with an actual bat spreading its wings on top.

And by the way, that covers from 1933, seven years before Batman came out.

But a typical Brundage cover had a woman who was either completely naked or barely wearing anything.

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