Tag: Samson Pollen

Unfortunately this example of Samson Pollen’s work, which I just sighted on Bluesky, wasn’t posted at larger size, but it’ll still do and you can click to enlarge it. This comes from Male magazine for July 1974, illustrating a story called “The Gun Them Down Bunch”, and this blog post summarises it. This is evidently the scene where the bunch have come to bust an injured member of the gang out of hospital, which apparently ends badly. Curiously, the gang apparently prides itself on not killing people; I presume that cop we see about to hit the ground was an exception.

As with the prevous example of Pollen I posted here a few months ago, I’m struck by the incidental details, but I’m even more struck by the thoroughly odd angle from which we see the action… it’s so strange that it actually took me a moment to properly read it and work out what was happening in it. Look at how the ambulance doesn’t sit completely on the ground as if it’s tipping a bit, to say nothing of the odd posture of the gang member apparently emerging therefrom… which I presume is actually accurate to how someone in motion would actually look from whatever the hell that angle is, but damn it looks peculiar. And I daresay this picture is far better than the story it was made to depict…

Given the hideousness of the US right now, let me write something positive instead:

Someone posted this recently on Bluesky, noting the artist was one Samson Pollen, of whom I had otherwise never heard. Turns out he was a prolific contributor to men’s adventure magazines in decades gone by; I found a Facebook page for him, which says this comes from Stag magazine, March 1974, and it illustrated a story called “The Battling Priest Who Smashed a N.Y. Mob”. I feel the story is probably not an undying masterpiece of world literature, but I’m kind of blown away by the art.

Cos LOOK AT IT. I’ve linked the image so you can see it properly at full size. There’s… kind of a lot going on. The titular priest is wielding what looks like a screwdriver AND a hammer, and he’s attacking the gun-wielding mobster with it, while the knife-wielding mobster is distracted by cops bursting into the church being led by another priest. And look at the smaller details, too: the window art, the (presumably) Last Supper altarpiece, the pattern on the other guy’s shirt, the priest’s previously-sustained injury, the falling candelabra, the word visible on the scarf, all of it…

I daresay that Stag wasn’t the most highbrow of publications, and most magazines of the era were probably considered ultimately disposable, and things like Stag would been considered even more so than most; and I’m sure the publishers felt the same way about their own product, which they would’ve been just grinding out and moving on from it as fast as they could. I imagine Samson Pollen had minimal time to come up with a painting like this, and whatever magazines he did art for would’ve been casually tossed off and tossed away, and the art would’ve been considered as disposable as the mags it appeared in, probably. And yet he still put this sort of effort into it despite that. I kind of love it.