Clay Ferguson Jr. Cosmos Art - Flying Pony Studios

This is the companion post to Rocketeer Podcast #65 posted on Substack on 5/7/2025.

Clay Ferguson Jr.

This information comes directly from The Ultimate Cosmos (2025) by First Fandom Experience Project. Henry Clay Ferguson, Jr. (1914–1995) was a major contributor to the schemes of the semi-pro Science Fiction Digest crew, including the novel Cosmos. Despite extensive work for amateur and semi-professional publishers in the early 1930s, Ferguson fell short in his aspiration for a career as a fantasy artist. Ferguson’s contribution to Cosmos was monumental—but very obscure. The staff of Fantasy Magazine commissioned the artist to create unique illustrations for five copies of the novel, including unique art for each chapter in each copy. Most of these were bound by the owner.

The opening splash page illustration for Cosmos (1933, Science Fiction Digest insert)

One of my favorite Ferguson Cosmos illustrations, it’s so expressive and dramatic!

Several things about his images fascinate me. One was that he created different illustrations for each of the five special edition private copies of Cosmos. In all my 37 year career as an illustrator, I would never have conceived of producing different illustrations for each of five copies of the same story. But I was trained in an era of easy reproductions, even before digital art. What a job! But also how freeing to be able to do it? For me, the parameters of production sit too heavily on my shoulders.

Two illustrations for the same scene for two different special editions.

Ferguson’s view of Cosmos’ unhuman Saturnian and Neptunian heroes was both accurate to the text and naive by modern standards. He was imaging them as you might have seen them in an early issue of Amazing Stories. When I illustrated the Neptunian hero, Bar Steepa, I took a more humorous approach. I had to. If not, he might have come across as more like a Japanese Yōkai, which I didn’t want. I didn’t attempt to illustrate the Saturnian heroes, although I had a mental picture of what they looked like. After seeing Ferguson’s ideas for both these aliens, I tried my hand at illustrating a couple of scenes with them in the way he had. It was an interesting experiment which I’ll show you below.

Scene showing the Saturnian characters. The hero is named Fo-Peta.

Another scene showing Ferguson’s view of the Saturnian characters. My sketch is on the right.

Ferguson’s view of the Neptunian hero, Bar Steepa (left). I had not seen Ferguson’s illustrations until 2025.
My preliminary sketch of Bar Steepa from 2020 (right) is based on the text.

My final illustration of Bar Steepa, included in The Ultimate Cosmos.

I was curious to try drawing the Neptunians the way Ferguson had (left) and did this color sketch (right).

In one case, I have a complete disagreement with Ferguson’s handling of a character in Cosmos. In Chapter 3 we are introduced to “Callisto’s Children” and the hero, Parcele. He’s described as having “black eyes deeper than space,” “leonine hair,” “tumbles of black hair,” and “an aspect of wildness as a hunted creature.” He has deeply red lips and runs with the grace and speed of a gazelle. But he was also 900 years old, a genius scientist, and one of the few breeding males left in an almost entirely female society. To my mind Parcele was a combination of Tarzan (with the mind of Mr. Spock) running through a cheezy 1950s Amazon planet movie. Parcele was a buff guy, in my mind. No doubt about it. Ferguson saw him differently. In fact, I was shocked when I saw his interpretations of Parcele. Then I thought about it. He’d literally translated the text without the internal processing I would have done for a book illustration. Without that processing filter, we have true outsider art. Naïve but perhaps also more accurate. In the final analysis Ferguson’s hero of Callisto is accurate, even if somewhat naïve to my eyes.

Ferguson’s interpretation of Parcele may be accurate, but it’s too feminized for my tastes.

Ferguson had several color illustrations in Cosmos. However, as his handling of color was more naive than his black and white work, I have downplayed them in this post. Here’s one example created in what appears to be gouache.