"For Humans Only," 1953

In the course of a long career, Everett Raymond Kintsler (1926-2019) became perhaps America’s most celebrated portrait painter since John Singer Sargent. Literally hundreds of the nation’s great and good, or at least famous, sat for him, including two presidents.

But well before all that, he pushed pens for many of the major comics companies as well as Avon and Ziff-Davis pulps. See for instance this, a bravura illo for Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader # 1 (January 1953). In my book, this is about as good as pen and ink got in the 20th century, and unusually racy for its era.

Alfred Coppel’s short story “For Humans Only” may be the heaviest-handed allegory of racial intolerance I have ever encountered, and I am not forgetting the Star Trek episode about the folks who are both black and white, but on different sides. So humanity created this race of humanoid robots, see? And they built our cities and did all the crap work, see? But us homo saps are prejudiced against them, and we stamp them all with big Rs and call them “R-boys” and forbid them from various places and generally push them around, see?

You get it, right?

PS: There are no R-babes in this story, nekkid or not. Perhaps Kintsler just couldn’t face the assignment without some visual interest.

This piece and the accompanying one have been through the wringer of time and are already in the hands of Austin’s Art Conservatory. I will repost the restored images when they return.