Craft
The old covers were extremely good commercial design working under conditions most illustrators would refuse. Learning the mechanism is the prerequisite for doing anything else with it, which is why the composition pages come first and the harder question comes second.
Reading a peril cover as design: diagonals, the eye path, the colour of danger.
Pulp cover composition taken apart: the diagonal that carries the whole picture, the eye path from title to figure to threat, the colour of danger, why the menace is nearly always cropped, and what the price box does to the corner.
Comic cover colour theory in practice: how a limited palette and one warm accent steer the eye, why red reads as danger, and what digital printing changed.
Drawing a bound character who is still the protagonist of the panel.
Drawing a bound character without turning her into scenery. Five craft decisions that separate peril from display: eyeline, whether she is doing something, tension versus limpness, camera position, and what modern comics changed.
Drawing figures in tension: weight, counterbalance, and where strain actually shows, plus the difference between a body exerting force and one arranged.
From thumbnail to finished cover if you want to work in this idiom yourself.
How to design a comic cover, step by step: postage-stamp thumbnails, a value study before colour, where the type has to sit, and the three-metre squint test.
How pulp covers were painted: the approval rough, the size of the original against the printed seven by ten inches, oil against pastel, what gets painted fast, and what happened to the canvas afterwards.
Pulp illustration economics with the documented numbers: ninety dollars a cover at Weird Tales, twenty five for a beginner, a cent a word for the writers, and what that arithmetic did to the picture.
Every pose discussed on these pages started as two people agreeing what to try and how it would look. The drawing is the easy half.
See where it happens now