1961 Alex Schomburg painting for Amazing Stories

What a beautiful painting by Alex Schomburg, a Puerto Rican illustrator who was known for images that “filled every square inch with flamboyant characters, flames, knives, guns, explosions, Nazis, Japanese, and pretty girls in need of rescue.” [Wikipedia]

This painting is called “What Need of Man?” and appeared on the February 1961 cover of Amazing Stories.

Fantasy Ink has a bigger image.

1961 was around the time that chimps and other non-human animals were being sent into orbit. (Nate DiMeo of The Memory Palace did a great podcast episode about space animals, which you can listen to here.)