The Gland Superman — Amazing Stories October 1938 Mad Science Cover

What's startling here is the sheer physical grotesquerie played completely straight: a massively overdeveloped, near-naked figure crouches in a gleaming laboratory while a white-coated scientist recoils in apparent horror or awe, clutching a glowing orb. The implied narrative — glandular science run catastrophically amok — is conveyed with serious painterly muscle, the deep blue laboratory interior crowded with coils, tubes, and pulsing apparatus giving the scene a genuinely menacing atmosphere rare for pulp cover art of the period.