To boldly go

And people complain that comics had suggestive art. This is nearly pornography.

Interesting that the organic landscape reacts by forming feminine attributes once her surface is violated by men in their HUGE rocketship.

SF mags and pulps also shared an attribute with comics in that the cover often did not match the content. That is not so unusual as deadlines and the need for effective marketing on crowded newstands require a cover that catches the attention of a consumer. I am a reader though who often feels dissapointed, if not outright ripped off, by the promise of a good story on the cover of a comic (in particular) or book.

June 1960 FS&F contents
Covert art by Emsh
The Non-Humans by Charles Henneberg; trans. by Damon Knight
Fireside Talk by H. F. Elli
Cato the Martian by Howard Fast
The Swamp Road by Will Worthington
Slammy and the Bonneygott by Mrs. Agate
The Sixth Season by Avram Davidson
The Golden Bugs by Clifford D. Simak
Beyond Ganga Mata by John Berry

All the indexes I can find simply describe the cover as "Emsh's version of a soft landing".

Emsh was born in Lansing, MI and served in the Army from 1943-1946. He earned a bachelor of design degree from the Univ. of Michigan in 1949 & studied art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (with his wife, Carol), & Art Students League.

He designed hundreds of covers for the SF mags, able to do a painting to order in just a few days.

In much the same way comic editor Julie Schwartz worked in the Silver Age, Emsh would sometimes make a cover painting for which editors would assign an author to write a story about. For many magazines the cover art had no tie-ins to stories in the issue. The art would be a story or even a character in itself.