As he settled into San Francisco, Johnson set about developing his artistic and literary talents.  He developed a gouache process--a water-painting variation--and used it to paint circus scenes.  He showed these at Oakland Art Gallery in 1939, at the Golden Gate International Exhibition--these have been confirmed---as well as other places around the Bay Area, according to Johnson.  (An administrator for the Church of Satan told R. Alain Everts that LaVey owned some of Johnson's circus paintings as well.)  In addition, according to Don Herron, he created a 500,000  [late edit: 50,000] scale-replica of a circus, which was shown at least once, in the display window of an Oakland department store.

 Johnson also began writing around this time, as well--although the exact timing is difficult to pin down because his memory is not great and he sometimes wrote under an unknown pseudonym, making it impossible to confirm.

In his memoirs for The Weird Tales Story, Johnson says that upon making the rounds through San Francisco's artistic community, he had only written a few detective stories, "mostly under pseudonyms"--which would imply that some were not pseudonymous.  But, so far, I have found nothing in the indexes of pulp detective fiction under his name.  An article that he wrote for the fanzine New Frontier also raises some questions about the timing of those stories.  In that article--written twenty years before his memoir for The Weird Tales Story and so maybe more accurate--he says he published in a couple of Rogers Terrill-edited pulps "a couple of times myself, in lean periods, though under such heavy aliases that they have happily never been penetrated"--suggesting that all of the stories were published pseudonymously and in the late 1930s.  (Of course, he could have published in other detective pulps under his own name earlier.)  Even here, though, his recollection cannot be completely trusted.  Among the pulps he credits to Terill's editorship are Terror Tales, Horror Stories, and Ghost Stories.  But, while Terrill did edit the first two, I only know Ghost Stories to be a British pulp that ran from 1926-1931.

Nonetheless, it is still possible to say something about Johnson's literary output at this time, the beginning of his career.

A New Jersey-its, born in 1900, Rogers Terrill attended Columbia University, where he studied to be an actuary.  He became involved with the pulps in the late 1920s, making his way to the new Popular Publications in the 1930s, where he took over a stable of magazines.  Probably his best work, according to pulp historian Will Murray, was done on the Western pulps, widening the genre conventions.  He also involved himself with detective stories, developing a competitor to Black Mask in Dime Detective and took on Weird Tales with Terror Tales and Horror Stories.  Here was the emotional identity for those magazines:

"Terror is the emotional effect produced by extreme fear; it is horror brought home to us personally, that knowledge of something horrible about to happen to us or to someone dear to us, at which menace we are almost powerless to combat."

Johnson saw these magazines as "oversexed."  He wrote in New Frontier, "They were the most lurid magazines of their era--which was not known for its prudery.  Terrill would not buy a story in which, at some point or other, the heroine was not completely nude, and either raped or threatened with rape by some monster. . . .   The magazines were tripe, no other description is accurate."

Johnson presumably brought himself to write for Terrill because Popular Publications paid well, and because the formula was a more twisted version of that in Weird Tales.  Johnson still had a soft spot for Weird Tales and weird tales, having read every issue of the magazine and interested in the odd and uncanny, which was central both to Terrill's tripe and Weird Tales more literary fiction.