I’ve been spending a lot of time amongst the Pulps lately. And it begs the question: what is the appeal of these old, flaking, brown books? One thing strikes me immediately, the collector’s mania that says, “I want them all!” Since Pulp magazines are no longer produced it is a finite proposition to own a “complete Weird Tales” if not a cheap one.
But this doesn’t explain everything. The idea of a rare magazine or comic sealed in plastic, unreadable, priced at, say, $1000.00, makes it no more interesting than a rare coin or a bearer bond. This is about owning a commodity, an investment, and in this respect I have no interest whatever. I know this as a fact, the same stories (and art) from that issue, when reprinted in a paperback or new magazine, are of equal interest to me. The state of being the original appearance is of only scholarly interest.
“Pulp” has become a pejorative in writing circles. If your writing is “pulpy” you are being accused of purple prose, melodrama, bathos, clunky Science, sexism, racism, outmoded ideas of romance or honor or any other number of sins. Unfortunately it doesn’t mean: fast-paced, exciting, vibrant, ass-kickin’ or fun. (Though all of these could be equally true.)
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster 2: From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly.
“I feel blessed really to have been a 12 year old in 1975. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard in paperback, followed by tons of comics. I caught the Fantasy explosion as it was growing and finally exploded after Star Wars. Joe Kubert’s Tarzan, John Buscema and Roy Thomas’ Savage Sword of Conan, Star Trek, Space 1999, Logan’s Run, Dan Curtis’s Kolchak– the 1970s. That is my nostalgia, not 1932”
Yep. Same here. I always refer to the 1970s as The Decade of The Big Pulp Boom because that’s when the Bantam Doc Savages really exploded and the resurgence of so many Classic Pulp Heroes began. The Shadow, The Avenger, G-8, The Phantom Detective and so many others along with the ones named in this excellent article. Whenever I have to talk about the major influences on my own writing i have to point to the pop culture of the 1970s; the movies, the comic books, the TV shows, the cheap paperbacks that cost less than a dollar…that was it, baby.