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.)
I’ve been trying to divine what attracts me to these musty old tales and I can’t grab a definite answer. Am I getting old? Nostalgic? Not likely, since these magazines appeared when my dad was in diapers. I never read a copy of Weird Tales from the newsstand as did Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight or Robert Silverberg. (I’ve fantasized about owning a time machine and owning a complete and pristine sets of WTs.) By the time I was born and of a reading age Science Fiction had suffered through the New Wave and was trying to figure out what to do next in the Disco Seventies. The proponents of the New Wave had wanted to divorce themselves from the Pulps and become more literary. Out went the space villains and ray guns, in came the social issues and sexual issues and art-for-art-sake writing. (Don’t believe me? Read Philip Jose Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage” (1968) or Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren (1975) Put your jim-jams on first.
So why should a 56 year old man want to read R. F. Starzl, Raymond Z. Gallun, Charles W. Diffin, Nat Schachner, Neil R. Jones, P, Schuyler Miller, Sewell Peaslee Wright and a host of others? The answer lies with Star Wars and comic books. I was 14 when the original Star Wars came out. I was already a Star Trek re-run fan so it made perfect sense to me. And still it was a revelation to Hollywood, audiences in general. Space Opera could sell – like a hot damn! And in the comics Pulp had never really gone away. Superheroes to graphic novels, it all has the same spirit as the old magazines from which they were born. Entertainment first, save the literary flourishes for college.
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. But there is a kindred feel to those two decades. Maybe it’s escapism. The 1930s Astounding Stories reader escaped from the Great Depression, just as we were reading Conan and The Lord of the Rings to escape Viet Nam. But I never bought that “escapism” rot that mainstreamers (call them Mundanes if you prefer) sell. “Fantasy is escape: ergo you want to escape reality.” Shows you what you know if all you read is Newsweek and Jackie Collins.
Fantasy literature transcends reality – to see things in a wider view, from another perspective, to quantify it and deal with it. Proof? A mainstream bestseller about environmental issues might make the bestsellers’ list if it had some raunchy sex thrown in and a huge marketing budget. But Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) deals with the subject within a space opera, keeps you riveted and gets you thinking about so many things. And you’ll read it every 10 years or so just like The Lord of the Rings. Because it’s worth reading over and over. Tolkien’s series explores war, sacrifice, belonging to a community, all issues for the Viet Nam generation that adored it. Even something as simplistic as Lin Carter’s Thongor of Lemuria (1965) (which I read at 13 or 14) and despite its zillion literary flaws, still sells the idea of bravery against terrible odds and how to be a hero (in a Joseph Campbell sense). And why do we all need to be heroes? To face the troubles in life. Great literature, no, but neither is it existential, relativistic, down-beat and angst-ridden.
John Dickson Carr in his Henry Merrivale mystery Night at the Mocking Widow (1950) sneaks in a little diatribe on good writers. To save a young girl from teenage confusion he throws her copies of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov out the window and prescribes:
“I want you to read some fellers named Dumas and Mark Twain and Stevenson and Conan Doyle. They’re dead, yes; but they can still whack the britches off anybody at tellin’ a story…” I could not agree more. And is it any surprise that this list of authors are all those who inspired so many Pulp writers who followed? The sword-fight tales of Sabitini and Johnston McCulley’s Zorro are direct descendents of Dumas, while what pirate yarn does not bow to Stevenson’s Treasure Island, as all detective tales do to Doyle’s Sherlock and Watson? And here lies the answer at last: a Pulp tale might be laughable in terms of technique, social comment, but the author has but one agenda: to entertain me. To make me thrill, or laugh, or cry, or all at the same time. (You don’t believe me, read Talbot Mundy’s “The Soul of a Regiment” I finished that one with a lump in my throat.) It is this joie du vivre I hope to engender in my own stories, to give a chill, a rush of excitement. If I don’t succeed, if the critics judge me harshly, I will still be in good company. Bring on the Pulps!
“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.