#pulp magazine

[sumarex]

[cavalier-consciousness]

+ james spader and deborah unger cover of detour magazine (1996)

[psychorockette]

Before the future arrived, it was already posing for the cover.

From pulp pages to rocket runways—where 40s–50s pinup glamour collides with chrome-plated futures.

Aliens whisper, engines hum, and every heroine looks like she could outfly the galaxy and still make it to cocktails by eight.

These covers weren’t just stories—they were promises of a brighter, stranger tomorrow.

[spacenoirdetective]

Clyde Caldwell, cover art for "Heavy Metal" magazine, July 1978

[jcwdrawskinda]

@rad-roche and @chadfallout76podcast gave me permission to animate her lovely art! This is for the upcoming VoiceAPalooza charity drive for the Alzheimer's Association, there will be a lot amazing voices, new and old, and I am personally hyped to sit down for another radio special!

I had a lot of time to theorize what this special might be about--I'm excited to see if I've hit the mark or strayed far from it ✪ ω ✪

A short breakdown of the process below~

Usually I would share a timelapse with y'all but I forgot to press record :'D

I went back and made some gifs though that hopefully show what I did! It's pretty simple! I took Rad's art and copy-pasted all the parts I wanted to move, then painted under to try and match what would be exposed under that movement. Following that, I had fun adding jolts, smoke, and a little tween! The hardest part for me was nailing down the timing of the gun; that took some tries to make it look natural.

[talefoundryshow]

Brainrot this, chronically online that... Meanwhile some teenage girl in the 1930s was sending these to her favourite horror magazine:

[misforgotten2]

Cover by Bob Clothier -- 1950

[alpaca-clouds]

No, Really. You Should Read Pulp!

Does these pictures grab your attention? Yes. Okay, great. Now listen (or I guess: read).

You might actually want to read some pulp. Really. I mean that. Because Pulp is a weird kind of medium - especially now that it is largely in hindsight.

So, before I talk about why. Let me quickly put it here: The Pulp Archive (curated over the Internet Archive, and really, really, REALLY important). Go. Save the link. Please. Read some Pulp.

Now, let's quickly talk about the why. And let's start simple.

What is Pulp?

A couple of years back I had this really fun presentation on this topic for congresses on literature. But let's just do the quick one.

Basically, when literacy rates when up, and printing became fairly cheap, there were a bunch of fiction magazines mostly covering what we now consider "genre fiction". Those were printed on very cheap paper - called pulp, hence the name - and often had very, very little barriers to getting your stuff printed there.

This is why the name Pulp Fiction became fairly synonymous with sort of bad, tropy genre fiction. And it is also very much related to why genre fiction to this day gets treated as lesser than "literary fiction". Mind you, it is not the only reason, but one of them.

Because yes, lower barriers, little editing, and the fact that it was cheap created a scenario where pulp was everything that literature adjacent academia sort of hated for a while. Especially at the time when pulp was really having its hay day (mostly from 1890 to 1960), when academia also had higher barriers and was more elitism based.

I first got into contact with Pulp via Digimon, ironically. If you read this blog, you might actually know Digimon Tamers 1984. The Digimon Tamers backstory that forever seemed to be out of reach for the western fandom, until one day a scanlation came out.

I was the person who did the scans. I hunted down the magazine in which this story was published, and got it over Yahoo Auctions. This magazine was the SF Japan. And the SF Japan was a Pulp Magazine. And that was how... I first became obsessed with Japanese Pulp, which actually is other than western Pulp still going. Like some of the magazines there are being published to this day. (I mean, figures. Many of the manga magazines are technically speaking Pulp Magazines. Cheaply printed on cheap paper.)

Why Pulp is Actually Kinda Important

Now, here is the thing. Pulp is the origin of genre fiction. I do not mean this in some metaphoric way or anything, but quite literally. Many of the genres that make up genre fiction were named by pulp magazines. Like, their names trace back to either a specific magazines or the language those magazines used. Fantasy, Scifi, Horror, Romance, Mystery. Pretty much all of this.

And that is somewhat related to why it is important. Because Pulp is massively related to how we tell stories in the genre.

See, what got me to look at American pulp magazines was actually another question: where the hell did the "vampires and werewolves hate each other" trope come from? Some of the people over at White Wolf claimed that World of Darkness is the originator. But I was pretty certain that I had seen some schlock horror movies that predated World of Darkness and at the very least referenced the trope. And so I went digging I and I found the Jules de Grandin Pulp Series that released in the 20s and 30s, and pretty much codified a vast majority of Urban Fantasy tropes that we know this day. The series had about 90 different stories, and released in the Weird Tales magazines - the one in which Lovecraft published as well.

So, to make it simple: Urban Fantasy, one of the big subgenre of Fantasy, got codified by a story series that while some treat it as a cult classic, is largely forgotten.

And this is actually somewhat true for a lot of genre tropes. These stories are somewhat an important in understanding the history of the genre and how they came to be.

But there is another factor to this...

The Class Aspect

So, another bit in regards to how often pulp fiction gets ignored in the context of a lot of academia is related to how genre fiction to this day often gets ignored. Sure, there are bits that break containment and actually get referenced, and these days it has gotten a bit better for a bunch of reasons. But still...

And that issue is of course linked to classism. Pulp was cheap fiction. It had a low barrier to be obtained. This was the kind of stuff that normal people would just read. (See also my argument of why Thedas is not medieval: it does have pulp!) It had low barriers throughout. Many people could have their stories published, and many people would read it. Many of the stories were on the shorter site and often could be read even at times when we did not yet have the 40h week.

This of course does in some ways show. Because a lot of it also reflects the wider society at the time. Racism is definitely there, and so are many of the other *isms. But if you actually read these stories you will also find that there actually were people who were very aware of the issues and actually tried - in their stories - to push back.

And... well, I guess part of my issue is also that there is this big volume of stories that were in so many ways important, but almost got completely forgotten. And I find that sad.

In a weird way, I would argue, that those pulp magazines were somewhat comparable to fanfictions today. And... well, I do not think fanfictions should go forgotten either.