I've heard that song before...

I recently got my grubby little hands on a new book from Collectors Press titled The Incredible Pulps. It's a collection of great old pulp covers from the teens through the 40s and even into the 50s when the pulps finally gasped their last brown paper breath. The pulps are the definite father of comics, no paternity test needed. Comics started as reprints of newspaper strips on basically the same cheap paper, but the pulps were novels, fiction on a sometimes-weekly basis and all genre-related, just like comics. Science fiction, fantasy, adventure, crime and mystery, heroes like The Shadow and Doc Savage, westerns...pretty much everything the pulps had, comics out and out stole, and the covers here prove that.

Paging through the book, I was smitten by 2 of the covers which reminded me of some boyhood favorites. The Jimmy Olsen "Turtle Boy" cover is a particular favorite and comes from a time period when our boy Jimmy became many strange characters and creatures. The incredibly similar pulp cover just rang the bell of memory for me. Ditto for the Blackhawk cover below. Many pulp writers made the leap to comics as both writers and editors. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Mort Weisinger had a hand in the pulp cover to the left that "inspired" the classic saga of Turtle Boy. And the Blackhawks had a habit of coming under siege by weird inventions and machinery. Undoubtedly the dastardly villain who created the "flying buzzsaw" sold the plans via Popular Mechanics or some other similar boy-oriented science mag of the past. (Or else they traveled into the future and bought them off eBay.)

Comments

[Ian Moulding]

This site http://henryvallely.blogspot.com/2006/05/gang-busters-secret-origins-of-batman.html
found a couple of panels from early Batman comics that are blatant swipes from the pulps. And a lot of the early 'superheroes' were basically pulp characters in bright costumes. Not that I'm complaining. The guys who created the comics grew up reading and in some cases working for the pulps.

[elessa]

when i was editing the comicbook marketplace we did an article on this very subject. the use of art from the pulps was very prevalent.