The past few years, I’ve been actively bulking up my collection of pulp fanzines. I've purchased scores of Echoes, select issues of Xenophile and dozens of issues of other zines.

They are packed with a mix of terrific research, articles, illustrations, opinions and letters, as well as a fair share of, well, goofy articles. In general, though, they are great reference material.

If you look at the defunct pulp zines page on the alt.pulp FAQ, you see a long list of zines that have come and gone since the 1960s. The current zine list is relatively short.

Back in early 2000, the idea of The Pulp Companion was germinating. What I wanted to create was essentially an online pulp fanzine, with articles, columns, news items, etc., that would be updated regularly.

It would be a couple of years before The Pulp Companion would actually come to fruition. But in the development stage, I contacted several possible contributors. One, who has been a regular contributor to just about every pulp zine since the ’70s, wrote back with this comment:

However as long as people are publishing fan journals on the pulps, I don't think it is fair to the publishers of these journals to write original articles on the pulps which the fans can obtain off the Web.

Eight years later, that comment still comes to mind occasionally. Did he have a point? Is the Web hastening the end of the printed pulp fanzine? Are Web sites taking the place of the fanzine? How fair is it to the zine publishers?

Years ago, someone might start a zine as an expression of his or her interest in the pulps and to reach out to other pulp fans. These days, that same fan might start up a Web site.

You can certainly reach more people on the Web than in print. Where some zines’ total press run might be 200 copies or so, Web sites can have that many visitors every day.

For instance, ThePulp.Net sees between 100 to 200 unique visitors each day. I’m sure other pulp-related Web sites would report similar results.

It’s great to search TPN or use the Pulp Gumshoe to search other pulp Web sites for something you’re looking for at the very moment you want the answer. But there’s also something to opening the mailbox to find the latest issue of Blood ’n’ Thunder waiting, or searching through the zines that line one of the shelves in my pulp bookcase.

Have you dropped a pulp fanzine subscription because the Web offers a cheaper, more immediate alternative? Or do you prefer the hard-copy version of the zines?

— William

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Walt Disney Studios announced plans for its next 10 animated films on Tuesday, April 8. There was no mention of the John Carter series. But buried way down was reference to a Christmas 2012 feature: King of the Elves.

It’s based on an early Philip K. Dick story of the same name that appeared in the September 1953 number of Beyond Fantasy Fiction, a short-lived (10 issues) pulp digest published by Galaxy Publishing Corp. as a companion to its more popular Galaxy Science Fiction digest.

Can’t say I’ve read the story, but Lawrence Sutin in his book Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick calls it “Phil’s best fantasy story.” He provides this brief summary: “Shadrach Jones, an old man in a desolate small town, offers shelter from the rain to a tattered troup of Elves, whose ailing King dies in Shadrach’s bed. The Elves are battered from their fierce war with the Trolls; they badly need a new King and convince Shadrach to lead them. His neighbor, Phineas Judd, tries to persuade Shadrach that he is losing his mind — but...” Well, I won’t spoil the ending for you.

The film will be computer generated and, as seven of the other movies on Disney’s slate, will be released in 3-D.

— William

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Following up my previous post, here’s an interesting glimpse at what might have been had animator Bob Clampett gotten the greenlight for a John Carter of Mars project in the 1930s.

Thanks to Bill Crider’s Pop Culture blog; Chris Roberson’s blog, Roberson’s Interminable Ramble; Christopher Paul Carey’s blog; and original YouTube poster, FMatson.



— William

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Have we moved a step closer to a John Carter of Mars movie?

John Hill Media, a blog about the entertainment industry, and the Walt Disney Co., in particular, has a recent post detailing how Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios has acquired numerous Web domain names related to John Carter.

Now, registering domain names for a movie is exciting. But remember in 1999 and again in 2002, Warner Bros. reserved several domain names related to Doc Savage. Nine years later, are we closer to a new Doc Savage movie?

The promising news in the John Hill blog comes farther down the article. The blog suggests that Pixar’s plans may include a live-action John Carter movie trilogy, not just a single picture. It goes on to say that the first draft of the first film’s script has been written and that there is a window in Disney’s release calendar for a blockbuster in 2011.

Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter series was one of the first pulp series that I read as a teenager. The paperbacks were the Ballantine Books’ versions with the terrific Gino D’Achille covers. Ever since reading those, I’ve thought that John Carter would make a great movie.

If Pixar can replicate the script quality of its animated The Incredibles with a serious adventure version of John Carter, pulp fans should be overjoyed. I know I would be.

— William

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I’ve been going through some old pulp fanzines recently. And this quote about the pulp era from Xenophile No. 9 (December 1974) caught my eye. I thought i’d share it with you.

It’s originally from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (May 1950) and attributed to Erle Stanley Gardner, who is probably best known for his Perry Mason books. But Gardner had many stories published in Black Mask and numerous other pulps from 1921 through the mid-1930s.

Some 25 years ago, a new force vitalized the field of fiction. Mystery writers began selling stories.

The old-fashioned mystery story dealing with deduction, a recapitulation of the clues midway in the story, and a detective who ‘slipped something into his pocket while the police detective was looking the other way’ was thrown out of the window.

In its place there came a new, virile type of story told in terms of action. The reader, moreover, was given an equal break with the detective. Those were the days when wood-pulp magazines were at their zenith.

The public eagerly devoured the stories. While it didn’t demand characterization in the best literary style, it did demand a story. A lot of slush has been written about the pulps, principally by writers who knew the market only by hearsay.

It is true, as has been frequently charged, that the better pulp writers, being paid by the word, ground out a terrific wordage. They were able to do this, however, only because they had imagination.

The telling of the story may have been sketched with road strokes. There was certainly no time for subtlety. But the writer of the period either had ingenuity, imagination, and touch of novelty, or he went broke.

— William

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