I have previously posted on the excellent fanzine Blood ‘n’ Thunder produced by Ed Hulse and his Murania Press.
Maybe calling it a “fanzine” does it a disservice, as it’s a high quality journal aimed at late 19th and early 20th century pop culture. For the pulp fan, this means the pulp magazines, their forerunners (story papers, dime novels, and nickel weeklies) and the complementary forms of stage melodramas, motion pictures, serials, and old-time radio.
My prior posting gave an overview of the most recent three issues published. This update looks at the latest issue, a huge special issue done to catch up on delays, clocking in at 300 pages. It will serve as issues 38-40. As with my previous posting, I’ll focus on just the items of particular interest to pulp fans, but I think much of the rest would be of interest as well.
A cover article on the pulp “Yellow Peril” villains such as Wu Fang, Yen Sin, etc. This is an excerpt from a larger work on anti-foreign imagery in the pulps by Nathan Madison.
Will Murray gives an article on Popular Publication’s G-8, their successful air-war pulp hero who faced a bizarre version of World War I on the eve of WWII. Here he looks at the possibility of Popular doing a series of G-8 adventures set after WWI. Sadly, it never happened. But I think this could inspire some to create post-WWI G-8 stories.
An expanded article by Ed on The Shadow feature films of the late 1930s that now includes info on the short “Shadow Detective” featurettes of the early 1930s, which I had only recently learned of.
A review of one of the recent Doc Savage novels by Will Murray, “Skull Island,” is included with the editorial. This story serves as both a tie-in with another classic character, as well as examination of the young Doc and more about his family. Rick Lai contributes an article on how this work challenges the Wold Newton Universe, and Will Murray contributed an article that serves as a response to that, though probably not so written.
Larry Latham has a great article on how dime novels, story papers, and nickel weeklies gave way to the pulps. For hero pulp fans, I think this is important, as there existed characters in these works like Nick Carter, the Man in the Black Cloak, and the various detective, western, and boy inventor characters who predate the pulp heroes.
We get a reprint of pulp editor Robert A.W. Lowndes‘ advice to budding pulp authors. This editor worked for Columbia, which was a low-rent pulp house that actually lasted to around 1960.
Two pulp fiction reprints take up about half the magazine. The first is “The Last Passenger” by James B. Connelly, and seemed inspired by the Titanic tragedy. The second is novel from a 1918 All-Story Weekly, “The Strange Case of Cavendish” by Randall Parrish.
If you don’t subscribe to this excellent magazine, do so now. It’s well worth your while. The next issue is the summer issue, as the magazine will now be quarterly, and should be out now.
