Pulp magazines had a number of great cover artists that are remembered today, such as Walter Baumhofer, Earle K. Bergey, Margaret Brundage, Edd Cartier, Virgil Finlay, Frank R. Paul, Norman Saunders, Nick Eggenhofer, Hugh J. Ward, George Rozen, and Rudolph Belarski. When many pulp characters began appearing in paperback, the cover artists for those works included such greats as James Bama, George Gross, Frank Frazetta, Jim Steranko, and others.
But the one artist that caught my eye in many pulp fanzines was Frank Hamilton. His detailed black-and-white artwork of pulp heroes, villains, and others stood out from all the rest. I have no idea how much artwork he did during his career, or if anyone has cataloged what he has done. And I wish someone would come out with a book collected his works.
But until then, we have two works from the ’90s: Amazing Pulp Heroes (1988) from Gryphon Press, and Favorites (1999) from Tattered Pages Press, to fill that void. In addition to Hamilton’s artwork, both works also feature the writing of pulp historian Link Hullar.
Amazing Pulp Heroes is a small booklet, 5.5×8.5-inches in size. Billed as by “Frank Hamilton and Link Hullar,” the focus is on artwork by Hamilton with short write-ups of the characters by Hullar. We get the “usual suspects” of The Shadow, Doc Savage, The Spider, The Phantom Detective, Tarzan, and more. But we also get western characters like Pete Rice, villain pulps and villains from G-8. We also get several other jungle characters, over a half dozen. We also get some of the distaff characters from the hero pulps.
Favorites, however, is large size, 8.5×11-inches, and instead billed as “from Hullar & Hamilton.” Here the focus is collecting their favorites from several various fanzines. Most of Hullar’s articles are on Doc Savage, though we get one on Pete Rice. Hamilton has several cover artwork pieces showing various pulp heroes, but also subjects like Walter Baumhofer, Prince Valiant, and Aleta, The Phantom, the Maltese Falcon, and Buster Crabbe and son.
In 1996, an expanded edition of Amazing Pulp Heroes came out, upping the page count from 62 pages to 200 page! It includes all the materials from Favorites and a lot more.
Both works are out of print, but if you look for them, you should be able to find them. I really wish that someone would come out with a volume collecting all of Hamilton’s work. And I am sure there are enough articles from Hullar that those can be collected as well. With all the recent volumes collecting and highlighting other artists, I wish Hamilton would not be overlooked.
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