‘The Pulpster’ #30

For PulpFest 2021, we have The Pulpster #30. It’s the biggest regular issue so far at 64 pages. Two major themes for this year: the 100th anniversary of the romance pulp, and the 90th anniversary of The Shadow. All this under a Graves Gladney Shadow cover.

For The Shadow, we get several articles.

Craig MacDonald helps us understand how radio changed The Shadow, looking at how the character changed from the first to last stories — “The Living Shadow” and “The Whispering Eyes” — both written by Walter Gibson.

David Saunders introduces us to actor James La Curto, who was the first voice and “face” of The Shadow. He handled The Shadow in the early years when he was just a narrator of stories, and his face was used for the first image of The Shadow: the “hooded monk” look on early covers before we got the iconic face most of us are aware of.

The Shadow’s ring, the girasol or fire opal, has been a long-time symbol or sign for the character, and Will Murray takes a deep dive into it. This ring would be shown on the hand of The Shadow on covers, and was also used in some of the stories. Most importantly, in early stories, it was tied to his origin as a WWI spy and possible agent for the Czar.

Walter Gibson, the creator/author of The Shadow, looks back at writing The Shadow novels in an article from Writer’s Digest in 1941. He breaks down his method of working. The accompaning ad from Corona typewriters, I’ve seen before. They should have done one for H. Bedford-Jones, since he wrote more than Gibson, I believe.

The cover artwork of The Shadow was a big part of how the pulp was sold, and we get interviews by Al Tonik with Jerome Rozen, whose twin George was also an artist, and then one with Graves Gladney. George Rozen was responsible for the iconic image of The Shadow that most of us are aware of, working on The Shadow for years before Gladney took over.

For the romance pulps, we get an article by Thomas Uzzell reprinted from Scribner’s in 1938 on this huge area of the pulps, which at times were the top sellers. It began with Love Story Magazine started by Amita Fairgrieve in 1921. It would peak at 600,000 issues.

Rounding out this issue we get several other articles. Editor Bill Lampkin looks at the Usenet group alt.pulp that kicked off the online pulp fandom 30 years ago. A group that I was very active in when it started, creating and maintaining the FAQ for the group for several years. I was at college at the time, and before that I had never met any pulp fans, knew nothing of pulp fanzines, or the like.

Sai Shankar looks at the history of Everbody’s Magazine from a slick to a pulp. It has started in 1899 as a non-fiction magazine with some fiction, and was soon bought by the publisher of Adventure. It was a slick until 1927 when it became a pulp. I had thought it had always been a pulp, a sort-of companion magazine to Adventure. I’ve reviewed several works reprinted from it. It lasted until 1929, when it merged with Romance. So it was really a pulp for only a short time. But this is a good overview of the magazine and the authors that appeared there.

Another article by Tony Davis looks at pulp editor Dorothy McIlwraith, who handled Short Stories and Weird Tales for several years. She had been the editor of Short Stories and took over editorship of Weird Tales when the magazine was sold to Short Stories. As well as a good intro to this editor, we also learn a lot about both magazines under her editorship. This is a great lead into an article by McIlwraith from The Writer in 1949 on the need for a hero in stories, as well as another short one by The Author & Journalist editor Margaret A. Bartlett in 1948 on getting your story into Short Stories.

We also get an interview with pulpster Hugh B. Cave from Darrell Schweitzer done in 1997, and published 1998. This is another interesting piece.

As always, it’s another great publication. This fanzine (journal?) is a great resource of information and history of the pulps. If you missed PulpFest, be sure to get a copy. Maybe someday I can attend.