‘The Pulpster’ #31

For PulpFest 2022, also being noted as PulpFest 50, we have The Pulpster #31. It’s the biggest regular issue so far at 72 pages.

The major theme, like with the Windy City Pulp Stories for this year, is “Fiction House at 100,” though there are other articles as well. Thus we get an Allen Anderson sf pulp cover from Planet Stories in 1952.

For “Fiction House at 100” we get six articles.

Michael Chomko has the first of a two-part article on Fiction House. Part 2 will appear in the next issue of The Pulpster. Part 1 takes the story up to about 1932 when they temporarily suspended publication. The article looks at the different magazines and genres served by Fiction House, and the editors and major authors in them. I think together the two articles will serve to be a pretty good in-depth history of FH. Here we learn about the development of Action Stories, The Lariat, their romance pulps, air pulps, northwestern pulps, Fight Stories, and Black Aces.

The Vizigraph is the focus of Sara Light-Waller‘s article. The Vizigrah was the letter column that ran in Fiction House’s Planet Stories starting with the second issue. I think too many pulp fans are ignorant of the letter columns that ran in various pulp magazines, though many are very important, such as the ones in Adventure and Weird Tales. Unless one gets and reads the original pulps or facsimiles, you’ll miss out on them. This one sounds to also have been pretty interesting as well.

From Jess Terrell, we get two articles on the major jungle heroes of Fiction House: Ki-Gor, their long-running Tarzan clone in Jungle Stories, and Sheena, who was much more successful in comics and TV than the pulps (one pulp with three stories), and who outlived Fiction House itself.

From illustrator Mort Künstler, with Wyatt Doyle, we get personal reminiscence about pulp and paperback-cover artist George Gross.

Finally, Science Fiction Grand Master Poul Anderson speaks with Darrell Schweitzer on the genre in an interview from 1974.

For the rest, we get:

The “slabbing” of pulps by CGC from David W. Smith. This is a practice in comicbook collecting that I don’t care for, as I get comics to read them. I would get pulps for the same reason, so slabbing them, which is grading and then sealing them in an unopenable plastic container kind of defeats this. I would hope that the pulps this happens to will be ones that someone has a good quality digital scan of to allow for the reprinting of the stories or even fascimiles.

The emergance of the “weird menace” or “shudder pulps” in Dime Mystery is the focus of Emily Sisler‘s article. This was under the editorship of Rogers Terrill, but publisher Harry Steeger thought it up, taking inspiration from the French Grand Guignol theater. This began with the October 1933 issue of Dime Mystery, less than a year after it started as Dime Mystery Book Magazine. There is a whole study on the genre, and many reprints from the “shudder pulps” out there.

Tony Davis gives us a look at the creator of the Church of Satan and how his love of pulp magazines influenced him in this. While I have heard of Anton LaVey, this was an interesting look into him.

From Craig McDonald are two articles. One is on pulp author William Lindsay Gresham, whose one book, Nightmare Alley, was recently adapted to film; the other is on two anniversaries for Street & Smith’s The Avenger.

On the 150th anniversary of his birth, we get a look at the legacy of the godfather of pulp westerns, Zane Gray, in Dan Smeddy‘s work.

Pulp fan Rusty Hevelin was one of those responsible for starting Pulpcon, the forerunner to PulpFest, so Curt Phillips provides a personal look at him.

As always, attendees will receive a copy of The Pulpster, and there should be extras available on its website and from some of the pulp dealers after PulpFest. As with prior issues, this is another great volume with quality paper and color printing throughout. If you haven’t gotten these, please consider doing so.