I have been posting on the fanzine bare*bones, which is devoted to “unearthing vintage, forgotten, and overlooked horror, mystery, sci-fi, western, and weird film, paperbacks, comics, pulp fiction, and video.” It is produced by Peter Enfantino and John Scoleri through Cimarron Street Books.
I have reviewed the first 20 issues. Now there are more, so here are the next four, moving into their sixth year, which is a pretty good achievement. Six years of quarterly issues, all coming out on a regular basis.
Again, for many readers, there is probably other material included in this zine that will be of interest, but as this blog is focused on pulp, that is what I will focus on.
There are reviews of movies, books, comics, digests, and more that you may enjoy. Each issue also has an in-depth look at different crime digests, successors to the pulps, along with an irregular column on the “Field Guide to L.A. Pulp,” though sadly it does not always focus on actual pulp.
bare*bones #21 (Winter 2025) is a shorter issue than last time, around 100 pages, with several articles of interest. There is a nice piece on the Mr. Moto books and movies. Mr. Moto appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, so not technically pulp, but I think these stories would have worked there just fine. I was fortunate to find a wonderful reprint edition from Little, Brown in the 1980s that I read. While I know of the movies, I have never seen them.
Another article looks at the Eurospy movies based on Kommissar X, a German pulp series. Nearly 2,000 issues were published from the 1960s into the 1990s. Kommissar X is really New York private investigator Joe Walker, who partnered with NYPD cop Capt. Tom Rowland. I have no idea why he was called “Kommissar X,” which sounds more like a government spy. Seven of these movies were made in the 1960s and 1970s. I know that Sinister Cinema has five of the seven on DVD. There is also an examination of the short-lived Charlie Chan Mystery Magazine from the 1970s. Charlie Chan began as a series of novels and went on to movies, serials, television shows, and more. I remember the Saturday morning cartoon version.
Starting this issue is a four-part series by comic-book artist Stephen R. Bissette on cryptids in Westerns. This installment is heavily footnoted, with many references tying back to pulp and pulp-adjacent works. Finally, I enjoyed the short article on the Monster Gallery coloring book, which either my brothers or I had, along with some of the others produced by the same company. I am not sure if I still have this one.
bare*bones #22 (Spring 2025) is another fun issue, though nothing here is explicitly pulp. We get an article on films influenced by The Lost Patrol (1934), another on filmmaker Roger Corman, and the next installment in Bissette’s series, this time getting into apes, yetis, and similar creatures.
bare*bones #23 (Summer 2025) opens with an article on the classic 1950s sci-fi film This Island Earth (1955), which was based on a pulp science-fiction story by Raymond F. Jones serialized in three issues of Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1949 and 1950 before being reprinted by Shasta Publishers. Interestingly, the novel differs somewhat from the movie. This was the most pulp-related item in the issue. Another article looks at the apocalyptic films of Japanese director Toshio Masuda. There is also an article on the novelizations of the “Dollars” trilogy of spaghetti Westerns, along with the next installment in Bissette’s cryptid series.
bare*bones #24 (Fall 2025) includes an article on five Gold Medal Western novels written by former pulp author Dudley Dean. He wrote mainly Westerns, with some detective stories in the pulps, and later transitioned to original paperbacks. In this installment of the “Field Guide to L.A. Pulp” series, we get a true pulp author: Fritz Leiber. I was not aware he had a bit part in the interesting horror film Equinox. I saw most of this on television and recently picked up the Criterion edition. Of the other pieces, I enjoyed the article on the novelizations of the “Sabata trilogy” of spaghetti Westerns, if you can call it a trilogy when the middle film is actually a standalone movie with a different character. The final installment in Bissette’s series is also good. I also do not recall the bizarre Mattel toy mentioned.
It’s another great set of issues. I see they have included placeholders on their back-issues page for the next four volumes. I plan on getting them. If you have not checked out this series, do so.
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