This week’s entry: Pulp stores

What is it about : In the first half of the 20th century, fiction magazines were popular and were usually printed on inexpensive paper made from wood pulp (as opposed to the high quality glossy paper used in traditional magazines). “Pulp” became shorthand for an often grim, lowbrow style of writing that could include all manner of genre fiction – romance, mystery, horror, sci-fi, westerns, and even softcore porn were all mainstays of Pulp.

Weirdest fact: The pulps were bankrupted by Hitler! A paper shortage during World War II made production costs untenable for most pulp publishers, and most magazines either folded or changed format. Some sci-fi and mystery titles have moved to a smaller digest format, but most other titles, including well-known series like The shadow, Doc Savageand strange tales– simply disappeared. After the war, the economy rebounded, but pasta did not. Genre fiction and its readers had moved on to comic books, book-length short story collections, and the nascent medium of television.

Biggest Controversy: Batman maybe the hero Gotham deserves, but he wasn’t the only bat-themed hero to debut in 1939. The pulp series Black Book Detective introduces a hero called the black bat around the same time, the Caped Crusader debuted in Detective comics. District Attorney Anthony Quinn (no relation to the actor) is blinded and disfigured by acid thrown by a crime lord’s henchman. His other senses have been augmented, and when a surgeon grafts a dying policeman’s corneas onto Quinn, he finds that not only is his vision restored, but he can see in the dark. From now on, he dresses in a black suit, with a cape and a balaclava, and attacks criminals whom justice cannot reach. The creators of Black Bat and Batman both accused the other of stealing their work; in all likelihood, both were inspired by a precedent black batwhich ran for six issues in 1933–34.

However, DC boldly lifted elements of the Black Bat for both Doctor Mid-Niteand Batman villain two sides. (Marvel later used a similar backstory to daredevil.) black bat was revived by Clockwork Comics in 2011, but the same year DC used the Black Bat name as a new identity for the old Batgirl. Cassandra Cain.

What we were most happy to learn: Pasta has attracted top-notch authors. Although pasta pays less than books or glossy magazines, it could be a stepping stone to a better job. They also paid upfront, so many authors used them as a way to supplement their income or prop up a failing career. At one point, Upton Sinclair wrote 8,000 words a day for the pulps, often writing under multiple pseudonyms so that magazines could publish multiple stories by the same author without appearing monotonous. Unsurprisingly, an A to Z of science fiction writers appeared in the pulps –Asimov, Better, clark— but you can also read the works of Agatha Christie, William S. Burroughs, CS Forestier, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rudyard Kiplingand even Mark Twain. First American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, Sinclair Lewisgot his start editing and writing filler material for a paste called Adventure.

What we were most upset to learn: Like just about everything in the first half of the 20th century, pasta could be quite racist. the Yellow Peril was a persistent theme in adventure stories, characterized by villains like Fu Manchu, a series that was actually halted by the US State Department during World War II for fear of alienating China, an important ally in the fight against Japan. (The Chinese Embassy had also complained about the 1932 film The mask of Fu Manchuwhich includes a scene of pan-Asian stereotypes plotting to “kill white men and take their wives”.

But there was plenty of room to offend all races, as many pulp series chronicled adventures in distant lands, often with results that, say, didn’t age well. biggles, a series about a dashing pilot, had a Hindu-speaking hero raised in India, with multi-ethnic allies whose portrayal was about as positive as you’d expect for the time. Corn biggles also had a rogue gallery of regrettable stereotypes, as the inhabitants of almost any remote location could and would be portrayed as “savages”.

One area where the pulps were ahead of their time, socially, was in the publication of gay-themed fiction. Because the pulps were not considered “serious” literature, they escaped censorship to some extent, as their content had to be sinister. As a result, pasta was one of the only places you could read about homosexual and lesbian characters of pre-war America. To accommodate the censors and cultural mores of the time, the stories were almost universally conservative – heroes ended up committed or dead (or magically made right) by the end of the story. Yet pasta publishers produced gay-themed stories less out of altruism than because there was money to be made in a market that most of the country refused to acknowledge.

Also note: Although Pasta itself did not survive beyond the 1940s, many of its characters did. While 21st century culture seems to be devoted almost solely to remaking things from the 20th, pulp staples like Conan the Barbarian, John Carter Of Mars, Tarzan and Zorro have all seen recent times (or waiting) updates. A gritty reboot of Dan Turner, Hollywood detective be far behind?

Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: While the ranks of pulp writers were almost entirely male, there are notable exceptions. Leigh Bracket began writing in his mid-twenties, at the end of the pulp era. She was a prolific science fiction writer, publishing dozens of short stories and 11 science fiction novels, but this was one of her tough detective novels, No good from a corpse, which caught the attention of Hollywood. She was asked to adapt Raymond Chandler’s film The big sleepand wrote the screenplay alongside future Nobel laureate William Faulkner and oscar winner Jules Furthman. This led to a second career as a screenwriter, penning big-screen adventures like Rio Bravo, Eldoradoand Robert Altman’s remake of The long goodbye. She died of cancer in 1978 while working on an early draft for The Empire Strikes Backwhich was completed by Laurent Kasdan.

Further down the wormhole: The grim stories told in pulp magazines were very much in Quentin Tarantino’s mind when he wrote pulp Fiction. While fans have long speculated about the contents of the mysterious briefcase that appears throughout the film, the director insists the contents are irrelevant – the case only exists as a MacGuffin. Alfred Hitchcock popularized this term, for an object in a film that is only significant because several characters want it, and that desire drives the plot. A similar term is a Large mute object, a science fiction term for a mysterious object that exists to generate a sense of wonder in its audience. One of these objects, the Dyson Sphere— has real-world scientific implications, which we’ll explore next week.