Yellowed Perils

You can’t get too many looks behind the scenes at pulp magazines. There are a number of books that give insight into writing and producing a pulp, but not nearly as much from the perspective of the artist.

Over at Heritage Auctions, there’s a nice example of what artist Virgil Finlay went through to get the right image down for the cover of the September 1939 number of Weird Tales.

The five preliminary watercolors and gouache paintings (see the gallery at the bottom of this page) take you through the process as Finlay tinkered with the characters — Edgar Allan Poe and the raven — starting with a wide shot, then focusing in on them. He’s also narrowing the colors, even at one point depicting the raven as a blood-red shadow looming over Poe.

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Now would be a good time to win the lottery.

If you haven’t checked it out, head over to Adventure House and browse through the Frank M. Robinson auctions that have gotten under way recently.

You can pick up a complete run of Adventure pulps — all 753 pieces in fine condition — for a starting bid of $10,000. For the same starting bid, you might win a nearly complete run of The Blue Book Magazine — 593 pieces, including a number of early stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

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Paper vs. digital is a topic I’ve written about before. It’s still something I think about quite often (recently, in particular, since I just ordered another bookcase for all of the books stacked on my office floor — and for a few boxes of them in the closet).

Rene Ritchie takes a look at “Paper books vs. iBooks and Kindle books” over on iMore.

Good food for thought when considering the future of the pulps.

By now most of you have heard that pulp fan and author Howard Hopkins suffered a fatal heart attack last week (Jan. 12, 2012). He was 50.

New of Howard’s death hit the newsgroups and Facebook on Monday afternoon. (The holiday weekend didn’t give me a chance to post this sooner.)

It has been a very sad couple of months for the pulp community, with the losses of Rusty Hevelin, Glenn Lord and, now, Howard.
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I was traveling over the weekend and didn’t get a chance to post the news. But if you haven’t heard, we’ve lost another long-time pulp expert. Glenn Lord, who was literary agent for Robert E. Howard‘s heirs and an REH expert, died Saturday, Dec. 31, 2011. He was 80.

You can find complete information regarding Lord, and links to online tributes, over at Damon C. Sassar‘s REH: Two-Gun Raconteur blog.

If you care to listen to Lord’s 2007 Guest of Honor presentation at Pulpcon 36, we’ve reposted it along with our coverage of that year’s event over on our Pulpcon 36 page at ThePulp.Net. You’ll also find a link to a recording of the late Rusty Hevelin‘s opening comments.

As many of you already know, Rusty Hevelin, one of the founders of the original Pulpcon, passed away Tuesday, Dec. 27. He was 89.

He was hospitalized Dec. 21 with circulatory problems, according to a post by Curt Phillips over on the PulpMags group at Yahoo. Brian E. Brown reported his death late Tuesday evening.
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Reading novelist Derek Haas‘ column “The Code of the Thriller: Never Bore Them” in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal made me think of the fiction in the pulp magazines.

His column could easily have been written for Author & Journalist or Writer’s Digest back in the 1930s by any number of pulp scribes. Take, for instance, this quote, which also applied to the pulp fictioneers:
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“If we do Doc Savage, the challenge is make it adult,” says screenwriter and director Shane Black told Comic Book Resources at the Long Beach Comic Con over the weekend. “I think that there are so few practitioners of action movies these days who are doing worthwhile stuff that it behooves me to try to weigh in and try to do the ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’-type stuff, to try to recapture the magic.”

There’s more to the quote over at the Comic Book Resources site.

It’s the “if we do” that makes one wonder how much (or little) of a chance we’ll ever see the Man of Bronze on screen anytime soon. Maybe it depends on how well “John Carter” does at the box office.

That’s the question Anne Thompson and Sophia Savage ask over at the Thompson on Hollywood blog.

Weaving together reports from The New Yorker, /Film and Disney 23, they wonder if John Carter, based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ novel series, can possibly recoup its $250-million production costs. (They say it needs to bring in $700-million in order to earn enough for a sequel.) You can cast your vote in their poll.

John Carter will hit screens March 9.

I just finished Paul Malmont‘s The Astounding, the Amazing and the Unknown.

I realize I’m a bit late on this topic; the book has been out since July. It finally made it to the top of my reading stack a week or so ago.

Despite a few quibbles here and there, it was a fun read. Having previously read quite a bit of Isaac Asimov, several L. Sprague de Camp novels and some Robert Heinlein (see photo below; click for a larger view), I felt as if I got to know the pulp writers better — though clearly in a fictionalized form that may have little in common with their real-life counterparts.

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