Jabroniville wrote: ↑Fri Oct 05, 2018 7:43 am
Wow- lotta pulp fans in here! I'll admit it was never a genre that interested me, despite being a predecessor for the whole superhero genre.
It's interesting how many of the main heroes tend to be the ultimate "Power Fantasy"- big, stoic, strong, multi-talented renaissance men who were capable of just about anything, and usually had a best friend who was an noble ethnic buddy
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The Pulp Genre is interesting to me, because it's basically the precursor of the modern big summer blockbuster film, but in book form. They were also an amazing gold mine of creativity and entertainment.
The whole reason they were called "Pulps" was because they were seen as cheap, fun entertainment at a time when the US had to be cheap with its paper, so they were printed on pressed wood pulp rather than normal print paper. The writers were also literally paid pennies by the word, so to make a living they had to be writing constantly. This lead some to some very formulaic stories, but it lead others to incredible bouts of creativity and fun adventure.
The Pulps are the folks who created the old adage of "When you can't think of anything to movie the story forward, have someone with a gun kick open the nearest door and start shooting". Writers block was a good way to starve to death, so they had to do everything to keep the words flowing.
What was also fun was that the genre was incredibly diverse, both in terms of types of stories and in terms of what folks today look for in diversity. Sure, the heroes of the Pulps were 99% of the time white guys with impressive jaw-lines and action hero sensibilities, but the stories ranged everything from cops and robbers, noir detective work, supernatural horror, weird sci-fi, two-fisted action adventure stories, jungle exploration, war stories, romance, etc. Pulps were very much the precursor to Comic Books because their genre was every genre.
Pulps were also one of the few places where you could see women and minorities in a positive light. Sure, the women often needed saving and the minorities were often sidekicks, but they were also often very competent sidekicks with fleshed out personalities who were treated well. The Spider / Richard "Dick" Wentworth is one of my favorite examples of this, since his girlfriend Nita and his Hindu servant Ram Sing were very positive portrayals. Nita was shown to be very smart, capable and dangerous. In the very first Spider story, she actually prevents her boyfriend's secret identity from being discovered through cleverness that surprises even him. Frequently, she would be the mastermind to save Dick from the trouble he gets into, and a couple of times even took up the Spider mantle herself. She was definitely no damsel in distress.
Likewise, Ram Sing was portrayed as loyal, faithful, competent and probably the most dangerous close quarters fighter in the entire book series. There was one story where he was left to protect Nita while Dick was out on a case. Ram Sing was angry that he couldn't be out helping his master, and feeling pretty useless because he needed a cane to get around. This was because in the previous story, he'd been nearly tortured to death for not giving up Dick and Nita's secrets and refusing to break. He was almost crippled, but would eventually recover completely.
Well, while walking with that cane, a group of elite assassins tried to break into the building Ram Sing and Nita were in, and Ram Sing hobbled over to stop them. The first guy comes at Ram Sing with a knife, and Ram Sing not only ducks the attack, he whips out his own knife and brings the blade up in the guys . . . . tender areas, driving the blade to the guys pelvis so hard and up that the knife blade breaks. The guys buddies see this, dance back, and get ready to throw their knives with what is described as Bullseye like accuracy. Ram Sing LAUGHS, picks up the guy he just mortally wounded up up over his head and throws him at the assassins in a way that the thrown guy's body intercepts the thrown knife blades, and then the thrown body hits both of other assassins. Ram Sing then starts making his way towards them, and the two survivors pull themselves out from under their buddies corps and flee for their lives. And the only reason they survive is that Ram Sing is too hobbled by his leg to chase them.
And that's Ram Sing when he feels weak and useless. Jesus.
This was the era that gave us heroes like Conan the Barbarian. Robert E. Howard always wanted to do historical adventure stories, but he felt he wouldn't be able to really do that due to the time it would take to research certain periods to do them justice. So he created the Hyborean Age, a pre-historic era where he could just put "Serial Numbers Filed Off" versions of the cultures he wanted to use together and have fun with them. This created the modern Fantasy genre (specifically the Swords and Sorcery genre), which later gave us Tolkien and C.S. Lewis' High Fantasy, so on and so forth.
So we got everything from the Lovecraft Mythos to John Carter of Mars to Conan the Barbarian to Tarzan of the Apes to Doc Savage, the Shadow, the Spider, the Green Hornet and Kato, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, it was all just very fun. Like I said, the best aspects of an action blockbuster film in novel form.
Not saying they were all great or that there wasn't a lot of unfortunate examples of the time (despite some positive racial portrayals, there were some decidedly negative ones as well), but overall it's a lot of good fun.