/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22887134]

How would I get into old pulp magazines? The covers are kino and I want to read some fun adventures and mysteries. Any pulp enthusiasts here?

[Anonymous No.22887147]

I like to read hero pulps like The Shadow, The Spider, The Avenger, or Doc Savage myself. There is a certain escapist charm to them that seems like it is in need of a comeback.

[Anonymous No.22887150]

Most of them are up on archive in pdf format, if you don't mind reading on a screen.
A lot of them have modern omnibuses and collections in e-book and print on demand.
You can also get originals off of ebay but the prices vary wildly brand to brand. Weird Tales for example, is surprisingly cheap, whereas issues of Astounding Tales go for hundreds.

[Anonymous No.22887905]

Sometimes I must remind myself that pulps never actually went away. They just evolved with the times. Honestly they sound like they would be fun to write and for others to read for casual entertainment.

[Anonymous No.22887909]

>>22887905
They're easy to write, you just shit out prose

[Anonymous No.22887914]

>>22887905
Really? What are the modern equivalents of Weird Tales or Black Mask?

[Anonymous No.22887969]

>>22887914
They went away with the advent of paperbacks taking off. The pulps were called such because of the cheap cost of the pulp paper they were printed on. However, the spirit and nature of the pulps survived into the paperback boom period.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperback

[Anonymous No.22887977]

>>22887969
> Weird Tales, Black Mask
I do not know about any magazine as such but magazines that published genre fiction persisted for decades, if in lesser number of publication titles.

Consider the story of Arkham House. They preserved the work of HP Lovecraft and other pulp era writers. This led to short story collections of contemporary horror writers. Many such stories were originally published in magazines. The medium changed, but the spirit carried on and evolved.

Any time you read a cheap, mass market paperback detective novel you allow the spirit of Black Mask to draw breath again.

[Anonymous No.22887986]

>>22887977
Here's a book about the history of pulpy horror novels that flourished from the late 60s to the early 90s. Catchy covers, lurid and wild stories, cheap thrills - they were the equivalents to Weird Tales in their time. Especially the short stories.

[Anonymous No.22887991]

>>22887909
Right. Come to think of it, web fiction might be the closest modern equivalent to pulp.

[Anonymous No.22888024]

>>22887134
That is a cool piece of cover art.

[Anonymous No.22888025]

>>22887969
>>22887977
I agree that paperbacks were an evolution of pulp magazines. But part of the charm and interest of the thriving pulp-mag ecosystem was that it gave a space for unknown writers to publish and experiment.

A magazine stacked full of short tales from a range of different authors - with amateurs right next to your Lovecrafts or Howards, who themselves started as amateurs - is very different from a paperback market dominated by franchises, with series centred on a single character and written by a single writer.

Mailing off your story to a Weird Tales head-office that is constantly hungry for more and weirder fiction is much easier than landing a paperback contract. What's been lost is that ecosystem, the space and the opportunities it gave to amateur writers, the sense of a collective profusion of ideas and inventiveness.

Now either you have to be a career-oriented paperback author writing 300,000 words a year for your marketable franchise, or you participate in some dismal fanfiction community with no originality, no standards, and no editorial vision. The space in between was served by pulp magazines, and now it's disappeared.

[Anonymous No.22888044]

>>22887914
There is no modern equivalent because the cliches are worn out now. Fantasy and comic books and Marvel movies are the modern equivalent

[Anonymous No.22888051]

>>22888044
royalroad.com

[Anonymous No.22888072]

>>22888044
As I was trying to get at here >>22888025, I'm more interested in something equivalent to the format of old pulps, not to their specific content.

Plus I don't think Marvel or even modern fantasy can be considered equivalent in content to old pulps (beyond some superficial similarity in being 'fantastical'), since old pulps had the aura they did because they formed a sort of sordid and garish subworld to mainstream culture, whereas a Game of Thrones or a Deadpool now forms a central part of that culture's dull, glossy edifice. But that difference also ties back to a difference in format: the disposable pulp commodity, compiled from the imaginings of a bunch of weird little hobbyist writers, is naturally going to correspond to the social id, while the corporate Marvel movie can only reflect its super-ego.

[Anonymous No.22888099]

>>22888072
See >>22888051

[Anonymous No.22888102]

>>22888072
>the disposable pulp commodity, compiled from the imaginings of a bunch of weird little hobbyist writers
See >>22888051

[Anonymous No.22888124]

>>22888102
Maybe, but when I look at an old Weird Tales scan, it feels like it has some kind of coherency, like it's coagulated in the sewers of all these 1930s American cities, taken on a solidity and substance of its own, and crawled out into the upper world. It feels like some esoteric object, even though it's disposable. It has an aura and a potency, like how Surrealists were haunted by the images of B-movie monsters that would fleetingly stare out of them from posters on the city walls. But when I look at royalroad, everything just feels random and hollow, like something AI generated, issuing from a digital void. The stories are constructed from cliches, but not the folk-tale type cliches of pulp, not the denizens lurking in the cultural subconscious and cropping up here and there in different forms, but algorithmically generated cliches, statistical averages. A royalroad project feels both too private (like some random fetish-story text file you found on your autistic cousin's desktop) and too public (like some SEO filler text written by a disinterested copy-writer to be read only by webcrawling bots). They all feel so lifeless. It's just content, not cultural objects.

[Anonymous No.22888128]

>>22888072
Manga and light novels are closer to the old pulp spirit due to the hotbed of creativity and required industriousness to make it in the field. The diversity of world, characters, and ideas is what draws people today but it's what drew people back in the days of the pulps.

[Anonymous No.22888137]

>>22888128
I think you have a point. Also this reminded me that one of my holiday plans was to read a bunch of Junji Ito one-offs.

[Anonymous No.22888146]

My favorite pulp hero is The Spider by far. He's like The Shadow if The Shadow was more like Charles Bronson from Death Wish crossed with Batfleck* and he actually encounters the supernatural. His stories take wild turns and they do not hold back on the violence.

Pic related was my first. He starts the novel literally prowling the streets looking for criminals to shoot dead and brand their heads. He quickly runs into robots that march up and down the streets of NYC grabbing people and ripping them limb from limb while they scream. He eventually gets injured but he refuses to stop so his girlfriend drugs him so that he will heal and then she puts on the gear to go do it herself out of sheer devotion to him. Yeah, it doesn't work out for her but eventually they figure out who the guys behind the robots are and both of them get brutally gunned down by The Spider like he's The Punisher. The cops immediately open fire on him the moment that he's spotted too.

There's way more where that came from.

* literally stole The Spider's branding gimmick BTW.

[Anonymous No.22888155]

>>22888146
The Spider even has kids who form fanclubs and they are under no illusions about what he does.

[Anonymous No.22888158]

>>22888146
You seem knowledgeable, rec me some pulp fiction collections.

[Anonymous No.22888170]

>>22888155
I want to note that in this novel (The Devil's Paymaster) these criminals go around handing radium-infused silver dollars to random people on the street. A nurse just tried to finish the job on this kid while goons held him down. The Spider literally came in unrighteousness a window and shot all of them square on the head before these excerpts.

The Spider is based.

[Anonymous No.22888177]

>>22888158

[Anonymous No.22888368]

A lot of the old pulp magazines can be found on internet archive.

[Anonymous No.22889762]

>>22888368
>>22887150
Actual scans?

[Anonymous No.22889766]

>>22889762
Actual scans.

[Anonymous No.22890071]

>>22889766
Noice.

[Anonymous No.22890442]

>>22887991
There is no equivalent of pulp right now, there is a vacuum waiting to be filled. The last pulp was bad action films from the 80s and 90s.

[Anonymous No.22890473]

>>22888146
Sound great. The Spider it is.

[Anonymous No.22890484]

>>22887986
That's a fantastic book and I've gotten many recommendations from it.

[Anonymous No.22891304]

>>22890442
How could it be revived?

[Anonymous No.22891385]

>>22891304
I'm not really sure. I forgot about video games, but those have been sanitized thoroughly as well. Honestly, when I read your question, my first thought was, in the present age where art is what is acted out ironically by people, the new pulp would be, in a way, acted out irl. End of the day, reality is the most popular artistic medium. And when I think about the popularity of superhero movies, there is a real desire for real life heroics.

[Anonymous No.22892023]

>>22891385
The main thing is that pulps were about delivering cheap thrills no matter the genre. Crime, mystery, detective, horror, western, romance, sword-and-sorcery, the list goes on. Almost entirely comprised of short stories and novellas.

One of the key elements that would be in the spirit of the pulps would be sincerity and giving the readers what they want. No subverting of tropes. Millennial writing is almost the exact opposite of pulp writing.