Modern Thrills

It came from overseas, fully realized in all of its aspects and ready to print. The English and the French had perfected the entire form. Continuing characters, crime fighters, the illustrated approach to presenting the fantastic had already been fleshed out. Some heroes even wore funny outfits and had secret identities.

Our topic is a form of popular literature, an offshoot of science fiction, Modern Thrills: a story of outstanding circumstances and amazing events set against the pedestrian background of our everyday world. A hold over from the gothic period, the default setting for most popular fantastic fiction was the modern here and now. It was what Jane Austen mocked—that the preposterous and the mundane should so commingle without seemingly having a lasting effect on either. The publishers let plausibility be damned and counted the money.

The Americans added the one element that Europeans lacked--The West. Dime Novels characterized a frontier whose dimensions were drawn from pure imagination. Although they may have inspired many to go west, they were not very instructive-- given that the average writer of such never strayed much further west than the Bronx. Let’s just say they exaggerated a little, in the places they weren’t just making things up altogether.

Dime Novels were also in the truly strange habit of licensing the images and names of famous real people. Publishers would then contract to have the celebrity’s adventures made up from whole cloth. The most notable of the lot was Buffalo Bill Cody, one of the first western heroes to have frequent encounters with the occult--at least in fiction. They also had a salacious side. Lewd material involving outlaws was fairly common. One publisher had to cease his offerings after being sued by Billy The Kid’s family—for defamation of character…

Dime Novel heroes fought the usual and the unusual alike. Soon, however, there developed a genre of heroes who made battles with the strange their stock and trade.

None did it better than our pal, Dr. Frank Reade Junior. He was the archetype of every single master scientist hero to follow. In the issue pictured, he is fighting Central African slave traders in his steel plated, self propelled, armed wagon. Frank was the original boy with the toys. And next week he would go after someone just as bad with something just as fantastic.

Frank wasn’t alone. The cowboys still about supplemented their diets of rustlers, Indians and range wars with the occasional battle against dinosaurs and deranged men of science. Rounding out the hero faction were no less than a dozen men of a thousand faces.

Appearing at roughly the same time as the Dime Novels were the Story Papers. These publications were the products of legitimate newspapers and owed their popularity to a series of disturbing events which took place in the mid 1800s. In one such widely reported incident, the residents of an entire apartment building lost their lives, having been transformed overnight into green skeletons; the result of a combination of leaking sewer gas and sea salt.

Ghastly, yes, but great for newspaper sales! A small industry cropped up, focusing on the demonstrated market for sensational material. In order to protect the reputation of their real newspapers, the publishers launched new and officially unaffiliated titles. These ‘Story Papers’ ran off the same press. They were written by the same staff. But other than that, the real newspaper had nothing at all to do with its dirty little sister. Features typically included in-depth coverage of police procedures, autopsies, executions, industrial accidents, war atrocities, accounts of the occult and some fairly weird predictions, usually involving trends in the weather. Although circulation for these papers was good, advertisers shied away from them. So the publishers jacked up the cover price.

To understate this, not much of what was reported in the Story Papers was literally true. A new and popular type of Modern Thrills had been created, Big Lie News Fiction.

What we see here is a typical example of a Story Paper from the 1930s. This very thin newspaper is priced at 25 cents. The standard for a normal newspaper at the time was 2 cents. As for the contents, it is an example of taking a rather minor criminal incident and blowing it entirely out of proportion.

Which was not to say that the Story Papers were all bad. Some of them were very literary. It was the Story Papers who first brought the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne to the American public. It was they who published Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Edgar Allen Poe. It was in the Story Papers that a realistic representation of the West started to take shape. Story Papers introduced the public to that progenitor of the adult western hero, Hopalong Cassidy. In their latter stages, they were also responsible for the popularity of the vigilante crime fighter, having republished the works of Edgar Wallace whose Four Just Men is the archetype that has been followed ever since.

Although they evolved beyond the simple peddling of sensation, they never did completely leave it behind.

If Story Papers had a vice, it was a tendency to be extremely preachy. The poor were poor because they were immoral. The presentation of criminal activity was for the purpose of uplifting the public good and displaying for all the deprivations of the lower classes, women and minorities. If you had a prejudice you could certainly find a Story Paper to back you up. A certain class of Dime Novel made this trend its bread and butter.

Family Star ran from 1934 to 1977. Like many Story Papers, it was heavy on soft features—cross words, cooking tips and the like. Family Star had as its lead a full color comics section comprised of all new material. It also contained a scary, supposedly true story. This was the type of presentation that its considerable readership had come to expect.

At the turn of the century, just as Dime Novels and Story Papers were at their height, a new form of presentation came upon the scene: the pulp magazine.

Unlike the flimsy Dime Novel, which looked like a coverless comic book, or the tabloid format Story Paper, the Pulp looked like a real magazine. It had a slick, full cover color. It was the size of a magazine. The paper inside, however, was pretty questionable. It wasn’t newsprint, it was something less. They couldn’t even trim it properly at first.

Pulp magazines did not initially set out to publish low brow material. No, they were as haughty as any group of literary publishers. The idea was to produce name brand fiction at a generic price. And it worked. Soon there were dozens, hundreds of general fiction anthologies in pulp form. Many publishers went from rags to riches overnight. They had struck gold.

At their height, pulp magazines published more fiction in one month than the entirety of the paperback book industry does in a year today.

Eventually, the market subdivided. The large, general anthologies gave way to more category directed magazines. The stuff that stuck best was Modern Thrills in all of its various shades. Although the publishers knew what people liked, they weren’t sure how to brand it.

Everything that wasn’t a purely literary work was branded as Romance. This is similar to how all of Shakespeare’s plays which aren’t tragedies are somehow comedies. The lord of the jungle was sold as romance, in fact subtitled ‘A Romance of the Jungle’. The barbarian from prehistory was branded as romance. The guy who used his sword to scratch ‘Z’ in things was romance.

If you can figure out what this cover is supposed to advertise, then you are putting more work into it than the magazine’s publisher did. Pulp publishers were positively convinced that words on the cover meant absolutely nothing. Covers were commissioned months in advance of even having a single story or, for that matter, knowing what the title of the magazine would be. The way most publishers looked at it, if they stuck the word ‘weird’, ‘detective’, ‘mystery’ or ‘adventures’ on a cover, they were good to roll. A lot of cache is given to such words as ‘saucy’, ‘spicy’ and ‘breezy’. It’s supposed to yell SEX. Here, to reinforce the point, you have ‘nudist’, ‘body’ and the promise of ‘lavishly illustrated’. (So what’s with the skeleton?) By the way, the closest you’re going to come to any flesh in this magazine is the word ‘nudist’

Moreover, the covers seldom had anything to do with the contents. Columbia Magazines once put out a dozen titles in a single month with a dozen different covers, all of which had the exact same contents. They were caught and were kicked out of pulp magazines for a year--so they went into comic books.

What is being advertised here is Modern Thrills. It’s horror. It’s adventure. It’s Earth-bound science fiction, with a capitalization in lurid description followed by a few words of explanation. Pulps also peddled Big Lie News Fiction. It’s what people liked. It’s what people came to the pulps for.

75.000 Girls in White Slavery! In 1940! If that doesn’t stretch credibility, how about a true, complete, real mystic first hand account of being murdered by a sex mad-playboy?

Not to cast doubts upon Norvell, the ‘famous Hollywood astrologer’ who wrote that magazine, but by contrast, it almost makes the flying guys in tights seem plausible. Edgar Wallace’s Four Just Men and the 1930 publication of Philip Wylie’s novel Gladiator had wetted the public’s appetite for extranormal heroes. The genre of the extranormal hero jumped straight from the Story Papers and into the emerging medium of radio.

A Detroit radio station began syndicating the adventures of an American Robin Hood. Like Robin Hood, his adventures were set in the past—and true to American form, the old west. The Dime Novel western hero had been reincarnated as a vigilante. This program proved so popular that they spun off a modern day version.

The firm which had dominated Dime Novels was heavily invested in radio. They had no less than three programs on the air at all times. Despite this, their targeted anthologies were not doing very well. They, like the rest of the pulp world, were in a slump.

Taking their cue from the success of the Detroit radio shows, they dusted off their Dime Novel heroes and modernized them. They produced an updated knock off of Frank Reade. Then they produced a new hero whose entire business was Modern Thrills in all of its sci fi and horror glory. Once that was on the newsstands and on the radio, they turned around, cloned him and got that on the radio.

The boom was back. The other publishers got into the act, and soon the pulp world was swarming with hero types. There were no soft focus pastels on the covers or tossing the word ‘romance’ around at random. They all followed the photo-realistic presentation.

As for the prose, they didn’t deviate much from Wallace, which may have been a mistake. The hero on the Detroit radio station was toned way down. He shot guns out of people’s hands. His modern version gassed people. They didn’t kill people.

By contrast, the invisible pulp hero on the radio killed people every week on his show. And he killed more people in his magazine. Far from toning it down or seeking a middle ground between the two, the other pulp heroes seemed to be in a contest to see who could loose the most blood. Not only did they not shoot the gun from the bad guy’s hand, they shot the bad guy between the eyes and laughed, placed a tattoo on the corpse, played tic tac toe with the blood and left behind cryptic greeting cards. That is, if they felt compelled to not liquidate the body or perform a little ad hoc brain surgery.

And then comic books ‘happened’. This supposedly killed off the Pulps, Dime Novels and Story Papers. Except that it didn’t. Pulps and Story Papers continued to mutate and took the Modern Thrills genre in different directions than the comics.

The comic book Modern Thrills heroes either followed the example of the man with the faithful Indian companion or that of the invisible mind clouder. The characters who worked for the three firms who came to dominate comic books in the 1940s, all sided with the masked cowboy. Of those three firms, two had roots in the pulps but had long outgrown the industry and were full fledged, full service publishers: owners of slicks and hardcover imprints as well as paperback lines. The third firm, the one which had proved the viability of mass producing comic books, arguably didn’t have any ties to the pulp industry at all. In fact, that firm came in with a veritable editorial Deuteronomy which specifically outlawed each and every vice that the pulp magazines had ever trotted out.

Weird, that they should be so thorough from the onset. Not that it helped them. When the 1950s tide of censorship rode in, this publisher was specifically targeted.

What we have now come to term as ‘comic book violence’ did not exist in the early comics. Even the heroes of the big three publishers hurt people and weren’t exactly shy about using torture tactics. As for the heroes who worked for the other firms, scenes of general carnage were front and center features of their exploits. And when it came to battling Nazis and Japanese, anything goes.

With the exception of the Green Lama, Captain Future and a few others, there was no mass conversion of pulp heroes into comic book heroes. The two coexisted in their separate mayhem filled dimensions and, at least for the top shelf magazines, sold well during the WWII years.

Both the comic book and pulp heroes ranged all the way through the catalog of Modern Thrills. For the most part their adventures were Earth-bound. If they did venture into space it was generally for the high-minded purpose of getting into a fist fight. They fought vampires one moment, protection racketeers the next, aliens the next, did lunch and went at it again. All sometimes in a single issue! Talk about versatility.

The Pulps did have an element that most comic books would never touch. They lived to depict the abuse of women. It wasn’t just in the Modern Thrills pulps or even the Weird Menace titles--where it started—it was in all of their genres. This was a strange trend, considering that almost all of the editors were female and that, at any time during their history, the majority of pulp magazines were Love titles.

An industry joke was that sticking ‘Love’ on your cover was a sign of desperation. This is the former Double Detective in its death throws.

Taking their cues from the success of magazines such as Confidential, many pulps began using photographic covers. They also began emphasizing Big Lie News Fiction. Finally, the pulps created and monopolized an off-shoot genre of Modern Thrills which simply needs to be seen … Nazi Sex Conspiracies.

I suppose ‘Deadly Nazi Fight of The Depraved Nude Girl Duelists’ might, by strange flight of imagination, have some topicality, but this magazine is from 1953. It would be one thing if it were just limited to this publisher, but it was everywhere. In wargames we used to say that anything with ‘Nazis’, ‘NATO’ or ‘Nukes’ on it would sell. In pulps, it was Nazis and Babes. For good measure, many magazines began adding a nude pictorial section—also often featuring those dashing Nazis.

Here we are in the 1960s and they are just not letting the Nazis go. Many pulps by this time had started peddling Big Lie News Fiction almost to the exclusion of everything else. If the title and editorial drift of this magazine reminds you of that of a girlie rag, the resemblance is more than just coincidental.

Skin magazines had been in existence since the first press could reproduce a photograph. Most pulp publishers did not publish porn. However, it should be noted that before the advent of Playboy, ALL of the skin magazines were put out by pulp publishers. And we’re not talking tasteful nudes here. In fact, for many, skin magazines were their core business and pulps and comics, mere sidelines.

Once Playboy gained mainstream acceptance, many of the pulps took the hint and started sticking the girls on the covers. Due to the sudden—and strange--respectability of having naked women in their pages, pulp magazines were never formally censored. Besides exploring the sexuality of fascists, many of these skin magazines also published some of the best up and coming science fiction writers of the time. Comic Books, on the other hand, got smashed hard.

While pulp magazines were spending the 1950s making the heady transition into porn, comic books were running into one problem after another. The censorship crisis started not with the comics, but rather with the television show based on the most popular of the comic book heroes. The first season of this program was done straight, just as it appeared in the comics. Parents groups began a protest campaign against the program. The female lead was too mean and not lady-like enough. The bad guys killed people. And the hero was too violent. Of course, at this point the character was well known to the public, having appeared in cartoons, movies, newspapers and a top rated radio program for ten years. Suddenly, what he was doing was no longer in style. For the second season, the show was toned way down. But by that time the censorship snowball had reached critical mass.

This was the start of what we now call Comic Book Violence: a graphic action event with no visible consequences. It started in television. Although the number of televised fictional murders didn’t drop appreciably, no one was allowed to bleed anymore. This clean death syndrome is still with us today.

As another byproduct of the censorship craze, the comic books adopted an editorial policy wherein all criminal activities depicted had to have an improbable motivation, impossible to duplicate methods--and not in any way show disrespect for the police, government officials or parents in general. That’s one odd group of criminals. Working under these constraints became a genre of Modern Thrills in and of itself--one which has lasted to this moment in the form of the plotlines for most cartoon programs.