RePulp

The pulps have been gone for years, but their core themes never leave. Smutty Romance and True Crime have evolved their ways into the paperback section along with Detective Mystery, Science Fiction, Westerns and the other labeled as fiction genres. Celebrity Myopia maintains as strong of a place on the newsstands as it ever has: Confidential’s spoils split not so evenly between the one firm that owns all of the tabloids and a dozen slicks. Even the occasional expose on aspects of the phenomenal has not entirely disappeared.

During the 1960s and 1970s that broad pulp topic known as The Unexplained was regularly plastered across various supermarket check-out weeklies. In the 1980s and 1990s UFOs, werewolves, ghosts and the like fell out of favor with most tabloids. Only the Weekly World News and its cross Boca Raton rival The Sun kept the freakish front and center. With the combination of these two papers’ parent organizations, one paper demoted its arcane offerings and the other was cancelled. It is only recently that a redesigned and yet again full of elves version of The Sun has reemerged—this time combined with a parody version of the Weekly World News inside.

I’m not sure if the approach works. Like most of the National Enquirer’s holdings—The Globe, Star Magazine, National Examiner—The Sun is in the midst of being re- imagined. When you own all of the tabloids, coming up with a way of distinguishing between them becomes a priority. The tongue in cheek tactic The Sun has adopted may suit a publishing empire set on maintaining some semblance of journalistic integrity, but it does leave the door open to competing interests willing to handle the topic with a straight face.

If the newsstand is any guide, doing the weird straight seems to have the greater pull. What had been tabloid fodder almost exclusively has now departed for a new form, the RePulp: a stand alone slick magazine anthology featuring a single sensational topic.

Given the entities involved with the RePulp trend, playing it sober with news of the fantastic is darn good business. Leading the league is Time-Life, aka Time-Warner CNN. Publishing wise, this firm has always been willing to turn any trick short of porn to churn a buck. They have a long history of peddling serial hardcover dreck dressed sensation, usually on the installment plan. (We will send you the first one on approval now, while you are drunk and watching cable television. Then, every month, we will embarrass you again by sending another example of your poor taste, whether you want it or not. If you can muster the nerve to talk to an operator and explain why you no longer wish to receive Alien Trophy Wives, we will have lost our bet and will gladly find something else to lure you into.) This was always an adjunct sideline to Time-Life’s core business in recycling music. The serial book market today seems to have headed where encyclopedias went with the advent of the interweb thingy.

Simultaneously Time has an apparent irrevocable quest to revive Life Magazine as… something. Life has now spent more than half of its life commemorating how good of a magazine it was when it was a magazine. That is, when it’s not being a Sunday supplement clone of Parade, as it was last year. Having taken two fading ideas and merged them as one, Life’s latest incarnation is as the repository of everything fantastic. It is a slick become pulp as slick, the true prototype for the RePulp.

This may not be a bad move since people who remember Life in its original incarnation are in diminishing supply. One of the latest RePulp issues of Life was The Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of All Time. Another issue, Life: The Most Notorious Crimes in American History is advertised, so it seems that trotting out typical pulp genres is the venerable big picture slick’s future.

It’s not off to a promising start.

Newsweek should take heart that Time-Life doesn’t seem to know how to do True Crime, either. Greatest Unsolved Mysteries is a slap dash affair, even by the low standards of their previous serial sensation hard bound sets. It gets some good marks for not being simple shovel ware. This is new material. It’s just not very good.

Life seems very ashamed of itself. Half of the entries contained disclaimers—not for failing to add a jot of further understanding to what they covered—not for having done no additional research on any topic (no researcher time was killed in the creation of this work—but rather for bothering to broach the subjects that they did. By the time I was through I felt sorry for myself for being so low as to have an interest in such things.

Our other purveyors of RePulp are not so ashamed. There are currently two stand alones on the subject of Bible Prophesy that trot their smug crapola with a kleptomaniac’s clean stare and kick to their steps. Similarly US News has a stand alone on the entirely contrived subject of Secrets of America’s Greatest Generals.

This spate of manufactured sensation peddling is part of a trend in stand alones which started with this President’s ascension and recently reached a crescendo with the orgy of Michael Jackson death picture parades. All of this is something of a build out from those special end of year stocking stuffers that have been showing up as of late. The stand alones have also matriculated into themes previously explored by coffee table reference guides. One example of this is the current 100 Greatest Spy Movies Collector’s Edition put out by National Enquirer through their Weider History Group under its American History masthead.

Most of these stand alones are original for the format works and are generally well done. When it comes to Time-Life, Life seems stuck with the soft subjects whereas the Time imprint is being used for the chore of bringing to market such high minded sounding fabrications as Decade in Review or The Year That Changed Everything. (Guess the year. Take a guess and then hit your local supermarket. The year in question will surprise you.) As time goes on, we can expect the RePulp business to further subdivide as each publisher dedicates itself to a specialty.

This would be a perfect time for the National Enquirer to uncork all of the pulp titles they inherited from The Globe. It won’t happen, but it should. Right now Weider is having all the RePulp fun because it, unlike the rest of the enterprise, is making money. National Enquirer (formally American Media) is the world’s least integrated media operation. Right now the pocket where all the pulps are, the tabloid group, is bleeding red ink. It should also be said that history is the hot topic in RePulp land and the Weider Group already has a perfect format and a well honed network of specialty writers. Time-Life is playing with feature hacks doing dredge jobs. Weider fields impassioned professors who know how to write. What, if anything, the Enquirer could contribute to Weider other than all of the best True Crime pulp title trademarks that ever were, is open to question.

It’s a gimmee putt, fools! Why did they bother to acquire these assets for in the first place?

Oh, that’s right—they just wanted the tabloids. But tabloids is no longer where they want to be really. Sort of. They also want to be hard news. The hard news has been a hard thing for the National Enquirer to get a hold of. All of their tabloids have three headed babies and UFO invasions lurking in their backgrounds. The idea that they can become intellectually double vested—credible in some of their newspapers and incredible in others—is a problem unique to this firm. In the mean time they are letting the RePulp trend—which they should flat out own—slip through their fingers. Serves them right for being monopolists.

The current wave of stand alones is primarily a Quicky Mart phenomena. They are taking advantage of two factors: most of these stores do not handle paperbacks and the current advertising depression has left gaping holes in the magazine racks. Whether this latest bloom in pulp themes will lead to an actual reappearance of fiction is anyone’s guess. But this is where the pulp magazines originally came in.

I am sorry that I have no visuals for this post. My puter with the cover scan collection is still on the fritz.