Before going on to tonight's topic (the scandal magazine Midnight), I thought I would give you some further insight as to why I am leaving the world of small fiction magazines. I got this in the mail today. To be honest, the wait wasn't all that long. The text is, however, fairly typical.
In case you can't read it. the long and short of it is that they will not be reading my story until June of 2011 because--oops they forgot this in the writer's guidelines--they intend to be publishing faculty pieces for their 100th Year Anniversary issue. They would have gotten back to me sooner, but they have been 'absorbed in planning.' So long Litmag world. I can get 'absorbed' on my own.
Which brings me to the topic of fiction magazines people actually read, such as...
This 1965 edition of Midnight doesn't look too fictional. And at this point it wasn't. In 1965 Midnight was what we would call a 'Slinger', a barber shop newspaper of some disrepute. If you caught a copy of the National Examiner at the time, you would have found a similar presentation. There was a time when not all supermarket tabloids were complete clones of each other. Midnight went on to become the Globe and, as such, became the last of the large pulp magazine publishers. In the late 1960s they went on a spending spree and bought all of the remaining pulp magazines. Seeing how the magazine got its start is one of the reasons I made my ill-advised bid on a box full of the dreadful things. What I am going to present is actually from a 1954 edition. That copy didn't have the neat logo and headline.
Today the Globe, the Enquirer and the National Examiner are all owned by the same chain and have identical layouts. In the 1960s there were still fairly distinct varieties: cheese cake Slingers, which made their livings plying the fleshy misdeeds of your neighbors; Celeb Gossip, a newer form started in the 1950s with the magazine Confidential; Splatter Porn, a low rent type of True Crime genre which was a reversion to the pre-WWII picture news presentation; and the venerable tale of the fantastic, the oldest of the forms. Mixed in with this was the still not extinct Story Paper, which is physically identical to the tabloid, but which is focused on hobbies, crafts, participatory sports, light romantic fiction or just reads like a typical woman's magazine without the glossy photos. The Story Papers, who had given us the likes of Poe and Twain, would not make it out of the 1960s. They were steadily being crowded off drugstore shelves by a proliferation of steamy trash. The drugstores were the main sales venue at the time. Our supermarket tabloids weren't quite supermarket safe yet.
I mentioned that I was gifted a bonus copy of Confidential Flash in my box of Midnights, which I thought might have been a sister publication. It is not. Both papers are Canadian, but otherwise not related. I just think my Midnight subscriber had very high brow reading tastes.
As the name 'Confidential Flash' might suggest, it was a take off on Confidential Magazine and had started off primarily in the Celeb Gossip business. My issue's headline reads 'Ingrid Bergman says all women need lovers.' By the 1970s many of the tabloids were going for two genres, such as Celeb Gossip/Fantastic Tales. Flash went with the oddball mix of Celeb Gossip/Splatter Porn. It was an odd evolution. It was also oddly typical.
The Cheese Cake and Fantastic Tales genre tabloids started before the Civil War. They were variants of the Story Paper format. You standard Story Paper was part family crafts and part staid serialized fiction. After the Civil War, papers mixing True Crime with Cheese Cake such as the Police Gazette started cropping up. Dime Novels, comic book like publications, featuring the licensed fictional exploits of Celebs showed up at the same time, but actual Celeb Gossip is relatively new. It's also financially risky. Oh, it sells fine. But the Celebs can hit back. Most of the evolution in Tabloids wasn't in that direction until later. The big hit of the post WWII Tabloids was Splatter Porn, and it owed its popularity to one publication.
The National Enquirer was the king of Splatter Porn. By Splatter Porn, I mean blood all over the page. If it bleeds, it leads. Dismemberment. Burnings. Car accidents. Body parts all over the place. For a black and white newspaper, it was pretty gosh darn graphic.
In the immediate aftermath of WWII newspapers found themselves in the same situation that they are in today. There was a depression on. New mediums were pealing off advertisers. Worse, new presses had been developed which lowered the costs of printing papers, thus inviting in competition. You needed to specialize in delivering a specific market or divorce yourself from advertising as your main revenue source by giving the public something that they couldn't find in any other media.*
Now let me take you back to 1954. The National Enquirer is still the New York Evening Enquirer, a Sunday afternoon weekly. This paper's marginal existence dates to the late 1920s. It has only been a tabloid for a year. Two years before the paper's circulation bottomed out at 17,000 copies. The new owner is only now just dabbling in Splatter Porn.
Meanwhile in Montreal, a new newspaper is trying the direction of delivering a specific audience. Both papers will eventually become identical, but they come at it from two different directions.
Midnight is a supra-regional weekly, directed at the English speaking youth of Quebec Province. It is a bar rag, focused on youth culture and the night life. It has local advertisers who are clearly looking for the young market with its precious unaccounted for spending wads.
It has some nice youth features, such as this weekly review of recent record releases. That's certainly not something that you are going to find in the Toronto Sun or the CBC. The paper also ran a feature on a local disk jockey.
This youth focus was apparently not draw enough for our aspiring press baron. There is an absolutely shocking amount of Canadian Cleavage going on in this thing. If you are a young lady with cleavage anywhere near Montreal, Midnight would like to take your picture. You do not have to show them much of your cleavage, but you must have a lot of it.
In fact. if you have particularly astounding cleavage, no part of it need be seen, merely demonstrated. The picture mentions that the young lady is a ski instructor. (And a model!) Not mentioned is her capacity as an industrial flotation device.
Perhaps somewhat upstaged by our ski instructor (you would have to be the Graf Zeppelin not to be) is My 30 Days Inside Hell by Dr. X. This is a good, old fashioned book serial, the type common in Story Papers. At least in Canada this was still a part of the newspaper package. The story itself is about a perfectly normal doctor who goes undercover posing as a patient in a mental hospital. Not that Midnight needed to rely on books for sensation...
I don't know about you, but my mother tried to sell my sister and I a dozen times and it never made the paper. If you read the story closely, this woman isn't even offering her kids to people at the supermarket, like my mom used to do. Instead, she's just written the paper a letter threatening to sell herself and kids... if her darn lazy husband doesn't get himself a job. My mom used to offer a cash-back incentive. About half of the stories are completely outlandish letters that readers have sent in.
Thrown in is this True Crime take on the Montreal Police Blotter, this time featuring a pair of homosexual men. As a Romeo and Juliette touch, the paper highlights the fact that the men were from different sides of the tracks.
Our crescendo here is the line "It wasn't too long before they were engaged in a brand of illicit enjoyment which would revolt the strongest stomach." And probably get you about six years in the states. Our Canadians walked with a $50.00 fine and no mention of their names in the paper. Midnight was nothing if not strangely sympathetic. And I do mean strangely...
This is yet another letter from a Midnight reader, a man who has spent two years in a TB sanatorium. Like the Child Sale, this was another "Gotcha" headline. The whole bent of the newspaper seems based on readers supplying the material and playing along with the gag. Midnight does not seem to have had much of a staff. (It did have a glamor photographer.)
Midnight did subdivide into two magazines for a time, Midnight and the Globe. The Globe was a Cheese Cake barbershop Slinger. It was called the Globe because... Check the above photos. It apparently didn't do that well, so Midnight began pulling double duty as both a Montreal Bar Rag and a tabloid meant for export. Eventually it became the Midnight Globe and then just the Globe. By the time it had transitioned to the Midnight Globe, it had lost its Montreal focus entirely. Before its absorption, the Globe was a distant second to the Enquirer in terms head to head sales. As a group, Globe Publications outsold the Enquirer and reportedly was far more profitable at least as far as publishing operations were concerned. For more information, check out the last few pages of Real Nazi UFO Man-Eater Cults on the www.HIL-GLE.com website.
*Divorcing themselves from advertising revenue is not really a rational option.
What a history of depravity! Generations of the pulp genre making minds with little to entertain themselves occupied in the fascinations of complete fiction!
ReplyDeleteWhere there's a desire there's a need. Where there's a need, the publications will always flourish.