I'm not particularly adept at gauging the audience here, but I will go out on a limb and say that the majority of you are not here for a pulp fiction history lesson. For this reason I will keep my addendum to the last posting brief and hopefully pithy. It seems I missed three types of pulp magazines or pulp vehicles last time. This is what I get for leaving my notes in my car. It was really cold out. Besides, I'm a pulp magazine history genius. I wouldn't forget anything, would I?
Pulp Vehicles That I Forgot
(1) Mimeozine: Although not a commercial form unto itself, many publishers built their ideas up from humble cheaply replicated mimeograph offerings. Everyone from Captain Billy Fawcett to Herbert W. Armstrong got their starts foisting bluish printed pages at the public. Beyond the publishers, countless artists self-published their earliest works on such machines, including H.P. Lovecraft and the creators of Superman. In fact, this device has been responsible for preserving the works of many a pulp author, such as Lovecraft and Howard, during phases when their works were otherwise unavailable. It is responsible for the creation of science fiction fandom and all of its spawn. It was such a mainstay that it was involved in three waves of publications, starting first with the College Humor phase (which led to Flapper Fiction) and helping to create the Underground Comix movement to the current trend in artsy zines. The presence of Kinkos and those many unattended to photocopiers lurking in office halls eventually did it in, but for a time there anyone who became anything in the fiction or comics rackets got their starts in mimeograph.
(2) Bedsheet Pulp: Is a Pulp Magazine the relative size of a modern tabloid newspaper. This was once a common size for magazines of all kinds, mostly the imitators of Life or the Saturday Evening Post. Rolling Stone recently dropped from the bedsheet size. Whether center stapled or pad bound, the bedsheet pulp has usually been reserved for special issues or annuals. A noted exception was Amazing Stories, which published in the bedsheet size for as much time as it took Hugo Gernsback to learn the economics of the pulp magazine business. Ditto Dell publications with its Ballyhoo. Once Dell mastered the economics of comics, he never plied the size again. It was also sometimes favored by Sweat publishers whose core business was in the publication of Movie Fan magazines, for which the bedsheet size was a standard. All American Comics (part of the D.C. group) went all bedsheet in 1948 for a year, but that was choice made for reasons other than economics.* The only modern bedsheets that you are likely to find are Interview (Andy Warhol) the occasional issue of Zeotrope All Story and many Sunday magazine newspaper inserts. Once Life cashed it in, the entire size went with it.
(3) Ace Doubles: It's two paperbacks bound in one. Actually it's a Flippy Book, an idea seemingly borrowed from coloring books. (Newsweek did a Flippy Book a while back, too.) These books actually have two covers--or two cover illustrations. One half of the book is printed in one direction and then its 'double', generally another novel, is printed in the opposite direction. There's a joke about how Ace would have released the Bible as an Ace Double. The Old Testament would have been 'War God of the Jews!' and its companion New Testament entitled 'The God With Three Heads!' This was really a one publisher trend as far as paperbacks were concerned. It's only common in smut and coloring books. Only Marvel has tried it in comics.
Pictured tonight are various Ace Doubles, which I understand had a 25 year publication history. As you can see, they usually stayed within the same genre. (I don't suppose packaging a romance with a western would make any sense.) It's a pity I couldn't find any Andre Norton Ace's, since she was my favorite author for the longest time. As you can see from the title above, sometimes the same author got both halves of the package. Nothing quite like an Emile Zola twin spin!
There's another website which has been threatening to do a history of Ace Publications, so I will hold off to see if it gets done. As many of you may know, Ace Science Fiction is still with us, however it is no longer an independent company. Ace's original publisher was a fellow who went by the name of A. A. Wyn. He and his wife had a line of pulp magazines, comic books and paperbacks. Unlike a lot of publishers, Wyn was prolific in the trade press, so any history of his firm can use quite a bit of his own words. Not to ruin it, but Wyn's story sort of ends in tragedy.
Not that he went broke. Far from it. A few too many histories, including some recent ones, have dismissed many of the pulp publishers as mom and pop type operators. Many of them certainly do have a mom and pop feel to them--having the publisher married to his top editor was the set up at Ace and Popular and perhaps a few other shops. I think historian types mistake that set up as indicating that the businesses were small. In publishing terms, most pulp outfits were at least middle sized. They encompassed a not small portion of the publishing world. Moreover, the pulp format was not merely the haven of small publishers who later became big. Large and established publishers also dropped a toe into the format once it became established. That it was the publishers who started in pulps who came to dominate the form says quite a bit about them as a group. The business was very specific and tricky. But that doesn't mean it was small. Many of what seem to be small firms were multi-million dollar businesses even in their day. All of them would be so in today's money. What is truly fantastic about the pulp publishers is how very few of them failed.
I can name the failures on one hand: Hersey, Clayton, Gernsback and Ullem. I suppose we could add the dime novel houses that didn't make the jump to pulp, but that only adds Beadle & Adams. Street & Smith, Munsey and Fawcett can only be considered failures if the measure is that the name brands have disappeared. Ditto Macfadden. For an industry as large as it was, there should be a lot more dead bodies.
Why Is My Stinking Lunch Ten Dollars?
What the hell goes on here? Ok, I worked nights for a few years. But it was just a few years. As any night-time worker will tell you, lunch is that thing that looks least wilted at the 7-11. You pay whatever you pay for it and you know what to expect. The world is run for those people who are awake when the sun is up. Surely they must have something nice for lunch. We know they are having lunch because all of their pictures indicate how very fat they all are. Something must be going on in those darkened Burger Kings we pass.
It's only been a few years since last I trod the Earth in day. Back then, lunch was FIVE DOLLARS. Do not exceed five dollars or I do not go to you for lunch. By lunch I mean two items of indifferently prepared something or other and a medium drink. And if I have to go to McDonalds or something along that line, I am expecting to come in at a shade under five dollars. If I'm going to sit down and eat and drink off something other than plastic and paper then I expect to chuck a few bucks more. But I really don't want to spend more than that for half of a beef on rye with a pregnant dixie cup full of French Onion soup and a roll. I'm certainly not paying you more for the indignity of being handed a vibrating paddle.
JOKES OVER. I AM NOT AMUSED HERE.
U.S. News & World Report Urinatess on My Nissan Leaf
Full Disclosure: I do not own either Nissan, a Nissan Leaf, any shares of Nissan, the Useless News & World Distort nor any issues of it. Hil-Gle is not a paid blogger for or against either.
It appears Mort Drucker does not much care for the Nissan Leaf. Last week he had one of his U.S. News & World Report hacks flash Yahoo a freebie declaring the Leaf crumpled and fallen on arrival.
My instant reaction was purely intellectual: You mean old dried up land speculator you! Just because you're going to die soon and in misery doesn't mean the rest of us have to. You're just having your hacks pooh-pooh the thing because it's new and you don't like new things, do you Drucker? I suppose if I dug long and hard enough I could find something similar that you have said about the cell phone--or c.b. radios or the internet itself, for that matter. Why do I care what you have to say? You've never been right about anything! Your future is drooling in a cup, Drucker. The rest of us will be driving clean and electric FOR FREE! Got that, bug head? Free driving in clean damn air. We're saved, I tell you, saved!
Moreover, my blog, which has as many print editions as U.S. News will have after December, has been championing Electricar for some time now. Maybe a whole year! So don't tell me what's up, bucko! I know what's up! I'm happening! I blog, baby!
(All kidding aside, I hope the cancellation of U.S. News & World Report as a magazine will not also mean Drucker's exit from the Neo-Pulp field. Although I am not so hot on his college books, he is by far the best Neo-Pulp publisher out there. I also hope that U.S. News & World Report going web only doesn't mean that it is about to become nothing. Drucker is the only moderate press baron out there, even if he really is a real estate investor.)
The Drucker Flack Hack's argument boiled down to three points, only one of which had any merit--and none of which were news (as in new) nor specific to the Nissan Leaf. In fact, Mort's Hack kinda got his facts wrong. I am not entirely blaming Mort's peon pen however, since the Nissan spokes-models have been doing for the publicity world what Mister Magoo did for eyesight.
The poor Nissan people seem to have been sentenced to listening to lawyers for fifty hours at a crack. They no longer know their middle names. Having had this experience myself, I can tell you it happens. All they are now willing to say about the Leaf is that it will at least get 100 miles off a charge--provided you are not towing a boat or powering something other than the Nissan Leaf's own systems with the Nissan Leaf. If you are powering something in addition to the Nissan Leaf or something instead of the Nissan Leaf, they don't know what the hell it will do or how many miles it will get. Just to show how snake bit U.S. News is, not hours after their slam piece came out, the U.S. Government doubled Nissan's mileage estimate based on an independent test. Just to show how cowed the Nissan people have become by their own attorneys, they nearly drowned out this good news with disclaimers.
Mort's Flack's bit about operating expenses went out the window, in either case. By U.S. News' standing numbers, with the Leaf now getting an adjusted ridiculous 200 miles per gallon, it had just made every car in the universe obsolete.
Moreover, Mort's Flack kind of gets the sticker price wrong. It is stated that the Leaf's battery costs 10K and that the Leaf itself is 33K. If you read that wrong, it means the Leaf is 43K. It's actually 33K. The battery is included. The Flack then compares the Leaf to cars it is not really like. The Leaf is not an electric Datsun 210. It's a Civic, a Corolla, an Impala, one of those new midsized cars. It's not the freaking Neon with a plug.
That said, it's really not a LaSabre, either. But it is the same size as all the other euro poop cars people have been buying for the last few years. Is 33K expensive? Yep. Is it still expensive if you get a 7K tax break for buying it? Less so, but the thing is not a steal.
Mort's guy (Rick Newman in 5 Reasons Electric Cars Will Disappoint) probably should have held his fire. "Now for the bad news: Hardly anyone will buy one" is the type of prognostication best saved for bets on college football. Right now the Leaf and the Volt are only being sold in a few states. Wait until production and distribution start to ramp up in 18 months or so. And these aren't the only two cars in the game. General Electric is already shilling plug stations.
Mort's two points, "that it's too expensive" and that "no one will want one" are badly backed opinion and not news. The issue of limited range evaporates if there are charger stations in every parking lot. And the bit about "America is not the right place for electric cars" is old man-ism at its worst. That what facts Flack Newman had were proven wrong within 24 hours does not augur well for the depth of his research. Maybe the next time Mort wants you to write something like this you can distract him by pointing out the window and yelling "Look, one of the Gabor sisters!"
One point Newman did hit on may have some merit: Other technologies are getting better. The Leaf and cars like the Leaf are meant for commuter use. They are not suitable as cabs or for cross country driving. And there is no way that the trucking industry is ever going to go electric. What we may be suffering from here is a belief that one technology will power all of our transportation needs. Lost in the shuffle of history is that it is something of an accident that oil and the combustion engine have had such a long and dominating run.
*The owner of All American was in a near legal dispute with D.C. over who owned what characters. He was publishing comics in bedsheet form primarily to use up art inventory. And to prove that he could publish comics without them. He proved his point. Eventually the D.C. people showed up with a dumpster full money and bought him out. Sadly, like A.A. Wyn, his story ended in tragedy.
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Next: Vanity Fair Continues Its Obsession With Dead Women
It must be mocked.
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