Pulp Today (Intro)

The Things Themselves (Pulp Magazines Today)

Pulp Magazines are now, for the most part, gone. Very few publications which started at pulp magazines are still in existence. A minority of the publishers still continue on, most of them in aggregated form. The vices which the industry once became known for touting have long since been adopted by other mediums. Although the pulp magazine may have a fairly rich family tree, as an actual living form it would be fairly easy to write off.

I am a little less sticky about how I define pulp magazines and pulp fiction than most people are. In the traditional sense, a pulp magazine is a newsprint publication with a glossy cover. The format is similar to what you see from most puzzle and astrology magazines. To be blunt, puzzle books and astrology magazines are pulp magazines—and they seem to be about as healthy of a medium today as they were since the 1960s. It’s portable pencil fun, suitable for passing the time at the reception desk, in the airport, at the laundry or wherever quiet interactive entertainment is allowed. Weirdly, the computers don’t seem to have encroached all that much on this medium. The easy interface, the disposable nature of the products, are hard to match. They have been holding fast to their widespread retail space for as long as I have been alive and for perhaps twenty years before then.

In classical terms, these magazines are not pulp magazines. Pulp magazines generally contain fiction, confined to a number of genres all traditionally labeled ‘romance’ or ‘escapist’ in the modern sense. It could be argued that astrology magazines are escapist flash fiction, but that would be giving the randomly created astro babble too much credit. Hoax news is certainly an established pulp genre, but the peddling of Flash Hoax in the form of fortune cookie compilations should fall beneath the category of any type of literature. What can be said without fear of contradiction is that the crosswords and astrology books are brothers of the Pulps. They were invented by Dell, a major pulp publisher. And many of them were published by the same folks who published pulps originally.

Also plying this general form are about six fiction digests. These include Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Analog, Asimov’s, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Fate Magazine. Although all of them have adopted the digest format many Pulps eventually reverted to, only two of them (Asimov’s and Analog) started as Pulp magazines—and both under different publishers and different names. With the exception of Fate Magazine, none of these titles is currently in the business of printing up Pulp fiction. In the case of Asimov’s and Analog, they have long drifted away from the thrill-a-page format. In the case of the others, it was never their forte to begin with. Many of the digest magazines were launched in an effort to break from the trends that seemed to have doomed the pulps.

As for Fate Magazine, it’s an astrology book. It’s an astrology book for people who think astrology is real. If astrology books are marijuana, then Fate is cocaine. My opinion of its genre is rather dim—that it is a straight-faced hoax. It is, however, a rather long running hoax, today plying the new wave of the new age. (If people knew how old New Age is, they would stop calling it that. Only the celebrated Young Turks have had more grey hair.) Fate itself was started by a Pulp magazine editor who got high on his own supply. Factually the straight faced hoax is a pulp genre, a venerable one, and Fate is a surviving Pulp magazine. Like it or not.

Celebrity Gossip, a mutation of the straight faced hoax, is also a Pulp genre. Other genres of pulp fiction that I dislike include True Crime and Romantic Confessions. Here I think the Pulp vehicles have largely died, although perhaps not at their own hands and not due to market factors.  All of the True Crime magazines, most of which started as Pulp magazines in pulp format put out by pulp magazine publishers became amalgamated by the same company. And they were all cancelled at the same time in the 1990s. The exact same fate happened to the True Confessions magazines, although at a later date and by different hands. The True Crime magazines look like they are dead to stay. The Romantic Confessions magazines may come back. But as of 2014 the whole shooting match is kaput.

Which means that Fate Magazine is the only pulp still being published, albeit in digest form. I should also mention Weird Tales, which is still published in a sort of pulp format and tries to carry on the type of literature it always plied. But there is some question whether Weird Tales ever really was a Pulp magazine in the classic sense of the word. It was never really “thrill fiction”, fast moving third person narrative. Nor was Breezy Stories, for that matter.

If Weird Tales and Breezy Stories weren’t pulp magazines, then there never was  such a thing. If Fate is the only pulp magazine still being published, then the medium is indeed dead.  No one is making such obvious straw man arguments, but there is a cadre within the dork points accumulation class who might argue that Blue Book wasn’t a pulp because it was printed on slick papers and that the entire output of Macfadden—king of the pulps—is not pulp for the same reason. If the history of pulp magazines is confirned to objects of a specific standard of manufacture—literally a standard of pages and binding—it’s not much of a field and not much to be interested in.

In our next series of postings, we will be covering the current state of Pulp: the traditional publishers, the surviving formats, the great works, the characters spawned and the classic pulp genres. And we’ll be covering the current Pulp Revival as well as the state of Pulp Fandom

In Pulp it’s what’s on the page, not the page itself that is interesting. It is a specific mindset, a narrow grouping of genres, that defines Pulp.  It isn’t necessarily era-bound, though it does have a definable history. Now that I have dismissively covered physical things, it will be my intention to outline the current state of the Pulp art.