Newsweek Not to Be Believed

 

Once upon a time, I had a subscription to Newsweek.  Founded by the Washington Post, Newsweek covered much the same ground as Time magazine in its heyday.  It and U.S. News and World Report provided a more plain language counterweight to the haughty Time.  As part of its mandate Time invented new language, deliberately created its own compressed reporting style and appointed People of the Year. Time assumed that it had weight and proceeded accordingly. U.S, News and Newsweek offered English translations of Time, for people who weren’t into the whole thought experiment.

All three magazines have become relics of the past. Time ceased being meaningful round about half past the point where a television appeared in every living room. Newsweek held on as a method of burnishing the national reputation of the Washington Post organization. U.S. News took the unusual tactic of heading upscale, becoming an American version of England’s Economist. None of them did well in the modern era. Both Time and U.S. News took to running stunt issues or simply pulling stunts. (1) Today the haughty School Ratings Guide is all that remains of U.S. News.

Newsweek had the most tragic fall, as we detailed in this blog at the time. First, its parent company became taken over by an academic testing firm. (2)  At the start of the last print downturn, the firm decided to offload all of its news assets—essentially giving the Washington Post away to the owner of Amazon and then freebie garage selling Newsweek to… Harmon-Cardin Speakers… then the Daily Beast… and then a pernicious end of the world cult.

Please be advised that Newsweek is still the possession of a split off of the Unification Church, a truthfully dubious Ponzi scheme in the form of a religion.  In this incarnation, the purpose of the Newsweek trademark is to act as click bait for advertising media. Any story which surfaces on their pages has to be judged from this perspective first. There is no actual newsgathering institution informing its choices or abiding by any known journalistic standard. Much of what they have reported previously has turned out to be TRUE CRIME PULP FICTION.

While we at Hil-Gle love us some pulp fiction, we prefer the more clearly labeled as sensationalist type. We mention Newsweek’s current pedigree only because its words are being reflected as truth by legitimate outlets. In all likelihood the reporting that Vlad Putin has leukemia or “blood cancer” is erroneous. It is more probable that it has no source at all. Not that Newsweek’s heart isn’t in the right place, but rather that they are not disclosing their methodology. The cult’s doctrine is that if something is believed in widely or earnestly enough, it will become true. From their mouths to God’s ear. This story is doing double duty in priming the wish pump and drawing eyes to their usual flow of nonsense.

I am not about to debate the efficacy of their operant cosmology. I would just like to point out what it is. Until Newsweek is in other hands it may be safely disregarded.

(1)    Time took the weird tactic of attempting to outrage the masses. This was always a part of its presentation, however at about the O.J. Simpson cover on, it became their meat and potatoes. Alienating middle America has its consequences, as it and Rolling Stone later found out. Recently Time was offloaded from what had been Time/Warner (formerly AOL/Time-Warner and Warner Seven Arts) and traded for gum money by AT&T along with cash cow sister rag People Magazine to a firm which actually likes being in magazine business. The new firm is now attempting to define what an international news digest actually is. The verdict isn’t in yet but we wish them the best of luck.

(2)    Very long story, short. The testing firm was an investment, something with a small but predictable income that would help the Washington Post wean itself off of reliance on the spectacularly erratic advertising income cycle. And it was a good investment, one that grew both in size and profitability to the point that it dwarfed its parent company. Then the Washington Post and Newsweek started bleeding red ink with no end in sight and liability which hampered the testing firm’s continued expansion. Eventually someone who could read a spreadsheet without sentimentality showed up and made the obvious choice. Bad news for the Washington Post and Newsweek, but good news for the heirs of fatcat press barons. Our fairy tale ends happily with the rich people staying rich and no longer having to bother with a grimy public information trust.

Women in Crime and the Twilight of the Pulps

 Note: Some of this appeared on a page linked our HIL-GLE website. This page and a few others are in the process of becoming defunct. (After a mere fifteen years of my free use. Capitalist bastards!) Prior to starting HIL-GLE and this blog, I had a number of free webspace ventures where I covered much the same material that I do now. I’m not quite egoist enough to port it all over to this blog simply for the purposes of preservation, but there are some topics which I know a bit more about than I did before which I would like to cast new light upon.  We are starting this updating venture with Women in Crime.

There’s really no excuse for Women in Crime. Whenever people claim entertainments of the past were tame in contrast with today, I am reminded of Dick Tracy blowing folks’ brains out in four color Sunday Funny Page glory, Popular Publication’s Horror Stories, newsreels of Chinese monks being shot by the Japanese and… Women in Crime.

It really should be called ‘Sex-Crazed Female Murderers on Drugs’ since that is its entire literary slant. Women in Crime occupies an odd place in the history of pulp magazines. It spans the transition from pulp paper to photo offset and from painted covers to color retouched black and white photos.

Women in Crime owes its existence to a ban on the importation of pulp magazines into Canada which was instituted at the start of WWII. (1)  With the flow of comics and pulps from the US suddenly cut off, Canadian publishers rose to the challenge, fulfilling their patriotic duty by producing a slew of slam-bang knockoffs of every genre with a following. In general, most of these simply reprinted or repackaged US offerings under another title. Not to cast dispersions upon dead folks, but many supposedly Canadian pulps were more or less smuggle jobs sent over the border and haphazardly distributed by front companies. Women in Crime is not. It is a homegrown, all original, all Canadian publication. Moreover, it was something of an export in its day: perhaps the only Canadian pulp to be widely distributed into the United States.

Its secret? Focus. The publisher only had one magazine and he put all of his efforts just into it. Unlike others in the trade, the publisher, whom I will call Merchant House, did not have any connections to legitimate avenues of magazine distribution prior to the war. Instead, it had spent its entire pre-war existence as an advertiser in pulp magazines--a mail order distributor of flatware, novelties, and paperback editions of well- known classics. From its start as a publisher of any kind-- offering paper bound editions of the 100 Greatest Books of Western Civilization for $10.00--it branched out to commissioning original works, starting with manuals on the subjects of art and photography. It is from the production of these manuals that it evolved into its true publishing niche.

The ban on American pulps was a boon to other Canadian publishers, but sort of a pain to Merchant House. From their perch on King Street in Toronto, Merchant House had been able to service the novelty needs of both the US and Canada by placing ads in US based pulps. At the time, there was a good postage deal for Canadian mail order firms shipping into the United States. In the wake of war rules, that economy had vanished. Moreover, the new Canadian pulps were restricted in page count, had limited advertising space and were possessed of far more stringent editorial standards for advertising material than the types of pulps Merchant House was used to advertising in. The Canadian pulps had slated themselves as strictly kid’s stuff—and that wasn’t Merchant House’s market. Finding a vehicle for their advertising seems to have been Merchant House’s sole motivation for getting into the pulp magazine business.

That is, if they were in the pulp magazine business at all. Every physical copy of Women in Crime that I have is built around their advertising. As I will touch on later, this does not necessarily make them the publisher.  The entirety of Women in Crime’s editorial is a tease for the firm’s other offerings. And what offerings they are!

As a novelty house and a purveyor of gadgets, they were closer to Harriett Carter than they were to Johnson Smith Company (a dealer in fake dog vomit). It was in literature that they were truly distinct. By the time WWII rolled around, Merchant House was publishing sex manuals almost exclusively. Due to restrictions on such vividly illustrated matter being imported into the US, also brought on by the war, the publisher had repackaged some of its catalog of naked women as photographic study manuals. Not much of an innovation. And they were certainly not the first to think of this. What they were the first to think of was publishing fast fiction with the spurty bits fully detailed. Not only that, but Merchant House’s core literary theme was Depraved Girls Who Do It in Depraved Ways.

As the blurb advertising the best-selling, exclusive to readers of Women in Crime novel ‘Diana’ from Dr. Victor Robinson states: “The Publishers wish it expressly understood that this is not a work of fiction. It is a true story, fearlessly told, of women you have heard whispered about. It is the frank autobiography of a woman who tried to be normal but couldn’t. Although the author has found it necessary to hide the identities of the women whose life stories have fused with hers, she boldly tells the truth about them and herself.”

This ad is not hidden in the back pages. It is full page, page one, across from another Merchant House offering for a Pre War Quality Cutlery Set from a Renowned Manufacturer.

Besides setting a sort of standard for original smut, Merchant House was also in the business of spicing up the classics. One ad promises that their offering of the Three Musketeers is Definitely not the book you read at school!

Even today this would be considered a shocking cover. The artwork on the cover is a black and white photo with an overlay, not an actual color photo. As these things go, it is rather well done. Like most pulp publishers, Merchant House shot its production budget wad on the cover and then cheaped out everywhere else. 

Merchant House may have taken economy one step further by importing some of its interior staged photographs from Argentina. Very similar magazines with very similar themes had been popular there since the 1930s. As per the Argentine convention, many of the models in Women in Crime seem spectacularly overdressed for their given situations. There is also a certain style to the Argentine form which Women in Crime seems to match.

The end of the war killed the Canadian pulp magazine industry. Without the tariff barriers and restrictions, the poorly executed Canadian pulps were swiftly swamped by their US cousins. Seeing as how most of them were simply fronts to begin with, it was no real loss. Women in Crime, however, marched blithely on.

And here is where my extrapolation from the original essay goes entirely astray. As per my introduction, I know more now than I did before. I initially wrote off Women in Crime as some sort of one-off smut purveyor’s advertising vehicle, stating that it was probably using the porn and digest distribution system, and that rather appearing on newsstands, it was sold in barber shops and pool halls. While that may be largely true, I no longer believe that it was an orphan sole publication but rather the progenitor of what turned out to be a healthy line of pulps from a 4^th Wave publisher.

I have seven or so issues of Women in Crime, all of which are from the war years. Sources on this title are spotty. It could simply be a title that several publishers have used over the years with no real relationship between any of the runs.  The variance in titles would indicate as much. Except that the variance in titles and cover presentations are with the book from the start. This is the cover of what I believe is the first issue. The photographic bondage cover from above is either the second or third issue

After the bondage cover, Women in Crime mostly went back to using retouched paintings which first appeared in other pulps. The interiors, interior stock, and binding remain consistent—as does an early photo-offset interior print job. The staged crime photographs reproduce poorly and the lay-out is not quite up to snuff. It’s not scaled correctly. All in all, it is shameful and shoddy—matching the layout stride for bad stride with the ads from Merchant House itself. Clearly all the work of the same all-thumbs hands.

Women in Crime was published from 1942ish to 1961ish, with about 30 total issues. If we could find evidence of six more issues, it might even classify as a biannual. But it was not published at all regularly, is not dated, and sources vary as to its publisher. Only Merchant House is willing to fess up on the issues that I have. Sources cite Alval (Canada), Detective House Inc and Skye Publishing as its producer(s). The long and short of my current thinking is that these are three names for the same publisher. The publisher became known as Jalart (like Alval, the contraction of two first names. My own personal preference is that Jalart is a contraction for Jail Art, but I have no substantiation for this).

Like people, publishers have affinity orbits. Several sources state that Detective House is related to a low rent smut digest producer who fronts for Lev Gleason (Comic House), and that Gleason and a pal of his are also affiliated with Skye, and that Skye and Voliant are the same firm. I have no doubt that all of these people are thick as thieves and that all of them surround Lev Gleason in some way. That said, I have good evidence that Jalart and Skye are the same firm. 

My evidence, such as it is, comes from January of 1956. A lot of things could have changed between the time Women in Crime debuts in 1942, and 1956. In 1942, Lev Gleason is printing money in comic books and has no reason to dabble in near-smut smut advertising vehicles. Gleason doesn’t start dabbling in other publications until the middle 40s. Moreover. Gleason is at least a middle production quality publisher. Nothing as poorly done as Women in Crime came out of his shop. It’s not Lev. Enough said.

While Lev Gleason and a few others are doing well in comic books, not everyone in the pulp adjacent industry is weathering the storm of price controls, restricted markets and paper rationing brought on by the war. Under war time rationing, publisher paper volume was itemized by gross weight and allotted based on a fraction of previous average use. Everyone is getting a 35% haircut—and that’s if you are in business before rationing started. Your ration is zero if you weren’t in business before then. This means that the number of new publishers for pulps, comics and anything else low brow would be zero for the war. For the most part, this turns out to be true, with the exception of Women in Crime and a handful of other Canadian pulp publishers. 

The Canadian publishers, by contrast, are getting a fresh start in a now protected market. Their ration is based on the circulation of pulp magazines into Canada—mostly from American publishers. Prior to the war, there is no Canadian pulp or comic book industry to speak of. The canuks are being given a competition-free interval to start this industry. Women in Crime is unique as a Canadian publication, inasmuch as it does not seem to be intended for the Canadian market.

Printing in Canada for US consumption and thus bypassing rationing was attempted by a few other firms later in the war. (2) Women in Crime goes this one step further, since the magazine would have been illegal to distribute in Canada. Not to paint the Canadians as prudes, since Women in Crime would not have passed American standards for decency during the war years, either. For this reason, Women in Crime spends its first span of ten or so issues stripped of any sort of publisher information whatsoever. It just sort of mysteriously appears at your barbershop, pool hall or liquor store when it feels like it.

US pulp publishers were largely playing by the rules. (3) The rationing and price control regime forced a majority of them to cut titles and focus on their most profitable lines. Comic books were the best bang for the buck, provided the publisher had the enormous amount of up-front cash required and the network of special connections to pull it off. This was a you snooze, you lose industry. If you weren’t in comic books by 1942, you weren’t getting in. A number of pulp publishers simply blinked and bungled it. Popular stayed out of comics and decided to convert its flagship pulp Argosy into a slick magazine. Macfadden blinked and watched its circulation shrink in half. Fawcett killed its pulps in favor of comics. Street & Smith got into comics at the sacrifice of both pulps and dime novels. Staying pat in pulps meant accepting higher prices and diminishing profits, leading publishers such as Martin Goodman to bail out entirely. A few publishers also began dabbling in the digest market, producing various prototype paperback formats. 

While all of this is well and good for the publishers, it leaves the pulp’s stable of advertisers, such as Merchant House, in the lurch. Comics are a juvenile medium. Digests carry few advertisements. The remaining pulps have cut page counts and frequency. The majority of pulp’s fine advertisers have been frozen out.

Enter some enterprising pulp insider, someone privy to the ins and outs of distribution and printing, but with rather light pre-press skills.

Jalart does have a provenance. The firm remained in business perhaps as late as 1990. It was a substantial publisher, although in about the lowest wrung of the field as one can get. Except for a brief period in the 1950s, their works have a family resemblance, much the way that Charlton Comics had one. Women in Crime seems to have been their first child.

Jalart was only tangentially in pulp magazines. Headquartered in Scottsdale Arizona, Jalart’s stock and trade was sports fandom. It produced one of the first catalogs of baseball cards. They published pre-season predictions for baseball and football—and special off-season baseball updates for the hot stove leagues. Initially focusing on baseball, football, and hockey, they came to promote and cover boxing, auto racing, and roller derby. They were one of the early prime promoters of professional wrestling. The firm occasionally spit out sports cards of their own as well as a few comic books, posters, and sticker sets.

 The only name we have to hang on Jalart is Leonard Greene and that’s from a 1967 edition of True Crime. Jalart is very weird when it comes to information they are required to disclose in magazines, producing such gems as “published bi-monthly except for summer and spring” and charging the full cover price plus unspecified shipping for subscriptions (in type you would need a magnifying glass to read). (4)

Pinning a start date to Jalart’s sports publications is currently beyond me. Although sports fandom is healthy, it’s history is unexamined. Whether Jalart started in sports publishing or came to it is unclear. If they were in it as of 1942, then they had motivation to try something else. The audience for their materials was leaving for war. The leagues themselves were contracting or suspending operations. If they had a paper ration as a publisher of sports annuals it was probably cut to zilch.

The way I believe the deal with Women in Crime went is that Merchant House paid for the printing and then let Jalart keep whatever they could get for the magazine. To Merchant House, it’s like having their catalog printed up and then getting its distribution for free. For Jalart, it’s largely a shlepping exercise involving a little smuggling and some low rent adventures in clandestine wholesaling. Women in Crime used the same distribution method that was being used for proto-paperbacks. (5) As propositions of this kind go, it was worth a shot. Merchant House didn’t have too many other options. It seems to have been worthwhile enough to do ten or so times.

After the war ended Merchant House went back to its normal advertising venues. Since I do not have a copy of the post war Women in Crime issues, I will have to take it on faith that they are listed to Detective House and Skye in the early 1950s and to Jalart from 1955 on. From the end of the war on, Women in Crime and the digests matriculate into the drug store distribution system where they and a slew of similar materials will enjoy a ten-year heyday. 

There was something in the post-war air. For a few brief years it seemed that America was destined to become a version of France. We had just defeated totalitarian book burners. Stuff like Women in Crime became neo-kosher. All sorts of magazines sprung up. And nearly every pulp title from before the war came back, mostly in the form of digests or short run photo-offset magazines. Women in Crime remained an infrequent presence on the magazine racks, probably because Jalart had developed better titles. Although no one dominated this market early on, Martin Goodman and Jalart were the two largest publishers.

Every publisher we have covered has a unique spin to his business model. I intend to do a publisher’s biography of Jalart at some time when I know a bit more, but from what I can tell their guiding light seems to be ATTRACT MALE EYES. In this respect Jalart is typical of magazine publishers. It has a targeted demographic and everything it publishes is designed to reach that audience. Jalart does have a few interesting twists to its formula.

Other than the sports titles, nothing they produce has a regular publication schedule. And even the initial sports magazines are essentially annuals. The pre-season for baseball comes out in March. The football prognostications, both college and pro, hit shelves in late July or August. The hockey preview is out in September. Then there’s the post-season in anticipation of training camp baseball thing, which shows up sometime after the baseball winter meetings, covering trades and coaching changes and whatnot. That has a shelf-life through January. In effect, this is a quarterly advertising buy. As in Women in Crime, Jalart is driven by advertising packages. 

The package is initially built out through expansion in sports magazines. The objective is to hit the next benchmarks for newsstand exposure advertising buys, from quarterly, to bi-monthly, to monthly. At its height in the mid-1950s, Jalart is spitting out two magazines a month, a bi-weekly publishing schedule. This makes them a perfect avenue for advertisers with seasonal or short run goods. All in all, Jalart is your one stop shop for the entire false teeth, watch, technical school, novelty, and rupture truss mail order industry. (6)

Moreover, most of the sports magazines don’t cost them much to produce. The information they are peddling with the mainstream sports is provided, or at least produced, by the leagues themselves. The contents of these magazines are mostly grids of numbers, with the occasional square photograph or “Crimson Tide hopes for top national ranking” blurb thrown in to round out pages. The editorial objective of the layout for these magazines is uniformity and ease of use.  It’s even two-column pages, straight through the magazine. I think this focus explains their problems when it comes to the lay out of pulps, wherein the objective is to cover as much paper as you can with something fetching. If they are using the same layout boards (or personnel) from the sports magazines, then they are winging it.

Compounding their production quality issues further, I believe that Jalart is wedded to its printer. The same bad layout and photo-offset print job found on 1940s era Women in Crime is also evident on 1950s and 1960s issues of True Crime and other Jalart offerings. If Jalart is just the sales office of a printer, their focus is on prospecting for advertising and conceiving ad vehicles (magazines of male interest) and they probably have no say in the lay out, other than in the provisioning of art elements. 

Women in Crime uses a lot of found objects as art elements, from the cover to the interiors. Some of the covers are sourced from decade-old pulps, others from digests, and others from hardbound dust jackets from circulating lending library materials. At least on the war era run, Women in Crime’s editorial seems to be original. It may be written to order based on obtained photographs, but it does not seem to have appeared elsewhere first. This would not be true of Jalart’s other pulps.

Jalart did build out its editorial capacity. The materials for auto racing and wrestling and roller derby need to be hand-crafted, need to be columns of words, since these sports are more spectacle than statistics. It’s doubtful the same writers they contract for the sports magazines are also the ones they used for their Ten War Stories pulp. From what I’ve seen, all of their pulps are entirely made of recycled editorial. True Crime magazine in both its 1950s and 1960s incarnations is wall to wall reprints—from other true crime magazines—some of it quite ancient. (7) Jalart hoovered up a bunch of old pulp material and repackaged it over and over. Or seems to have. 

The firm became something of a multi-media enterprise. Several sources cite Jalart as the producer and syndicator of first roller derby and then wrestling programs for the burgeoning UHF market. They certainly went all in on these efforts on the publishing side. The firm also produced a weekly supermarket tabloid, but it is unclear which one. I suspect it is Confidential Flash, which would tie the firm back to Toronto printing interests. In fact, a lot of things seem to tie Jalart back to Toronto. Given that Merchant House is itself a publisher, Jalart may be part of the same entity—perhaps not legally, but the same fluid partnerships parading around under several names—the same set group of people engaged in various different ventures. If that is the case, then this is a business story which went on a long, strange trip—from Women in Crime to videotaping men smash each other with fake chairs.

WE DON’T KNOW EVERYTHING! YOUR COMMENTS, CRITICISM AND CORRECTIONS ARE ACTIVELY ENCOURAGED. AS WITH ALL OF OUR POSTINGS ON HISTORICAL TOPICS, THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS.

(1)    Canada loves to ban magazines. This is actually a reimposition of a ban which dates back to the 1920s. The original ban was against flapper fiction titles such as Breezy Stories and the Smart Set.

(2)    Both Archie and Harry Chesler both had Canadian operations which served that market and then occasionally slipped titles into the United States. Chesler can be given a pass, since he is an art studio which only tangentially dabbled in publishing. Once wartime provisions took hold, he sold his going Dynamic line of comics to a Canadian firm who continued them, serving both sides of the border. Archie seems to have reached an agreement with something called Greene Publications, which comically put new covers on Archie titles and then offered them in Canada. On occasion this firm would ship two-year-old re-covered and re-titled Archie content into the United States.

(3)    The rules had set prices for everything, including author’s rates. But the rules only covered existing types of products. What the rules did not cover were the creation of entirely new types of products, which the publishers could charge whatever they wanted for. This is what was leading the evolution of the digest, a type of paperback. Whereas most pulps were price-controlled and mandated to sell for ten cents a copy, digests were comprised of one third of the paper and typically retailed for twenty-five cents.

(4)    Jalart does not quite go into the conniption fits that Dell and Martin Goodman did about changing titles of magazines to make use of a limited number of special rate mail permits for subscription fulfillment. In order to qualify as periodical literature of any kind, the publishers were required to offer subscriptions. This was a provision enacted by the Post Office to thwart the dime novel industry’s practice of using the mails at a reduced rate, and it carries over to this day. Jalart simply did what it could to discourage subscriptions of any kind on magazines whose frequencies depended entirely on the volume of demand for advertising space.  Per the terms they offered it is entirely unclear what a prospective subscriber would receive and for how long. My best guess is that those confused enough to subscribe would wind up on the mailing list with Jalart’s advertisers, being sent whatever the publisher was printing that month.

(5)    The system is similar to how comic books are distributed today. The publisher pays his printer. The distributer pays the publisher. In modern times, the distributor is in turn paid by the retailer. There’s no credit extended anywhere in the process, with the ultimate risk being shouldered by the retailer. In the digest system there’s a middleman between the retailer and the distributor, the regional distributor, who is actually the party taking the risks. Retailers only paid for copies that they actually sold—or wanted to keep around, for whatever reason. The regional distributor generally moved his unsold inventory around to a succession of outlets until they all found a home. The system’s primary outlets were liquor stores, pool halls, taverns and street corner grocery stores, and usually in that order. This is in contrast to the typical system, wherein only the printer is paid off and everyone else gets a slice only if the magazine sells. In the depression printers often were involved in extending credit and accepting payment on the basis of sold magazines.

(6)    Jalart came to also stray into female slanting titles, thereby picking up potential for diet pill, weight loss, cosmetic and lift bra advertising. In the end, they had a whole mail order panorama of advertisers.

(7)    In pulps the rights to content remain with the publisher in perpetuity. (That’s what their contracts say.) There doesn’t seem to be any pattern to Jalart’s sourcing from other pulps early on. It’s unclear who they are buying this stuff from and under what conditions. They do come to own a number of once-promising pulp titles, mostly in the true crime category. In the mid 50s they bought out Skye, which seems to have been the repository of some MacFadden material. Whether they were plying an asset sale or making ad hoc purchases is up in the air—at least from my standpoint. A few True Crime issues appear to have content from Police Gazette and other dime novel era publications.  

Comic Book Dystopia: City of the Living Dead

City of the Living Dead: An examination of Dystopia in American comic books.

In our last posting on Dystopia, it was stated that global fictional un-utopia came in two flavors: Literary Dystopia, which is an exercise in a big bad idea playing out on an individual (1984, Brave New World) and Pulp Dystopia, wherein whatever it is that went wrong is treated more or less as scenery (Mad Max, Hunger Games).  While Literary Dystopia adheres to the plot conventions of Horror, Pulp Dystopia cleaves to tropes found in the Western, Romance or Fantasy genres.  That Pulp Dystopia has such flexibility is one of the reasons for its current popularity.  My own contention is that there is an attractive democracy to Pulp Dystopia, a world devoid of celebrities and distinctions in class. I believe that Pulp Dystopia and Fantasy are occupying the same popular space that Westerns once did.

Attempts to tie this new Pulp Dystopia back to the actual Pulp Magazine era are dubious.  The pulp magazine form had faded by the time 1984 first hit the literary world. The other powerhouses of the dystopian form also came to us from the world of lit fiction. Our pals in the Sweats (linear descendants of pulp magazines, slick paper photo offset periodicals plying pulp genres) were still rolling off White Slavery and Nymphomaniac World War II tales at the time Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 were setting the pace in hardbound form. Real contributions to Dystopia were made in paperback, such as A Clockwork Orange, but there is next to no connection between this and the world of pulp in terms of authors, editors or publishers.  (1)

When it comes to popularizing Pulp Dystopia, I am laying the blame squarely at the feet of movies (Mad Max, Logan’s Run, Blade Runner, Japanese Animation), role-playing games (Gama World, Shadowrun, Morrow Project) and video games.  That said, I may have cut the other spawn of the pulps, comic books, somewhat short as far as covering their contribution.

Comic Books have been parading dystopian themes since their inception. While researching another project I ran into a slew of titles with a dystopian bent.  As a whole, the comic book presentation of dystopia peaked in the early 1950s, which indicates that it is breathing the same air as Literary Dystopia. Both the comic book version of dystopia and Literary Dystopia emerge at the same time and seem to have the same historical influences.  While not exactly conforming to the later idiom of Pulp Dystopia, the Dystopia found in comic books is very distinct from the co-emerging Literary version. 

In our last posting on dystopia, we traced the earliest emergence of Pulp Dystopia to a cycle of novels appearing in the character pulp Operator Number Five.  This series, known as The Purple Invasion, was a late 1930s imagining of the WWII to come, albeit involving a fictional nation invading the United States.  Much of the early comic book dystopia follows something along the same lines. Nearly every escapist action character took his or her turn at ending the paraphrased coming war.  Comic book anthologies were replete with eight to ten-page Armageddons wherein a singular figure is instrumental in the defeat of some Asian or European dictator. Even Superman took a turn at this, in fact several. That certainly is a form of Pulp Dystopia. As opposed to going through the horror process of learned helplessness, the superhero attempts to solve the crisis. But this may be defining dystopia too broadly.

There were several superheroes who fit the Literary Dystopia mold of being trapped inside a pervading big bad idea, mostly set in the future. All-American Comics featured Gary Concord, the Ultraman, the superhero policeman of a world-wide government.  Power Nelson was situated similarly, the sole superhero cop in a future world plagued with fantastic disruptions to civil order. Both Power Nelson and the interstellar dystopian Spacehawk wound up plopped down in 1940s America once real-world WWII became eminent. (Sorry about your future setting, the publisher needs you here now.) Super American took this concept one stage further. He lived in a future where everyone was a superman. Having lost some sort of draft lottery, he was sent back through time to aid the WWII Allied cause. Once the real war was under way, a lot of the paraphrasing and dystopian themes went by the wayside.  One can argue whether WWII constitutes a dystopia itself (two racist totalitarian nations attempt to enslave the world), but the stories which play out do not follow either Literary or Pulp Dystopian formulas.  (2)

Literary Dystopia does not pick up steam until after WWII and is largely inspired by the aftermath of that conflict.  Mechanization had advanced to the point wherein an unprecedented amount of control over the populace could be exerted by authorities.  Technology was now such that we could blow ourselves out of existence.  With the fascist, racist, totalitarian empires defeated, half of the world had been enveloped by atheist, collectivist, totalitarian regimes.  That’s a lot of angst.

Literary Dystopians broke the mold for popular novels.  Not much action. Characters are uniformly Alice in Wonderland types. Backstory is ladled on. And then it plays out like a horror story. Breathing the same air, in 1947 comic/pulp publisher Fawcett released its own dystopian work.

Or at least it looks the part. At first glance, Anarcho Dictator of Death seems to be some sort of arty expansion of the comics form, a “Complete Novel in Comic Strip Form.” Fawcett was one of the Golden Age of Comics Big Three sales leaders, a true innovator and top-quality operator. The Saint Paul-based firm was highly connected and very politically active. (3) Even before WWII had ended, Fawcett was sounding the alarm about communists through its spokeshero Captain Marvel. The firm seldom missed an opportunity to defend the free enterprise system or decry evidence of creeping socialism.

Taken in the best possible light, Anarcho Dictator of Death is a warning that the peace we have won requires defenders, that the peace is precarious and that there is a need to be vigilant against lingering forces of global division.  But that is cutting this work way too much credit.

This is an unmarked superhero comic.  Had Fawcett been interested in sending out a serious warning as to the return of fascism, they would not have waited three years after the war in Europe’s conclusion and might have used a higher profile hero--Captain Marvel, or more appropriately, Spy Smasher. (4) Instead Comics Novel features Radar, a back page non-entity which had been running as the last slot feature in Master Comics since 1943.  

In my opinion Radar isn’t on the cover because he has no sales draw.  The Radar feature does have an interesting backstory.  This superhero was commissioned at the request of the US Government, its purpose to promote a Wendell Wilkie global good guy government version of the United Nations, complete with its own anti disrupting the new world order police force. (5) Radar’s origin was featured in the 35^th issue of Fawcett’s top selling Captain Marvel Adventures title and includes a key role for their flagship hero Captain Marvel.  In this origin it is revealed that Radar comes by his abilities naturally, being the son of a circus strongman and a Gypsy fortune teller.  (Several sources have stated that Radar is a non-powered hero like Batman. This in not the case. Radar has that level of super strength which allows him to shoulder open an iron door but not quite snap out of a pair of handcuffs. He can read minds and has a remote viewing ability which accounts for his nickname.) At the end of his origin, Radar is requested to blaze the trail for an unofficial International Police Agency, acting as a global Jedi Knight answering only to FDR, Winston Churchill, Joe Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek. In the last panel it is announced that Radar is heading off to Master Comics to share anthology space with Captain Marvel Junior and Bulletman.

My best guess is that Anarcho Dictator of Death is an unused Radar serial, probably commissioned in 1945 for Master Comics.  Radar appeared in several continued stories early in its run.  Something went wrong with this story line between the time it was sent for art and the time it was completed. The first obvious issue deals with the people Radar supposedly answers to: FDR is dead; Churchill has been voted out of office; Chiang Kai-shek is being chased out of China; and Uncle Joe Stalin is no longer in the good guy club. By that time it was also becoming obvious that the United Nations was going to fall far short of its idealistic designs.   Although Radar was still appearing in Master Comics at the time that Anarcho Dictator of Death was released, he had undergone the fate of all comic book counter-spies and aviators—he was fighting aliens from outer space.

Radar would disappear from Master Comics shortly after Anarcho’s release, replaced by Hop-a-long Cassidy.  In Anarcho Dictator of Death, Radar’s International Police Force is an operational entity, with offices and prisons all over the world.  His sidekick is a Kai-shek issued fellow international cop named Chen.  They are engaged in rounding up fascist sympathizers at the onset of the novel. The tone is never dystopian, nor elevated above that of standard comic book fare, and any attempt at reading this for additional meaning will be dispelled midway through the first chapter. Far from channeling George Orwell, writer Otto Binder is doing a bad imitation of movie serial screen scribe George Plympton. The story is more about hidden doors than it is about politics.

Are there any Dystopian elements? There is a torture scene…

But Radar, being a superhero, shrugs it off and judo flips Anarcho into a troth of lye built into a hotel room’s floor. (Don’t ask.)  As opposed to sending political warnings, Anarcho is about salvaging 48 pages of expensive comic art.  They slid Anarcho into the slot of some cancelled comic title, stuck a two tone ‘arty’ cover on the thing—and issued it as a single title, without advertising, in order not to impact their circulation figures.

Anarcho is something of a rarity. There were some free-standing anti-fascist propaganda works in comic form, such as It Could Happen Here. Literary Dystopia only appears in earnest somewhat after Anarcho’s issuing. Other than occasionally sideswiping its feel, dystopia was largely ignored in the comics.  Even the popular Horror/Mystery anthologies avoided dystopian themes, favoring more visual supernatural stories involving witches and zombies.

On occasion, dystopia was simply grafted onto other genres.

The idea of atom bomb secrets being stolen by America’s enemies is absolutely terrifying.  Atomic weapons spreading into the hands of unscrupulous parties is the thing of nightmares. That one’s fellow citizens—your neighbors—might be so low as to give aid to the process of disseminating world ending weapons to foreign powers is enough to evoke paranoia.  Sadly, all of the above happened and is still happening today. But it happened first in this 1950 Avon comic book.

Atom bombs were supposed to make war obsolete.  The Korean conflict proved that this wasn’t the case. Our pals in the war comics business weren’t quite sure what to do.

Some of these are disguised anthologies about the Korean conflict, dressed up in atomic bunting for additional sensationalistic sales appeal.

Comic books in the early 1950s are shameless.

All of these are series books. Atom Age Combat was published in two series, one in the early 1950s and one in the middle 1950s.

Although most of these war anthologies are fairly pedestrian 1950s era stuff, there are many examples of Armageddon and Post-Armageddon tales in their pages.

The trend largely petered out by 1957. At that point most of the war comics publishers went back to depicting WWII--which is where they stayed until the demise of the war genre in comics.

The bulwark genres of comics in the 1950s were Horror/Mystery, Romance and True Crime. (6) This is a reversion to the mean, since these were the same genres which propped up the remaining pulps. Although Dystopia was an extension of the Horror/Mystery genre—a horror story writ very large—there was all of one horror comics anthology which routinely ran it.

This is a minor title from a minor publisher and only a minority of the stories fit even the Pulp Dystopian mold. As with most horror, it’s mostly monster stories.

Big Brother, Energy Shortages, Environmental Collapse and the other boogey men of Literary Dystopia are hard to do in eight-page comic book chunks. That said, comics did like to ape the globally oppressive feel of Literary Dystopia. Lacking time for a backstory, comic books substitute something visual as an analogy.  It’s a big bad thing and it’s in the midst of winning.  Our hero has given up on the idea of defeating the thing or saving other people and is instead simply focused on surviving it. Or the hero is fighting a seemingly hopeless rear-guard action. It clings somewhat close to the conventions of Literary Dystopia, only with a physical monster taking Big Brother’s place.

This may be the first zombie graphic novel.  Zombies were popular in all mediums in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  Most comic book publishers of the time were only willing to produce comic books in series form.  This publisher, Avon, sells comic books by the issue.  If they have a strong story idea, they will make a title for it, even if it’s only a one-time thing. (7)

Aliens also make good Big Brother stand-ins. There was a flurry of UFO sightings in the late 1940s which led to something of a pulp fiction craze.  This particular graphic novel (they were called comic books at the time) was written by Walter B. Gibson, the primary pulp writer of The Shadow.

Dystopian themed anthologies do start to appear in 1950s comics, but they are all weird genre grafts. Comic book Dystopia falls into the broad general category of “Space and the Future Suck, Too.”   If we include oddball works such as St John’s Tor we could add “Prehistory Was No Fun, Either” or the raft of still strong selling jungle books, “The Wilderness Also Sucks.”  The underlying message is that there is no geographic escape to conflict, that no matter where you go oppressive existential threats will greet you.  That may not be a form of dystopia, but it is hardly the warm and fuzzies of Star Trek.

Most of these are from Charlton Comics, a firm known for its nimble capacity to triangulate trends.

Of these, the most successful title is Space War—a dismal, violent vision of the future.

Some of these anthologies did feature continuing characters, inhabitants of offshoot dystopian realms unrelated to the other stories. There were also a few dystopian character titles, all in the Space and the Future Sucks, Too category.

Major Inapak is pitted against an evil global Earth government, leading a rebellion in the remote space colonies.

Captain Science lives on a future Earth which is being invaded daily by a coalition of alien space nations.

Space Busters: Alien invasions have become so pernicious that a global Earth government has decided to go after them like an organized crime task force.

Commander Battle and his Atomic Sub find numerous uses for end of the world weapons.  Although the premise is as close to Literary Dystopian as it gets, most plots are typical Bug Eyed Monster hunts.  It seems to have been the inspiration for a later Irwin Allen television show.

My initial intention was to chronical these titles and extrapolate their possible influence on the development of Pulp Dystopia. Not all of my ideas are any good.  As any student of evolution will tell you, some paths just dead end. 

While comic books acknowledged Literary Dystopia, their approach is strictly cosmetic. Key to the early dystopian form are disasters propelled by human bureaucracy. Like mental powers, bureaucracy isn’t a particularly visual thing. If you substitute vampires or aliens or zombies for Big Brother, you’re not dealing with dystopia but rather a more pedestrian aspect of science fantasy.  Pulp Dystopia focuses more on the effects than the causes of a crisis, and was never chanced on as a repeated literary construction in comic books.

The current Pulp Dystopia TV hit Walking Dead did start as a comic book, but it doesn’t have much in the way of precedent within the comic book form. Even as a comic book, it has more to do with copping the feel of George Romero movies than advancing any idea from the world of four color sequential art.

This is not to say that Walking Dead is the only modern era comic book to have played with Literary Dystopia or Pulp Dystopia.  The Kamandi and Kilraven (War of the Worlds) series put the post global disaster themes front and center. (8)  Underground Comix anthologies such as Class War, Slow Death and Zap ran stories set in a decadent version of after the fall of now. True to Pulp Dystopian form, many were more interested in exploiting the shock value of leather clad women walking their sex slaves like dogs than explaining exactly what circumstances may have led to this. Mainstream comic book publisher Charlton had at least two continuing titles set after doomsday.

Comic books have generally had little truck with dystopia in any of its forms and have lacked the influence to impact the new Pulp Dystopian form.  That the medium has dodged having an influence for 60 plus years does not mean that it will continue to do so.  As long as Pulp Dystopia remains an ascendant genre, the chances of it making a strong showing in the graphic novel form remain high.  It is a mainstay of the Japanese version.

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(1)    There was a non pulp separation in Science Fiction, led by the digest title Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. In this new school, science fiction was getting away from the camoflague  Western Space Opera, bug eyed monster hunting, action plotting emphasis found in the pulps and more towards relativism and relevancy.  Ray Bradbury, though a pulp era author, was a part of this trend and his Literary Dystopian work Fahrenheit 451 is one of the better examples.

(2)    Most comic book superhero stories are set in what I have dubbed the Modern Thrills genre.  It’s the real world but… your wife is a witch… there are secret societies of vampires lurking about… there are occasional super powered beings.  Everything else is normal and the supernatural elements that do exist do not have the sway to make overall changes in society. Instead, the normal world sort of seals up wounds made by the fantastic hermetically, showing no lingering signs that anything out of the ordinary has transpired.  

(3)    Fawcett was well situated to withstand the sort of criticism that would later engulf other comic book publishers.  Not that they were any less vulgar.  Just in Anarcho they run an extensive torture scene and portray the people of Tibet as being demon worshippers. As opposed to policing their content, the firm had hired the First Lady and the daughter of Freud (along with Admiral Byrd and a bevy of other luminaries) to sit on their editorial board. These people were surely not reading the 60 comics per month Fawcett produces. It’s pure bribery. The names of these prominent establishment Americans on their comic book mastheads provided a very nice political smokescreen. 

(4)    Spy Smasher was Fawcett’s big hitter in the comic book spy game.  He had been featured in an early WWII movie serial and appeared in several of the firm’s comic titles.  It’s a big seller, drawing better than their licensed Captain Midnight title. Come the end of the war, however, both the Ovaltine owned Captain Midnight and Fawcett’s own Spy Smasher are in existential trouble.  With no war raging, neither of these guys has a reason for being. Fawcett took the typical tact of sending Captain Midnight into outer space.  Spy Smasher, at about the same time as Anarcho’s release, was re-christened Crime Smasher and then did a fast fade from view. Like Anarcho, Crime Smasher was given a one shot title and was never heard from again.

(5)    The US Government does seem to have a Department of Messing With Cartoon Characters.  Weird as it seems, this is not the first record we have of the government making such a request.  The popular Don Winslow of the Navy character was also commissioned by the government, supposedly to aid in recruitment. Winslow’s adventures in comics, radio and the silver screen were just as fantastic as anything Captain Marvel participated in. At this point Winslow was also appearing in Fawcett comics.

(6)    This was only the case of publishers who had failed to find a niche to monopolize.  Post the collapse of Fawcett,  Superman’s publisher DC Comics had a monopoly on the diminished superhero genre.  Archie had a monopoly on teen humor.  Dell Comics had a monopoly on licensed animation characters.  Post the emergence of the Comics Code, the True Crime genre would vanish. EC wound up with Mad Magazine, to this day the best selling comic book in America. Harvey would chance on a theme of dysfunctional weird kiddies (Casper, Richie Rich). Everyone else scrambled.

(7)    In general, distributors of the time wanted a commitment from the comics publishers. A publisher had to provide X number of new titles a week, mostly for distribution to local pharmacies. Avon was unusual, being effectively distributor sponsored. It was piggybacking its comics off of a system geared to circulating paperback novels.

(8)    Kamandi was a very imaginative Jack Kirby work, however it’s standing on the shoulders of previous dystopian lit and not making much of a unique contribution.  It reads more like a jungle comic than Pulp Dystopia.  The Kilraven series was a continuation of War of the Worlds and in the end seemed to be more about a post apocalyptic Marvel Universe than a real world dystopia.