Pulp magazines (or pulp fiction ; often referred to as "the pulps") were inexpensive fiction magazines. They were widely published from 1896 through the 1950s. The standard format was a 7" x 10" magazine with a spine, printed on cheap paper with ragged untrimmed edges. Pulps were typically seven inches wide by ten inches high, about half an inch thick, having around 128 pages. In their first decades, they were most often priced at ten cents, while competing slicks were 25 cents.
The name "pulp" comes from the cheap wood pulp paper on which such magazines were printed. Magazines printed on better paper and usually offering family-oriented content were often called "glossies" or "slicks". Pulps were the successor to the "penny dreadfuls", "dime novels", and short fiction magazines of the nineteenth century. Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines are perhaps best remembered for their lurid and exploitative stories, and for their similarly sensational cover art. Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered descendants of "hero pulps"; pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters such as The Shadow, Doc Savage, and the Phantom Detective.
Illustrators
Pulp covers, printed in color on higher-quality (slick) paper, were famous for their half-dressed damsels in distress, usually awaiting a rescuing hero. Cover art played a major part in the marketing of pulp magazines, and a number of the most successful cover artists became as popular as the authors featured on the interior pages. Among the most famous pulp artists were Frank R. Paul, Virgil Finlay, Edd Cartier, Margaret Brundage and Norman Saunders. Covers were important enough to sales that sometimes they would be designed first; authors would then be shown the cover art and asked to write a story to match.
Later pulps began to feature interior illustrations, depicting elements of the stories. The drawings were printed in black ink on the same cream-colored paper used for the text, and had to use specific techniques to avoid blotting on the coarse texture of the cheap pulp. Thus, fine lines and heavy detail were usually not an option. Shading was by crosshatching or pointillism, and even that had to be limited and coarse. Usually the art was black lines on the paper's background, but Finlay and a few others did some work that was primarily white lines against large dark areas.
Street & Smith
The first "pulp" is considered to be Frank Munsey's revamped Argosy Magazine of 1896, about 135,000 words (192 pages) per issue on pulp paper with untrimmed edges and no illustrations, not even on the cover. While the steam-powered printing press had been in widespread use for some time, enabling the boom in dime novels, prior to Munsey, no one had combined cheap printing, cheap paper and cheap authors in a package that provided affordable entertainment to working-class people. In six years Argosy went from a few thousand copies per month to over half a million.
Street & Smith were next on the market. A dime novel and boys' weekly publisher, they saw Argosy' s success, and in 1903 launched The Popular Magazine , which was billed as the "biggest magazine in the world" by virtue of being two pages longer than Argosy . It should be noted that due to differences in page layout, the magazine had substantially less text than Argosy . The Popular Magazine introduced the use of color covers to the pulp world. The magazine began to take off when, in 1905, the publishers acquired the rights to serialize a new work, Ayesha , by H. Rider Haggard, a sequel to his very successful novel She . Haggard's Lost World genre influenced a wide number of pulp writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Talbot Mundy and Abraham Merritt . In 1907, they raised the cover price to 15 cents and added 30 pages per issue; this, along with a solid stable of authors, proved a successful formula and circulation began to approach that of Argosy . This demonstrated that the market could support multiple competitors. Street and Smith's next key innovation was the introduction of specialized genre pulps, each magazine focusing on one genre such as detective stories, romance, etc.
At their peak of popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, the most successful pulps could sell up to one million copies per issue. Among the best-known titles of this period were Adventure , Amazing Stories , Black Mask , Dime Detective , Flying Aces , Horror Stories , Marvel Tales , Oriental Stories , Planet Stories , Spicy Detective , Startling Stories , Thrilling Wonder Stories , Unknown and Weird Tales .
WWII
The Second World War paper shortages had a serious impact on pulp production, starting a steady rise in costs and the decline of the pulps. Beginning with Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1941, pulp magazines began to switch to digest size; smaller, thicker magazines. In 1949, Street & Smith closed most of their pulp magazines in order to move upmarket and produce slicks. The pulp format declined from rising expenses, but even more due to the heavy competition from comic books, television, and the paperback novel. In a more affluent post-war America, the price gap compared to slick magazines was far less significant. In the 1950s Men's adventure magazines began to replace the pulp.
The 1957 liquidation of the American News Company, then the primary distributor of pulp magazines, has sometimes been taken as marking the end of the "pulp era"; by that date, many of the famous pulps of the previous generation, including Black Mask, The Shadow, Doc Savage, and Weird Tales, were defunct. Most all of the few remaining pulp magazines are science fiction or mystery magazines now in formats similar to "digest size", such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The format is still in use for some lengthy serials, like the German science fiction weekly Perry Rhodan (over 2450 issues as of 2009).
Over the course of their evolution, there were a huge number of pulp magazine titles; Harry Steeger of Popular Publications claimed that his company alone had published over 300, and at their peak they were publishing 42 titles per month. Many titles of course survived only briefly. While the most popular titles were monthly, many were bimonthly and some were quarterly.
The collapse of the pulp industry changed the landscape of publishing because pulps were the single largest sales outlet for short stories. Combined with the decrease in slick magazine fiction markets, writers attempting to support themselves by creating fiction switched to novels and book-length anthologies of shorter pieces.
Genres
Pulp magazines often contained a wide variety of genre fiction, including, but not limited to, fantasy/sword and sorcery, gangster, detective/mystery, science fiction, adventure, westerns (also see Dime Western), war, sports, railroad, romance, horror/occult (including "weird menace"), "spicy/saucy" (soft porn), and Série Noire (French crime mystery). The American Old West was a mainstay genre of early turn of the century novels as well as later pulp magazines, and lasted longest of all the traditional pulps. In many ways, the later men's adventure ("the sweats") was the replacement of pulps.
Many classic science fiction and crime novels were originally serialized in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales , Amazing Stories , and Black Mask .
Notable original characters
While the majority of pulp magazines were anthology titles featuring many different authors, characters and settings, some of the most enduringly popular magazines were those that featured a single recurring character. These were often referred to as "hero pulps" because the recurring character was almost always a larger-than-life hero in the mold of Doc Savage or The Shadow.
Popular pulp characters included :
- The Avenger
- Biggles
- The Black Bat
- Bran Mak Morn
- Buck Rogers
- Captain Future
- Conan the Barbarian
- The Continental Op
- Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective
- Doc Savage
- Doctor Death
- Dr. Yen Sin
- Domino Lady
- The Eel
- Flash Gordon
- Fu Manchu
- G-8
- Green Lama
- Hopalong Cassidy
- Jim Anthony
- John Carter of Mars
- Jules de Grandin
- Ka-Zar
- Kull
- Lord Lister AKA Raffles
- Moon Man
- Nick Carter
- Operator No. 5
- The Phantom Detective
- Secret Agent X
- Sexton Blake
- The Shadow
- The Spider
- Solomon Kane
- Tarzan
- Terence X. O'Leary
- The Whisperer
- Zorro
Kilgore Trout, the perennial character in the work of Kurt Vonnegut, is a fictional pulp fiction writer.
Authors
Another way pulps kept costs down was by paying authors less than other markets; thus many eminent authors started out in the pulps before they were successful enough to sell to better-paying markets, and similarly, well-known authors whose careers were slumping or who wanted a few quick dollars could bolster their income with sales to pulps. Additionally, some of the earlier pulps solicited stories from ama
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