Pulps

Pulp magazines (or pulp fiction; often referred to as "the pulps") were inexpensive fiction magazines. They were widely published from the 1920s through the 1950s. The term pulp fiction can also refer to mass market paperbacks since the 1950s. more...

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Terminology and history

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 fast-paced, lurid, sensational and exploitative stories and thrilling 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. However the pulps were aimed more at adult readers whereas comic books were traditionally written for children and adolescents.

Because of the copyright laws at the time, there were distinct lines of this sort of magazine in Britain as well. These magazines, called "story papers", were distributed throughout the British Empire. Story paper characters such as Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee were similar to American pulp characters. At the time, there was no global media market, so even though these were written in the same language, there was no recognition of the characters by each nation, just as in much of television today.

Pulp covers 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.

The first "pulp" is considered to be Frank Munsey's revamped Argosy Magazine of 1896. 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 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.

The pulp format eventually declined (especially in the 1950s) with rising paper costs, competition from comic books, television, and the paperback novel. The 1957 bankruptcy 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 remaining pulp magazines are science fiction or mystery magazines now in digest form. The format is still in use for some lengthy serials, like the German science fiction weekly Perry Rhodan (over 2300 issues as of 2005).

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