New Pulp And New Pulp Heroes
Clancy O’Hara’s PULP #7
The hero pulp magazines ended
in the summer of 1953, while genre pulp magazines continued through the late
fifties, and even into the 1960’s. One had the gall to hang on until about
1972. But the end had arrived. Men’s adventure paperbacks were taking the place
of those old magazines on the racks, and digest magazines replaced the SF,
Mystery, Western & Romance pulps.
The pulp magazines had kept to
a strict moral code watched over by publishers and editors, though some of the
covers might have given a different impression of what was inside. By 1953,
however, the hero pulps were not immune to the changing time, and the morals were
beginning to evaporate. The final issues of The Phantom Detective, Dan Fowler
(G-Men Detective), and The Black Bat (Black Book Detective) contained strong
hints of sex and rougher language. But by then their time was dying, and the
paperbacks had taken over for good.
Jerry Page’s The Armadillo
Let’s concentrate on the pulp
hero, or I might use the term NEW PULP HERO at this phase. When did it start?
That’s easy. The first we absolutely know of for sure, was Jerry Page’s The
Armadillo, a masked hero that appeared in print just a few years after the hero
pulp magazines ceased in the mid 1950s. By the 1960s there were new stories of
The Shadow, to prove that OLD PULP HEROES were not dead. And others were
writing clones of Doc Savage and Tarzan, like Phil Farmer and Lin Carter, among
others. I don’t have a good track on all the new pulp heroes that were
strangely appearing in paperback, but I could name some, if pressed. Even major
comic book houses like Marvel and DC were bringing their characters out in
prose paperback editions.
Tom Johnson’s The Black Ghost
Unfortunately, there wasn’t a
concerted effort to maintain this new pulp/new pulp hero tradition until 1995.
In January of that year – dated Winter - it all changed. The culprit was Clancy O’Hara’s PULP FICTION MAGAZINE - changed
to PULP, A FICTION MAGAZINE with the third issue and just plain PULP with the
seventh issue. And the first new pulp characters to arrive in Clancy’s magazine
were Aaron B. Larson’s Haakon Jones, and Tom Johnson’s The Black Ghost, both
appearing in early issues. In June 1995, Tom & Ginger Johnson’s FADING
SHADOWS magazines kicked off with CLASSIC PULP FICTION STORIES and ran through
December 2004, and the new pulp/new pulp heroes were claiming their place as
“new pulp fiction”. Clancy may have been the first to call it NEW PULP, but we
at FADING SHADOWS called it NEW STORIES IN THE PULP TRADITION. I’m not really
sure when the NEW PULP banner started, but I imagine someone at Pro Se could
fill us in.
As the reader can see, NEW
PULP is really quite old. I still prefer NEW STORIES IN THE PULP TRADITION, however.
Doesn’t that make sense? But whatever we call it, since 1995 NEW PULP FICTION
has been going strong, and we’ve definitely seen some interesting characters
show up on radar. In January 2015, the modern day pulp fiction will be twenty
years old. Haakon Jones and The Black Ghost will also share that honor.
