After reading the last thread we had about it I was curious to check some of this stuff out, actually surprised myself that I enjoyed some of them despite their old age, particularly The Shadow and sci-fi stuff like Amazing Stories. What do you guys think about this stuff? I haven't checked out any radio stuff yet since the sheer amount of radio series is kind of confusing. And what else would you suggest for a dumb zoomer just getting started with it like me?
Pulp/Radio Heroes
Luis Garcia
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Chase Cox
>I enjoyed some of them despite their old age
Man, I am the exact opposite. I checked out some Doc Savage and other stuff posted on here and it just didn't click because of the gulf of time between it and modern media.
Luis Lewis
I liked The Spider, The Avenger, and Doc Savage the most. The Shadow was just ok out of the ones I've read so far.
Jonathan Thompson
>the gulf of time between it and modern media.
So what's the problem
Parker Parker
It's not for everyone. You may not appreciate WC Fields or the Marx Brothers either.
Connor Martin
There's some audiobooks on Youtube if you're interested in giving The Shadow another go, those are solid.
youtube.com
Thomas Torres
Somebody in the last thread was asking about Adventure Magazine and what was in it. As it turns out I recently bought an anthology book of just adventure stories (ie King Solomon's Mines, Tarzan etc) and the preface actually mentions that Adventure Magazine was the longest running pulp publication ever made, it started in 1910 and ended in the 70's, and the content is exactly as advertised; the Indiana Jones type turn of the century civilized man in bumfuck Timbuktu throwing punches and grabbing idols, but also western stories, sea stories, medieval, etc. Best of all, it seems a fuckton of issues are on Wayback Machine for all to see:
Caleb Price
Comic books are very much pulp stories with art. A good idea would be to start with Robert E Howard, his colorful energetic style really crackles with energy, HP Lovecraft has the best concepts but his writing strikes most modern readers as slow and too wordy. Fritz Leiber is amazing, as is Henry Kuttner, At his best, Edgar Rice Burroughs is very imaginative but he did turn out a lot of filler.
Reading old pulps, you'll see a LOT of ideas that were later swiped to be used in comics,.Everything from Iron Man to the Green Lantern Corps to Swamp Thing can be traced back to the pulps.
John Lee
War comics are better.
Jack Morales
Thank you. That's one of the top tier pulps. For fantasy and horror, let me recommend UNKNOWN (later UNKNOWN WORLDS). Every issue had a few great stories.
Chase Cox
what's the deal with Flash? Was he only newspaper strips or did he have anything else beyond the old serials?
Noah Butler
He appeared in an Old Time Radio show and a sad dismal 1950s TV show. But yeah, extremely popular and successful Universal serials and a long-running lucrative newspaper strip were big accomplishments in themselves. And enough merchandise to fill your house
For a chuckle, check out the Hawkmen in FLASH GORDON and compare them to DC's Hawkman that Gardner Fox created five years later.
Hunter Butler
The best Edgar Rice Burroughs would be from the period that gave us TARZAN THE UNTAMED and TARZAN THE TERRIBLE, TARZAN AND THE ANT MEN and TARZAN AND THE JEWELS OF OPAR.
Unfortunately, Burroughs sat back to type out a dozen further novels with the same story, no creative details and slack characterization. Too bad,.
Daniel Myers
Zachary Adams
John Carter also met a similar fate after the original Mars trilogy, but I don't think they got as batshit as Tarzan became
David Moore
Yeah, as I remember Burroughs kept introducing new protagonists to carry the further stories, including the daughter of John Carter and Dejah Thoris.This kept things from getting stale.
With Tarzan, he was stuck with Tarzan as the main character and Burroughs obviously got tired of him. There was a fun novel where Jane survives a plane crash in the jungle with her friends. Right away, she starts them building a shelter, she makes a bow and arrows and brings back a dead antelope for food, she shows them where to find water. I really liked Jane as an adventuress /.
Noah Johnson
And Flash Gordon appeared in original comic books, paperback novels and Big Little Books (which are a huge and fascinating topic themselves.)
Joshua Ortiz
Drop me some titles brother
Jeremiah White
>Everything from Iron Man to the Green Lantern Corps to Swamp Thing can be traced back to the pulps.
One of the coolest unexpected mentions of comics I've ever come across was in a Theodore Sturgeon collection called The Ultimate Egoist, where Sturgeon mentioned that he was amazed to learn that his story ''It'' had been such a seminal influence on comics characters like Man-Thing, Swamp Thing etc. He wasn't embarrassed or angry at all, just happy to see he'd been such an inspiration. A real class act.
Joshua Bell
Robert E Howard gave us a dozen adventure heroes. Conan the Cimmerian, Solomon Kane, Kull, Bran Mak Morn, Cormac Mac Art, El Borak, Kirby O'Donnell, Dennis Dorgan, Steve Costigan, Dark Agnes (who became Red Sonja in the comics).
The problem here is that Howard's excellent stories are swamped by thousands of pastiches by other writers. These range from okay to dreadful. But to feel the real jolt, you have to read Howard himself.
Michael James
I'm honestly not a fan of his purple prose.
John Peterson
Yes! I was lucky enough to read "It" when I was ten or eleven, and at my most impressionable. Beautifully written, And that story gave us Solomon Grundy, Swamp Thing, Man-Thing, the Heap and all the other lurching piles of gunk coming out of the swamp.
Oliver Davis
Not for everyone. I find it energetic and creative but he does go overboard. One story opens with people blowing into conch shells "which bellowed like oxen in pain." He's full of images like that.
If you like a more restrained and straightforward style, the pulps gave us Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler
Zachary Clark
What disappoints me about the modern impression some have about Conan and Howard is that the Hyborian age was created slapdash just to justify a backdrop for Conan. When in reality Howard put tremendous effort into fleshing the world and the age out, probably not much less than Tolkien did with Middle Earth, just Howard chose to focus on stuff like race, migration and shit. The only big gripe I have with the Hypnotism age is that you can't walk ten miles without stumbling upon some lost civilization or den of subhuman throwbacks at any given time.