Forty years after the decline and fall of a publishing empire that once sold millions of magazines each month for more than three decades, former Popular Publications, Inc. President Henry Steeger reflected:

“Pulps were the principal entertainment vehicle for millions of Americans. They were an un-flickering, uncolored TV screen upon which the reader could spread the most glorious imagination he possessed…on dull, no-gloss paper that was kind to the eyes.”

Counting British “penny dreadful” novels and the popular successes of early 20th century adventure authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack London and Upton Sinclair as inspiration, the concept of the “pulp fiction magazine” – or “pulps” to the layman – is a uniquely American phenomenon that be accredited directly to one man: Frank A. Munsey. The former telegraph operator from Maine was able to utilize a method of high-speed printing on cheap pulp paper (hence the name) that allowed him to take his magazines to turn-of-the-century newsstands with a price tag of 10 cents, at a time when copies of more highbrow fare, printed on glossy paper, went for a quarter.

By the 1920s, dozens of imitators and competitors had picked up on that highly lucrative business model, creating magazines like Black Mask, Amazing Stories, Marvel Tales (the forbearer of Marvel Comics) and, most importantly, Weird Tales, in the process. Though the content of the pulps covered every genre imaginable - adventure, western, fantasy, crime, mystery, war, aviation and more – the stories featured in Weird Tales introduced pre-Word War II America to literary titans whose work is still admired (and imitated) today: Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan and Solomon Kane), Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 151, The Martian Chronicles), Isaac Asimov (I, Robot), Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) and Robert Bloch (Psycho), to name but a few of their innumerable contributors.

According to Bloch, the fictional worlds produced by that formidable stable of talent was “the work of writers inspired by the opportunity to create stories on a more literate level than was commonly accepted of the period and transcend the taboos and challenge the smugness of a Norman Rockwell view of America.” And, in truth, the secret cults, blood wielding maniacs and far-flung cosmic utopias of the best pulp stories were most definitely some of the most subversive material available during FDR-era (barring the underground pornography pamphlets known as “Tijuana Bibles,” that is).

While such esteemed writers struggled away for pennies a page with aspirations of one day seeing print in the Saturday Evening Post or Cosmopolitan, other publishers, most notably Street and Smith Publications, created solo “hero pulps” that featured the monthly, novel-length exploits of characters like William Gibson’s The Shadow and Lester Dent’s Doc Savage, among many, many others. It was these “super-heroes” that later gave birth to the pulps’ would-be successors: the comic book.

By the early 1950s, all but a few of the original pulps had been forgotten in lieu of the fully-illustrated – though far less risqué - adventures of the likes of Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel and the rest of their cape-clad ilk. But the influence of those pulp progenitors on some of America’s most valuable intellectual properties can still be felt today. For instance, Doc Savage’s oft-mentioned Arctic retreat, the Fortress of Solitude, was later “borrowed” by DC Comics’ writers to stand in as Superman’s secret citadel. Whether such maneuvers were a loving tribute or outright theft, the thinking behind them was undoubtedly thus: “Who’ll remember those cheap pulps anyway?”

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