Sunday, March 02, 2014

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, September 3, 1921


ADVENTURE's covers during this era tended to be simple but pretty effective. That's certainly the case here. We don't know where those Viking ships are going, but there'll be blood spilled when they get there. In the meantime, the authors in this issue include W.C. Tuttle, Rafael Sabatini, Arthur D. Howden-Smith, Captain Dingle, Thomson Burtis, and Stephen Chalmers. Hard to beat a line-up like that.

5 comments:

Walker Martin said...

At this point ADVENTURE was twice a month but was soon to increase the schedule to three times a month. I consider the twenties to be the very best period for this excellent magazine. Copies are still available at the pulp conventions and ebay.

The cover was done by one of my favorite artists by the name of Edgar Franklin Wittmack. I still have a cover painting by him from PEOPLES MAGAZINE. One of the better painters but almost forgotten today.

Neil A. Waring said...

Now there is a cover that would pull me in.

Duane Spurlock said...

Is there a Viking story in this issue?

James Reasoner said...

Just going by the titles of the stories listed in the Fictionmags Index, none of them sound like Viking stories.

Walker Martin said...

Usually the 1920's covers of ADVENTURE did not illustrate a story in the issue. They sort of represented the spirit of adventure, etc. They covered all types of subjects except for SF or the fantastic. There was a policy of not publishing fantastic or supernatural stories.

In the teens they followed the practice of many other pulps like BLUEBOOK and ALL STORY and showed pretty girls on the covers. But by the later teens and 1920's, this practice ceased to such an extent that there were absolutely no women showed at all.

It was a man's adventure magazine without what editor Arthur Sullivant Hoffman called "women's interest" stories. The covers reflected this policy and though women might appear as characters, the stories avoided the love and romance formula demanded by the slicks and other pulp magazines.