This issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE sports a gruesome but eye-catching and dramatic cover by Rafael DeSoto. Nothing good ever comes from a suit of armor on a pulp cover! Inside this issue are stories by Barry Perowne (a Raffles yarn), Arthur J. Burks, Steve Fisher, Dwight V. Babcock, John Scott Douglas, Paul Hawk, Edmond Du Perrier, and the oddly named Tom Erwin Geris, who, if you rearrange the letters, turns out to be none other than Mort Weisinger, who wrote quite a few pulp stories but is best remembered as the long-time editor of the Superman titles at DC Comics during the Silver Age. He had a reputation as quite a curmudgeon as far as the writers and artists were concerned, but I didn't know any of that at the time. I just read the comic books and enjoyed them. I don't believe I've ever read any of his pulp stories, though.
Weisinger was a jerk, and his overlong influence on Superman is a direct and significant factor in why DC is the smaller of the Big Two by a fair margin. Hugely not a fan of the man or his legacy.
ReplyDelete"Nothing good ever comes from a suit of armor on a pulp cover!"
Depends on the genre. You really need to read more sword & sorcery pulps. :)
You won't believe me when I say this, but I have just gone down a major rabbit hole on the history of Marvel Comics because of your throw-away lines about Mort Weisinger.
ReplyDeleteI've been reading Jim Shooter's blog for the past 6-7 hours and am no where near complete. I wonder how much the comics had taken up the pulp mantle, and what can we then learn from this moving forward? Billions have been spent on stories in this realm, and I wonder where is the current (or even next) market. People crave good, simple stories. Where can people like us tell good, simple stories?
Now I know great magazines like Asimov's and Fantastic and Ellery Queen's Mysteries continued on from the mid-50's, but they fell by the wayside to the mass appeal of the comics.
I don't think there's much good, pure storytelling in mainstream publishing anymore. But I could be wrong about that since I don't really keep up with it like I once did. And I don't know much at all about current comics. But as far as books, the new ones that seem closest to the stuff I like to read usually are self-published or come from smaller publishers such as Wolfpack, Dusty Saddle, Aethon, Ark Press, outfits like that. There are plenty of good books still out there, they're just harder to find.
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