Today in pulp... a rather elusive artist, the brilliant Gene Szafran! #SaturdayVibes
Gene Szafran was born in Michigan in 1941 and studied at The Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit. He later became an art teacher there.
Szafran moved to New York City in 1967, where his work featured in Playboy and Cosmopolitan. He also worked on a number of album covers, winning the 1969 Grammy for his Rhinoceros album cover.
This led him into the world of book cover design, particularly science fiction where his stylized kaleidoscopic images brought him to the attention of Signet Publications.
Gene Szafran produced an incredible set of covers for Signet's range of Robert A Heinlein novels between 1971 and 1974. As a collection they're stunning and unique.
It certainly wasn't what you might expect a Heinlein book to look like: bold colours and exquisite geometry, often coming together around a central human form.
The Heinlein covers led to a number of contracts for other work. Szafran's amazing use of colour and symmetry seemed a perfect match for the early 1970s scene.
Although Szafran did more traditional cover art - notably for Daphne Du Maurier titles - it's his science fiction work that really stands out as unique. It set an esoteric, somewhat erotic note. Whether the books themselves warranted it is a moot point.
In 1972 Szafran won the Locus Award for best paperback cover artist; his career in the industry seemed assured...
And then... tragically he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which severely affected his ability to paint and draw. His last covers were completed in 1977 before he returned to Detroit with his family.
Gene Szafran's work is a time capsule of 1970s psychedelic Americana: complex, dazzling and rich. He was an exceptionally gifted artist with a keen sense of colour and composition.
Sadly Gene Szafran passed away in 2011, but his legacy is a fantastic collection of artwork that's well worth collecting. Keep an eye out when you next visit your local book market.
More artists another time...
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Many readers have asked me over the years what my definition of pulp is. I've thought about it a lot, and the definition I keep coming back to... well it may surprise you.
Let me try and set it out.
There are lots of definitions of pulp out there: in books, in academic papers and on the web. And most circle back to the same three points: the medium, the story type and the method of writing.
Pulp is of course a type of cheap, coarse paper stock. Its use in magazine production from the 1890s onwards led to it becoming a shorthand term for the kind of fiction found in low cost story magazines.
let's take a look at the extraordinary work of Victorian illustrator and cat lover Louis Wain!
Louis Wain was born in London in 1860. Although he is best known for his drawings of cats he started out as a Victorian press illustrator. His work is highly collectable.
Wain had a very difficult life; born with a cleft lip he was not allowed to attend school. His freelance drawing work supported his mother and sisters after his father died. Aged 23 he married his sisters' governess, Emily Richardson, 10 years his senior.
Over the years a number of people have asked me if I have a favourite pulp film. Well I do. It's this one.
This is the story of Alphaville...
Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965) was Jean-Luc Godard’s ninth feature film. A heady mix of spy noir, science fiction and the Nouvelle Vague at its heart is a poetic conflict between a hard-boiled secret agent and a supercomputer’s brave new world.
British writer Peter Cheyney had created the fictitious American investigator Lemmy Caution in 1936. As well as appearing in 10 novels Caution featured in over a dozen post-war French films, mostly played by singer Eddie Constantine whom Godard was keen to work with.
Al Hartley may have been famous for his work on Archie Comics, but in the 1970s he was drawn to a very different scene: God.
Today in pulp I look back at Hartley's work for Spire Christian Comics - a publisher that set out to spread the groovy gospel...
Spire Christian Comics was an offshoot of Spire Books, a mass-market religious paperback line launched in 1963 by the Fleming H. Revell company. The point of Spire Books was to get religious novels into secular stores, so a move into comic books in 1972 seemed a logical choice.
The idea was to create comic book versions of popular Spire Books like The Cross and the Switchblade; David Wilkinson's autobiographical tale of being a pastor in 1960s New York. It had already been turned into a film, but who could make it into a comic?
It was a phenomenon, spawning a franchise that has lasted over fifty years. It's also a story with many surprising influences.
Today in pulp I look back at a sociological science-fiction classic, released today in 1968: Planet Of The Apes!
Pierre Boulle is probably best known for his 1952 novel Bridge On The River Kwai, based on his wartime experiences in Indochina. So it was possibly a surprise when 11 years later he authored a science fiction novel.
However Boulle had been a Free French secret agent during the war. He was captured in 1943 by Vichy forces in Vietnam and sentenced to hard labour. This experience of capture would shape his novel La Planète Des Singes.