Many readers have asked me "why do so many pulp covers feature women in ripped red blouses standing in swamps while a man who looks a bit like David Bowie fights off an unusual animal attack?"
The answer is pulp artist Wil Hulsey...
Wilbur "Wil" Hulsey was the undisputed king of the animal attack pulp cover. You name it, he'd paint it attacking you in a pool of stagnant water.
Very little is known about Wil Hulsey, but he worked on a number of men's pulp magazines in the 1950s and early 1960s including Man's Life, True Men, Guilty, Trapped and Peril.
Their audience for these was ex-GIs: during WWII the US Council of Books in Wartime had given away over 122 million books to American servicemen to read. This led to a post-war surge in paperback and magazine sales amongst these newly enthusiastic readers.
As a result the 1950s saw a raft of men's pulp magazines being published to tap into this market - almost 200 different titles!
For some reason the most popular types of story in the late 1950s were tales of men surviving attacks by vicious animals - the more unusual the better. Many pulp artists did their best to paint them.
But painting magazine covers is hard work, especially at speed, so many artists worked to a formula - often set out by the publisher. Wil Hulsey certainly perfected his.
The main male character in a Hulsey cover generally looks a bit like David Bowie. Artists would often use photos of the same model for various covers and the 'Bowie' model clearly worked for Wil.
Next there would be a woman in a button-popping ripped red blouse. Bright red, like bright yellow, is a stand-out colour which is eye-catching on a cover - especially if you're not sure how the blouse is staying on.
But why are they always in a swamp? Well, if you want the head and arms to be in the centre of the cover you have to lose the legs. Water, or long grass, is an easy way to do that, or you can paint people crouching.
There is a huge amount of male masochism in 1950s and early '60s pulp covers: men are trapped or bound, being flogged, eaten or bitten. The message seems to be 'real men can take it - and live to tell the tale!'
But by the early 1960s pulp tastes had changed, and animal attack covers gave way to violent war stories. By the end of the 1960s they were replaced by tales of bikers in leather jackets and hopped-up radical students running amok.
It just wasn't Wil's bag...
By 1973 the men's pulp magazine market was almost out of business: softcore titillation and physical fitness magazines were selling far more copies, and the days of the painted pulp cover were over.
So let's hear it for pulp artist Wil Hulsey. He could only draw one thing. But it was a great thing! And he drew it!!
Pulp salutes you Wil...
(And his legacy still lives on...)
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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.