Esprit De Corpse: A Johnny Liddell Thriller, by Frank Kane. Dell, 1965
"Johnny Amsterdam - eye with a beard"
I like It Cool, by Michael Lawrence. Popular Giant, 1960.
World Beyond Pluto: a new Johnny Mayhem novelette. Amazing Stories, November 1958. Cover by Ed Valigursky.
Johnny Staccato, by Frank Boyd (aka Frank Kane). Gold Medal Books, 1960.
Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. Edited by Tommy Hancock. Moonstone Books, 2020.
This is an anthology of new pulp stories based on the popular 1950s radio series. Do check it out!
"Funny how?"
Johnny Havoc, by John Jakes. Belmont Books, 1960.
Johnny Comet, by Peter De Paulo and Frank Frazetta, 1953.
This was a short-lived syndicated comic strip in various Sunday newspapers and is now highly sought after!
The Suicide Squad (1939-46): Johnny Kerrigan, Stephen Klaw and Dan Murdoch. Three tough FBI agents sent to tackle the toughest crime bosses in America. They always came out shooting!
Johnny Bruck, one of the most prolific illustrators in science fiction. He painted over 6,000 covers during his career, as well as many interior illustrations. The vast majority were for one title: Perry Rhodan.
Misfits of Science (1985). Generation X-Men with super powers and a primetime TV show. Featuring Johnny B, who gained the power of electricity after he electrocuted himself on stage.
Oh and Courteney Cox...
Johnny Canuck (1940 onwards) The bare-chested Hitler wrestler of Saskatchewan, drawn by 16 year old Leo Bachle. What a guy!
Hello I'm Johnny Cash. Spire Christian Comics, 1976. Art by Al Hartley.
Johnny Alucard, the groovy Chelsea vampire from Hammer's "interesting" updating of the Dracula legend 'Dracula 1972 A.D.'
Yes his name is Dracula spelt backwards. No the audience didn't realise. Yes you should watch it at least once.
Jay Underwood as Johnny Storm, in Roger Corman's unreleased 1994 movie The Fantastic Four.
This is the only good Fantastic Four movie, so therefore it's never been officially released.
Introducing Johnny Alpha...
Star Lord issue 1, May 1978. This outsold 2000AD until IPC merged the two titles for cost reasons.
More Johnnys another time. Don't be rotten to each other...
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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.