Today in pulp... I look back at an artist whose brazen, action-packed news images captured the essence of post-war Italy: Walter Molino!
Molino began his career as an illustrator and caricaturist in 1935, working on a number of Italian newspapers. But in 1941 he took the prize spot for Italian commercial artists: cover illustrator for La Domenica del Corriere.
La Domenica del Corriere came out every Sunday, free with Corriere della Sera, and its hallmark was always its cover illustration: striking, exciting and sensationalist!
Molino was following in illustrious footsteps: Achille Beltrame had made his career illustrating for La Domenica del Corriere and had defined its cover style - direct and dramatic.
Walter Molino would carry on this tradition for the next 48 years with a torrent of drastic, action-packed illustrations for the newspaper.
Molino's speciality was capturing the moment of acute danger: his illustrations seize the moment and foreground the action, no matter what the story was.
And Molino was a master of displaying tension: with tight composition and excellent use of perspective he thrust the viewer into the action.
No story was too trivial to capture Molino's imagination: if he could wring tension out of situation he would paint it.
Many of his covers for La Domenica del Corriere feature crashes, accidents or near-misses. The crunch of bones, figures flying through the air to disaster, the shock of the moment of impact: his illustrations captured it all.
But Molino also captured the changes to society that were rapidly happening: his art was about change as much as impact. He tried to make sense of mid-modernity to an audience struggling to keep up with the sheer pace of the modern world.
He also captured the drama of everyday life in Italy; its passions and conflicts...
...along with the strange and unusual!
La Domenica del Corriere ceased publication in 1989, but its covers are still collector items thanks to Molino's eye for the dramatic.
So here's to Walter Molino: the artist who helped shape modern Italy through the power of the image. Proof that a well made illustration can sometimes tell us more than a simple photograph can.
More stories another time...
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Given the current heatwave, I feel obliged to ask my favourite question: is it time to bring back the leisure suit?
Let's find out...
Now we all know what a man's lounge suit is, but if we're honest it can be a bit... stuffy. Formal. Businesslike. Not what you'd wear 'in da club' as the young folks say.
So for many years tailors have been experimenting with less formal, but still upmarket gents attire. The sort of garb you could wear for both a high level business meeting AND for listening to the Moody Blues in an espresso bar. Something versatile.
Today in pulp I look back at the publishing phenomenon of gamebooks: novels in which YOU are the hero!
A pencil and dice may be required for this thread...
Gamebooks are a simple but addictive concept: you control the narrative. At the end of each section of the story you are offered a choice of outcomes, and based on that you turn to the page indicated to see what happens next.
Gamebook plots are in fact complicated decision tree maps: one or more branches end in success, but many more end in failure! It's down to you to decide which path to tread.
He was the terror of London; a demonic figure with glowing eyes and fiery breath who could leap ten feet high. The penny dreadfuls of the time wrote up his exploits in lurid terms. But who was he really?
Today I look at one of the earliest pulp legends: Spring-Heeled Jack!
London has always attracted ghosts, and in the 19th Century they increasingly left their haunted houses and graveyards and began to wader the capital's streets.
But one apparition caught the Victorian public attention more than most...
In October 1837 a 'leaping character' with a look of the Devil began to prey on Londoners. Often he would leap high into the air and land in front of a carriage, causing it to crash. It would then flee with a high-pitched laugh.