The past year has seen the release of such important pulp art retrospectives as Pulp Culture and Infinite Worlds. At the same time, a circle of smaller publishers have made it their mission to reprint pulp tales, reacquainting the reading public with everything from Hugh B. Cave's weird fiction to the multi-volume "Purple Invasion" epic from the obscure hero magazine, Operator #5. The newest volume from the Insight Studios Group takes this nostalgia to a new level, offering up a brand new pulp with fiction promised "to rot your brain". Titanic Tales offers a wide range of stories, all of which ring with the lurid cackling and overwrought gasps found in the original hero and terror mags. The interior art is sharp, the layout and design attractively retro. The book's centerpiece is a new Spider story, "Burning Lead for the Walking Dead," which is not prose, but a nicely noir-ish illustrated tale by Mark Wheatley. Regular readers of indie comics will also welcome the stories featuring such established characters as the Reality Knight and Doc Cyborg. The interview article with legendary artist Al Williamson could have been longer, and the book as a whole should have been proofed more carefully, but readers hungry for new pulp thrills will not be disappointed with Titanic Tales. --
--James Lowder, Sci-Fi Universe, Oct. 1998
Pulps. Rotting old paper wrapped up in lurid colors and forbidden images. That's the reputation of the old pulp magazines, published decades ago. What do I know about it? Certainly there are people who have devoted their lives to documenting the history of the pulps and many of the pulps' most popular titles, characters and authors. I can't compete with that level of research or knowledge. But I believe I do have a natural feel for the pulp attitude. And more than the size, color, shape or smell of the old magazines, pulp is an attitude, a state of mind. Somehow, I had that pulp mind-set and was writing pulp-flavored comic book series such as MARS, TARZAN and THE BLACK HOOD before I ever saw my first pulp magazine. How I developed the taste for a cultural phenomenon that vanished before I was born I can only guess. It might have something to do with the 1960s revival of interest in the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard. Those thundering, blood and guts adventures got me hooked and over the years since I have hunted up the stories and illustrations from our popular past that tickle my need for pulpish adventures. These days I have got a fairly large room in my home that I use as a library. The books and magazines that are crammed into every spare nook and cranny would appear to be nothing more than piles of paper garbage to most viewers. At the very least, whenever she visits that's what my mother thinks of it all. But I see a room filled with wonderful treasures. And the most highly treasured items in my library are my pulp magazines. My collection of pulps takes the form of boxes filled with magazines published as early as 1901 and as late as the 1950's. They have titles like ARGOSY, ADVENTURE, WONDER STORIES, TOP-NOTCH, THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, CAVALIER, NEW STORY MAGAZINE, ALL-STORY, BLUE BOOK, SHORT STORY, FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, POPULAR DETECTIVE, WEIRD TALES, THE SPIDER, THRILLING WONDER STORIES, FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES, ACE G-MAN STORIES, AIR WONDER STORIES, MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES, DIME DETECTIVE, AMAZING STORIES, FUTURE, SUPER SCIENCE STORIES, TEN DETECTIVE ACES, HORROR STORIES, TERROR TALES, STARTLING STORIES, CAPTAIN FUTURE, UNKNOWN, ASTOUNDING and many more, using every exciting adjective in the dictionary. The names of the authors who filled those old pages with tales of mystery, magic, and mayhem include the famous and those who were never heard from again. Authors and illustrators who inspired TITANIC TALES include Fredric Brown, Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Talbot Mundy, Norvell Page, Robert E. Howard, Hugh B. Cave, H.G. Wells, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, E. Hoffman Price, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, George F.Worts, J. Allen St. John, Edd Cartier, Hannes Bok, Frank R. Paul, Alex Raymond, John Richard Flanagan, Walter Baumhofer, Jerome Rozen, John Newton Howitt, Raphael de Soto, Virgil Finlay, Earle K. Bergey, Norman Saunders, Austin Briggs, Hubert Rogers, Herbert Morton Stoops and many others. The pulps were a breeding ground for quick imagination and inventive action. When those now brittle magazines were new, they were the latest, raciest, titillating entertainment that money could buy. And at 104 to 254 pages per issue you got a great deal of entertainment for your dollar. But that was decades ago. Most pulp magazines went the way of the dodo bird and were extinct by the end of the 1950s. All that was left was for us to forget about these embarrassing exceptions to the general good taste. The years rolled on and the world did manage to forget that entertainment ever had the guts to entertain. Somewhere along the way race and class and national identity became organized special interest groups, each insisting that they were the focus of unwanted bad jokes and bad taste. Who knows, maybe they were. Certainly some of them were. We know that because some of them were us. But as the end of the century looms in our imaginations, the time has come to agree that we are all human people, brothers and sisters, and every one of us has earned the right to be criticized and joked about. We need the return of straight-shooting comment and in-your-face entertainment, if only so we can stay awake into the next century. To that end, I have gathered together eight of my friends. They are all very talented writers and artists who would like to reinvent pulp magazines for the twenty first century. It was almost exactly 100 years ago that the first pulp magazines began to crawl out of their evolutionary, publishing slime. Perhaps history will repeat itself and slime us once again. TITANIC TALES is a throwback to an earlier age. The stories that fill this book feature Tough Guys and Sexy Women. But, since it is the 1990s and not the 1930s you'll also find more than a few Tough Women and Sexy Guys. Mainly you're in for a whole lot of love. No, not romance, though we offer several doses, and I'm not talking about sex, even though more than a little is hidden in these pages I'm referring to the love each writer and artist has invested in the stories and art that fill TITANIC TALES to the very brim. If you have any doubt about the values expressed in this book, never question that every inch of type and every line of art was created out of a love for the old stories, the old heroes, the old adventures and maybe the hope that there is still room for such things in today's world, or even tomorrow's.
