For this reason, most of the original canvasses were painted over or destroyed. “The helplessness that’s in the center of your worst nightmare is at the center of the pulps.”Ĭriticized even at the time as vulgar, pulp art was simply a moneymaker to many artists who thought it unworthy of their portfolios. “I call it American nightmare art,” says Lesser, describing the melodramatic formula of villain/victim/victor that most of the pulp artists employed. His collection of about 150 paintings spawned the first display of pulp art as legitimate art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art last year. Only the artist that could reach the public and pull out the dimes got steady work,” says Robert Lesser of New York, the foremost - and, until recently, one of the only - collectors of original pulp art canvasses. The result was an arms race at the newsstand with hundreds of pulps competing for consumers’ precious nickels and dimes. Both Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler popularized their Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe characters, respectively, in the pages of Black Mask, a detective pulp.īut many authors - and cover artists - toiled in obscurity, especially during the Depression when publishers slashed their payment rates along with newsstand prices. Other publishers jumped into the game, pushing the pulp equation into other genres - hardboiled detective stories, Westerns, science fiction and heroics from the likes of Doc Savage and the Shadow.

Vivid cover art depicting Tarzan’s struggles with the beasts of the jungle brought Burroughs’ exotic tales to life for the readers of a more isolated America. So what really matters is finding writers to make the story move,” Ardai says.Ībout the time of World War I, when books were costly and talkies hadn’t yet taken over cinema, the demand for prose that cruised at a quick pace broke a wave of new writers whose stories, published in serialized installments, kept readers coming back for more.Įdgar Rice Burroughs, whose Tarzan of the Apes first appeared in 1912, helped touch off the genre. “Someone might buy one for novelty value, but they’re not going to buy 10 of them for that reason.

Fade to Blonde by Max Phillips