Theagenes

Very nice! And welcome to the boards Mad Artist!

I wonder how I'd look in Mylar.

I wrote Partch a fan letter back in 1966 and he sent me the original artwork for a Sunday strip as a thank you. Those were fun days. That's really cool.

Yes, and looking at some of the other books in the series many of them do have a discount on Amazon, but not a huge one. Unfortunately these kind of books are aimed at libraries and academic institutions and are pretty pricey.

I suppose there are worse epithets.

Wow, those are great! I had never heard of him until now.

Yeah, I think that was a little hyperbolic. Thanks guys!

Is that a Kamen cover? EDIT: Nevermind, I see it's Lubbers.

Nice!

Here's something less academic and more fun that came in the mail today.

It's a little pricey, but academic books always are. I'm just excited that I got second billing after Joshi.

Shameless plug time! Salem Press has just announced their forthcoming collection of essays on the pulps. I have an article on REH's creation of sword and sorcery. Due out in May: Critical Insights: Pulp Fiction of the 1920s and 1930s Outstanding, in-depth scholarship by renowned literary critics; great starting point for students seeking an introduction to the theme and the critical discussions surrounding it. Explores the "weird" and diverse fiction of popular pulp writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, A. Merritt, as well as pulp magazines such as Weird Tales. From their origin at the end of the nineteenth century to their decline in the 1950s, "pulp" magazines entertained the masses with lurid stories in such genres as adventure, Western, romance, crime, fantasy, horror, and science fiction. Notable publications, such as Weird Tales, also served as apprenticeships for many new writers, including H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. Edited by Gary Hoppenstand, Professor of American Studies at Auburn University at Michigan State University and editor of the Journal of Popular Culture, this volume in the Critical Insights series presents a variety of new essays on the topic of popular pulp fiction and writers of the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on those major contributors to the Weird Tales school, which not only included Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith, but also Seabury Quinn, C.L. Moore, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and others. For readers who are studying pulp fiction for the first time, four essays survey the critical conversation regarding the subject, explore its cultural and historical contexts, and offer close and comparative readings of key texts. Readers seeking a deeper understanding can then move on to other essays that explore it in depth through a variety of critical approaches. Among the contributors are S.T. Joshi, Jeffrey H. Shanks, Andrew J. Wilson, Garyn Roberts, and Richard Bleiler. Rounding out the volume are a list of literary works not mentioned in the book that concern the theme as well as a bibliography of critical sources for readers seeking to study this timeless theme in greater depth. Each essay is 2,500 to 5,000 words in length, and all essays conclude with a list of "Works Cited," along with endnotes. Finally, the volume's appendixes offer a section of useful reference resources: About This Volume Critical Context: Original Introductory Essays Critical Readings: Original In-Depth Essays Further Readings Detailed Bibliography Detailed Bio of the Editor General Subject Index

Wow! What a haul!

it ain't over; bob will be back, you can bank it. Well, that's problem. It was an interesting discussion... until Bob came back. I refuse to defend his condescending, insulting, rambling anymore just for occasional historical tidbit that may or may not even be accurate (who can tell?). Have at it!

Well, it was an interesting discussion while it lasted.

No idea. :shrug: I admit, I'm curious about this one: "P ussy" by Flavia Richardson

I think most of the other stories, by Cook and a few others were British writers, but in searching some of the names and titles I haven't seen them published anywhere else previously. Pat, you've got one don't you?

Cool!

What a pleasure to read such a cognitive, compact, and credible post from a subject-matter expert. You really need to post more often, Rich. Seconded!

I need a copy of this one! Anyone have one they can part with? Good luck! I think we all need one now.

So the theme for Howard Days this year will be REH in the comics and the Guest of Honor will be Tim Truman. Here's the schedule: http://www.rehupa.com/?p=3780

The interrelationship of different entertainment media and how it affects and is affected by rise and fall of different genres is an interesting discussion. In the pulp thread, where we've been posting a number of weird menace pulps, I just mentioned an interesting Pulp Studies paper from the PCA conference a couple of weeks ago. It was on how the rise of the shudder/weird menace pulps with their lurid, graphic, and misogynistic imagery took place at exactly the same time in the early 30s as the institution of the Hayes Code and the crackdown of the same type of imagery in the film industry. Nature abhors a vacuum I suppose, and as long is there is an interest in a given genre, it's going to find a medium to deliver it -- in the case of the superhero genre it may have kept a medium alive well past its expiration date.

One of the more interesting Pulp Studies papers at the PCA conference a couple of weeks ago was on the rise of the shudder/weird menace pulps with their lurid, graphic, and misogynistic imagery took place at exactly the same time in the early 30s as the institution of the Hayes Code and the crackdown of the same type of imagery in the film industry. I thought that was a fascinating observation, though her evidence was circumstantial. That sort of goes along with the discussion in the comic book origins thread about how interrelated the different entertainment media are and how the rise of a particular genre in one medium may mean it's decline in another and vice versa.

Another great point I hadn't really thought about! Without super-heroes, would there be anything beyond a niche (well... even nichier) core of collectors out there, say along the same lines as BLB collectors today. It occurs to me that perhaps the reason BLBs are so minimally collected today, isn't so much because of the format being unpopular among collectors, as it is that there are so few super-hero titles to be found in them. I think if 2 or 3 dozen super-heroes had crossed over into BLBs, they might have a different collecting landscape today... Tim, you've been skirting the point all along without realizing that you'd said it . Exacty. I was just distilling Tim's early thoughts.

Another great point I hadn't really thought about! Without super-heroes, would there be anything beyond a niche (well... even nichier) core of collectors out there, say along the same lines as BLB collectors today. It occurs to me that perhaps the reason BLBs are so minimally collected today, isn't so much because of the format being unpopular among collectors, as it is that there are so few super-hero titles to be found in them. I think if 2 or 3 dozen super-heroes had crossed over into BLBs, they might have a different collecting landscape today... And that dovetails with your point that SF&F fandom gravitates toward collecting for whatever reason. You can see this in the classified ads in the earliest fanzines where from the beginning you had a knowledgeable and sophisticated collecting community. Fans of Romance, Detective, Westerns, etc. just didn't tend to collect like SF&F fans did. So they went from medium to medium -- dime novels to pulps to comics to paperbacks to TV without looking back. But since the superhero genre could only thrive in comics due to special effects limitations, the SF&F fans stuck with the medium and a collecting hobby developed around it in the 60s and 70s. That hobby continued to drive the medium even as other genres disappeared from comics and special effects got better. Today, with the superhero genre now being fully-realized on the big screen, the collecting hobby is the only thing keeping the medium around on life-support, in the US anyway.