Theagenes

Still have to read it but I did mention that the stories were un-memorable, right? I guess The Black_Hand will love it though ... breasts and all It was repetitive, but I've read worse. He had kind of a poor man's Lovecraft thing going for a little while (I think he even used the verb "gibbering"once). But that all kind of came apart with the Scooby Doo it-was-just-a-guy-in-a-costume ending.

We should try this. Let's both (and everyone with the inclination) read the following Bellem story for Spicy Mystery (Dec. 1936) and report here! Here's the link to the PDF of that story: Bellem's The Moon-God Takes [Note: Clicking on the link will open an Explorer window and then start downloading a PDF file] I just printed it and plan on reading later tonight. Cool, I'll read it tonight too. (thumbs u

I love reading these Siegel letters!

I'll post a bunch of 1934 and 1935 Weird Tales covers in the next week or two. (thumbs u There are nine issues where a Conan story made the cover, only three of which actually have Conan himself. Usually it is just the nude or semi-nude damsel of the story in some sort of lesbo-bondage scene.

Scrooge and BZ, Thank you for posting all that information on Saunders - that was a fascinating read! (thumbs u

You know I've never read the Venus series. I understand that contains a good bit of political allegory, with various groups representing communists, fascists, etc. I should probably check it out sometime. BB posted another Carson cover with the "tailess whipscorpion" the other day, so here's a third:

Great cover, plus an ERB story! I'd love to see more of your 'trooper pulps.

The Finlay art is amazing!

But you do have handmaidens, right? Just two kids and some cats....

The pulp?.. or what is depicted on the cover? Well, it wasn't quite that kind of scene, but it was definitely good to see the wife again.

Alright, this one's for Tupenny! Took your advice and blew some of my per diem from St. Croix. Won this last week on ebay and it was waiting for me when I got home from the airport last night.

Many REH critics consider it one of the top two or three best written Conan stories. (thumbs u I'm a big fan of the Roy Thomas/BWS adaptation from Savage Tales 2 & 3.

And speaking of my adventures in the islands.... After two long weeks of digging holes in the side of a mountain with very little to show for it other than some hornet stings, I finally got home last night to find this waiting for me:

That's easy. I've recently learned that they are called Tailess Whipscorpion - Man, to what effort would that Theagenes go for his pulp collection!! That's nothing! The Tailess Whipscorpions I encountered were sissies compared to the "Killer Trees."

Buck Rogers is another character that has fallen by the wayside. Once the phase "That Buck Rogers stuff" was the way most people referred to SF. Now the character hasn't had any popular exposure since the Gil Gerard show nearly thirty years ago.

Actually I think is a pretty interesting idea for a thread, but maybe that's because I tend to collect those heroes of yesteryear that no one else seems interested in any more. I'll try and get things started with Tarzan. ERB's Jungle Lord was probably one of the most recognizable fictional characters of the previous century. He was the subject of numerous books, movies, TV shows, comics strips and comic books, promotional items, you name it. But today Tarzan is nearly forgotten, the last major appearance of the character in popular media being the somewhat mediocre Disney animated movie from a few years back. As for myself, I remember a much better animated version of the character - Filmation's Tarzan: Lord of the Jungle which aired on Saturday mornings from 1976-79. This was my first introduction to the character as a little kid and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. Next I discovered the Marvel series and then the original books. As a child I had no awareness of the inherent racism and social Darwinist ideology that the character represented. To me Tarzan was the ultimate hero - always brave, always noble, always the good guy, without the slightest hint of moral ambiguity in his actions. When I got into collecting a few years it was probably inevitible that I would start picking up some early Tarzan comics. The first Tarzan comic strip appeared in January 1929 and is tied with Buck Rogers as the first real "non-funny" adventure strip. The B&W strip, which adapted the first Burroughs novel, was drawn of course by the legendary Hal Foster. Foster would return a couple of years later as the writer and artist of the Sunday color Tarzan strip, which even today has got to be considered one the greatest comic strip runs ever. Tarzan's first appearance in the comic book format was in the first issue of Tip Top Comics in 1936 which reprinted the Sunday Foster strip. This feature ran in Tip Top for a number of years. The first all-Tarzan comic book was the oversized Large Feature 5 (1939), which reprinted the complete Foster B&W 1929 strip: The following year saw the release of Single Series 20, which was 64 pages of all-color, all-Foster Tarzan strips: These last two books were once major key grails, but have not kept pace with the big super hero keys over the last few decades. I would say that there are several reasons for the character's decline. When Tarzan of the Apes was first published in 1912, the jungles of the Congo were largely still unexplored by Westerners and still represented a mysterious frontier. The existence of the mountain gorilla had only just been confirmed a few years before. But today the Dark Continent just doesn't have the same mystique. Rather than a symbol of mystery and adventure, Africa has become a symbol of tragedy and exploitation. Tarzan is a fictional product of that Western exploitation - a physical embodiment of the perceived manifest destiny of European colonization. Because of this, the character has become an embarassing reminder of the sins of the so-called "civilized" world. Perhaps there's no more place for such a character.

Love the Spicys!

Max Plaisted is also remembered as being the artist for one of Harry Donenfeld's earliest comic features, Diana Daw, that appeared in the November 1934 Spicy Adventure Stories . Wow, fun read! I'd love to see more of these pulp comic strips.

Very cool! That beastie has a very Lovecraftian look to him. Have you read the story?

I don't see what all the hubbub is. I enjoy Saucy Movie Tales because I'm a film buff.

So... anybody got any Saucy Movie Tales?

I'm playing catch-up on this thread right now. Lots of great stuff posted this week - Planets! Spicy Pulps! Great stuff!

Nice avatar!