STRANGE TALES #4 (Clayton Publishing, 1932)

Art: H.W. Wesso

Master of the Asteroid - art by Frank R. Paul (1932)

Vintage Pulp - Saucy Movie Tales (Mar1936)

Art by Norman Saunders

Movie Digest

diversity loss! the only male witch we see in the entirety of hilda the series mysteriously vanished and was never seen again after a giant hand monster from the void snatched him.

and I begin to bloom like a lotus flower once again the Agust D trilogy

Reading pulp fantasy and understanding how it shaped the fantasy genre is extremely fascinating because its like "oh, that's why every Strong Female Character heroine of the 80s-90s fantasy boom was Like That, huh"

𝔊𝔢𝔬𝔯𝔤𝔢 ℜ𝔬𝔷𝔢𝔫

Vintage Pulp - Weird Tales (July1937)

Art by Virgil Finlay

movie poster - 30 Million Miles To Earth - Jun 1957

Anselmo Ballester

i forgor i took this p good pic of mr Cock(er) himself at the pulp show last night

BUSTER

Creeps book series (1932-1936)

Doc Savage (Jan1938)

Art by Emery Clarke

Street And Smith

Yes, Scientology is an evil cult that ruins people’s lives, yes, he spent a lifetime as a con-man and pathological liar, but I feel this should be said: L. Ron Hubbard was not just a good writer, but a great writer, even in the context of the Golden Age, which had no shortage of them, and he was a popular one as well, regularly topping reader polls in Unknown and Astounding.

His contemporaries, like Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp, were in awe of him (at least until things started to get weird with Dianetics). He was the first major writer of scifi to prioritize characterization over a science fiction idea, to write stories that dealt with neurosis and everyman protagonists over adventure stories where an engineer solves a problem, and because of that, his 1930s-40s work has aged so much better than nearly everyone else from that time. 

His best work, in my opinion, was not his scifi but his fantasy/horror, published mainly in John W. Campbell’s Unknown, a magazine he created for horror and fantasy (the two were, really, one genre until the 1960s, like twins conjoined at birth, there was scifi and then there was everything else, witch’s brews and dragons). They include Slaves of Sleep, which starts with a millionaire in modern times who was cursed by an Ifrit inside an artifact he finds, so that every time he goes to sleep, he wakes up in an Arabian Nights realm ruled by an evil genie queen, and whenever he wakes up, he vanishes from that world back into ours, and it’s unclear which is the dream and which is reality. This was a major theme of Heinlein’s work, the blurring between reality and fantasy in a story to the point where it was unclear which is which. He wrote two other fantasy novels with a similar theme: Typewriter in the Sky, which starts as a traditional pirate adventure story, but then there is a sound of a typewriter clacking in the sky, and then everything in the story is rearranged. 

The most fascinating work of Hubbard’s fantasy/horror, and the one with the best insight into his psyche, is Fear, a psychological thriller where a man is visited by demons and ghouls after mocking black magic, and it’s not clear if he’s hallucinating them or if he is going insane, and both possibilities are equally horrifying. There’s no Soldier of the Mist (or Gene Wolfe in general) without Fear. The reason this story is the most fascinating insight into Hubbard as a man is because I actually suspect that L. Ron Hubbard, who wrote about the blurring between fantasy and reality, and had a tendency to write nervous, unheroic, nebbish main characters, may not have been a complete scammer. I think he was the kind of scammer that believed his own bullshit and got high on his own supply, a pusher and user simultaneously. This reminds me of stories Scientology insiders tell where he would have auditing session after auditing session when he felt tormented, something it’s hard to imagine a completely cynical fraudster would do. 

Anti-Nazi 1930s heroes who aren't Jewish but also are and can't seem to decide whether they're glasses-wearing nerds or pillars of machismo.