Anyone here read pulp? Considering the close relations of comics and pulp it was high time we got a thread about it. I'm a big fan of Tarzan clones myself, in fact Tarzan was what led me to discovering and reading the pulps. I picked up Ki-Gor Vol. 1 on kindle last Saturday, the Atlus Press omnibuses are available at a steal as ebooks. I've read the first five of em so far, enjoyable if entirely generic and a bit inconsistent in the character department. I'll be picking up more of the Atlus Press books up soon, probably either The Black Bat or The Griffon. I also have the Jongor stories which are on my reading list.

Probably in my top five movies of all time.
Wait, what are we talking about?

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Do not bore me with such trite cliches. For I have you in my clutches, and should I choose, I could snuff out your insignificant lives in an instant.

Pulp fiction magazines. Basically cheap fiction, printed on cheap wood pulp paper, and sold for cheap prices. Very popular in the first half of the 20th century, up till WW2 when printing prices skyrocketed and comics stole a big chunk of their audience. Most well known for pulp heroes like Doc Savage, The Shadow, and Tarzan, who were big influences on early comic characters.

Yea, I love old school pulp. The Tarzan books were great. I think the original Conan books fall into the same camp, right?

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Ha, funny.

The magazines he is talking about is actually what Tarantino named the movie after. He envisioned his movie as an updated form of the classic pulp books.

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This is actually one of the very few that I watched but never had the chance to read. I might need to snag it sometime soon as its been a few months since I have gotten any new books lately.

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crazy 8s

Way funny because I had no clue what this was about either. I was thinking of the John Travolta movie too. I have to say that I hated that movie. I've never read any pulp comics though.

I think you misunderstood what they are talking about. Pulp fiction the movie is not based off of a book. What he is talking about is a genre of books from the 40's and 50's called pulp fiction.

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I'll be honest and say I have not read much from the 40's and 50's time period. If I wanted to start, which should I start with? Would the library have them?
I loved the movie by the way. Tons of blood and guts ~ my kind of movie.

Those dates actually a bit off, the 40's and 50's were when pulp was mostly winding down, the 20's and 30's were the height of pulp but it began way back in 1896. As far as where to start, well that depends entirely on what kind of fiction you're interested in, the pulps were made in every genre. If you just want a sampling then pulpgen.com has over a thousand stories, most of them short, divided up by magazine, everything from hard-boiled detectives, to damsel saving adventurers, to sappy romances.

If you like crime fiction then I recommend Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. If you like adventure then I recommend just about anything by Edgar Rice Burroughs especially the Tarzan and John Carter of Mars novels, also you can never go wrong with Doc Savage.

If you want to purchase actual books there's been a huge increase in interest, and therefore publication, of pulp reprints lately. There have been two big omnibuses of crime fiction The Big Book of Pulps and The Big Book of Black Mask, the latter of which collects stories from Black Mask Magazine, the magazine that inspired the movie the most. Sanctum press sells the Conde Nast heroes (Doc Savage, The Shadow, and The Avenger basically the big names). Atlus Press publishes omnibuses containing the lesser known heroes (Ki-Gor, The Black Bat, Secret Agent X etc.) in complete volumes in publication order. Girasol Collectables reprints The Spider and does replicas of pulp mags ads and all, pricy but very nice. Radio Archives does ebooks of The Spider, Operator #5 and a few others. Finally Adventure House has High Adventure a bimonthly publication that usually spotlights a single character, either a whole novel, or a handful of shorter stories, they also do replicas of various pulps.

EDIT: Apologies for the incredibly disjointed and poorly put together post, I kept adding on and rearranging it, resulting in the mess you see before you.