PULP FACTION

"There must be ephemera. Let us see to it that they are good."-- Gilbert Seldes, THE SEVEN LIVELY ARTS.

"...the pulps began to feature more action stories, some of them wildly implausible-- a selling point for the pulp audience. The slicks, on the other hand, were reality bound. Their stories didn't stray far from home and hearth, while pulp stories frequently ventured from the Wild West to darkest Africa, or voyaged to the moon or Mars."-- Frank M. Robinson, "The Story Behind the Original All-Story," online publication ZOETROPE ALL-STORY.

When I first began using the terms "adult pulp" and "juvenile pulp" as a way of placing a new context on Dirk Deppey's view of superhero comics as inherently juvenile, I assumed that any readers would pretty much get what I meant by "pulp." But as a means of illustrating some of my general points about popular literature and the history of comic books, I'll belabor the definition a bit.

The only literary definition of "pulp" given by American Heritage (the one quoted at the beginning of Tarantino's PULP FICTION) refers to a publication, such as a book or magazine, containing lurid subject matter. But clearly the word "pulp" has taken on wider colloquial meaning, since the term is being used to Tarantino to refer to the subject matter of a theatrical film, which is not a "publication" as such. Thus there should be no difficulty in applying the term "pulp" to a medium such as comic books, which are not actual pulp magazines no matter how much influence comics took from the pulps.

Similarly, one may extend the synechdoche backwards as well as forwards. Lee Server's history of pulp magazines, DANGER IS MY BUSINESS, makes abundantly clear that though pulp magazines themselves didn't come into existence in the United States until the 1880s, what one might call the "pulp tradition" of sensationalistic fiction goes back to what he calls "story weeklies," which were printed on newspaper, and to the better-known "dime novels" that gave us fictional heroes like Nick Carter and fictionalized heroes like Ned Buntline's Buffalo Bill. Server demonstrates that tradition by noting that 'One weekly boasted of its contents as containing "sensational fiction with no philosophy."'

(Side-note: there are parallel "pulp traditions" in Europe and other nations as well, such as the so-called "shilling shocker" of the Victorians, but for my purposes here I can only deal with the history of U.S. popular culture as if it was a thing unto itself, even though it wasn't.)

Of course the notion that any coherent narrative can be utterly without "philosophy" is a misapprehension, as I discussed here. But it's a pleasant enough misapprehension for one to entertain, and to be entertained by, as when one is told that one can only enjoy a given film by "leaving your brain at the door." To indulge in works of thematic escapism is to free up the mind to what Gilbert Seldes calls the "high levity" of the "minor arts," which he opposes to the "high seriousness" of the major arts-- a point I'll be touching on again in my next DIVIDING LINE essay, concerning the differentiation of adult and juvenile fictions.

Of course, even if the "pulp tradition" had literally started with the first pulp magazines, it's clear that the comic books of the Golden Age primarily patterned their presentation after the pulps (an imitation so sincere that it helped "flatter" the pulps right out of existence), despite the fact that the medium of comic books descended more directly from comic strips. Frank Robinson's quote illustrates a difference in tone and subject matter that separated the disreputable pulps from the high-quality "slick" magazines, to say nothing of real books, and a similar "high class/low class" relationship evolved between comic strips (mentioned approvingly by Seldes in his 1924 book) and comic books. Of course comic strips weren't strangers to sensationalism by any means. However, just as Robinson notes the preference of the "slicks" for "home and hearth," comic strips too showed a marked tendency to emphasize domestic constancy over wild extravagance. In SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT Frederic Wertham largely gives comic strips a free pass from the seduction-accusation, for he assumes that newspaper editors were more conscientious than comic-book editors about keeping their illustrated fictions safe for all ages. And even if "home and hearth" were challenged for a while by the growth of the adventure-strips in the late 20s and early30s, modern newspaper comics have almost entirely returned to domestic themes, though it's anyone's guess as to whether Gilbert Seldes would find "high levity" in any of them.

In their respective comic-book commentaries both Jules Feiffer and Jim Steranko found the Golden Age comic books of the pre-Superman years to be poor imitations of the newspaper comics, Steranko diagnosing said imitations as being afflicted with "conceptual anemia." For Steranko "comic heroes were outweighed, outnumbered and outclassed by the newspaper characters that spawned them," but comic books would soon take new vitality by going back to the "source" that gave comic strips such characters as Tarzan and Buck Rogers-- that source being "the pulps," albeit more those that emphasized featured heroes than those that were primarily anthologies of unconnected stories.

It should be added that in doing so, however, comic books went pulps one better. The majority of the pulp-heroes were ordinary humans who supplemented their physical skills with bizarre weapons and minor mental powers, but post-Superman comic books are famed for giving their readers ordinary humans with the powers of gods. Admittedly, there are probably a lot more "Batman-type" heroes in comic books of the Golden Age than "Superman-types," as it would seem to be much easier to think up new variations on the former than on the latter-- particularly variations that wouldn't get one sued by DC Comics. But even if the super-types didn't outnumber the bat-types, the former would come to dominate the medium, both within the particular genre of the costumed hero and in terms of the genre's dominance of the marketplace. What was a minor iteration in the pulps, sometimes giving rise to rare first-rate stars like John Carter but more often to obscurities like Aarn Munro and the Golden Amazon, became the defining idiom of the comic book medium.

As others before me have speculated, such a departure into outright fantasy may have only been possible because early comic books concentrated on juvenile audiences, rather than allowing adult sensibilities to hold any sway, as they did in comic strips and pulps. In theory both strips and pulps were written to "all ages" and could be read by either adults or juveniles, but clearly each of them had particular items that skewed more juvenile than adult, and vice versa. Comic books, even if they occasionally allowed for moments of "juvenile decadence" of which Grandma and Fredric Wertham wouldn't approve, remained skewed toward juveniles for some forty years before the fan-base became entrenched enough to demand works with some "adult" connotations, whether those of high art or "adult pulp."

Having come to that crossroads, I close by asserting once more that the next DIVIDING LINE will deal with more of the theory behind the adult/juvenile divide, though I'll probably postpone the promised comparison of Owen Wister and George Lucas as I don't have time to read THE VIRGINIAN just now.