Strange Horizons Discussion Forum: The Hero, Pulped, by Matthew Cheney

When I was a child, I could only catch occasional glimpses of the world that had been contained in pulp magazines. Sometimes there would be newspaper articles that reprinted some of the less lurid covers. Sometimes a member of my parent’s generation might pause and wax nostalgic about characters like The Shadow or G-8. The magazines themselves seemed to have vanished from the physical world, they could not be found in the barbershops that warehoused old comic books full of hair, or in used bookstores with their dusty backlog of paperbacks. They could not even be found in antique stores. I understood the pulp heroes were the precursors of the comic book characters I knew and loved, and that they were gone, passed into the stuff of legend.
Occasionally, a character might return from the dustbin. Doc Savage enjoyed a paperback revival in the 60’s, thanks in large part to a brilliant re-imagining by cover artist James Bama. Conan also returned, owing a similar debt to cover art by Frank Frazetta. The Shadow had a variety of paperback runs before blending back into the darkness, but then, his status as an American icon had already been assured through his radio career.
In 1969, Berkley press tried to revive a character known as The Spider, who, after The Shadow and Doc Savage, starred in the third best selling title of the old hero pulps. Berkley aimed for the phenomenal success enjoyed by the Doc Savage reprints. They even hired James Bama to establish a new look. But the series flopped almost immediately, and stopped printing after only four titles. The character had almost completely vanished from the popular consciousness, and there was no lingering nostalgia to help boost sales. Bama employed the same male model as his Doc Savage, but dressed him in a gold braided opera cape with a black cowboy hat and a domino mask. The new visualization of The Spider was ludicrous.
I stumbled upon one of the Berkley paperbacks on a back rack of a bookstore, where it had rested unsold for years. The pages were coming loose from the cheap paste binding. I’d never heard of the character, but I bought the book anyway. After settling in for what I expected to be at best a camp experience, I was startled to find it intoxicating, a work as full of violent poetry as its title, “City of the Flaming Shadows.”
Robert Sampson wrote a superb critical study titled “Spider,” but this is out of print, and as obscure as The Spider himself. Because the works were so fundamentally rare, it would take me 35 years to compile and finish reading the sequence of novels that formed the heart of what Robert Sampson called “one of the more curious heritages of American letters.” These were the books that ran from “Wings of the Black Death” in December of 1933 to “The Devil’s Death Dwarves” in October of 1936.
The original pulp magazine withdrew from the newsstands around the time of the explosion of the first atomic bomb. Perhaps these feverish visions of wanton destruction and wholesale slaughter were too pedestrian after the actuality of World War II, or the vision of incipient doomsday was too depressing to read in the shadow of nuclear holocaust. Norvell Page went on to serve on the Atomic Energy Commission.
Most readers might, like Harold Bloom confronting Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, fail in the initial efforts, “flinching from the overwhelming carnage.” Yet Harold Bloom would later call that work the best novel written by an American author still living. Some of what Bloom said of Blood Meridian could be applied equally to the Spider: that it is an “authentic American apocalyptic novel” more relevant today than when it was written; that it is “a canonical imaginative achievement, both an American and a universal tragedy of blood,” that the book’s “magnificence—its language, landscape, persons conceptions—at last transcend the violence, and convert goriness into terrifying art…more prose epic than novel… a post Homeric quest where the heroes (or thugs) have a disguised god among them…” Bloom’s description of one of the central characters could apply equally to Richard Wentworth: “he speaks all languages, knows all arts and sciences, and can perform magical, shamanistic metamorphoses.”
When Simon and Schuster Pocket Books attempted to reprint the Spider, the covers boasted that Spider sales exceeded twenty million copies, referring to the sales of the original pulps. They fooled no one, and the reinvented series was stillborn on the racks. Still, they featured three of the very best books from the height of the series, and they were a treat, even if I had to mentally rewrite them back into the 30’s as I was reading them.
In 1979, in Gainesville, Florida, I was able to get a reasonably priced original copy of “King of the Red Killers,” the September 1935 issue of The Spider.
Reading the original pulp gave me an ethereal thrill. Robert Sampson best described the experience in his book “Spider.”
"The strange red flckering of 1930's fiction seems distant now. You hold in your hand the product of a time too remote to recall, and feel a slow stir of wonder. The smell of pulp pages, an illustration, an advertisement, these fragile things mark the slow hammering of time and display what it has done. About you are today's machines, todays shadows. Outside the window, leaves hang against the sky, as did leaves during the 1930's. The sound of voices are no different then than now. You hold the magazine and feel something quite delicate slipping past. These solid forms surrounding you are all insubstantial. Time's hammer will also pass across them, leaving little enough behind."