THE GREAT PULP HEROES
Don Hutchison
Book Republic
Pub Date: April 24,2007

Before Superman and Batman, there were Doc Savage and The Shadow. The Spider and The Phantom Detective. Tarzan and Captain Future. They were gaudy, glorious, larger-than-life heroes who fought for justice and truth. But these pulp do-gooders weren’t afraid to pump a bad guy full of lead either. They lived in the pages of such pulp magazines as “Black Mask,” “Argosy,” “Jungle Stories,” “Amazing Stories,” and “Adventure.” And in the 1930s and ’40s they were everywhere. It was the golden age of short stories and heroes, and inspired hacks churned out millions of words during that time. It was, as author Don Hutchison writes, “the greatest explosion of mass entertainment via the printed word that a thrill-seeking public ever experienced.”

In “The Great Pulp Heroes” (revised edition), Don Hutchison chronicles the rise and fall of these old-time do-gooders and the hard-working wordsmiths who brought them to life. It’s an exciting ride that makes a 21st century fanboy wish he lived through the Great Depression.

The preeminent hero of the pulps was The Shadow, that mysterious, caped man who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. But his origin is far from inspiring. He was created after publisher Street and Smith decided to capitalize on the popularity of the mysterious voice, who went by The Shadow, on their radio program. The assignment has handed to a newspaperman and part-time magician named Walter Gibson. He was given no outline or character description, just the task of writing a 75,000 word story about someone named The Shadow. Gibson did so, under the pen name Maxwell Grant, and the magazine soon began to sell 300,000 copies an issue. Then, like Superman years later, The Shadow became the standard that every pulp publisher tried to reproduce.

That led to pulpdom’s second major character, Doc Savage, who himself would be copied, but to much greater success. Doc, who made his debut in 1933, was a clean-cut, all-American hero whose real name was Clark Savage Jr., but he was also known as the Man of Bronze and when things got too tense he liked to retire to his Fortress of Solitude in the Artic. Any of this ring a bell? No doubt, we have the pulps to thank for Superman.

But the most interesting and sinister pulp hero of them all had to be The Spider. The Master of Men was really Richard Wentworth, a millionaire philanthropist. He wore long wigs and fake fangs to scare evildoers, and if that didn’t work he killed without mercy and then would use his cigarette lighter to brand the foreheads of the murdered thugs. The Spider, which was a favorite of the young Stan Lee, was such a frightening character that he wasn’t depicted in his true form on the cover. Instead, artists drew him as a mundane hero in a domino mask. The Spider’s web crumbled in 1943, because of a paper shortage and a general decline in readership.

More and more readers were turning to comics and other forms of media during the ’40s. By the 1950s the pulps had vanished. Street and Smith, publisher of “The Shadow” and “Doc Savage,” had discontinued its pulp magazines in 1949. In 1957 American News Company, the primary distributor of pulp magazines at the time, went bankrupt, and the exhilarating ride came to an end. But the influence of the pulps has been immeasurable. The burgeoning comics industry lifted most of its ideas from the pulps, and every adventure story of today owes something to the pulps. Without the pulps, there would be no Superman, Batman, James Bond, Doctor Who, or Indiana Jones. The pulps are much more than distant memories; they are the lightning bolts that brought the adventure story to life.

“The Great Pulp Heroes” is an invaluable resource of that heady time when the wildest adventures could be bought for just a few cents, when imagination ran riot on the newsstands. After reading “The Great Pulp Heroes” you’ll want to pick up all 283 “Shadow” novels.