'Pulp Power' by Neil McGinness
Shakespeare endures but the literary giants from the recent past, the bestselling authors admired by critics, have enjoyed less purchase on the popular imagination. Today’s pop culture, baring only traces of Ernest Hemingway or John Steinbeck, is built instead on literature the literary establishment once dismissed as trash. Pulp Power focuses on the productions of one down market but hugely successful “trash” publisher, New York’s Street & Smith.
Author Neil McGinness has more than an academic stake in the story he tells. He has been involved in some of the recent resuscitations of those old pulp characters, including a Shadow-Batman collaboration for DC Comics but his mission isn’t self-congratulation but tracing the origins of familiar images and stories to their source. McGinness has no trouble documenting the influence of 1930s-40s pulp fiction on the oeuvre of George Lucas and friends. Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones is Doc Savage in a pinch-front fedora.
Nowadays more than ever, box offices are dominated by comic book characters that originated in the 20th century. McGinness shows how much those seminal superheroes owe to their immediate predecessors in pulp fiction. In many cases, the wonder is that copyright holders at Street & Smith didn’t sue DC and Marvel for infringement.
At the root lurks the Shadow, the crime fighter who debuted as the eerie voiced narrator of a weekly radio drama in 1930. To meet unanticipated public demand for the character, Street & Smith began publishing Shadow stories in pulp magazine form. Eventually voiced by Orson Welles (complete with maniacal laughter), the Shadow is the alter ego of Gotham millionaire Lamont Cranston, covertly working with the crime-ridden city’s police commissioner. The Shadow dons a mask and a black suit and cape with a slouch hat pulled low across his forehead. The inspiration for this creature of the night, McGinness learns, came from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
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The Shadow was the original Dark Knight, an aristocrat on a nocturnal, morally ambiguous quest. Superman’s origins in Street & Smith’s Doc Savage are even less disguised than Batman’s in the Shadow. Savage’s real name is Clark, he owns a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic … oh, forgot to mention, Lamont Cranston’s girlfriend is called Margo Lane. The influence doesn’t end with Batman and Superman. Stan Lee acknowledged that “Doc Savage and his oddly assorted team might be considered the progenitors of today’s Fantastic Four and many other teams of superheroes.”
The Shadow, Doc Savage and their descendants embody the myth of the lone vigilante whose predecessors can be found in western dime novels and Zorro (the original masked man?). They represent the Dirty Harry anxiety that the law will fail to protect us. There is much to criticize here. McGuinness acknowledges the controversy surrounding Doc Savage’s “prescribed method of criminal rehabilitation via brain surgery.”
Doc and company have sometimes been taken to task for implicit (sometimes explicit) white supremacy. McGuinness answers by quoting crime novelist Walter Mosley who calls the pulps “a transportative vehicle that could take us from the daily grind … Literature for the masses kindled the imagination and used our reading skills so that we could regale ourselves in the cold chambers of alienation and poverty.”
But valuable as its history may be, Pulp Power is a coffee table book whose primary interest is visual. The covers of pulp magazines and paperbacks are reproduced in full color, brimming with lurid dynamism as vigilante heroes fire guns and save women in distress, locked in a forever war with the world’s villains.
