Day: March 27, 2008

(From a comment made in an earlier post, which I think merits a post of its own)

If you’re looking to jump into reading Pulp, here are some suggestions:

First up, an excellent overview, which might give you an idea of what directions you’d like to look toward:

The Great Pulp Heroes by Don Hutchison. It’s probably the best overview I’ve read to date, organized by chapters devoted to the big name characters and magazines.

Nostalgia Ventures has been doing two-novels-per-issue reprints of the original Shadow and Doc Savage pulps, complete with original interior illustrations, and historical commentary by Will Murray. Well worth your time.

Here’s a list featuring some of The Shadow reprints on Amazon,

and

A similar list of Doc Savage reprints.

There have also been reprints of The Spider, by various publishers, easily found by searching on Amazon under “The Spider”, “Grant Stockbridge” or “Norvell Page”.

Baen recently produced The Spider – Robot Titans of Gotham, which reprints two complete Spider stories, and is a good introduction to the character.

From there, doing searches on characters — “Operator #5”, “Secret Agent X”, “Phantom Detective”, etc. — will lead you to various reprints that are available.

…and that’s not even getting into the new Pulp fiction (Moonstone’s collections of new short stories featuring The Spider or The Phantom …. or Adamant’s own Thrilling Tales Quarterly….

After the joy (looong, friends-locked story) that we went through in trying to get The Minion’s passport last year, you can imagine my opinion of the following “solution” by the US Government:

A Washington Times investigation has discovered that the US has outsourced the manufacturing of American passports to overseas companies — including a Thai company that has had problems with Chinese espionage infiltration.

Not only that, but the GPO (government printing office) is charging the State Department more money for manufacturing the passports than it costs to make them, which apparently has allowed them to ring up more than $100 million in profits (although how one office can make a profit from another, when it’s all tax dollars anyway is beyond me).

Jesus Christ, that’s POWERFUL stupid.