Wednesday, March 21, 2012

A Little Love

As promised, I will continue to talk a little bit about pulps. As a general rule, people seem to treat them as both terrible books and a relic of the past. Neither statement is factually accurate. For one, they're both sweeping generalizations, but even beyond that, they display a tendency to ignore very real and objective facts. Saying pulps are terrible old relics is right up there with saying "all self published books are crap."

Really? What about those self published authors who sold 100,000 copies on their own and then get picked up by major publishers? When you say "all" don't you really mean "most vanity publishing"?

Or how about another widely believed bilbiophile principle- "The book is always better than the movie." Really? Lord of the Rings was long, boring, confusing, slow, and had bizarre focuses. Tolkien's skill was in creating a world. His ability to actually tell a story was quite limited. On the other hand, the movies were so popular, they caused a comeback for the fantasy genre, immediately spawning Narnia movies and surely being in the backs of all our minds with the Game of Thrones' success as both books and TV. Or how about the movie Adaptation? Would you rather read a non-fiction about flowers or see a writer have a nervous breakdown while attempting to turn something so dull into a movie script? And then there are the times when it's not really better or worse: A Clockwork Orange comes to mind. As a fan, I give a heary thumbs up to both book and film.

If you want to argue over whether popularity, ease of understanding, and massive commercial sucess *actually* disprove the old truths, we can do that another day. Suffice to say, life ain't black and white. You can say, for instance, that none of my examples were of "substantial" works, but I disagree. A Clockwork Orange is an incredibly substantial book. It's also Sci-Fi, a genre many people frown upon. A genre that wouldn't *exist* the way we know it if not for the pulps.

So to return to the point: the claim that is often made that works of pulp are failures as books and are something irrelevant today. Consider the Shadow. He knows what evil lurks in the hearts of man. He's also one of America's most enduring fictional characters, having starred in about 300 books, years worth of radio dramas, and a number of movies, even inspiring music. And in case you think that's all old hat, it's worth noting that the radio dramas are being re-issued even now. The 1990 film Dark Man, directed by Sam Raimi (who would later be famous for Spiderman, and many of his roles as both director and producer are the TV equivalent of pulps- from The Evil Dead II to Xena: Warrior Princess) was "inspired" by the Shadow only because he couldn't obtain the rights, which is where the 1994 Alec Baldwin movie "The Shadow" comes in. Raimi is, to this day, trying to get a *good* Shadow movie made. Furthermore, the Shadow was the direct inspiration for a myriad of other fictional characters, most notably Batman. Batman was not so much "inspired by" as "ripped off from" the Shadow, and Walter Gibson, the Shadow's primary writer would later contribute stories to the Batman franchise. And good luck convincing me Batman's not a cultural icon.

Or how about your friend and mine H.P. Lovecraft? Along with Edgar Alan Poe, he's one of the defining voices in the Horror genre the world over. And like Poe he died poor, miserable, essentially alone and at least a little bit crazy. But would Steven King own Maine without Lovecraft? No. One of the interesting things about Lovecraft is that it's not whole properties that make a splash. Certainly there are books, movies, comics etc. based on his works, but he is probably more well known for individual characters, especially his faceless monstrosities. And certainly Nyarlathotep is a popular choice, but Cthulu is the hero of the internet with games, toys, especially plushes, his very own line of clothing, and so much more. Either we live in such a jaded age that infinite madness and universal destruction seems quaint (there's a scary thought) or the internet has freely understood and accepted itself as the hideous, insanity inducing maw of the mythical monster and has thus come to love Cthulu as a form of self love. And if there's anything we as a species are good at, it's self love.

So to all you pulp haters, I have but one thing to say. The pulp is where all the nutrition is. Seriously. Ask your dietician.

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