Incredible Pulps: A Gallery of Fiction Magazine Art

by Frank M. Robinson (Introduction)

Phantom creatures, alien encounters, grizzled heroes, and maidens in distress were the staples of the golden age of pulp art. These colorful characters are the stars of this exciting visual tour of a once-thriving popular art form. Divided into four categories — science fiction, mystery, horror, and western/adventure — the book features a wealth of magazine covers and other pulp fiction images by such legends as Edd Cartier, Frank R. Paul, Walter Baumhofer, and others who brought monsters and maidens to appreciative audiences from the late 19th century into the mid-20th. Pulp collector Frank M. Robinson offers context and history for these campy, over-the-top images from a long-vanished era.

Genres: Art

175 pages, Paperback

First published April 21, 2006

About the author

Frank M. Robinson was an American science fiction and techno-thriller writer. he got his start writing for the old pulp fiction magazines. He wrote several novels with Thomas N. Scortia until Scortia's death in 1986.

Born in Chicago, Illinois. Robinson was the son of a check forger. He started out in his teens working as a copy boy for International News Service and then became an office boy for Ziff Davis. He was drafted into the Navy for World War II, and when his tour was over attended Beloit College, where he majored in physics, graduating in 1950. Because he could find no work as a writer, he ended up back in the Navy to serve in Korea, where he kept writing, read a lot, and published in Astounding magazine.

After the Navy, he attended graduate school in journalism, then worked for a Chicago-based Sunday supplement. Soon he switched to Science Digest, where he worked from 1956 to 1959. From there, he moved into men's magazines: Rogue (1959–65) and Cavalier (1965–66). In 1969, Playboy asked him to take over the Playboy Advisor column. He remained there until 1973, when he left to write full-time.

After moving to San Francisco in the 1970s, Robinson, who was gay, was a speechwriter for gay politician Harvey Milk; he had a small role in the film Milk. After Milk's assassination, Robinson was co-executor, with Scott Smith, of Milk's last will and testament.

Robinson is the author of 16 books, the editor of two others, and has penned numerous articles. Three of his novels have been made into movies. The Power (1956) was a supernatural science fiction and government conspiracy novel about people with superhuman skills, filmed in 1968 as The Power. The Glass Inferno, co-written with Thomas N. Scortia, was combined with Richard Martin Stern's The Tower to produce the 1974 movie The Towering Inferno. The Gold Crew, also co-written Scortia, was a nuclear threat thriller filmed as an NBC miniseries and re-titled The Fifth Missile.

He collaborated on several other works with Scortia, including The Prometheus Crisis, The Nightmare Factor, and Blow-Out.
In 2009 he was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame

Reviews

[Michael P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a missed opportunity and a lot of fun. A cheap art book that reprints covers of pulp magazines, it fails to fulfill this modest goal well. The organization that separates sci-fi, horror, and mystery pulps is fine, but then lumping together mainstream fiction, jungle, cowboy, aviation and everything else makes no sense given the sheer numbers of some of these categories. Worse, they are mixed within their own chapter, so two pages of Western covers are followed by an adventure magazine cover, and that is followed by another Western cover (pp.145-8). This is annoying, but less annoying that a tendency to cut off enough of some covers so that only partial cover blurbs are visible. Another fault is when three covers are shown on the same page, large enough to know what the cover looks like, but too small to enjoy. Different covers of the same title are not always together, but scattered between the covers of other magazines. There is virtually nothing about the artists, the magazines, or the publishers after the too-brief introduction. It would have been interesting to organize the book in one of these ways.

The plus sides, there are three, is that the full-page covers are fun to see, it is interesting to see the covers of the first publications of Tarzan, Hopalong Cassidy, and Dr. Kildare stories, and I did not know that some characters such as The Lone Ranger, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and Nick Carter had pulp magazines that not only featured their stories, but were named for them. There is much fun in this sadly misfired book.

[Warren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could have had a little bit more of the history of the artists, or the magazines that they were featured on. Also, three covers on one page can get a little cramped.

Nice book for the most part, though. Not sorry I bought it.

[James Crawford · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is another of the books that reproduces covers from the pulp magazines of the thirties through fifties. It's divided into four sections: science fiction, horror, mystery and adventure/western.

There's a brief introduction, and the name of the artist, if known, for the illustrations.


The book is about 5 ¼ inches by 6 ½ inches in size, so it's fairly small. Also, some of the entries in the horror section are ones that don't really belong there. They have a half-dozen Shadow covers, and various ones from other detective magazines, all of which, at least in my opinion, should be under the mystery section.

It's an ok book, but I would have preferred larger illustrations/larger pages and more accuracy in categories that were used.

[Stan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting history, good overview of pulp history. Incl. 5 ERB covers.