vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Pulp is a place where the men are decisive and the women are as light as feathers. We’ve gotten together a collection of paperback covers featuring women being spirited away to places unknown, usually unconscious, by men and things that are less than men. You have art from Harry Schaare, Saul Levine, Harry Barton, Alain Gourdon, aka Aslan, and others.
Stud boy there is gonna need a bigger knife. Not only that—he needs peripheral vision, better hearing, and a little something called a sixth sense. We’ve talked before about cover artists taking liberties with classic literature, but in this case the cover is accurate—the hero of French author Victor Hugo’s seafaring novel The Toilers of the Sea (originally Les Travailleurs de la mer) does indeed fight a giant octopus. Hugo even painted the octopus in question himself, which you see below. As to whether Gilliat survives his deadly encounter, let’s just say he really developed a taste for tako sashimi.
This poster was made for the German release of the French film Notre Dame de Paris, based upon Victor Hugo’s tragic masterpiece, with Anthony Quinn as Quasimodo and Gina Lollobrigida as Esmeralda. While the film isn’t what you’d call pulp, the promo art has all the elements, and Lollobrigida is a personage who crossed paths with some important figures, including Howard Hughes and Fidel Castro. In her day, she was so famous she was immortalized on episodes of both The Flintstones and The Jetsons, as, respectively, Gina Load-O’Bricks and Gina Lollojupiter. But here’s what we like best about La Lollo: there’s a type of lettuce named after her. Der Glöckner von Notre Dame premiered in West Germany today in 1957.
Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl and his five man crew set out from Peru on a giant balsa wood raft called the Kon-Tiki in order to prove that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia. After a 101 day, 4,300 mile (8,000 km) journey, Kon-Tiki smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947, thus demonstrating that it is possible for a primitive craft to survive a Pacific crossing.
After two days of rumors and denials the Soviet Union admits there was an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Reactor number four had suffered a meltdown, sending a plume of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area. Today the abandoned radioactive area surrounding Chernobyl is rife with local wildlife and has been converted into a wildlife sanctuary, one of the largest in Europe.
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, his mistress Clara Petacci, and fifteen supporters are arrested by Italian partisans in Dongo, Italy while attempting to escape the region in the wake of the collapse of Mussolini’s fascist government. The next day, Mussolini and his mistress are both executed, along with most of the members of their group. Their bodies are then trucked to Milan where they are hung upside down on meathooks from the roof of a gas station, then spat upon and stoned until they are unrecognizable.
The Geheime Staatspolizei, aka Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established. It begins under the administration of SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police, but by 1939 is administered by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or Reich Main Security Office, and is a feared entity in every corner of Germany and beyond.
In Spain during the Spanish Civil War, the Basque town of Guernica is bombed by the German Luftwaffe, resulting in widespread destruction and casualties. The Basque government reports 1,654 people killed, while later research suggests far fewer deaths, but regardless, Guernica is viewed as an example of terror bombing and other countries learn that Nazi Germany is committed to that tactic. The bombing also becomes inspiration for Pablo Picasso, resulting in a protest painting that is not only his most famous work, but one the most important pieces of art ever produced.
In Detective Comics #27, DC Comics publishes its second major superhero, Batman, who becomes one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, and then a popular camp television series starring Adam West, and lastly a multi-million dollar movie franchise featuring such leads as Michael Keaton, George Clooney, Val Kilmer, Robert Pattinson, and Christian Bale.
British scientists James D Watson and Francis Crick publish an article detailing their discovery of the existence and structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, in Nature magazine. Their findings answer one of the oldest and most fundamental questions of biology, that of how living things reproduce themselves.
