Before I begin today on a pulp post, I'd like to remind everyone that I'm no expert! I'm a relative newcomer to pulps and pulp collecting and am certainly no authority. There are some nice reference books on pulps, but I daresay the best way to learn about pulps is to buy them and better yet read them. I'd like to stress that less desirable (but still great) pulps can often be had on ebay for the cost of one of today's newstand magazines or even cheaper. A $10 lot of mixed westerns, for example, will provide an enormous amount of reading. Pulps are rare and crumbling, but there is so little demand for most of these magazines that "junk" pulps can be had for cheap. Even the more in-demand pulps (hero pulps, weird menace pulps, weird tales, etc.) can be had for a fraction of the price of comics of a similar vintage.
One of the main attractions of the glory days of the pulps was the diversification. Books like All Story, The Popular Magazine, Munseys, etc. had provided the American reading public a broad variety of stories for decades by the time 20s come along when the pulp market really starts to develop some genre titles. There are some earlier genre entries like Railroad Stories that started in 1906 and Detective Story starts in 1915, there are some romance type of titles, and Western Story begins in 1919, but in the 20s and into the 30s pulp diversification explodes to the point where you get short-runned pulps like Submarine Stories, Firefighters, New York stories, or the most-famous of these strange short runs Zeppelin Stories. Most of these super-specialized titles lasted only a short time, but certainly the main branches of these pulp genres lasted for years and years. Westerns, Romance, Detective, Science Fiction, Adventure were all stalwarts, but many of the smaller genres were popular over many years as well, one of which I'm going to be posting some examples of, the sports pulp.
When I think about classic sports fiction, I guess I'm coming up short. You Know Me, Al by Ring Lardner is the best American sports novel I can think of, but there is no shortage of examples in the modern media to show America's continued interest in sports stories. Friday Night Lights has been running on TV for a good while, and a short list of movies that come to mind would be The Natural (from Malamud's novel), Bull Durham, Any Given Sunday, Rudy, Remember the Titans, Invincible, The Longest Yard as well some less serious fare like Varsity Nights, Major League, Waterboy, etc. Sports are a big part of American life, especially for teenage and college students, and I think a lot of these pulps were aimed at exactly this demographic.
The most successful of the sports pulps was Street & Smith's Sport Story which Bookery's Guide to Pulps (an indispensable tool for the pulp collector, I hope for a new edition sometime soon) tells me ran approximately 425 issues from the September 8th, 1923, issue until it's demise in 1943. A very solid pulp run built on sports fiction, so let's check out an issue shall we?
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Thanks once again to my man McCoy for his edit work on this issue, a marathon scanner that one is. I picked this issue up (besides the fact it was like 2 bucks on ebay) because of the cross-country cover. I ran a bit in school and was curious to see what a story about the sport might hold. I read this issue this week, and, as always, was amazed at the breadth of these little magazines. A lot of entertainment for a dime, I very seldom come away from a pulp regretting the time I've spent with it. Not that long ago, reading was still the American past time, and these books are full of thousands of unique stories. Sure there are formulas and conventions, but there is a sort of quirkiness to many of these pulp stories that I enjoy. I've had people ask me "isn't that stuff just plain awful"? Quite the opposite.
Sure, not every story is a winner (though I've read some uniformly excellent pulps too), but pace and variety and the occasional great story make the pulps fun to read. And you can always just skip to the next story, it's likely to be very different than the one before it.
Sport Story v25n02 (1929-10-22.Street & Smith)(DPP).cbr
Get the scan
here
Contents
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Well, my bit of cross country nostalgia paid off, the first story that is in the mode of the cover was my favorite. Cross Country, always a bastard Fall sport. The real men are playing football, the cool dudes are playing soccer, and the runners well they just sort of disappear at practice time. We'd run of in a pack away from the school upon the appointed route and return later in a straggled out line. Some guys liked to run alone and others loaf in packs, this story brought back some of those dynamics.
File this one under B for Bromance. I'm not quite sure what this new term that's slipped into usage means, but I'll go ahead and appropriate it. It's a buddy story about friendship in the comic mode but also heartfelt. A lot of these sports stories will come from the coach's point of view or follow a coach's attempts to bring good chemistry to his team. Sometimes a coach will be in danger of losing his job, other times there will be some prestigious trophy at play, other times some grudge-fraught rivalry will be the motivator. In this story, the coach needs to put a winning team together in order to win a trophy that an alumnus had established to go to a school that wins the league 4 years in a row. Having won 3, the coach now has a team that has lost its best runners to graduation and an underachieving star that is content to run with the pack. Add to the mix a scrappy newcomer with more will than ability who loves to rabbit in front of the pack. Complicating matters is the emergence of a campus group that believes the school is overemphasizing athletics. Once this group gets it's nerdish claws into our scrappy newcomer, the team's new-found chemistry sours just as it is all coming together. Can our heroes get it together and win the coveted Trophy???
I'll go ahead and post this story in it's entirety. Here's "Borrowed Power" by Jackson Scholz, who as it turns out, was quite the athlete himself (
his wiki).
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Lol, I'm not sure I'll do that again. I'm not sure how effective a presentation this is for a pulp story and it's a bit of a pain to manipulate and post 15 pages in a row. Viewing in the cbr is easier for all involved, har!
Also a quick synopses for the rest of the stories. The second, Hooley's Unmentionables (a great story name) from Robert H.H. Nichols was another story I enjoyed. Algernon Hooley, gawky and a know it all, is given charge of the football teams back-ups and rejects, an international cast of characters. Can Hooley and his unmentionables come to the rescue in the big game? Sort of a screwball comedy in the vein of the longest yard, making a fighting team out of the underdogs. Third up is One Gentleman's Game by Ralph Henry Barbour whose wiki
here shows a long career in sports novels. His tale here most definitely paints an aristocratic world of tennis players, probably more about how a gentleman might act as opposed to a sports thriller. Next up, Cocky Lorem by Laurence Donovan on the art of hockey. And I guess it's always been a smash-mouth game because there's no shortage of violence in this tale. Can team newcomer given the snooty nickname "Cocky" prove his worth to his teammates? The ice will be covered in blood!!! Then, Paddy Moran's Boy by Sam Carson, a tale of how an Irish copper's son comes into his manhood and a peek at jockey culture. Of course there might be a fistfight here or there, those fiesty Irish! Then a short interlude in which the pulp announces the establishment of a Hare and Hounds Club and promises to provide chapters with a carrying bag to play the game. I'm not too familiar with the sport, but the editors promise it is good for young athletes. This is followed by "The Announcer" a listing of upcoming sporting events. I'm not sure how many people actually got their sporting schedule news from this magazine but it does have a national scope, a look at college athletics c. 1930. Next up, a fun one, Honor Bound by William Bruner about the Four Cardinals, a group of West Point cadets from widely separated parts of the U.S. One of the more timid members is thrust into the spotlight as the school's boxing star is accused of thievery. Can our Cardinal defend the honor of West Point? And has the star boxer stolen a gift for his girl?? It looks like this quartet might have been a regular feature as the coming attractions lists a Four Cardinals story in the next issue. That story is followed by the second part of Mystery Ship by John Samson. I didn't read the installment, as it is a serial, always one of the fun but aggravating aspects of collecting pulps - getting the whole story together. Just one serial in this issue, though, I have a feeling this particular pulp liked to be more self-contained than some others. Next up, The Hard Luck King by Thomas Barclay Thomson, a psychological portrait of a football player. Psychology plays a huge role in these stories (as it does in sports themselves) and this one is about how one player gets his groove back. Next, Tri-motor Speed from Raoul Whitfield about a "big plane" competition upon which rests an important manufacturing contract. The last story is Rabbit Rampant about an underdog runner. Can a vicious foul keep our Rabbit from victory? The magazine is concluded with sports news and answers to correspondents.
I probably wont go line by line on every pulp like this, but you see the wide variety of sports and subject matter covered here, a little something for everyone no matter what sport you follow.
And a couple of art samples. I can't say the art for this issue thrilled me too much to be honest. I've found the interior art in the pulps to be of very uneven quality, some of it gorgeous and fine, some pedestrian and uninspired.
Up next time on Darwin Scans, a look at some of the other sports titles and a rare one-shot sports pulp, it'll be a slam dunk...
Also! An invitation. I've never mentioned on my blog an excellent resource for the pulp lover. I post my scans at an excellent yahoo group
here. This is a great place to talk about pulp and share pulp scans, really the heart of digital pulp preservation.
