Tag Archives: femme peril

New York has an insect problem

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It is the rule in pulp: no one and nothing is more interesting to a bizarre creature than a comely female human, and this cover by of the February 1940 Fantastic Adventures by Robert Fuqua (1905-1959) exemplifies the rule. I think it is probably illustrating Bertrand L. Shurtleff’s story “New York Fights the Termanites,”, although an interior an interior illustration by Julian S. Krupa (1913-1989) suggests a different conception of the beasties.

It looks like a pretty normal rush-hour on the 6 train to me.

This issue is available to read and download at the Internet Archive.

Crab peril!

The pulps would menace a pretty scantily-clad girl with anything, and by 1959 they would go so far as to menace an unclad one.

It’s something I came across browsing my way through men’s adventure magazines in the Internet Archive, a place where I think I could easily putter away all my remaining days rather happily if it came to that. It’s not quite erotic mad science (it would be if the giant crabs were the mutant product of an experiment!) but it seems thematically connected in any number of ways to the sort of things that run here. This particular story of Central American tourism gone wrong appeared in Exotic Adventures, Volume 1, Number 3, an obscure mag which ran for maybe six issues in 1958-9. Unfortunately but perhaps unsurprisingly I don’t have an artist credit for the peril scene above.

You can read and download this contribution to Western Civilization at the Internet Archive.

In 1959 (or was it 1958?) the sexiest girl in Japan was majoring in philosophy at Northwestern, in case you were curious.

Pre-code comics carried on the old pulp tradition

This is the cover from a series called Black Cat Mystery Comics, Issue #32, published December 1951. I hesitate to imagine what that poor girl is about to be plunged into. (A hot spring? Hell itself?) Details on the issue are thin, but there’s an entry for in in the Grand Comics Database here. This image is a reblog from a 16 November 2013 post at Infernal Wonders, itself originally picked up from the now sadly defunct tumblr Great Grotto.

Tumblr favorite #2294: Rocket to some moon

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My original tumblr post was here. This comics cover “Rocket to the Moon” features the text “Could TED DUSTIN, rocket explorer, and MAZA, beautiful princess of Lunar, stem the powerful hordes of GREEN MONSTERS who sought to conquer the World?” It was originally posted by brudesworld who attributed it to “Joe Orlando, 1951.” My snarky comment in reply was “Hell, if you’re pretty enough you don’t need any spacesuit, apparently.” The image comes to us via notpulpcovers.