Bonus pulp: Just a little (yellow) peril

Two covers from a short-lived pulp called The Mysterious Wu-Fang. I couldn’t find too much about this magazine, although an entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction does give a little background.

US Pulp magazine, seven issues September 1935 to March 1936, monthly, published by Popular Publications; edited by Edythe Seims working for Rogers Terrill. Intended to capitalize on the popularity of Sax Rohmer’s Dr Fu-Manchu, The Mysterious Wu Fang showed the “Dragon Lord of Crime” seeking world domination, sometimes using sf means in the attempt.

Our first cover, from October 1935, shows an instance of likely human sacrifice of a pretty woman:

For the second, we have an ISFDB entry and Jerome Rozen’s original cover painting, showing a lot of peril.

The cover in original context:

Both versions found at Pulp Covers.

Dime Mystery Meme #17: WTF II

We close with covers from near the beginning and the end of Dime Mystery‘s existence. From way back in December 1934 we have one with a very Shadow over Innsmouth vibe.

(Woefully thin ISFDB entry for this issue here.) The Pulp Covers scan is of a copy which unfortunately has suffered a fair amount of wear. The index at Galactic Central provides a brighter and cleaner, bur also smaller, version of the same cover.

Nearing the end, in June 1948, Dime Mystery came up with this cover.

We might now be living in brightly smiling, clean-scrubbed, post-war, neo-Puritan America, but we can still manage a cover in which the pretty blonde is at least somewhat scantily clad, and certainly looks to be in a bit of peril. Evidence that the Spirit of Exploitation will never really die out, as long as humans themselves do not die out.

Dime Mystery Meme #16: WTF I

As with items in nature, some Dime Mystery covers defy easy classification and make one wonder just what the artist or editors were thinking, and closing out with two days of posts on them seems as good as any way to finish up this series. In April 1938 someone came up with an imaginative series of tortures, though I cannot figure the rationale for their exact sequencing.

The curators at Pulp Covers provide some example of interior art from this issue, two of which seem to be classic examples of bound damsels being subject to some sort of mad science.

Another of which is an example of the Consigned to the flames trope.

And there’s some good-old-fashioned bondage, in this case with the hint of a cuckolding fantasy. (Bondage Blog kindly take note.)

The good curators at Pulp Covers have made the entire issue available for download.

But real zaniness was coming later in the year with the October 1938 issue.

The Pulp Covers curators were as baffled by this as I am. “Is he using attractive women as clappers in giant church bells which he controls with his Keyboard of Evil? I honestly have no idea what is going on here. None whatsoever.”

Dime Mystery Meme #15: You’re screwed

On at least two occasions Dime Mystery featured covers with women being threatened with some sort of corkscrew-like device. There is June 1936 (ISFDB entry here).

By the cover of August 1938, the villains were being significantly more thorough.

As the curators at Pulp Covers remark, “This poor woman is being drilled, snake harassed & branded, which might seem like overkill to some people.” Indeed.

Dime Mystery Meme #14: Watching her terrible fate

A number of Dime Mystery covers feature one or more women looking on as some other woman is put through some probably fatal ordeal, an ordeal which they to might soon expect to undergo. The cover of the April 1936 presents this as a simple case of crimen interruptum.

By January we have two beauties helplessly waiting their turn while a third puts up what again looks like ineffectual resistance to a fourth being put to the torch, itself a repeat Dime Mystery trope. The editors liked this idea so much that they commissioned the cover as an oil painting, executed in loving detail.

The cover.

And apparently the readership liked the theme so much that the editors again put it on the very next month’s cover.

We again see eyes directed heavenward.

Dime Mystery Meme #12: Murder carefully labelled

Wartime lewdness shortages meant that Dime Mystery had to recycle even fairly questionable cover-art ideas. In the 1940s, there was something we might call “murder carefully labelled.” In November 1944 they ran this cover:

And a little more than a year later, in February 1946, this:

I am unsure of how to comment exactly, except that I am reminded of a line in the Blackadder the Third episode “Sense and Senility,” which I recall as “Every criminal, no matter how ingenious, makes one subtle yet telling mistake. Theirs was to have written down their entire conspiracy in play-manuscript form.”

What can I say? It’s not like we can have naked women writhing in transparent tube in every post.

Dime Mystery Meme #11: Mummification

Another truly strange trope that came up frequently at Dime Mystery appears to be some sort of involuntary mummification, possibly in connection with forced mating with some long-dead Egyptian. A good example would be July 1936 (issue ISFDB entry here).

And there’s an even more thorough one for September 1940.

But perhaps my favorite of the trope is actually an inverse, a cover painting by Tom Lovell for the May 1937 issue (ISFDB entry here). It’s actually a man undergoing the wrapping, under the gaze of a laughing cultist. There’s a girl, and what’s she’s undergoing is rather more mysterious, with wisps of mist or mystic energy or whatever providing another example of just-barely-implied nudity.

This is another example of a page worth visiting at Pulp Covers where the curators provide some interesting interior art (described on the issue title page as having been done by “Monroe Eisenberg and Others”) and also make the whole issue available for download.

Dime Mystery Meme #10: Snake transformations

Yes, you read that right. The suggestion that a pretty girl is facing imminent transformation into some sort of snake creature. It seems like a somehow overly-specific trope to which to which to devote two different covers over a little over four years, but there it is. Maybe ophidiophilia was in back in the 1940s. A comparatively chaste if suggestive cover from July 1944.

And of course, a considerably more batshit (but loveable) one from October 1940.

Hssss…

Dime Mystery Meme #9: Mad science victims

And now, for a different view of mad science. It is perhaps significant that all three of the examples that struck me as salient had the word “corpse” somewhere on the cover. November 1939 features what might be a simple electrocution, although given the halo of energy that surrounds our hapless heroine, it might also be an irradiation with strange consequences.

While May 1939 features an x-ray of the innards of what does not look like a consenting patient, a woman who swallowed something someone else very much wants. I’m afraid that Brother Yellow-Robes there does not exactly look like a licensed surgeon.

But for full-on mad science, we should turn to February 1940. This cover painting is the full-on classic, with something going on that bears no resemblance to any known legitimate scientific process, a leering, obviously nuts experimenter working some sort of control a naked victim whose nudity makes it ever-so-barely into the category of “implied,” who is also in a tube or sorts, of course, and a stack of what appear to be previous (failed?) experimental subjects in the background. (Note: see Row of pretty corpses post, coming in a few days.)

Whew! I gotta go cool off.

Dime Mystery Meme #8: Mad science protagonists

With mad science we get into some tropes I really love. There’s a lot of illustration here, so I’m going to divide it across two categories: protagonists and victims. The protagonists are female characters who are someone participants in, or in opposition to, some mad science venture or another. Let’s begin with some protagonists, like this very late-period cover, from May 1945.

Unfortunately I don’t have much information about this cover, but a read suggests that while there’s fear here, our cover girl might be being given a warning that she might be able to do something about, rather than a premonition of unavoidable fate.

More spooky perhaps is from way back at the start of Dime Mystery’s publication history, this cover from March 1934 (issue ISFDB entry here.

Our heroine is getting an injection from a shady character, but at the same time this doesn’t read like a coercive situation. She’s not bound or held at gunpoint; rather, she’s looking in a mirror with what looks to me like a hopeful expression. Does the mystery shot convey beauty? Restore youth? To be sure, if this young woman knew what sort magazine her story was in, she might not be quite hopeful, but still, this illustration is a long way from the norm for the shudder pulps.

In at least one instance in Dime Mystery’s publication history, again fairly late (September 1942), we have a heroine who goes to full-on gun-wielding protagonism.

I don’t know the details of the story, but it sure looks like Dr. Mad here is about to get his ass kicked — or perhaps his brain punted.