Greg Clark Noir Art

  LEGENDARY HEROES #6 THE SHADOW Street & Smith was the country's oldest and largest publisher of pulp magazines.  One of their titles, Detective Story Magazine, was experiencing declining sales.  In an effort to boost sales Street & Smith decided upon a radio show that would promote the pulp.  The publishers enlisted an ad agency and a writer-director to adapt stories from the magazine into a radio series.  The creative team hit upon the idea of having the stories narrated by a mysterious storyteller with a sinister voice.  Seeking an appropriate name for the mysterious narrator they came up with The Shadow.  On July 31, 1930, the Detective Story Hour debuted on radio with veteran voice actor Frank Readick supplying the hauntingly sibilant narration.  Radio listeners were thrilled and the program became a national sensation.  The show aired on Sunday evenings at 5:30 and listeners were soon demanding from their local news dealers cop...

  LEGENDARY HEROES #5 BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY Buck Rogers was America's first popular science fiction hero.  Created by Philip Francis Nowlan (1888-1940) in the novella "Armageddon 2419 A.D.", it appeared in the August 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories.  Nowlan followed up with a second installment titled "The Airlords of Han" that was published in March 1929.  The two novellas told the story of Buck Rogers, a veteran of WWI who, in 1927, is working for the gas company and investigating abandoned coal mines in Pennsylvania.  Buck is trapped in a cave-in and exposed to radioactive gas that puts him into a state of suspended animation.  When he awakens 492 years later he discovers a far different world than the one he remembered.  His first encounter is coming to the aid of a woman, Wilma Deering, who is fighting off a gang of attackers known as the Bad Bloods.  Wilma is part of a rebel uprising, along with Dr. Huer, that is in...

LEGENDARY HEROES #4 IN A SERIES TAILSPIN TOMMY The period of the late 1920's through the 1930's became the heyday of pulp fiction.  At the peak of it's popularity over 200 magazines were published monthly reaching an audience of 10 million readers, with more successful titles selling up to a million copies per issue.  Publishers explored every popular category and genre in an effort to appeal to fans, from westerns and mysteries to romance and science fiction.  The golden era of the pulps coincided with the glory days of aviation, fueled by public interest in stories of WWI ace Eddie Rickenbacker and his memoir "Fighting the Flying Circus", and Elliot Spring's book on WWI combat flying "Nocturne Militaire".  But the major influence on the country's fascination with flying was the successful 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic by Charles Lindbergh in his plane The Spirit of St. Louis.  More than 40 pulp magazines - known as flying pulps - were de...

  LEGENDARY HEROES #3 IN A SERIES LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE In today's modern world, it's perhaps difficult to believe or understand the hero-worship that Little Orphan Annie commanded in her day and age.  Annie was the creation of Harold Gray, born in Kankakee, Illinois in 1894, who began his comic career as the letterer on the popular comic strip "The Gumps".  Gray worked for Sidney Smith and "The Gumps" for three years and was there in 1922 when Smith signed a million-dollar contract with the Chicago Tribune newspaper syndicate.  Smith had the most successful comic strip in the country and his contract gave him $100,000 a year for ten years.  (In 1935 Smith signed a new contract for $150,000 a year and that very same day he died in a head-on car collision.)  Harold Gray wanted the same success that Smith enjoyed, and began submitting his own comic strip proposals to the Chicago Tribune. The popular story is that Gray came up with a strip called "Little Orp...

 LEGENDARY HEROES #2 IN A SERIES TARZAN Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel "Tarzan of the Apes" first appeared in the October 1912 issue of All-Story pulp magazine.  It was an adventure story set in darkest Africa, telling the story of an orphaned year-old boy, scion of the English House of Greystoke, who is adopted by a tribe of apes and raised by a fierce she-ape named Kala.  The feral child is given the name Tarzan and grows up to become a protector of his adopted land.  Compared to normal men Tarzan's strength, speed and stamina is almost super-human as he wrestles and defeats evil men, poachers, cannibals, gorillas, lions, crocodiles and sharks.  Through the end of the 1930s Burroughs wrote 25 novels of Tarzan's exploits, many of them illustrated by J. Allen St. John.  He married Tarzan to an American woman, Jane Porter, and they had a son named Jack who took the ape-name Korak for himself. The popularity of the stories resulted in a 1918 film starring Elmo L...

LEGENDARY HEROES #1 IN A SERIES ZORRO  Zorro's first appearance came in 1919 in the pages of the pulp magazine All-Story Weekly.  It was a serialized novel that ran from August 9 to September 6 in five installments and was written by Johnston McCulley (1883-1958).  McCulley was born in Ottawa, IL and raised in Chillicothe, IL before becoming a crime reporter for the police gazette.  He turned to the pulps where he wrote adventure stories, and wrote about a dozen screenplays for Hollywood movies.  McCulley created several recurring pulp characters, including the Spider, but his greatest creation Zorro was only intended to be a one-time appearance. "The Curse of Capistrano" was Zorro's origin story in All-Story Weekly and was read by Douglas Fairbanks, the swashbuckling actor, while on his honeymoon with Mary Pickford.  He and Pickford had just formed their own movie studio, United Artists, with Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith, and decided upon this pulp a...