Merry X-mas ComicMixers! Spend Christmas Eve with us, as we review our Christmas lists and give some suggestions on what to binge-watch, read and listen to over Winter Break. You even get to watch us open our first present!
PulpFest website designer Chris Kalb hosted the Hero Pulp Premiums and Promotions panel at PulpFest 2013. The panel was recorded by The Book Cave’s Art Sippo.
You can listen to Panel Fest Episode 28: PulpFest 2013 Hero Pulp Premiums here.
About Hero Pulp Premiums and Promotions:
How did pulp magazine publishers keep readers coming back month after month? Of course the best way was to publish excellent stories. Regardless of genre, the leading pulps–Adventure, Astounding Stories, Black Mask, Blue Book, Dime Western, Doc Savage, Love Story, The Shadow, The Spider, Sports Stories, Startling Stories, Weird Tales, Wings–attempted to do just that, issue after issue.
Another method that publishers employed to lure dimes on a regular basis from buyers with thin wallets was to create a club and offer premiums. For a few cents or by clipping coupons from a favorite pulp magazine, a devoted fan could become a member in good standing of the Doc Savage Club, one of the Friends of the Phantom, or Adventure Magazine’s Camp-Fire Club. Also available were rings, pins, and other items such as the Spider Pencil, a celluloid mechanical pencil with rubber eraser of The Spider seal, produced in very limited quantity during 1941-42.
On Saturday, July 27th, PulpFest website designer Chris Kalb took us back to a time when a few cents not only bought a pulp magazine filled with thrills, but also an Operator #5 ring, a G-8 Battle Aces Club pin, or a membership in the Green Lama Club. Chris will be presenting Hero Pulp Premiums and Promotions, an event that you cannot afford to miss.
For a look at some other pulp premiums, please visit Pulpster editor Bill Lampkin’s The Pulp.Net website and do a search for “premiums.” Bill has photographs of rings, membership cards, pins, and other items on his highly informative website.
You can listen to Panel Fest Episode 28: PulpFest 2013 Hero Pulp Premiums here.
The responsible thing to do this week would be to write about The State of Women in Comics. With Gail Simone booted off Batgirl, coupled with Karen Berger’s departure from Vertigo, one can conjure all sorts of misogynist conspiracy theories, and one would have more than a 50% chance of being right.
But I don’t want to write about that. For one thing, I don’t have any inside knowledge, so I would only be speculating.
Here’s the thing. Comics is such a small world that I know both of these women. I worked with Karen for the better part of a decade, threw the launch party for Vertigo in my apartment when I couldn’t get DC to pay for it, and enjoyed her work a great deal. I don’t know Gail as well, but I’ve met her a few times, I love her writing, admire her work for the Hero Initiative, and think she’s a really classy person.
These are big names in the business. I am not. But comics is still low-profile enough that we are, more or less, peers. Or at least colleagues.
I was reminded of this last week, when I hosted our annual Hanukah party, the first one since my husband died. It was a bittersweet occasion, an event he loved very much. I thought it was an outrage that he wasn’t here for it, but I also thought it was important to continue the tradition. Life goes on, despite my best efforts.
My friends came out to support my son and myself, and that’s what friends do. The guest list isn’t just my friends from comics. It’s my friends from different aspects of my life, including my son and his friends. My apartment isn’t so large that the comics people can avoid the knitters, or the anti-war people can be in a room separate from my high school pals.
One of our guests is an aspiring comics creator whom I introduced to a few pros at New York Comic-Con last year. He happily told me about the other people in the business he’d met since then, and how great each of them had been to him.
That’s comics.
This is not to go all rose-colored-glasses on you. There are people in the business I don’t like. There are people in the business who don’t like me. There are people I don’t know, and more of them all the time. There isn’t any one of them I’d be intimidated to talk to.
And there isn’t anybody I wouldn’t defend against the attacks of the broader culture, the sneers of elitists who look down on the medium (fewer every day).
We’re in this together, and we have each other’s back. It reminds me of this lyric:
Faithful friends who are dear to us
Will be near to us once more
– “<a href=”
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”
And that brings me to my wish for you this season.
Someday soon, we all will be together
If the Fates allow
Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.
Or, of course, the solstice holiday of your choice.
SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: BLOOD & CHROME is finally here, but you don’t know the whole story on how this all came to be. Executive Producer David Eick shares some surprising facts (and a few sneaky spoilers) with us, plus October was another good month in the comic stores, but for which company and THE KILLING rises from the dead.
The Point Radio – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.
We’ve got more with THE WALKING DEAD‘s two latest casualties, Sarah Wayne Callis and IronE Singleton. We cover it all from Lori’s Haters, IronE’s surprise at his fate and the possibility that Sarah might have a chance to return to the show. Plus DC goes digital in an even bigger way and we move two steps closer to that ELFQUEST movie.
The Point Radio – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.
There’s been a lot happening on the NBC comedy, PARKS AND RECREATION including an out-of-the-blue marriage proposal. Co-creator & star, Amy Poehler catches up on all of it plus odds are Jamie Foxx will be Electro and more speculation on Disney and Star Wars.
The Point Radio – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.
During a recent in-house editorial discussion here, the notion was floated that we should be showing naked female breasts on this website, as part of an attempt to increase search engine rankings and site traffic.* To address this lack of undress, we’d like to present you with The Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society, whose slogan is “Making Reading Sexy”. Their raison d’etre:
We’re a group of friends, and friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, and complete strangers, who love good books and sunny days and enjoying both as nearly in the altogether as the law allows. Happily, in New York City, the law allows toplessness by both men and women. So that’s the way we do our al fresco reading. If you’re in New York and the weather’s good, won’t you join us sometime…?
And yes, you can go to their website, which features many photos of them in Bryant Park and other New York City locales fulfilling their organizational mission. (Of course, the site is probably Not Safe For Work.) They’ve been working their way through a recent contribution from Hard Case Crime who generously supplied them with free copies of some of their latest, including [[[Seduction of the Innocent]]] from our good friend Max Allan Collins. We hope he got a good back cover blurb out of it.
They don’t appear to have gotten around to comics and graphic novels yet, but we’re sure we can find something for them by the time the weather in New York gets nice again. And no, despite what you might think, we’re not going to send them a bunch of mini-comics. We just aren’t cynical enough for Cynicalman.
* Yes, this is what goes on in our workplace when we aren’t figuring out how many dimensions Cynosure intersects with. Arguing about whether Thor is stronger than the Hulk is for newbies.
Okay, if you can read this message, post in comments and let us know you’re okay. We know various ComicMix people from Maryland to Michigan to Manhattan are without power, and we want to hear from you.
Even if you’re not a regular poster here, check in so that your friends and/or fans know you’re okay. If you’re a comic store in the affected area, feel free to post and tell us how your store is holding out. (Jim Hanley, I’m looking at you.)
Since the day DOCTOR NO exploded on the screen, the fates and fortunes of James Bond has been in the hands of the Brocceli Family, first with Albert “Cubby” Brocceli and now his daughter Barbara. We sat down with Barbara to talk about the rich history of Bond and how they work out each detail from tone of the story to the  Bond Girls, even before the cameras roll – plus G4 gets overhauled and Arnold is CONAN again – really?
The Point Radio  – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any mobile device with the Tune In Radio app - and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.
AMC has given us another season of COMIC BOOK MEN, and Kevin Smith explains how all that – and the show itself – happened, plus your YouTube favorites are coming to SyFy in a new reality series, VIRIAL VIDEO SHOWDOWN but it’s not quite your regular online videos. Plus The CW gives ARROW a vote of confidence!
The Point Radio  – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any mobile device with the Tune In Radio app - and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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