| Femmes Fatales | Oct 24 2022 |
This one might even go to 11.
Above is a fun promo image of Scottish actress Caroline Munro, who's never far from mind because she played the unforgettable Stella Star in the 1978 sci-fi flick Starcrash. It happens to be one of our favorite films, and one of the worst ever made. It's an unbeatable combination. You can read what we wrote about it here.
| Vintage Pulp | Oct 22 2022 |
Hey, handsome! Ever get tired of all the uncertainty about how a date's going to end?
We finally got hold of one of our favorite George Gross covers. He put together this masterpiece for Harmon Bellamy's Pick-Up, published by Quarter Books in 1949, and everything works here—the colors, the framing, the pose, and the cool urban mood. Some of these digests have photo-illustrations inside, but not this one. It does have an ad on the inside front cover, which is below. We've seen this book go for more than two hundred dollars, but ours cost twenty. That makes for a fine day around the palatial Pulp Intl. metroplex.
Amusingly, the cover has nothing to do with the narrative, nor does the title. What happens is a seventeen-year-old girl named Lois Deane runs away to New York City, is immediately hit by a car, and wakes up in the hospital. The guy who hit her discerns her meager circumstances and gets her a job working for and living with his family. Lois has lied to her hosts about who she is, and her deception eventually comes to light. There are no seedy or criminal aspects at all here—Bellamy has written a straightforward romantic drama. For its type, it's fine, though nothing special.
| Intl. Notebook | Oct 21 2022 |
Dark on the outside, darker on the inside.
This is the second Canadian tabloid we've shared in October, and we have several others upcoming in the next few months. This time we're back to Minuit, the sister publication of Midnight, published today in 1968 with a cover featuring Susan Boyd. She's looking a little radioactive, and in unusually dark waters. This could everyone's fate the way things are going in 2022. We don't know what Minuit editors were shooting for here. Maybe they had a problem during the printing phase. But in it an odd way it's actually a nice cover, and Boyd pops up again in the centerfold, looking much healthier.
Elswewhere inside the issue Minuit wastes no time with its efforts to shock. We learn about Vietmanese youngster Bon Ngoc Tho, who editors claim is a demi-homme born with many characteristics of his father—a monkey. We can say a lot about this, but let's skip most of it and simply note that the 1960s were the tail end, so to speak, of a long-running fascination with supposed human freaks.
Moving on, editors have a curious photo of a model with something unidentifiable in her mouth. We took several guesses what the thing was, and they were all wrong. Turns out it's a pea shooter—a tire-pois. No, we'd never seen one, but a few of you probably recognized it. Minuit editors claim it can kill a kid, and that hospitals around the U.S. have been treating serious pea shooter injuries, along with wounds inflicted by “blow zappers and Zulu-guns.” The article explains that the injuries come not from shooting the projectiles, but from swallowing them while inhaling to fire the weapon, occasionally piercing arteries in the neck.
There are more stories along those lines, but it isn't all dark at midnight. Elsewhere in the issue you get men's fitness, nymphomania, and plenty of celebs, such as Claudia Cardinale, Nai Bonet, and Maureen Arthur, plus Robert Vaughn hawking a 100% legitimate Man from U.N.C.L.E. “plume espion.” That means “spy feather,” which doesn't help at all in determining exactly what it is. But a careful scan of the text suggests that it's an x-ray vision device that works on everything from walls to clothes. Right. We'll take two, and see you at the beach. Twenty-one scans below.
CanadaMontrealMinuitMidnightThe Man from U.N.C.L.E.Susan BoydSuzanne PleshetteMaureen ArthurJosiane LarazinClaudia CardinaleKim PorterNai BonetFranl Lee MorrisClint EastwoodRobert Vaughntabloid
| Vintage Pulp | Oct 20 2022 |
Gratuitous sex and Violenza.
Seems like time for another cover from Italian illustrator Franco Picchioni, so here's his always excellent work on Patrick McRoy's Violenza in nero, from 1966 for publishers Edizioni MA-GA as part of its Il Cerchio Rosso collection. Haven't we seen this pose from Picchioni before? Well, never mess with success. He even painted the same undergarment (a strapless teddy, we think). McRoy is an obvious pseudonym but we can't track down his real name. Anyone with knowledge, feel free to enlighten us. And not just about books. We're mixed up on a lot of stuff these days.
| Femmes Fatales | Oct 20 2022 |
Yes, we all saw your new boots, and for the last time—we all love them.
If you've never watched Japanese television but this person still seems familiar, it may be either because we used her in a collage several years ago, or because there are lots of high kicking images in Japanese posters and promo shots, and she reminds you of those. Either way, this is a fun image of Lisa Komaki, who rose to fame playing the character of Peggy Matsuyama the Momo Renjā, or Pink Ranger, on the hit tokusatsu series Himitsu Sentai Gorenger, which debuted in 1975. Komaki appeared in several short films and one other series, all along the same lines as Himitsu Sentai Gorenger, and was out of show business by 1979. But tokusatsu series represent a cult niche in popular Japanese culture, which means she's well remembered.
| The Naked City | Oct 20 2022 |
Everyone said they always did everything together.
More random midcentury aftermath. This photo shows a kneeling priest about to do his thing over the bodies of Thomas J. Hogan and Fred Romer, who together were a murder-suicide. Hogan shot Romer before turning the gun on himself. There's no information about the exact circumstances behind the event. Cops being cops, they probably ruled out the idea of this scene being any sort of willing pact. Romantics being romantics, we at least wonder about it. But alas, we'll never know. Usually these vintage crime photos come from Los Angeles, but lately we've been sharing examples from New York City. This is another one, and it happened today in 1961.
| Vintage Pulp | Oct 19 2022 |
No, seriously. I said come and get me. Don't just stand there. Or... did I interrupt something?
Above is a cover for Johnny Laredo's Come and Get Me, copyright 1956 from Popular Library. Think Laredo is a pseudonym? You think correctly. The publishers make a big deal out of keeping his real identity secret, writing a blurb inside the book calling Laredo, “the pseudonym of a young fiction writer whose stories have appeared in Argosy, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Cosmopolitan, and Bluebook.” Why an extensively published author wanted no credit for this book is a mystery, but the gig is up—he was Gene Caesar, a writer who had an affinity for westerns, but here crafted a crime drama about a man bent on avenging the murder of his girlfriend. The art, which we love because it can be interpreted a couple of ways, is by Raymond Johnson.
Popular LibraryArgosyThe Virginia Quarterly ReviewCosmopolitanBluebookJohnny LaredoGene Caesarcover artliterature
| Femmes Fatales | Oct 19 2022 |
If you think I look good this way wait until you see me with motion, sound, and character development.
Above: an excellent photo of U.S. actress Tanya Boyd, who rose to fame in ’70s blaxploitation movies, particularly 1976's Black Shampoo and Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, two of the wilder movies of the period. Most of her career afterward consisted of television appearances, including a 650-episode stint on the soap opera Days of Our Lives, but she's always been a favorite of ours for her film work. In terms of blaxploitation performers, she was never as famous as Pam Grier, but she was just as fearless.
| Vintage Pulp | Oct 18 2022 |
It's a different kind of jungle book.
When we saw this cover for Stan Shafer's Heat, we had to have the book, because that's Kitty Swan, Swedish b-movie actress from the 1960s, hanging on a vine and looking good doing it. The shot is an unretouched promo image from her 1968 lost world flick Gungala la pantera nuda. You can see the studio lights behind her and a guy's hand on the ropes at lower right, providing a step for her foot. If this had been used for the movie, the studio would have cleaned those elements off the final version, so we think of this as an outtake image, borrowed by Midwood Books. Because of the publisher, we figured Heat would be light sleaze, but we were wrong—it's pure triple-x raunch.
In short, a sexually precocious girl named Anna is taken from her father and sent to a nunnery, where her corrupting influence prompts her being shipped off to Brazil, a place where she presumably can do less harm. Unfortunately, her plane crashes (it's partly her fault, if you'd like to imagine how it happened) and she's lost in the jungle, there to be rescued by tribesmen who think her the earthly incarnation of a fabled sex goddess. She becomes a pawn in a power struggle between the tribe's leader and its head priest, as well as their sexual plaything, and that of a horny puma.
Most of the events in this bizarre tale take place during the 1930s, and are related via a contemporary frame that features an elderly Anna narrating her own extraordinary life story to a reporter—and you just know that's going to get weird too, because the reporter is beautiful and Anna remains hot, a youthfulness she attributes to daily orgasms. We'll stop there, except to mention that several early plot events situate this book waaaaay beyond the pale for the sleaze genre. In fact, if not for the ultra rare Swan photo we wouldn't write about it at all. Actually, that's not true. We considered not writing about it, but we don't self censor. So let's just say you've been warned.
| Vintage Pulp | Oct 17 2022 |
Is this an example of that pulp stuff you read all the time? Geez, it scared the pants right off me.
Above: an unknown model stars on a Technicolor lithograph titled “Solid Comfort,” which we think was printed around 1950. This has happened with the Pulp Intl. girlfriends a few times when we left an interesting book sitting around, but now they don't open them because they assume someone will be betrayed or murdered in short order. We'll try to get them to read David Dodge's To Catch a Thief. If there's such a thing as gateway drugs for crime fiction that's certainly one of them.In another case of vintage art being shoddily repurposed for modern usage, we found this litho for sale on a few websites as a poster, which you see above. The reproduction is absolute crap, but “so many books, so little time” is a sentiment we can get behind. A book definitely makes an afternoon more enjoyable, and we'd add that a nice glass of wine is a further improvement. Which is why we always have (at least) one close by when we read. We have a lot more Technicolor lithos in the website, so just click the keywords and have a look if you're curious.
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