It’s Super Bowl time again in the U.S., and as we did in 2009 and 2010, today we’re commemorating the occasion. This time we have a selection of five sports covers from acclaimed pulp artist George Gross. They were published between 1940 and 1951, and are alll college themed. No surprise there—collegiate ball ruled back then. But not today. Today the NFL is America’s passion, and Super Bowl Sunday is the day when even non football fans turn their attention to the sport. After revealing that we once lived in the Bay Area, is there any doubt who we’re picking to win tonight? That’s right—Baltimore in a walk. Just kidding. Chesapeake Bay has its charms, but when we say Bay Area we mean the one and only San Francisco Bay. So we’re backing the Niners, if for no other reason than football may be watching the emergence of a once-in-a-generation talent in Colin Kaepernick. If that’s the case, he can certainly announce his arrival big time with a Super Bowl victory. Final score: San Fran 24—Baltimore 20.

Update: Hey, we're writers, not seers of the future. If we actually knew who would win we'd be as famous as Criswell. At least it was a decent game .

 

Did you know there was a football team called the Brooklyn Dodgers? This nice little piece of Americana reminds us of that fact. It’s the cover of a program for an NFL game between the Dodgers and the Washington Redskins, played at Ebbets Field today in 1942. The Brooklyn Dodgers football team existed from 1930 to 1944, at which point it became the Brooklyn Tigers for one season, then the next year merged with the Boston Yanks. This move came about due to a decline in the on-field product caused by wartime shortages of players. But before being folded into another franchise and effectively disappearing, the Dodgers helped bring the NFL into the mass media era when its October 22, 1939 game against the Philadelphia Eagles was broadcast on television. That was the first NFL broadcast ever.

Another historical note: the unusual Dodgers nickname derives from the fact that through the late 1800s and early 1900s, there were so many trolley lines running through Brooklyn that people from that borough were called “trolley dodgers.” Naturally, this is also the reason the All-America Football Conference team called the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the baseball Brooklyn Dodgers, both adopted the nickname. Of course, baseball’s Dodgers were the first to do so, by decades. Lastly, on the cover is a photo of Frank Kinard, who played for the Dodgers/Tigers and, just to make the whole name thing even more convoluted, played for the New York Yankees of the All-America Football Conference. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1971. You can learn plenty more about the Brooklyn Dodgers at the website luckyshow.org.

This is a brilliant cover for Joan Sherman’s, aka Peggy Gaddis Dern's Suzy Needs a Man, published 1950. Dern was an extremely prolific author who between 1934 and 1966 wrote under many names, producing mostly romances, nurse novels, and light sleaze. The art here is by the great George Gross, who painted hundreds of covers for every pulp imprint from Detective Book Magazine to Football Stories. We’ll get back to Gross a bit later, but in the meantime you can see more of his work here. 

Today is Superbowl Sunday over in the U.S., so we thought we’d post a collection of vintage pulp covers from the days before some genius figured out that whole soft helmet/brain hemorrhage relationship. Alas, though the sport isn’t what it once was, we can still hope today’s big game is a classic, like these covers.