| Vintage Pulp | Oct 8 2017 |
According to Christian literature angels eat manna. According to R. W. Taylor's 1962 sleazer The Man-Eating Angel they just eat men. The book enjoyed both a U.S. and Australian release—though as She Devil up north. We find it interesting that the same character—Beulah Bell—was a devil in the U.S. and an angel, albeit a bad one, in Australia. In the book the character of Beulah Bell is married, but has the time and inclination to meet the carnal needs of a fella named John, and grants the sexual wishes of other men too. She just gets around in general. She even got around to the 1980s, where she inspired Hall & Oates to write the song “Manna Eater.” Well, maybe not. But she definitely inspired a pretty nice piece of cover art, which is uncredited. We're tempted to say it's Robert Bonfils, but we aren't aware of him ever working for Beacon-Signal, so we'll keep this in the mystery bin for now, and hope an angel or devil—or maybe even a crazy Aussie—provides an answer.
| Vintage Pulp | Jul 10 2015 |
Two years ago we shared five covers of women standing over men they had just killed and mentioned that there were many examples in vintage cover art of that particular theme. Today we’ve decided to revisit the idea in order to reiterate just how often women in pulp are the movers and shakers—and shooters and stabbers and clubbers and poisoners and scissorers. Now if they do this about a billion more times they’ll really be making a difference that counts.
French publishers, interestingly, were unusually fond of this theme—so egalitarian of them. That’s why many of the covers here are from France, including one—for which we admit we bent the rules of the collection a bit, because the victim isn’t dead quite yet—of a woman actually machine gunning some hapless dude. But what a great cover.
We also have a couple of Spanish killer femmes, and a Dutch example or two. Because we wanted to be comprehensive, the collection is large and some of the fronts are quite famous, but a good portion are also probably new to you. Art is by the usual suspects—Robert Maguire, Barye Phillips, Alex Piñon, Robert Bonfils, Robert McGinnis, Rudolph Belarski, et al. Enjoy.
