Vintage Pulp | Dec 17 2019 |
Classic pulp magazine goes for the throat.
Above is a selection of fifteen action covers from the pulp magazine Spicy Western Stories, dating from the late 1930s and early 1940s, and you've certainly noticed the choking. Those pieces are by H.J. Ward, and he worked extensively in the pulp sub-genre known as weird menace, which involved women in various forms of baroque peril. The magazines were generally mystery and horror, and while bondage, burning, cutting, and branding were common motifs in weird menace art, choking wasn't that common. It seems to have been Ward's special thing. Maybe he had a time machine and got the idea when he traveled to 2019 and saw some of the terrible American porn that's become popular. In any case, the imagery is odd as hell, and more than a little disturbing, but it's undeniably proficient.