Pulp fiction

Church Gibson focuses her analysis in particular upon Face/Ojf and Fight Club with additional reference to fihns such as Pulp Fiction. 

Since American comic books—as opposed to the newspaper comic strips—emerged at roughly the same time, this medium provided an even more popuiar outlet for conveying atomic information to the American pubiic. But here, it is necessary to lay a bit of background. The comic books, as we now know them, evolved in the mid-1930s from a merger between the newspaper comic strips and the parallel world of pulp fiction. Comic book writers and artists borrowed the... 

The second most popular superhero of the day. Captain Marvel, faced a similar dilemma, but with one exception he had better writers. The Adventures of Captain Marvel and Whiz Comics provided the most imaginative comic book treatment of atomic themes for the entire postwar era. Many of the approximately five hundred Captain Marvel stories were written by former pulp fiction writer Otto Binder and usually drawn by master artist C. C. Beck. They combined their talents to create a kindly, often obtuse, even whimsical superhero whose sales eventually topped those of Superman in the late 1940s. (His enemies called him "the Big Red Cheese.")... 

Atomic Spy Cases also features "U-231" bombs, elaborate disguises, a Nazi code embedded in an heirloom watch, a tmth semm dissolved in a cocktail, a femme fatale, and an agent who inked a secret map onto his bald pate and then covered it with a wig. Except for the addition of plutonium, the characters and plots were borrowed intact from the popular world of pulp fiction. That may account for the fact that no second Atomic Spy Cases ever appeared. 

His enemies called him a coarse, shallow charlatan, but he d somehow survived the harsh eraser of history. You can still see Cagliostro today in science fiction movies like Spawn or in dramatic costume movies like The Affair of the Necklace. At least half a dozen films have been made about his life—in Russia, in America, in Germany, in Italy, and in France. In the last two countries, he still features in television cartoons, comics, pop music, and pulp novels. More highbrow consumers encounter him as Sarastro in Mozart s famous opera The Magic Flute, or in Johann Strauss s operetta Cagliostro in Wien. 

Robinson, Frank M., and Lawrence Davidson. Pulp Culture The Art of Fiction Magazines. Portland, OR Collections Press, 2007. 

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