Pulpfest 2026 report

Two weeks ago I attended Pulpfest 2026, again held at the Doubletree in Mars, Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh. This year I decided to make the 1200 mile return journey in my MINI Roadster, rather than fly. It’s just so much easier to have your own car with you if you end up buying a load of stuff.

The theme of the con and the various evening discussion panels was “Amazing”, as this year marks the 100th anniversary of Hugo Gernsback’s magazine Amazing Stories. A good time was had by all, with sub-cons also running in parallel celebrating Edgar Rice Burroughs, Philip Jose Farmer, Doc Savage and The Shadow.

Michael R. Brown over at ThePulp.net has written a con report, so head over there for more details found here.  

As the theme of this year’s con was the 100th anniversary of Amazing Stories, one of the panel presentations was on the Gernsback years editing his magazine up until the time he was squeezed into bankruptcy by Bernarr MacFadden, who then took over the book and put in one Ray Palmer as editor of Amazing.  There was another session on the life of Ray Palmer, who was only a bit over four feet tall due to a childhood spinal injury and botched surgery which resulted in being a hunchback. 

Famed DC editor Julie Schwartz knew him, and named the silver age Atom after him.

Every attendee gets given an annual issue of The Pulpster, which is now up to issue #35.  This is a very professional zine featured various pulp research articles. One article by author Craig MacDonald focused on the debate whether Ian Fleming plundered the Doc story “The Fantastic Island" when writing Bond novel Doctor No. Craig referenced some of my research on Doc Savage pulp distribution in the UK for inclusion in the article, so a shout out to Craig for that.  Back in 1935 (when The Fantastic Island was published), Ian Fleming was toiling as a stockbroker at Rowe & Pitman at 43 Bishopsgate, London.  Atlas Publishing & Distributing (who distributed Doc Savage in the UK in the 1930s) had offices and bookstore at 28 Bishopsgate. It is not inconceivable that Fleming did not pick up a pulp to read from time to time. According to Google AI the addresses are only 25 feet apart, nearly adjacent on the same side of the street. He probably walked past it every working day.

My haul of stuff is shown in the photo below. As you can see, it comprised mostly paperbacks that I’d had and disposed of in the past. The CONAN paperbacks were the UK Sphere printings from circa 1974, and had come from the estate of Glenn Lord, who was Robert E Howard’s literary executor. I purchased the two Doc Savage hardbacks from the late Will Murray, which he kindly autographed for me.

The two comics I picked up were Sinister House of Secret Love #3 and #4.  I bought these to add to my collection of DC comics from mid 1971 to mid 1972, when the price rose to 25 cents (7.5p in Blighty) and page count went up to 48, then 52 pages. Those gothic horror romance comics, along with regular DC romance comics , are very rare finds at marts here in the US. I don’t remember seeing them on T&P stands at all in the UK back in the early 1970s.

© DC Comics

© DC Comics

Both Sinister House of Secret Love and Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love were gothic romance books which became more House of Mystery-type books around 1973, with a title change. I believe some of those subsequent issues may have turned up in the UK.    Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love became Tales of the Dark Mansion.  I do wonder if someone on the editorial team twigged that the term “Forbidden Love” might have other connotations….

I still need to get a two more of the Sinister House books and four of the Dark Mansion books to complete the mid-'71 to mid-'72 era for those titles. 

Some tables in the Dealer’s room at the con had some very interesting items. One dealer had some complete runs of British comics from the 1920s and 1930s  , such as the Magnet, Rover, Wizard, Dandy and Hotspur, including in incomplete run of The Triumph from 1939, which featured the first foreign reprint of the Superman newspaper strip.

In addition to pulps and comics, there were lots of those seedy “Men’s Adventure” magazines from the 1950s and 1960s that T&P did import if I recall correctly.

So, it was a great three days, and had some great conversations with attendees and dealers alike.  It seems they had a record breaking attendance this year of close to 500 people. Considering that the majority of attendees are in the 60+ age bracket, it seems that a new wave of fans is getting interested, which bodes well for the future.

Here's a few photos I took to give a flavour of the item on offer.

Will Murray (1953-2026) R.I.P.

 

I was very saddened this week to learn that Will Murray, pulp historian, pulp author, and co-creator of Marvel's Squirrel Girl with Steve Ditko, had passed away this past Monday at the age of 73. It was quite a shock, as I'd only been chatting with him a couple of weeks ago at Pulpfest in Pittsburgh, and we frequently exchanged messages on the history of pulps, most recently about Walter Gibson's (creator of The Shadow) involvement in negotiating early Shadow stories to be reprinted, heavily abridged, in the British adventure paper The Thriller, during the late 1930s.

Will is perhaps primarily known for the excellent Doc Savage novels he wrote working from unused outlines written by original Doc author Lester Dent, and Will became the literary agent for Dent's estate when Dent's widow passed. In recent years he expanded into novels about Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and The Spider. He had also ghost written many of The Destroyer adventure paperbacks.  He was a prolific writer and researcher, and luckily for us, most of his research on Doc Savage was collected in "Writings in Bronze" , as well the the recent hardback books covering the The Shadow's genesis and development. One of my favourite books of his is Wordslingers, a history of the Western novel in the pulps.

I first read his treatise on the various ghost authors of Doc Savage in Will's fanzine Duende #2 back in 1977, and have been an avid follower of his work ever since.

I can't claim to be a close friend of his, but I very much valued the friendship between the years I first met him at the Windy City Pulp & Paper Con in 2008 until our final meeting earlier this month.

I think it's fair to say that he was THE pre-eminent scholar of the history of pulp adventure fiction, as well the work of H.P. Lovecraft, and his passing leaves a huge gap in the pulp community, and the collective knowledge of pulp history.

On the comics front, Will co-created Squirrel Girl with Steve Ditko, a character that went on to be a member of Marvel's Great Lakes Avengers. I asked Will about his working relationship with the notoriously reclusive Ditko. Will responded "I was the one who let Steve Ditko know that Jack Kirby had died...... But he wouldn't give me a quote".

In contrast, I think Will would have been quite taken aback by the outpouring of sentiment this past week on various Facebook groups and websites.