While you’re anxiously awaiting the arrival of PulpFest 2015 in August, we’ll be profiling some of our sister conventions in the world of pulps. We’ll begin with what is hoped to be the first of many southern pulp cons.
On Saturday, February 21st, 2015, the annual one-day Pulp AdventureCon will convert the Universal Palms Hotel in Fort Lauderdale, FL, into a collector’s mecca of rare magazines, movie posters, vintage paperbacks, golden age comics and other pulp-paper memorabilia.
The fifteen-year-old collectors’ event, with a $5 admission, has migrated with its sponsors from New Jersey and added this Florida show to the pulp con schedule. Until now, collectors had to travel to the Midwest for pulp-related events in Columbus and Chicago. Now, like a pair of bookends, the pulp show season will start with AdventureCon in Florida and end with AdventureCon on Nov. 7 in New Jersey.
“In their heyday, before television, comics or graphic novels existed, characters like The Shadow, Tarzan, and Zorro prospered in the pulps,” said show promoter Rich Harvey of Sunrise, Florida. “Authors like Erle Stanley Gardner and Edgar Rice Burroughs started their careers in these rough-edged old magazines, before moving into books and the lucrative Hollywood realm.”
Most superheroes, from Superman to X-Men are rooted in the old magazines. Captain Future appears weekly on a background poster in the situation comedy The Big Bang Theory. Writers like Dashiell Hammett, L. Ron Hubbard and Ray Bradbury filled the pulps with inexpensive entertainment in a world before the Internet and television. Western writers Max Brand and Zane Grey also wrote for the pulps.
Of special note to pulp magazine collectors, 2015 marks the 125th anniversary of pulp author H. P. Lovecraft, known for such terrors as “The Call of Cthulu” and “At the Mountains of Madness.” The Rhode Island-based author was a visitor to the Central Florida area, long before Disney cleared out the swamps.
Pulp AdventureCon will be held Saturday, February 21, 2015 at the Universal Palms Hotel, 4900 N. Powerline Road , Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309. The show runs from 10AM to 5PM. Admission is $5.00. For more information, please visit www.pulpadventure.com.
