On this day when we salute the American worker, PulpFest is pleased to welcome its newest “laborers,” William Lampkin and Garyn G. Roberts, to its organizing committee.
William Lampkin, or Bill, has been reading fiction from the pulp magazines and collecting the magazines since the 1970s. He became involved in pulp fandom in the early 1990s when he discovered other like-minded individuals on the then-new Internet.
In 1996, he founded what later became ThePulp.Net, a website devoted to the pulps. The five-page website, which originated on AOL as .Pulp, has grown over the past two decades to include blogs, articles, histories, bibliographies, and more. He also writes the Yellowed Perils blog.
He attended his first pulp show in Tampa in the late 1990s, Pulpcon 35 in 2006, was actively involved with Doc Con from 2004 to 2011, and is on a two-year string of PulpFest appearances. In 2008, he became designer of THE PULPSTER. Bill assumed the editorship in 2013 when founding editor Tony Davis stepped down after 20 years.
Bill has been designing promotional material and advertising for PulpFest the past few years. His new role on the PulpFest organizing committee will be as director of advertising. He will also continue designing and editing THE PULPSTER. Why mess with a great thing?
Our other new committee member, Garyn Roberts, is an avid pulp collector and fan. He has written extensively about the pulps, both professionally and as a fan.
Garyn has edited or co-edited some of the best collections of stories from the pulp magazines, including A CENT A STORY: THE BEST FROM TEN DETECTIVE ACES, MORE TALES OF THE DEFECTIVE DETECTIVE IN THE PULPS, THE COMPLEAT ADVENTURES OF THE MOON MAN, THE MAGICAL MYSTERIES OF DON DIAVOLO, and THE COMPLEAT GREAT MERLINI SAGA. His anthology, THE PRENTICE HALL ANTHOLOGY OF SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY, a college-level textbook, is notable for the attention paid to the pulp magazines.
In 2013, Garyn received the Munsey Award, which recognizes an individual who has given of himself or herself for the betterment of the pulp community, be it through disseminating knowledge about the pulps or through publishing or other efforts to preserve and to foster interest in the pulp magazines.
A long-time college professor, Garyn also taught a class in science fiction at Northwestern Michigan College.
In addition to pulps, he is an expert on the Dick Tracy comic strip, was a friend of creator Chester Gould, and has written DICK TRACY AND AMERICAN CULTURE: MORALITY AND MYTHOLOGY, TEXT AND CONTEXT. Garyn will help with the convention’s programming.
If you’d like to congratulate Bill or Garyn via email, please write to them at bill@pulpfest.com or garyn@pulpfest.com.
(Robert Gibson Jones, a native of Ohio, began to work as a commercial artist for a Chicago advertising agency during the First World War. Nearly thirty years later, his first pulp magazine cover appeared on the January 1943 issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. According to pulp art scholar David Saunders, “He was soon painting many covers for this title as well as for AMAZING STORIES, MAMMOTH ADVENTURE, MAMMOTH DETECTIVE, and MAMMOTH WESTERN, all of which were produced in Chicago by the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.” During the 1950s, Jones painted painted covers for OTHER WORLDS SCIENCE STORIES and UNIVERSE SCIENCE FICTION. His cover for the September 1943 is a wonderful depiction of the women who took on many non-traditional roles, helping with the war effort during the Second World War.)
