My Thralls —
I, Shiwan Khan, have been reluctantly induced to pen this rare public statement in answer to the question regarding the worth and justification of the bewildering, even recherché August literary event during which I will at least find you, my soon-to-be loyal subjects, conveniently concentrated.
After several years of haranguing by your pulp convention’s pesky organizers, the Great Khan has condescended to ponder this otherwise imponderable conundrum. I do this because your annual gathering dubbed “PulpFest” is at last honoring the true heroes of pulp fiction, the so-called great pulp magazine “villains,” of which I am, naturally, the apex incarnation.
It now seems the appropriate interval to trot out and briefly ponder a few trite Western clichés. These are the kinds of quaint, turns-of-phrase too often found masquerading as the West’s facile conception of “words of wisdom.”
The “West” and “Wisdom”? Truly, contradictions in terms!
Back in the era when your precious pulp magazines ruled the newsstands, such homespun homilies were rendered in needlepoint, or via calligraphy. These days they are almost exclusively conveyed in digital images called “memes,” frequently festooned with misspellings and even misattributions as to their actual source.
And yet?
These would-be axioms may in their faulty reasoning inadvertently shed some useful light on this question I have somehow, to my bemusement, been compelled to address. “Why PulpFest?”
Behold! Some of your smug Western claims deludedly presuming to reach the level of bestowed wisdom?
“The difference between a hero and a villain is a matter of perspective.”
“A hero is best measured by the degree of menace posed by his opponent.”
And, finally,
“Every villain is the hero of his own story.”
I suppose I can — albeit with no small reservations — grudgingly accept that the third of these aphorisms touches upon at least a kernel of truth.
As the last direct descendant of Genghis Khan — justly deified founder of the Mongol Empire — I obviously have certain talents and ambitions tending in the same directions for domination as my equally and stubbornly misunderstood, mis-appreciated forbearer.
Conquest, particularly conducted upon a global scale (of course, one should never settle for stakes less than the entire Earth), requires a leader prepared as, the Bard suggested, to “Be bloody, bold, and resolute.”
Unfortunately, the confident and robust “will to power” crucial to uniting an oceans-straddling empire, frequently fosters enemies of one’s own.
Case in point: my revered ancestor had his Tatars and Naimans.
I have had my own pests with which to contend, but chiefly in the person of the cackling and cowardly cur who hides in the shadows and is mostly known in my rarified corners of the world as “Ying Ko.”
In so far as I have deigned to briefly study these crumbling magazines you so revere, I have noted few of their “antagonists” survive even a single encounter with each magazine’s titled “protagonist.”
Yet, I faced my own pulp antagonist no less than four times, and, rumor has it, would eventually have surfaced for at least a fifth time, if a certain Mr. Gibson had only had his way.
While I will not be afforded time to attend your “Steel City” convention in person, owing to certain other pressing doings in the District of Columbia and abroad, fully trust that I will be with you in spirit, and, yes, even in mind.
In the customary spirit of fawning loyalty and unthinking bliss I demand of all my loyal thralls, past, present, and pending, I wish each of you joy and happiness communing together while celebrating your precious pulp magazines. You will do so, I predict, while fast finding yourselves but an atom of a greater collective.
While visiting Mars, Pennsylvania, perhaps you will find yourself increasingly preoccupied by an enthralling collection of particularly entrancing lights — say, on a billboard, or possibly on some screen in your Cranberry hotel’s hallways, or even on the television in the privacy of your hotel room!
Perhaps you will hear the soft, but comforting, and even enticing chimes of distant bells of vexing source.
Or, maybe, a voice just on the edge of comprehension, may seem to speak to you in soothing but forceful tones, ripe with the tremor of intent.
If you experience any of these, I insist you relax.
I command that of each of you.
Trust, even then, in what might now seem distant August, that I am well with you in spirit, and looking forward to communion with each and every one of you — you, my loyal appreciators!
Call it, “The power of the distant mind”?
Yours always in looming and cheerful subjugation,
Kha Khan/
Shiwan Tulku/
Shiwan Khan/
AKA, “The Golden Master”
To learn more about “The Golden Master,” please visit our YouTube Channel to watch Craig McDonald’s The Shadow: His Greatest Enemies!
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Our featured image is excerpted from Graves Gladney’s original art for The Shadow for September 15, 1939, illustrating Walter B. Gibson’s “The Golden Master.” Gladney’s art also adorns the cover for The Shadow for December 1, 1939, illustrating Gibson’s “Shiwan Khan Returns.”
