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PulpFest, the annual festival celebrating mystery, sci-fi and adventure fiction, returns to the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Pittsburgh – Cranberry for its 51st year. Running from Thursday, Aug. 3, to Sunday, Aug. 6, with the tagline “Chilling Sports,” the weekend-long convention features panel discussions, vendors and classic short fiction.
Marketing and Programming Director Mike Chomko explains: “Chilling” is a play on publisher Standard Magazines’ propensity to title their pulp magazines “Thrilling” — Thrilling Detective, Thrilling Love Stories, Thrilling Science Fiction — while referencing fantasy and supernatural magazine Weird Tales, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year.
“You’ve got to be a pulp fan to be in on the joke,” Chomko says, chuckling, “but we liked it!”
This year is also the 100th anniversary of the first sports fiction magazine, which was called Sport Story Magazine. “Basically it had stories about sports. Stories about baseball games, football games, hockey,” Chomko says.
Pulp magazines got their nickname because of the wood pulp — pressed sawdust — used to make the interior pages. The magazines spanned just about every genre and were cheap to make and purchase.
Television, radio and paperback books pushed pulps out of popularity, according to Chomko. Now, pulps are collector’s items and rare, as wood pulp is highly acidic and degrades easily. Preserved copies exist, but “are difficult to find,” Chomko says.
And the pulp influence was broad in pop culture.
Although names like The Spider or The Man of Bronze sound like misnomers for popular superheroes Spider-Man or Superman, they are actually independent characters who predate comic books. Many early pulp heroes laid the groundwork for the modern superhero mythos.
“Stan Lee, the Marvel Comics guy, as a boy, he used to read The Spider,” Chomko says. “In a little way, when he created Spiderman, that’s kind of honoring his boyhood hero, The Spider.”
The Man of Bronze — more commonly known as Doc Savage — along with The Spider and other pulp heroes, are celebrating their 90th anniversary this year, adding another feather to the PulpFest cap of enumerable milestones.
“We like anniversaries,” Chomko says. “That’s kind of what we design our programming around. We’re talking about magazines that haven’t been around for, what, 70 years? So we kind of plan our programming around certain anniversaries like a magazine or the birth of a writer or an artist.”
PulpFest’s evening panels, which begin around 7 p.m. and end around 11 p.m., are free to the public.
While many celebrated pulp writers and artists have passed away, PulpFest attracts panelists and presenters who are well-known to the community. Novelists and comic book writers often make appearances, with Will Murray and Gary Phillips on the roster for this year.
“Will actually carried on the Doc Savage series for Phantom Books after they reprinted all the original pulp stories, and he’s written a lot of other types of fiction,” Chomko says. “Gary is a crime writer from Los Angeles. He, again, like a lot of us, as a boy read Doc Savage; he read The Spider.”
Mark Wheatley and Mark Schultz, both award-winning comic book artists, will talk about commercial illustration related to Conan the Barbarian, a pulp character later portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1982 film of the same name.
In 2021, PulpFest signed a three-year agreement with the DoubleTree to host the convention at the venue. Although 2023 brings the end of this contract, Chomko says he is almost positive Pittsburgh will remain PulpFest’s home.
“The manager has told Jack (Cullers, PulpFest’s chairman) that they like the people who attend our convention; they say they’re just nice people,” Chomko says. “In fact, I guess last year the staff had a rough convention a couple of weeks before us; the people weren’t very pleasant, and the manager told the staff, ‘Calm down, in two weeks PulpFest will be here.’”
Tickets, which are available on PulpFest’s website, grant attendees access to daytime activities, including the dealer’s room — where magazines, memorabilia and merchandise is for sale — as well as the afternoon panels. Daytime passes ($25) are available for Friday, Aug. 4 and for Saturday, Aug. 6. Weekend passes, granting access from Thursday through Sunday, are available for $50. Attendees are asked to bring a completed registration form with them even if they are buying tickets at the door.
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