Pulp History
Devil Dog – The Amazing True Story of the Man Who Saved America (Simon & Schuster, 2011) by David Talbot, Illustrated by Spain Rodriguez and Shadow Nights
After founding Salon.com, one of the first successful and influential internet magazines, David Talbot has started what may become a new literary genre – Pulp History – which combines classic comics and the novelized pulp paperback adventure story with real biography and history, thus opening up a whole new world of opportunities for bringing fresh topics to a new audience.
Best known for his critically acclaimed Brothers – The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (Free Press, Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2007), Talbot and his sister Margaret thought of the Pulp History idea as “a way to bring untold history stories to life, working with comics artists and illustrators and designers to fully exploit the lush possibilities of the printed pages.” They then convinced the Simon & Schuster publishers of its validity and potential.
It’s hard to say whether the audience for Pulp History will be young people who are just waiting to be inspired by such works, or older adults who were themselves inspired by comics and paperback adventures and who find these books almost nostalgic.
For starters, Talbot tells the story of US Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, who fought his way through China’s Imperial City, the Panama Canal and the trenches of World War I in establishing a reputation for bravery and integrity that was admired by all Americans, especially veterans.
In the course of his fighting wars, Butler came to understand the financial and industrial forces that instigate and fuel most wars, and eventually came to conclude that “war is a racket.”
“As a youngster, I loved the excitement of battle,” Butler said. “It’s a lot of fun, you know, and it’s nice to strut around in front of your wife, or someone else’s wife – and display your medals and your uniform. But there’s another side to it.” As Talbot notes, because of this other side, “he devoted the rest of his life to stopping war – and to exposing those who grew as fat as ticks off the endless blood.”
So in the early 1930s, during the course of the Great Depression, when a group of men decided President Franklin Roosevelt’s economic reforms were too radical and leading America towards socialism, they decided to stage a coup. They thought they could strip the power of the presidency from Roosevelt if an army of veterans would march on Washington and call for the resignation of the president, setting the stage for a coup.
First they went to Douglas MacArthur, who would later have his own run-ins with Presidents, but he declined to lead the charge, and instead suggested Smedley Butler.
When the men in suits visited Butler and made the pitch, Butler was certainly disenchanted with the state of affairs, but he was more suspicious of the men who were plotting against the president and played along in order to learn who was behind this conspiracy. Eventually he learned their identities, but instead of leading the veteran’s march on Washington, Butler instead testified before a Congressional committee and told them everything he knew.
Rather than investigate the sensational charges however, the committee didn’t do anything, and the mainstream media of the day, especially Time Magazine, the Washington Post and New York Times ridiculed Butler as a paranoid conspiracy theorists. Independent reporters however, confirmed much of what Butler had to say, including the identities of those bankers and industrialists he mentioned, as well as their plans, which Roosevelt took security measures against.
Few people today have ever heard of Smedley Butler, but David Talbot hopes to change that with his first Pulp History book Devil Dog -“the amazing true story of the man who saved America.”
In order to help establish more than a new genre, but a series of books, they published a second volume in the same vein - Shadow Knights – The Secret War Against Hitler by Gary Kamiya, with illustrations by Jeffrey Smith. Kamiya was Talbot’s partner in creating Salon, and Jeffrey Smith’s illustrations are a bit more realistic than those by Rodriguez in Devil Dog, though they both do the job of graphically portraying the riveting action of the text.
Shadow Knights concerns the secret and daring World War II exploits of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) – the Baker Street Irregulars, who were ordered to engage in covert operations behind the enemy lines and commit sabotage against the Nazis in Europe before D-Day.
While Devil Dog is a colorful, biographical portrait of one man – Smedley Butler, Shadow Knights scans the exploits of a number of interesting characters, including Colin McVeigh Gubbins, Jens Poulsson, Gus March-Phillips, Harry Ree, as well as vivacious women like Pearl Witherington, Christine Granville and Noor Inayat Khan, some of whom were caught, tortured and died in Nazi concentration camps.
There still might be a place for dry, academic history and biographies, but Pulp History is here, and whether its audience is old comic book patrons or a new, young audience ready to be inspired, there are certainly a lot of historical that could lend themselves to the pulp history treatment.
characters and topics
http://www.salon.com/books/excerpt/2010/10/05/devil_dog_slide_show
[William Kelly is the author of 300 Years at the Point and Birth of the Birdie – a history of golf. He can be reached at billkelly3@gmail.com ]
No comments:
Post a Comment