Adventures in Pulp Culture: The Year in Review

This has been a great year for me in my ongoing quest to promote pulps and comics in cultural studies and I thought it might be a good time to take a look back at my 2013 escapades.

Let me start with a plug for my lastest publication that hit the shelves last month. My buddy Mark Finn and I co-wrote a exhaustive article entitled "Vaqueros and Vampires in the Pulps" discussing the weird westerns of Robert E. Howard and his role as a pioneer in that popular hybrid genre.

The article appears as the opening chapter of the collection Undead in the West II: They Just Keep Coming from Scarecrow Press. This is a really fun book -- not a dry academic tome -- with an introduction from the legendary SF author Willian Nolan (Logan's Run) and articles on Joe R. Lansdale, Stephen King, The Walking Dead, and other icons of the weird wacky west. Check it out here.

More after the jump.

Gouged Eyes and Chawed Ears: Breckinridge Elkins Video Podcast

My previous video podcast of my 2011 PCA/ACA presentation was well-received when I posted it earlier this year, so I've decided to give the same treatment to my 2012 paper. The subject is Robert E. Howard's humorous westerns featuring Breckinridge Elkins, looking at the ways in which Howard used violence as a comedic motif in the tradition of 19th century frontier humor. In particular I use the theme of rough-and-tumble fighting in the Breck stories as an example of this humorous violence. This presentation began as an essay in my first REHupa fanzine in 2010, then expanded into an article for REH: Two-Gun Raconteur #15, and finally revised again for PCA. Hope you all enjoy it.