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.

Creating an Age Undreamed Of Video Podcast

This week I'll be headed to Washington, DC where I'll be chairing a Pulp Studies session at the 2013 PCA/ACA Conference. I'll be joined by my fellow Robert E. Howard aficionados, Mark Finn, Chris Gruber, and Rusty Burke. My paper will be on Howard's use of anthropological theory in his "Little People" stories like "Worms of the Earth."

In the meantime, I've gone back and taken my older 2011 PCA/ACA presentation and turned it into a video podcast. This is my first attempt at doing something like this and it's little more than me reading my paper over my powerpoint presentation, but hopefully some of you will find it interesting.

The topic is on Howard's use of the Atlantis theme in his fiction and looks at several of his sources in that regard. Much of this material would make it into my recent chapter in Conan Meets the Academy.

Video after the jump. Enjoy!