WESTERN NOVELS—PULP

WESTERN NOVELS—PULP

Ed Brubaker is an acclaimed comics writer with a passel of Eisner and Harvey Awards to his name. While he’s written super-hero fare—he’s co-creator of the popular Marvel character The Winter Soldier—it’s his crime fiction that strikes a chord with me.

 

Ed was a writer and supervising producer for the first season of HBO's Westworld, and is the co-creator and co-writer of Too Old To Die Young. His new graphic novel, Pulp, produced with artist Sean Phillips is a treat for fans of Western pulp and 30s noir. Pulp tells the story of Max Winter, an old man living in 1930s New York with a younger wife named Rosa. On the brink of World War II and with the Nazi bund operating just down the street, Max churns out stories for a Western pulp magazine.

 

Winter’s violent tales of the anti-heroic Red River Kid just might have a personal basis in reality, and when a retired Pinkerton agent tracks Max down with a proposition, the old west lives again in the gritty streets of grimy New York.

 

Image Comics have come a long way since their fanboy days of the early 90s, and Pulp is a graphic novel worth tracking over the comics wasteland. It’s a fast read for fourteen dollars, but the art is interesting and the tale fairly absorbing. Like too many of today’s writers, Brubaker’s dialog is too spare with too many F-bombs—and that’s a bit distracting. But otherwise, I’ll urge you to check out Pulp if old-fashioned vengeance and violence are your thing. I was able to pick up a digital copy from my local library on the Hoopla App—thus saving me the coin, and maybe you can too.