Pulp Art

Misogynistic? Definitely. Pulp magazines were sensational and had a bad reputation for things like misogyny. This is a piece for two competitions: a challenge at TheArtOrder.com (deadline this weekend) and for an open call for a Comic and  Fantasy Art Exhibition that opens April 14, 2012 in conjunction with C2E2: Chicago's Comic Convention, and the exhibition runs for 3 months.  I got a lot of very helpful feedback from the good folks over at WIPNation (much of them are also industry professionals). I worked on this every Saturday since Dec 23 2011, and will probably continue until the deadline in April.


I've always wanted to do a pulp magazine painting so this challenge was very exciting for me. I also used this as a piece of self expression to deal with emotional turmoil I've been tortured by for a while. Catharsis is a pretty good word I would use for this experience. It helped briefly, but I think ended up being more of a reminder of painful memories and emotions.


Pulp magazines in the horror genre were also called Weird Menace Pulps, Terror Pulps, and Shudder Pulps. Hence the title. For the text I originally had references to Shakespeare's Macbeth and William Blake's The Tyger. Some of the original text ideas were:
"Of direst cruelty"
"the sticking-place"
"Life's but a walking shadow"
But I decided on something different because I realized that Macbeth and Blake didn't fit too well in pulp fiction. The final text that I went with had  deeper meaning to me personally.
Lastly, HP Lovecraft sometimes used a pseudonym 'Humphrey Littlewit', I assume to be nonthreatening to the reader and to make them assume the writer lacked wit. I'd classify HPL as a pulp author so I wanted to reference him somewhere in the painting. I've sometimes been described as barbaric so 'Lilltetact' worked well for me.