Lobster Johnson: Satan Smells a Rat

[thwhtGuardian]

A fantastic read, it was just a great pulpy adventure from start to finish. And Nowlan's art? That's always a pleasure to see.

I loved how the Lobster played with Mr. Podell's mind by using the corpses, it was seriously twisted but fun as well. It seemed like something straight out of a Shadow story...which is why I was confused by the opening of the Mignolversity review.

"It has less of a pulp feel than normal. That’s bad!" I didn't get that feeling at all, and their assertion that it felt more sci-fi makes me think that they don't have that great a grasp of the pulps. Pulp fiction, or the pulps were stories that covered many genres from crime/dective stories with characters like the Spider and the Shadow to action/fantasy stories with the likes of Tarzan and Conan, and even science fiction with characters like John Carter and Buck Rogers.

In the same way that noir isn't all about crime and detectives as some wrongly believe, neither are pulps focused solely on one genre.

[Middenway]

"It has less of a pulp feel than normal. That’s bad!" I didn't get that feeling at all.

Neither did I. The whole thing was very pulpy to my eye, but then I've always thought of that kind of sci-fi as pulp. Hell, I think of the original Star Wars trilogy as pulp.

[thwhtGuardian]

Neither did I. The whole thing was very pulpy to my eye, but then I've always thought of that kind of sci-fi as pulp. Hell, I think of the original Star Wars trilogy as pulp.

They certainly have that easthetic to them, especially the poster for a New Hope:


That's the kind of exploitive, and borderline lurid art style that graced the cover of just about every pulp magazine.

[Middenway]

I can really see a lot of Francesco Francavilla's in that poster.

[thwhtGuardian]

He certainly has that old school style as well.