The Purple Skull Number 1

By Justin Thomas

Good evening.

Pulp magazines.

The glory days of pulp magazines are long ago and far away. The world moved on to comic books, the graphic novel, and serialized movie blockbusters, among many others. Oh, sure, we still think of them if we take a trip into film noir or space opera. The pulps remain an important evolutionary step in entertainment, but they are mostly extinct.

Should they remain extinct?

NO!

Rise! Rise pulp magazines! Return to the world to astonish and amaze readers of all ages!

"The Purple Skull" is an attempt to write pulp fiction in modern times. This first issue, appropriately dubbed "The Purple Skull No. 1," takes a look what to do when the world is too far gone to be saved, at sin and the meaning of sin, and how to help your neighbors when the chips are down. Boring? The first story has a mad scientist, the second has a devil or two, and the third is a masked superhero saving a small town from the Depression. Boring? I should hope not.

Please enjoy this first issue of one guy's attempt to resurrect something, even at a tiny level, and provide a little bit of enjoyment to a few readers.

Thank you. And good night.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Justin Thomas
• Release date: Jun 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311423252

Justin Thomas

A guy. Shortish. Impeccable taste in eyeglasses.Let's talk pulp!

Book preview

The Purple Skull

Number 1

Justin Thomas

Copyright 2016 by Justin Thomas

Smashwords Edition

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For the Boys.

Dear Reader

Good evening.

As it tends to be in small towns, movie theaters and elementary school libraries serve as the gateways to other dimensions. These gateways, wormholes, let’s say, are the way to cope with towns so tiny someone on one side of town says, Bless you, after another someone on the other side of town sneezes. The evolution of a small town occurs at a glacial pace, and something is needed to get away from the day in, day out normalcy.

My movie theater, the Spencer Theater, and my elementary school, Jefferson, were both built before the Wehrmacht rolled into Poland. The school, at fifty years old it was already ancient in 1985, had no air conditioning anywhere, a classroom with a fireplace, and a kitchen slightly larger than a modest-sized bathroom, had my first and all-time favorite library. The theater, with the art deco gosh-wow awesomeness replaced by mid 1970s blah, had the air conditioning to hold steady against the brutality of the Iowa summer.

When my impressionable young mind was taking impressions, the theater gave me early Lucas and Spielberg, and the library gave me the Hardy Boys.

Impressions indeed.

The World of Geek dominates these opening decades of the 21st Century with comics and comic book movies applauded when liking any of it during the Reagan Administration would have gotten one pummeled. The summer blockbuster. The cinematic universes. The comics and the comic-cons. All of it is normal now. None of it makes anyone an outcast. And all the geekery dominating the world can trace its heritage to the pulp magazines wildly popular right around the time Chamberlain thought appeasement sounded like a good idea. (Spoiler: it wasn’t.)

Plot. Character. Dialogue. Hyper-stylized prose. Action. Adventure. Dames. Guns. Cigarettes. Betrayal. Transmortification Death Ray Guns. Islands of the Lost, the Dead, and/or the Living. Chimpanzees with degrees from M.I.T. and centaronauts lassoing a meteor to escape the villains. Westerns. Horror. Sci Fi and Fantasy. The pulps were the first entertainment to tickle the fancy of people wanting to do nothing more than have a blast.

Our tastes in what gives us pleasure have not changed. How we consume the things giving us pleasure has, however, and the pulps went the way of the dodo because comics and movies seemed to do the job better.

The Purple Skull is me taking a crack at some of that pulpy goodness. To see whether I can write things to make the reader feel as I felt when watching Raiders for the first time or reading The Ghost at Skeleton Rock for the thirtieth time. Can I put to paper stories to make readers feel like I felt with Star Wars and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators? I will never know until I do it.

And so, The Purple Skull Number 1 is now in your hot little hands waiting, patiently, for you to read. Pulp is meant to be devoured. Enjoyed. Consumed. And it needs to get you jazzed for the next issue, which is now but a week away.

I hope you enjoy it. Drop a line via email or my