Pulp Friction #1 – Review

By: Mark Waid (story), Paul Smith (art), Jordie Bellaire (colors)

The Story: East Coast mystery man meets West Coast daredevil.

The Review: What is it about pulp, specifically one era of pulp, that keeps readers coming back for more even decades past its prime?  If you ask me, pulp offers baggage-free entertainment: all the action and dramatic flair, without the challenging gray areas.  In a world where each piece of fiction is a different cocktail of increasingly wild combinations, pulp is the whiskey shot of genres: straight, to the point, and just what you needed.

Certainly, there has been no better age for the everyman character.  So many of our heroes nowadays have to be “special” in some way: a mutant, a prodigious intellect, a person touched by the hand of fate—someone who is different from everybody else.  The Spirit and Rocketeer are comparatively ordinary beneath their domino mask and space helmet.  Denny Colt and Cliff Secord aren’t brawny Adonis’ or super-geniuses or gifted with unusual abilities and powers of any kind.  They get by on their guts, a good dose of cleverness, and their values.