Nik Poliwko: Pulpsploitation cover artist

Artist Nik Poliwko is the man to launch Pulpsloitation as the cover artist of the very first volume in the series. He delivered a great cover, but that should have been no surprise with a record of amazing covers behind him.

This pin-up was one of the reasons I
thought Nik was perfect for the first cover.

Nik is an artist with a ton of pin-up and design experience. He’s worked in the past for the fine folks at Airship 27 as well as regularly producing the War Chief strip for Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

Copyright ERB Inc.

With a great handle on pulp style characters and gorgeous colors, Nik seemed like the perfect fit to bring the four heroes of Pulpsploitation to life. And the final cover he delivered is nothing short of amazing.

For more great work by Nik, check out his Facebook page!

Frank Byrns: Why the Black Bat?

So… why the Black Bat?

If you’re asking that question, you must not know much about this particular pulp hero. Because if you did, you’d be asking a different question:

Why the hell not the Black Bat?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a brilliant young District Attorney runs afoul of the mob in his crusade to clean up his city and gets a faceful of disfiguring acid for his efforts.

Or this one: A blind defense attorney dons a different suit at night, using his enhanced remaining senses to hit the streets and take it to the criminal underworld as a costumed crimefighter, often going after the very criminals he defended in the daylight.

Or this one: A costumed crimefighter dressed in black, adopting the guise of a bat, striking fear in the hearts of cowardly criminals around his city and beyond.

All three of those should sound familiar to any self-respecting comics fan. But long before there was a Two-Face, or a Daredevil, or a Batman, there was a Black Bat.

And even better?

This guy might be crazy. Here’s a hero who didn’t mind killing a bad guy or two, if that’s what it took, usually with the pair of .45s he kept on his person at all times. And then, just to let everybody know he meant business? He’d pull out a knife and carve a little bat in the fresh corpse’s forehead. His calling card, if you will.

Like I said: crazy.

I’ve written the Black Bat before, over at Ron Fortier’s Airship 27 pulp revival house. So when Nick Ahlhelm came to me with his idea for Pulpsploitation, my mind immediately returned to Tony Quinn and his excellent supporting cast: Silk Kirby, Butch O’Leary, Carol Baldwin, even that suspicious old Lt. McGrath.

I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of legacy heroes. Even though I’m a Marvel guy through and through, one thing I’ve always liked about the Distinguished Competition is the idea of the hero’s mantle being passed down from one generation to the next. So from the start of this project, I hoped to go that route with the Black Bat rather than a strict reimagining.

So what would that mean for a Tony Quinn in his seventies? What would he be up to? If I left him in New York, I could work in another of my passions: the look and feel and vibe of 1970s crime films. The French Connection, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, sure. But also things like Rolling Thunder, The Killer Elite, Charley Varrick, The Yakuza. Friends of Eddie Coyle.

So give Quinn a pro bono legal aid clinic in a rundown Brooklyn neighborhood. Make Butch O’Leary’s daughter a crackerjack young lawyer working for Uncle Tony. Have Silk Kirby’s kid work as a plainclothes narcotics detective. Add in a former Vietnam tunnel rat, who’s used to fighting in the dark where he can’t see. The NYC heroin trade. The Mafia. Street gangs. Son of Sam. Reggie, Sparky, and Billy. The blackout.

Now we’re talking.

Why the Black Bat?

Why are you still asking?

Teel James Glenn: On choosing the Gunmaster

Dumas Poe, Hillman's original Gunmaster.

When Nick Ahlhelm approached me with the concept of Pulpsploitation—bringing old public domain characters forward into the 1980s to marry them with the hard corp action/men’s paperback type story—I thought he was a little nuts (Okay, maybe a lot nuts)—but in an inspired way!

It immediately started me thinking what old pulp era characters I loved the most. Well, the ones outside of the big three: Doc Savage, Shadow and the Spider.

Well, after some soul searching it came down to three others. I loved the eastern mysticism of the Green Lama, the generational aspect and sense of purpose of Lee Falk’s Phantom and the world spanning action of Agent X.

Then I had the hard task of looking at what public domain characters were out there that might lend themselves to a 1980s update and still satisfy my desire to take aspects from those legendary heroes.

I wanted something that I could write with the same kind of martial arts action I had liked in seventies books like the Jason Stryker series and the Destroyer books.

Then I found The Gunmaster comic book character.

The unrelated Charlton
comic character.

Now, as a child I had read a Charlton western character with the same name but they had no connection. This original Gunmaster was perhaps one of the strangest and most fascinatingly motivated characters in all of literature!

Specifically The Gunmaster of the 1940s was named Dumas Poe (already a legendary sounding name) that appeared in a limited series of ten tales in Clue Comics and Real Clue Crime Stories. He first appeared in 1945 and, tantalizingly enough, three of his stories were drawn by the legendary team of Simon and Kirby. No, that team did not create him, at least as far as anyone knows (they were not the first team on it). I have not been able to find out exactly who came up with such a wild concept, but whomever it was, my hat is of to them.

The Gunmaster was a none-costumed adventurer. He was a descendant of Kattak Po, a Tibetan monk who supposedly invented firearms. Feeling remorseful over all the death guns caused, Kattak made it his life’s mission to stop their spread and prevent gun-inflicted deaths. His descendants followed in his footsteps. They became known as Gunmasters because of their knowledge of firearms and their ability to use them with nearly superhuman accuracy.

As the latest Gunmaster, Dumas Poe relied on the skills honed by his predecessors to stop crimes and fight for justice on behalf of the victims of gun violence. He was assisted by the Circle of Elders, the spirits of previous Gunmasters who appeared in his room whenever he asked for their aid.

Wild, huh?

When I discovered this rare series I was fascinated by the entire, almost mad, concept. I saw so many possibilities for the semi-mystical hero. It had just the right mix of the Far East that echoed the Shadows and The Green Lama and the generational aspects of Lee Falk’s Phantom and even my own Skullmask.

Now that I had found ‘the one’ for me to attack I dove into it with gusto.

I decided then to infuse my own ‘mad’ sense of adventure and pulp excitement to the mad idea of using guns to stop guns. In this gun mad world it seems like trying to stop the ocean and is that not the definition of a hero; to try and stop the tempest single handedly?

The first of the New Gunmaster tales is “Praey for the Raven”, a tale set in the 1980s with Dumas Poe passing the torch to his son in a tale that starts in Hong Kong, skips to Tibet and then ends up on the Gold Coast of Long Island, New York.

I hope to write more hard hitting adventures of The Gunmaster and hope you will all enjoy them and ask for more!

Teel James Glenn 9/14/14

Nicholas Ahlhelm: On writing Airboy

All three of these characters will play a
part in future Airboy stories.

Why Airboy?

He certainly isn’t a character that went without a revival in the 1980s. Chuck Dixon and Tim Truman created a rather amazing series at Eclipse (now being collected by IDW) with art by the likes of Stan Woch, Ben Dunn, Ron Randall and Tom Lyle.

Flying Dutchman will be the first other Air Fighter to
make an appearance in the new book.

But that series didn’t tell the story of the original Airboy. Instead it focused on Davy Nelson Jr., the son of the original character and his interaction with a mix of the original Air Fighters and new “ripped from the headlines” adventures. Despite being written by well known Republican writer Chuck Dixon, it was even famous for being the anti-Reagan comic. But while it offered great stories, it wasn’t the take on Airboy I wanted to see.

I wanted to go back to the original, I wanted to make him a fish out of water and I wanted to update the Air Fighters in a very different way.

In my initial short story, Misery and the Airtomb play their part in the first story, but they are really a subplot as Airboy finds himself young and alive again in the early 1980s. He’s immediately thrust into a plot to stop the massive super-weapon that nearly killed him once before.

The tale will hopefully kickoff a new series of adventures starring the high-flying adventurer beginning in 2017.

Pulpsploitation is now available at Amazon.