Old New Pulp: Byron Preiss’ Weird Heroes
Weird Heroes was a series of eight books put out by Byron Preiss Visual Publications from 1975 through 1977, a copiously-illustrated mix of novels and short stories that aimed at creating a new kind of pulp fiction with new kinds of pulp heroes. The series had a specific set of ideals for its heroes, linked with an appreciative but not uncritical love of pulp fiction from the 1920s through 40s. Well-known creators from comics and science fiction contributed to the books, and one character would spawn a six-volume series of his own. And yet Preiss’ long-term plans for Weird Heroes were cut short with the eighth volume, and today it’s hard to find much discussion of the books online (though they’re well-remembered when they are discussed). That absence is a little surprising, as a whole new generation of writers has come along with an interest in creating new pulps. Now that we’re separated from Weird Heroes by about the amount of time it was separated from the original pulps, it’s well worth a look back at its truncated run.
Editor Byron Preiss was only 21 years old when he founded Byron Preiss Visual Publications in 1974, and the company began putting out two series of illustrated paperbacks the next year, Weird Heroes and Fiction Illustrated (which ran for four volumes with a fifth issued under a different name). Both were packaged by BPVP to be published by Pyramid Books. Weird Heroes started its run with two anthologies of short fiction that, according to Preiss’ introductions to both books, were conceived as a single volume but divided up due to length constraints. Over the course of the series’ run, it published work by Archie Goodwin, Steve Englehart, Harlan Ellison, and Michael Moorcock, alongside art by Jim Steranko, Alex Niño, Neal Adams, and P. Craig Russell.
In the editorial matter within the first book, Preiss laid out what he hoped to do with the series. Across a general introduction, a historical discussion of “old American pulp,” and an interview with Fritz Leiber later on in the book, Preiss articulated a specific sense of what old pulps did well, what they did poorly, what he wanted to take from them, and what he wanted to improve on. He also wrote about presenting an alternative to the heroes that had emerged up to that point in 1970s popular culture. Broadly, he wanted to recapture the storytelling thrills of pulp fiction and its sense of wonder, while avoiding its misogyny and racism — and unlike what he saw in both the pulps and much 1970s hero fiction, he wanted to find a way to resolve stories and conflicts without the use of violence and murder.
There’s a paradox in the nature of a dictionary of monsters. The medieval bestiaries at least claimed to be compendia of actual knowledge. But books like Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s Book of Imaginary Beings (Manual de zoología fantástica) and perhaps even Katharine Briggs’ Dictionary of Fairies are only superficially rational collections of information. Though alphabetised and cross-referenced, the logical framework’s a way of presenting wild fantasy and dream: basilisks and baldanders, brownies and banshees, sylphs and sphinxes. The Monster Manual, and the role-playing handbooks it inspired, take this contradiction to a new level — detailed statistics for each creature described along with the avowed intent of inspiring new stories featuring the legendary or imaginary entities. Quantified, numerically precise, the monsters in these enchiridia still crack open the inside of the head, driving readers to imagine worlds big enough to hold dungeon-dwellers and dragons. Rupert Bottenberg’s Fourscore Phantasmagores is the newest volume of these wonders for gamers and monster-lovers of all stripes, presenting, as it says on the cover, “A Gathering of Grotequeries for Gapejaws and Gamemasters.” And, conscious of its predecessors, the book’s a rich source of inspiration; a grimoire seeding new myths.
Though he’s written short stories and three self-published novels, Jess Nevins is likely best known as an excavator of fantastic fictions past: an archaeologist digging through the strata of the prose of bygone years, unearthing now pieces of story and now blackened ashes of some once-thriving genre long since consumed and built over by its lineal successor. Across annotated guides (three to Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, one to Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham’s Fables) and self-published encyclopedias (of Pulps and of Golden Age Superheroes with Pulp Heroes soon to come, as well as 2005’s Monkeybrain-published Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana) Nevins has reassembled old pieces of fantastika, indicating direct influences on modern writing and establishing directories of almost-forgotten story. He’s one of the people broadening the history of genre, in his books, and in articles such as 
Having finally posted reviews of all the movies I saw at the 2016 Fantasia International Film Festival, I want by way of conclusion to think about what I’ve learned. I don’t just mean about film, or about the film industry. But about genre, and what genre does, and how it works on film.
Wednesday, August 3, was the last day of the Fantasia International Film Festival. Three full weeks of genre films would wrap up here, and I was looking forward to the three last films of the year. The day would begin with the Chinese martial-arts film Judge Archer (Jianshi liu baiyuan). After that came the independent American movie If There’s a Hell Below, promising a paranoid thriller about whistleblowers and government surveillance. Finally came a movie I’d been eagerly anticipating since the start of the festival, the Polish science-fictional classic from 1977 On the Silver Globe (Na srebrnym globie), a space opera about colonization and war on an alien planet. All three were rewarding, and all three were pleasantly (and increasingly) elliptical.
Tuesday, August 2, was the next-to-last day of the 2016 Fantasia festival. I had two movies lined up. First would come The Arbalest, at the De Sève Theatre: a period fantasy about a man who made an addictive puzzle in a slightly alternate 1970s. That would be followed by The Piper (Sonmin), a Korean film that reimagined the Pied Piper story as set in a postwar Korean village. Both looked promising. One delivered on that promise.
By Monday, August 1, the end of the 2016 Fantasia Film Festival was in sight. Two more days, and it’d be over for another year. Bearing that in mind I was determined to pass by the Festival’s screening room and catch up with some films I’d missed earlier in the festival. First, though, I was headed to the De Séve Theatre for a showing of the American-Polish science-fiction movie Embers, about a world struck by a plague of forgetting. After that I’d go to the screening room, where I’d watch the French absurdist comedy L’Élan and the Mexican horror-fantasy We Are the Flesh (Tenemos la carne).
As the evening of Sunday, July 31, began I was looking forward to two films I planned to see at the Hall Theatre. The directors of both movies had interesting track records. Before I Wake, following the strange events surrounding an orphan boy whose dreams cross over into reality, was a new film from Oculus director Mike Flanagan. After that would come The Top Secret: Murder in Mind (Himitsu the Top Secret), a science-fiction murder mystery from Keishi Otomo, maker of the 
On the morning of Sunday, August 1, I was in no particular hurry to get to the Hall Theatre. I planned to see the Korean zombie movie Train to Busan, but knowing it had already played the large room of the Hall once I didn’t anticipate I’d have difficulty finding a seat. I intended after that to go across the street to the De Sève Theatre, where I’d watch Operation: Avalanche, a found-footage fiction about filmmakers who’d faked the moon landing in 1969. Then I’d go have a bite to eat and come back for two more movies. It sounded like a nice well-spaced day, but when I got to the Hall ten minutes before Train to Busan was scheduled to start I found I’d radically underestimated the film’s popularity. As the doors opened to let the ticket-holders in, the line stretched around the corner, up to the next street, and then around the corner there. Luckily enough, I was able to find a good seat in the back of the Hall, where I watched the auditorium fill up with an enthusiastic crowd.