No greater tribute to the power of memes exists that the current occupant of the Cherry Blossom throne. If you follow me on the tweetbox you've probably noticed my recent predilection for challenging conventional wisdom using covers of the old pulps to make a definitive statements about them than you typically see. We start will a series of three covers that get people considering the lies they've been told about the old pulps, specifically the lies about women being marginalized and only present to make the male hero look good...
But these are really just a few left hand jabs to the body to get people to lower their guard. Then you hit them with the right hand cross smack on the snotbox:
You might think it's crazy for a guy trying to break into writing to spend this much time encouraging people to read old works that won't make me a dime, but that's because you haven't gone full Jeffro yet. These are salvos in a cultural war designed to deny ground to the enemy. They are designed to pull eyeballs away from the drek populating the shelves of the local Barnes and Noble and to rehabilitate the reputation of the old masters. This is a war of attrition, and every time somebody spends an hour reading a scan of a magazine like this, they'll spend ten hours less reading the meaningless post-modern works of the establishment publishing houses.
Then they'll start to look for the true heirs of Burroughs, Howard, and Moore. They won't find them coming out of MFA programs. They'll find them among like minded fans of the pulps. They'll find them in places like this: