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Adventure/Pulp era costumes?


Rapheal
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Not very helpful but thanks.

 

Just think Indiana Jones and work from there. Pulp is usually defined as the interwar period, from the mid 20s to the late 30s. You start to get into Victorian the closer you get to WWI and you get into the radical changes wrought by WWII when you get into the 40s and beyond. I'd say err on the side of looking more Victorian and less postwar.

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I was thinkin' along the lines of ARCHETYPES.

 

1930s gangster outfits could cover any number of pulp villains. Add a toy octopus clinging to your head, or perhaps an Elder Sign, and you have a Call of Cthulhu character!

 

Anyone shows up painted Jersey Shore Tan Orange and with a torn shirt, I'll know he's supposed to be Doc Savage. I suppose you could come as Long Tom, Ham, Renny, or one of Doc's other assistants, but aside from Monk, none of them were very recognizable as far as cosplay goes; Ham comes closest, but by today's standards, most people would assume you were dressing up like a butler.

 

A suit and fedora could be any number of pulp characters and detectives. Add an opera cape and a prominent automatic pistol, and you have The Shadow. Add a domino mask, and you have the Crimson Avenger or the Green Hornet. All three of these guys were pretty much interchangeable aside from their suit colors and what their guns were loaded with.

 

Khakis and a bush hat give us Allan Quartermain, particularly if equipped with elephant gun (what's the gun policy at Reapercon, anyway? A lot of cons have some really sharp restrictions about toy weapons as part of cosplay). If Quartermain is too 1800s for you, switch the bush hat for pith helmet, and go as Congo Bill, Jungle Jim, or any number of Egyptologists who came to a bad end.

 

The Rocketeer (from the Dave Stevens comics and the Disney movie) were sorta kinda WWII, but I'd let 'em in on the sheer fun pulpy feel of it. Then again, I'd let the King of the Rocketmen in, as well as Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, Flash Gordon, his twin Buck Rogers, and the Zombies From The Stratosphere, especially the one played by a very young Leonard Nimoy. True, this was more postwar than pulp, but the flavor is very pulplike indeed -- just more cinematic than literary.

 

A truly ungodly amount of pulp literature was written about the Wild West. This being Texas, I would judge cowboy outfits rather stiffly -- none of this "cheap stetson, cheap boots, jeans, and western shirt" nonsense, unless you bring a guitar and make like Gene Autry. But I'd allow extra points for reasonably accurate replication of the Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels era of "The Lone Ranger." We remember him from movies, but he got his start in pulp... as did Zorro.

 

Come to think about it, a fair amount of pulp literature was written about pirates, as well -- Captain Blood was pure pulp adventure before it was collected and novelized. Musketeers, on the other hand, while equally swashbuckling, were written as novels, and don't really qualify as pulp.

 

Hey, what about planetary romances? Edgar Rice Burroughs PWND the pulps... could we get Bryan to ditch the Slave Leia costume and maybe come as Dejah Thoris?

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I will argue that it can go back into the Victorian period. Jules Verne wrote pulp adventure.

 

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)

A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864)

Around the World in Eighty Days (1873)

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs is also classic pulp adventure. Princess of Mars, Tarzan, Pellucidar....

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Dr. Bedlam has the best answer so far.

 

"Pulp", as originally defined, is fiction that was written quickly (and usually formulaically) for publication in digest-sized magazines published on pulp paper. These magazines usually published stories in specific, tightly defined genres such as science fiction, horror, true crime, western adventure, or romance.

 

This covers Doc Savage, of course, but it also covers Conan (sorry Heisler), lost worlds adventures, HP Lovecraft, quite a bit of space opera, and many other genres. The majority were set in the interwar period (1919 - 1939), so that's what comes to mind for most people when the period is discussed, but that's certainly not a requirement.

 

"Pulp", when referred to as a gaming genre, usually means adventure fiction with vaguely plausible technology (and no well-defined magic) set in the 20s and 30s, which is just the best-known sub-genre of its original meaning.

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*blinks* Ooooooo an excuse to bring the whole steamchair without being an absolute goof and finding a way to make a "base" for it so I could enter it in the open category. Now to find out if George has room in his car as getting all of it through airport security is an abject pain in the butt...

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I would not put Conan in there as pulp. He is pure fantasy, unless you want to call all fantasy pulp.

 

Just because the Conan property now transcends pulp into other markets doesn't mean it's origins didn't begin in pulp. One of, if not the, first appearance of Conan was in a story called "The Phoenix on the Sword" and was published in 1932 in Weird Tales magazine. Many other Conan stories were also published in Weird Tales before Howard's death in 1936. Movies and TV series aside, Conan will always be pulp to me.

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