I Love My Job Pt. 2,465

Part of my role as Pulp 2.0 Press' Mad Pulp Bastard is to design the advertising that will go into our books in both Kindle and print.  If you study all of the old paperbacks and pulps of yesteryear you will see many simple designs hawking next month's great adventure. I've found that many of those ads were really simple - single color, minimal text, and a primary image that holds your attention. 


Of course, we want to do something similar with our books, so I spend a little time in research using the web to peruse old pulps, paperbacks and lobby cards. Then I pull out the pencils and some scrap paper and start sketching a few things out.

Bottom line, after an hour or so we end up with something like this:

This advertisement will be in the upcoming RADIO WESTERN ADVENTURES  available from the Kindle store in October for the low, low price of only $2.99.

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Pulp 2.0 Design for Return of the Originals

I am friends with Mike Bullock, the writer of the upcoming BLACK BAT series  for Moonstone Books. As Mike has been out and about  the internet stumping for his book  which you can read about here, those of us over at the Pulp Factory Yahoo Group have been discussing how to market pulp stories and concepts to today's audience -- specifically at the comic shop.

The conclusion is that you have to take every opportunity you can to get your work seen by the right eyes and that means thinking outside the box of just your usual suspects.

Well since I was getting ready to tackle some new design work - I thought it would be good to do some quick design "sketches" as a warmup to the really heavy lifting I'm going to be doing.  Mike had a flyer for Moonstone's RETURN OF THE ORIGINALS and I asked him if I could get an image from him to play around with... he graciously agreed. So  after a couple hours I  fan-ficced their flyer.

And here's the result:

You can add it to your desktop if you want. Maybe it will remind you to ask your local comic shop retailer you want to take a look at these comics.  [Take the hint and just order the books] 

I kept it simple and widescreen - because of course,  I like it like that - and made the color palette something that would play against the deep blue of the original art.  Red, yellow and blue is an excellent color combination. Just ask Superman. 

It sort of reminds me of one of those newspaper box inserts you see in the big cities (which might be a really cool way to sell newspaper sized comics that have tons of big ads in them!) or an old serial lobby card (which might be a cool way to sell more comics - a cool serial adventure!). 

In any case it was fun and a good warmup for the pulp to come. 

Widescreen Keyart Lives!

Courtesy of Focus features and The Los Angeles Times:

Not a lobbycard, but a newspaper box insert... still very cool though. 

Retro Poster Design Tutorial

Tim Shrumm sent me a link from Adam Levermore on How to Design a Retro Sci Fi Poster.

This is excellent, step-by-step instruction on creating your own pulpy comic and mag covers.

Get out there and fire up your Photoshop!

This Cover is Made of All Sorts of Awesome

Pulp Design Strikes Again: Tonci's MURDERERS

Found it here.

Suffering shades of Toth!

Pulp Design Strikes Again: THE AMERICAN Movie Poster

Found it here.

Simple. Clean. Tells a story.

Old school brought forward.

Now if only it were widescreen... sigh.

Pulp Profile: Mike Fyles

Peter Miller has a profile piece up on pulp artist Mike Fyles that you should check out. 

Especially a link to a tutorial Mike has on creating a pulp illustration.

I have a couple of posts on Mike here.

Create Better Pulp Now!

Whether you're a writer, designer, artist, screenwriter or whatever you often need the fuel to get off your ass (or on it as the case may be) and create something.  As regular readers of this blog know:

THE BEST WAY TO LEARN SOMETHING IS BY DOING IT.

By doing something, learning from the action and the post-game analysis you get to a point in your creative cycle where you aren't daunted by the task.  Where you do it because deep down in the core of your being you've already done this and survived. Now you can just focus on getting better and distinctive.

So since I'm on deadline with about five different things, I thought I would send you off into your weekend with a Top 5 list of ways to get the best pulp out of your head and out into the world.


1. KNOW THE RULES

Don't reinvent the wheel.  Pulp comes with expectations from the audience.  They want to be entertained first and foremost - given a ticket to a fictional roller coaster ride - and they've come to expect that there is a buildup as the cars climb to the top of the hill right before that headlong plunge into adventure or romance or horror or whatever.

If you know the rules you know how to meet then exceed their expectations. Give them the roller coaster ride they'll want to hop back on later, and tell all their friends about.

If you're a writer you must read this.  It works. Screenwriters should also read this.

Artists and designers should go here.  And here.  And definitely here.

Again, know the rules back and forth.  Know what has come before so you can subvert expectation - add that turn to the roller coaster the audience wasn't expecting.

2. GIVE IT (A) CHARACTER

People watch television series and read series books because they want to see their favorite character in new situations.  The plots are important, but it's the characters that keep 'em coming back for more.

Make them memorable. Give them strengths and weaknesses and quirks and touchstones so that people know instantly who they are dealing with...

Then throw a wrench into their expectation machinery.  Let them like who they see or read, but then allow them to discover something else about your character that's surprising yet perfectly plausible.

For artists  this is usually done through character's expressions, their "look" and the overall design. If your character is in a dire situation maybe he's laughing instead of all grim.  Maybe a tattooed Chinese assassin cries after each kill. Maybe a detective solves cases by using just four senses because he's blind.

Maybe ( insert your idea here)...

3. GIVE IT MOMENTUM

Pulps give no man time to pause. Just like the roller coaster - once the car tips over the top - pulp is headed on a thrilling plunge through to its final destination.  Twists, turns, flips, complications, decisions... new perspectives for the audience to experience.

Make it fast.  Make it exciting.  Make it have a different perspective that says - this is entertainment. 

4. DO THE WORK

You want to write/draw/create better pulp?  Then you'd better create a lot of it.  That means sitting down and actually working on something. Don't put it off. There is no tomorrow.

We ALL fall victim to juggling deadlines and lack of prioritizing.  Make a commitment that you're going to do something every day - preferably at a specific time.  You will be surprised at what a little each day can accomplish.

Three pages a day of screenwriting yields a good first draft script in 30 days.  Ditto for novellas.

 The more you accomplish the better, the more accomplished you will feel.  It isn't impossible it just takes someone willing to take the first step.

Old Chinese saying:

The person who says something is impossible should not interrupt the person who is doing it.

That person who says it's impossible is usually you so shut off that negative voice in your head that tells  you to turn on the tube or play Halo 3 and just do the work.

5.  GET IT OUT THERE AND MOVE ON TO THE NEXT ONE

Pulp writers and artists and serial filmmakers all had one thing in common - as soon as they finished one, they moved onto the next one.  That's how they got paid - by the word.  They didn't worry about whether or not it would sell, they just  kept on with the work knowing the value was in the output. 

In today's world it works the same way. Movie studios with large film libraries are better off than others because they have a constant source of income.  Some movie may not sell now, but others will. Eventually they all sell somewhere.  Employers or galleries want to see a portfolio of work. Agents ask, "What else ya got?"

You can't get hung up on the one because you're too busy building the many.  You want to be productive.  You want to be active in your creativity (especially if you have a day job).


So get out there and create some great pulp no matter what it is that you're doing.

Pulp is not a medium. It's an Extra Large.

FRINGE: NOIR

I would watch this show every week faithfully at 9pm (instead of time-shifting as I normally do) if it looked like this while still keeping the same weird subject matter. 

What Makes Pulp 2.0 Press Different...

Joe Konrath and Lee Goldberg have been having an interesting discussion regarding the sales on Lee's .357 VIGILANTE series, leading to Lee figuring a few things out:

What did I learn?

1. Your covers should have a clear, simple, striking image that will still pop out when the cover is reduced to the size of a postage stamp.

2. Your covers need to have a consistent, branded look.

3. Don't be afraid to experiment, to rethink everything about how your book is presented: the title, the cover art, the categories its listed under, the way you describe it, the way you've priced it. Just because your book has been posted, that doesn't mean it's been carved in stone and can't be altered. You need to adapt to find your audience. In other words, you can't just post your book on the Kindle and leave it. Your book will continue to need attention and, if necessary, updating to stoke sales.

 At one point I wanted to license Lee's .357 VIGILANTE series, but the economy hit and I had to concentrate on other things. I am glad Lee is learning the lessons we've known here at Pulp 2.0 for awhile  now, and having greater success because of it:

• People DO judge a book by its cover.
• It needs to work in a variety of formats in order to be the most effective - as a thumbnail, a web banner, a poster and yes - as a book cover. 
• The book inside is the steak - you need to sell the sizzle because an entertainment purchase is an emotional decision.
• Add value to the book wherever you can. Your customers deserve it. 

And finally,  and perhaps most importantly...

THE BOOK IS ONLY THE BEGINNING...

At Pulp 2.0 Press we have these discussions all the time - via email, over the phone and in person.  We want you to read our books, but we also want you to experience them.  Call that transmedia or multiplatform or whatever... it's an important factor in how we approach what we do here. 

So when you make the decision to purchase a Pulp 2.0 book you should understand that we're going to use all of the buffalo in creating something unique and entertaining to which you can connect. That means the story, the cover, the medium and the "goodies" - it's the whole package.

www.pulp2ohpress.com
www.facebook.com/pulp2ohpress
www.twitter.com/madpulpbastard

You'll soon be seeing some of that difference here on the web.  Stay tuned. 

EDIT TO ADD:  Seems Joe Konrath agrees with me on some things.

Victory to the Daleks!

Not only for a cool episode last night, but for this WWII propaganda-inspired bit of pulpiness!


EXTERMINATE!
EXTERMINATE!
EXTERMINATE!

What's Your (Tri)Angle?

I've been watching a lot of video lately - a lot.  (Can you hear the absolute sorrow in my voice as I say that? )  I'm watching this video for a consulting gig I have with a client to maximize the entertainment value of their video assets for the web.  That means helping their media department develop their visual communication skills so that long streams of technical dialogue and jargon don't come off as boring.

Remember -- a picture is worth a thousand words. 

I've also been looking at a lot of indie video (mostly horror and scifi) that thinks it's the bee's knee's, and is trying to get distribution (a whole other Oprah)  but is actually framed  so poorly in the camera you want to click YouTube off after five seconds.

Quite frankly, it's pissing me off. 

We live in an era where highly sophisticated technical devices and software are available to the average consumer for a very reasonable price. We also live in an era where we have a tremendous visual library at our fingertips ready for us to draw upon (pun intended).

Never before have we handed over the keys (equipment and know-how)  to creating professionally-looking film and video to so many folks... and they don't know what to do with it.  
 
You've seen the videos I'm talking about - movies made by folks who purport to be horror fans, yet when they shoot a scene it's framed so... blandly, that the horror and fear they are trying to invoke in the viewer just isn't there.  The monster is walking around in a medium shot fully lit, instead of skulking in the shadows looking up and readying to strike its prey.  It's not funny.  It's not an intended effect.

It's just really bad. 

And no, I'm not talking about kid's videos either. I'm talking about adults who have purchased very good equipment and don't know how to use it to communicate visually... at all.  The best analogy would be a radio announcer who's calling the baseball game and saying everything...

in. that. same. monotone. voice. that. never. rises. nor. falls. 

It's boring.  Boiling water is more exciting to watch.

And then there's the indie film fucks ... folks out there who are always saying that they want to capture a real moment.  I'm sorry but that's just pretentious whanker bullshit. Somebody tells you that, your alarm bells better go off because this sis someone who doesn't know what film is...

(To borrow from Hitchcock)  Film is reality with all of the boring bits cut out.   The audience doesn't need "reality" - they need and require entertainment.  They need visual storytelling that keeps them interested even when there are only two people in the room. 

So how do you do that?  How do you frame your camera so you have something visually interesting going on even when the scene is just two people talking in a room?

I'm going to show you a quick technique that works every time.  It's easy to learn, subtle (or not) and can help you when you're stuck in staging a scene.  It shouts "This is important" to the viewer even when the action within the shot is static.  What I'm talking about is called FINDING THE TRIANGLE.

Below are some examples of commercial illustration by Mort Kunstler. It's all pulpy and all 'designed' to be exciting, but the same technique Kunstler uses to design these pictures is the same technique you can use when framing your shots.  It works.  

Note how the angle of the figures in the foreground lead the eye toward the smoking wreck of a plane in the background.  You can see triangle (actually several triangles - you can also follow the wing from the upper left down to the soldier with arm outstretched) that I've marked out here in red.

Note the angle and how it gives the scene an air of urgency and importance.  Now imagine these ladies coming directly at you as they drag the wounded pilot away.


That would be pretty damn exciting.



But how does it work for long shots where the action is shot from further away with a longer lens?  Take a look:

We're pretty far away from the action - the machine gunner here - but our eye is drawn directly to the action because we are framed right within the triangle.


He could be a butler walking in to serve food and our eye would pick him out first because of the visual storytelling  at work here.

Triangular composition = more entertainment value within the frame.  In this case we instinctively know this guy is important.




It also (especially) works for more intimate scenes:

We have three triangle going on here:

The Yellow triangle of the woman (and the fact she's in the foreground) tells us she's important.


The (Red/blue) triangle formed by her leg up against the wall (Hello, Mrs. Robinson!) points us to the man in the background... He HAS to be important too...

And the angle he's sitting at  (Blue) suggests the money on the table is important...

Now imagine how boring this would be if we were shooting this scene on set and moved the camera right, to frame this scene with the actress on the left side of the frame and the guy on the right.

No triangle.  You'd be left with a rectangular (static) composition.  A visual story that had little to tell and all of it monotone.

Here's another to get your eyes accustomed to looking for the triangle - even in the most unlikely of compositions:

Even within the box-like confines of the door frame (or is this a window frame?) you can see a triangular dynamic going on - his gun upraised, leading the eye to the lovely lady in the lingerie in the background.

Or our hero in the foreground who's framed so that he has his own triangle concentrating on his face.

Or the edge of the table providing the base of a triangle focusing on the lady's beautiful legs thrashing in the background (part of that larger triangle from earlier but framed in such a way so that you could go to a closeup of her face or her legs thrashing and cut back to this shot with a minimum of fuss (camera movement, lighting adjust) ...

and still have a shot that's visually a winner.

And that's what your audience wants - a winner.  Whenever they pick up your comic or your movie or your web video - they're rooting for you to be a winner. A visual storyteller who will entertain them.

Your job is to find the right angle of approach.

So tell me how many triangles there are in this composition:

Courtesy: Accidental Mysteries

Warning! Warning!

I have a couple of new media and pulp design rants building up inside of me...

I'm a little angry at indie film folk who cling to the old (ancient, decrepit, laborious, expensive) ways out of some misguided attempt at ego-stroking instead of you know,  actually making the best storytelling media possible.

Clive Frayne is one of those guys who's rethinking things... not reinventing the wheel, but making sure the wheels are on his media cart.  Give this a read.  

I'll be back.

Inspirational Pulp

One of the blogs that I read closely is Leif Peng's TODAY'S INSPIRATION - an illustration and design blog covering a host of illustrators, techniques and so forth from the 30's, 40's and 50's.

Leif has recently been chronicling the advent of the "paper-bounds"  - the cheap paperbacks that were the only books of that 1950's publishing era that were experiencing market growth. His source of information is a Sept. 1953 article from Fortune magazine and it certainly is an eye-opener in terms of how the market conditions then can be applied to today's publishing and media.

Here's a small sample of the pulpy goodness found in these blog posts:

Paper-bound publishers say their market is made up mostly of people who used to read only magazines, who are intimidated by the forbidding air of a bookstore, and who can afford perhaps a small fraction of the price of most new hard-cover books.

They buy and read on the move, picking books off a rack or newsstand to read while commuting or traveling or during a frenzied day of changing diapers and making meals. They are impulse buyers who pick books at point of sale, and after reading them, throw them away or pass them on to someone else. Few paper-bound buyers, say the publishers, want to keep the books as personal possessions or "furniture."

The Rise of the Paper-Bounds

Paper Bounds: "Give the people what they want" 

The Art of the Paper-Bounds: "... a mélange of sex and violence."

Paper-Bounds: Crunching the Numbers 

And Leif has been illustrating his posts with photos from UK Vintage

Meet the New Face of Pulp

I'm not talking about Ms. Saldana - though one could argue that between THE LOSERS and AVATAR she's hitting the "pulp genres" one at a time...

No, I'm looking at this poster as an extension/ evolution of the pulp design aesthetic:

Simple design.
Action-packed as if plucked from a scene in the story.
Colorful.
A bold title that makes you want to open up the contents and read.
Clearly part of a series...

Oh, and she's hot.  Very hot...

Because she has that pulp attitude.

A Rough Pulp Sketch...

You never know where an idea will come from. In this particular instance it came from  pal Jim Henshaw bustin' my balls over my cap and goggles seen here.

So I sketched out this rough idea, and I'll get back to it when time allows.

But I realize now as I look at it that the character needs a 1920-30's Indian motorcycle and a raygun of some sort...

More on that after I let my subconscious play for awhile.

Westward Ho!

In between discussing the classic monsters on Twitter I've been reworking my initial stabs at designing a western pulp.  I'm not reinventing the western pulp, but rather enhancing those aspects of the form that equate to creating a distinctive piece of media that stands out in a crowd of other pulp publishers.  You take one look at it and know it's a Pulp 2.0 Press book.

Let's face facts that I'm the "little guy" here, so Pulp 2.0 has to try harder to make something that speaks more to the western-reading audience than the multitude of paperback series out there.  We have to give the audience what it wants, but in a new and interesting way.  If I've done my research properly - that means I'll have a sale.

So I'm not just creating a book out of someone's tale, but rather creating a distinctive collector's item that has and holds value.  This is especially true for the print versions of the book which costs more than the digital versions we will eventually produce and release. 

So I'm pushing the envelope a bit in some areas, but my thinking has been  tracked on going back to the source material and seeing if there were some visual and design tropes we seem to have forgotten along the way as westerns moved from "dime novels" to "pulps" and on into "paperbacks" and hardcover books. I hope I can find some ideas within the 20 or so books I've downloa...er, acquired to review and dissect.  Thus far, I've found there are some book/pulp  design ideas that seem promising in that, "Oh, that looks interesting," sort of way. I'm not a big fan of western books (that's my father's area), but I'm a western serial fan. I hope to work in some of the details that speak to serials as well. 

All of our books have a "movie feel" to them - as if you've heard of that movie, but never saw it, and here you are looking at the novelization.  I come from a movie background obviously and tend to see things in those terms. That's while you'll find a movie "credit block" on the back of BROTHER BLOOD.  It's a blaxploitation movie that hasn't been made yet.

Thus far with this western, I've decided to go with a cream-colored paper to mimic that original pulp paper hue we all know so well.  If I can recreate that western pulp feeling then people like my father will buy into the whole story the author is pitching.. It's written in a very classic mold and uses "classic characters" (to say more would give it away).

 I'll keep you posted as to my progress. Something just arrived in the mail....

(OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG...)

Pulp Requires A Certain Look...

And it takes persons of a certain sensibility to achieve that look.

People like Kevin Conran.

Go. Look. Learn.

Illustrated "Bat-Pulp"

I saw this wonderful piece of Gotham by Gaslight artwork by Mike Mignola floating around the web so I thought I would use it to make a quarterly pulp- style magazine.  If only DC would take the hint and do what Moonstone does with their characters.

I'd love to see a quarterly illustrated (B&W naturally) pulp mag with stories featuring characters like Batman, The Crimson Avenger, The Sandman (Mystery Theater version), Slam Bradley and others.

Enough art, now I have to get to writing...


The Batman is (c) and TM 2010 by DC Comics. Original artwork by Mike Mignola.