Pulp by Ed Brubaker

The king of contemporary crime comics.

Pulp (July 2020) is a short graphic novel written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Sean Phillips, a team that has become renowned for their crime comics series such as Criminal and Fatale. The story is set in New York in 1939 and concerns an elderly pulp Western writer named Max Winters. Max is best-known for writing a series about a gunslinger called the Red River Kid. As the yarn opens, Max has submitted the latest installment to his editor, Mort, at Six-Gun Western magazine. The editor is pleased with the story except for the ending, which seems to indicate that the Kid and his sidekick are planning to retire to Mexico. Max explains that he wants to show the whole arc of his protagonist's life, not just his youthful days as an outlaw. 

Max: Howard did this exact thing with Conan and no one complained. Sometimes he's old... sometimes he's young...

Mort: Yeah, but he's never a fuckin' farmer in Mexico, is he?

The ending is redlined, and Max is sent on his way with a payment that has been reduced to two cents a word because, as the unsympathetic Mort explains, "our circulation went down forty percent last year.” 

As if his day weren’t already going badly enough, on his way home Max sees a young orthodox Jew being bullied by a pair of antisemitic thugs at the subway station. Unlike the other passersby, Max can’t ignore what’s happening and intervenes. He gets punched for his trouble, and in the midst of the beating that follows has a heart attack. As Max lies helpless on the ground, the two goons rob him of the money he was just paid.

Max survives the heart attack. A doctor gives him some pills and tells him to cut out alcohol and cigarettes. When he finally arrives home, he tells his younger wife, Rosa, about the mugging. She assures him that they’ll get by without the money somehow and goes to the kitchen to make him something to eat. Max reflects on how Rosa’s love saved his life and worries about the fact that, as he well knows, they really can’t get by without the money.

We then learn that Max’s pulp tales about the Red River Kid are really memories, stories about Max’s own life when he was an outlaw in the West known as the Red Rock Kid. After a reckless life of robbing and fighting, he really did retire to Mexico for a time, marry, and try his hand at farming. Now, struggling to get by and to support his Mexican wife in New York in his old age, he decides to resort to robbery once more. His plans are cut short, however, by an ex-FBI agent who has been following him for some time. Watching him case an armored car route, the agent has figured out what Max is up to and stops him from going through with it. Instead, he enlists Max into helping him rob American Nazis who are shipping cash to the Fatherland to support Hitler’s war. He explains, “We’d be robbing some people who deserve it... and it wouldn’t be like that suicide run you were planning.” 

The plot takes a few twists and turns on the way to the ending, and I won’t spoil it. I will say that the story is satisfyingly well-written and draws down to a conclusion that has the feeling of inevitability. Max has a dire philosophy about the way the world works that is never proven wrong. 

On a meta level, the story provides an interesting reflection on the fact that the late period of the Old West (the 1890s) was only thirty to forty years removed from the era of famous gangsters, the Great Depression, and the beginnings of World War II. People were beginning to drive around in automobiles back East at the same time the cattle wars were still going on out West. Time periods that seem distinct to us because of the movies blended into each other for the people who were alive then. Another meta-level reflection, one that makes the story feel especially relevant to our own time, is the reminder that, before our own entry into the war, a lot of Americans cheered on Hitler and supported his rise to power.