Pulp by Brubaker and Phillips

Max Winter used to be an outlaw.  He, his brother, and their gang used to rob from those who had too much money, and they left more than a few bodies in their wake.  Now it’s 1939 and Max is an old man who makes a living by writing thinly veiled versions of these adventures for a Western pulp magazine.  But times are tough and circulation is down, so writing doesn’t pay what it used to.  As circumstances conspire to make Max’s situation with his wife Rosa even more precarious, he starts to figure a return to the good old days might be the only way for him to make it through.  That is, until a figure from his past shows up with a plan right along those lines.  The best part is that the people they’re robbing from are a group that really deserves it:  The Nazis.

Brubaker and Phillips’ graphic novella is about a lot of things.  The way the elderly are treated.  The decline of print media.  The resurgence of fascism.   The difficulty of finding good health care.  The problems of an indifferent society.  I could go on, but “Pulp” is, more than anything else, just a really good example of “geezer noir.”  Max is an effortlessly sympathetic protagonist, regardless of his history, and Brubaker makes sure his story has some interesting twists to keep it from being too predictable.  Phillips’ art is on point as always, giving us a wonderfully gritty pre-war vision of New York, made all the more vibrant by his son Jacob’s colors.

It does bear mentioning that while “Pulp” is about a lot of things, just about all of the subjects it brings up transcend the era that’s being written about here.  While Brubaker and Phillips do an excellent job of evoking New York in ‘39, this story could easily be set in the present day without changing too much of its core narrative structure.  So while this story may take place in a bygone era, its subject matter is timeless.  Regrettably so in some cases, but only if we fail to learn from its lessons about the past.