Mexican Pulp Art is a true oddity: a collection of covers from Mexican pulp novels and comic books from the sixties and seventies. While some of you might be familiar with American pulp novels of that era, Mexican artists and writers took their smut to the next level. Beyond merely being racy and sexy, south-of-the-border pulp art blended the supernatural with already existing pulp and noir tropes, like a drug-addled mishmash of Jorge Luis Borges and Philip K. Dick:
The protagonists in these micro-cuentos tend to be ordinary people facing common challenges in life such as alcoholism, domestic disputes, or infidelity. Frequently the characters are not heroic in nature but simply ordinary people confronting complicated dilemmas. The most popular storylines appear repeatedly. One example is Las Aventuras de Concho (“The Adventures of Concho”) that begins in Micro-Suspenso at approximately #400. The story tells the escapades of a quirky impoverished boy named “Concho” who wears a distinctive newsboy hat. Poor decisions and risky behavior to stay alive on the street perpetually place Concho in dangerous situations that escalate into outlandish predicaments and unexpected calamities. The ending usually leaves the reader in dismay regarding the character’s misfortune.
Mexican Pulp Art is a full-color compilation of the craziest, weirdest and most outright insane cover art you’ll ever see. The brief introduction by Maria Cristina Tavera does a good job of setting up the book’s strangeness; since the vast majority of it is images, you can flip through it in about an hour.
While I’d have appreciated a bit more context in the book’s intro, Mexican Pulp Art is an interesting diversion if you’re into the weird and bizarre.
Click here to buy Mexican Pulp Art.
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