I’ve been deeply saddened and depressed by the London riots and have been trying to distract myself by going through my rainy day projects. One of those was to go through the dozens of pages of hand-written notes I’ve assembled over the past fifteen years on the pulps and add them into the manuscript for The Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes. This sort of thing is time-intensive, which is why I’ve put it off, but because it’s time-intensive it’s a good palliative for depression. As are the over-the-top ideas in the pulps—which in this case means any story or comic strip or movie with the pulp aesthetic. To wit:

• a female Ethiopian spy leading a battalion of lepers into battle against the invading Italians.
• a teenaged sailor discovering a Neanderthal raised in the jungle by talking lions. That’s right: caveman Tarzan.
• Buffalo Bill acquiring a Chinese cowboy sidekick and fighting Aztec mummies, decades before El Santo et al got there.
• Charlie Chan fighting a Mad Scientist who has created a telepathic Brain In A Jar.
• A brahmin Mad Scientist with a lab full of Dalit (untouchable) workers, creating a death ray to use against the British.
• A sect of Buddhist stranglers—not Thuggee, Buddhists—as the hero’s recurring enemy.
• an Australian occult detective teaming up with a magic-wielding Hawaiian kahuna to defeat The Curse of the Pharaohs.
• in 1940, a German adventurer (in a German pulp) fighting an evil American android which bursts into flames and terrorizes German-Americans. The name of the android? “Lebende Fackel,” or “The Living Torch.”
• a 1915 Portuguese horror movie called The Faceless Man.
• a Japanese-Sikh Yellow Peril Mad Scientist, “Dr. Singh Nokita.”
• a yeti Brain In A Jar.
• the ghost rickshaws of Tokyo.
• a 1920 South African film about a Lost Race of white Africans living in a subterranean city underneath the Great Zimbabwe ruins.
• a novel about the Soviet attempt to find Roald Amundsen’s corpse so they can turn it into a zombie propagandist for the Soviet Union.
• a teenaged explorer, his wacky inventor sidekick, and their new best friend, a twelve-foot-tall Amazonian (sic), hunting a Megatherium (giant sloth).
• a Communist Mad Scientist bringing the dead back as ectoplasmic slaves, which will power the Mad Scientist’s SCIENCE! machines. 
• Mad Scientist makes a zombie unit to fight for the French at the front during World War One.
• An Egyptian dime novel from the late 1940s in which a creepy Egyptologist comes back to life after Egyptian peasants violate his tomb.
• “the Witch of the Bronx.”
• a murderous cult of Maya death-god (sic) worshipers in the tunnels underneath NYC’s sewers.
• a factory which creates robot mummies. Which are of course used for crime.
• a 1921 German western which is essentially the plot of the Will Smith Wild Wild West, with steam-powered weaponry but without the giant steam spider.
• an island of kaiju-sized wild boars.
• a 1919 Ugandan science fiction story about a WW1 German air pirate avenging himself on the Allies.
• Nat Pinkerton (forgotten now, a giant of 1900-1920 global popular literature) solving the conspiracy of President McKinley’s assassination; fighting a lion tamer who uses his lions to carry out murders for pay; pursuing but never quite catching Irene Adler; fighting a murderous orangutan; fighting a Big-Headed Dwarf Genius Yellow Peril; and discovering a city, underneath the Rockies, inhabited by the descendants of escaped slaves.
• a group of hearse-drivers who band together to use their hearses to rob banks.
• an A.J. Raffles/Arsene Lupin-like Gentleman Thief named “Johnny Four Toes.”
• an American radio show, which ran for four years, entitled Rajput, Hindu Secret Service Agent.
• an Austrian Mad Scientist who kidnaps American naval admirals, transfers their personalities into the Mad Scientist’s zombies, and extracts vital military intelligence from them.
• a Headless Aztec Horseman. (sic)
• in a Chinese newspaper comic strip, far-future Shanghai is ruled by sexually aggressive women. The thong is the only permitted piece of clothing. Women are expected to take several husbands at once.
• a German cowboy circus rider who solves “the Mystery of the House of Usher” and engineers the election of the Dalai Lama.
• “the Death Prophet of the Gauchos.”
• a Yellow Peril version of Jack the Ripper in London’s Chinatown.
• a Sherlock Holmes clone (one of hundreds during the pulps’ golden era) finding Sherlock Holmes’ body at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls.
• the same Sherlock Holmes clone’s faithful dog, Admiral Nelson, narrating an entire issue.
• the Flying Dutchman as a cursed airplane.
• a film in which a small German village is terrorized by men and women dying of blood loss, each with puncture wounds on their neck. Because it’s Germany, they all know that a vampire is loose, so they take all the usual steps to prevent vampire attacks, arm themselves, and go hunting for the vampire. It turns out a visiting English tourist is a Mad Scientist who needs the villagers’ blood for his own experiments and covered his tracks by making the attacks look like vampire attacks. 
• a Czech film from 1938 in which a female android is stolen from her inventor and used by a gang of thieves to commit crimes.