Pulp Fiction Scholar Savages Jonathan Mayberry's Weird Tales Fantasy Magazine Revival

It seems as if skinsuits are a popular past-time of OldPub writers who still haven't fled the old system. Even legacy magazines from the heyday of the pulp era aren't safe from crusaders injecting their tired politics into them, which a pulp fiction scholar noticed about Jonathan Mayberry’s revival of Weird Tales.

It's not as well known today, but Weird Tales is one of the most important magazines of the pulp era. It ran from 1923-1956, though it was founded the year prior in 1922. Throughout its three-decade run, the ship was mainly steered by two editors, Farnsworth Wright and Dorothy McIllraith. The former ran the magazine through the 1930s before illness took his life too soon, and the latter for the remainder of the magazine's life span.

Weird Tales was responsible for breaking meteoric writers such as Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and Clark Ashton Smith, among many others, over its three-decade run. This naturally made it a prime target for "revivals" over the years. Many entrepreneurs decided to spend money on the IP to run their own magazine, but it never lasted for long. The original magazine folded for a good reason: readers and the market moved on. When the pulp market dried up and the magazine folded, many thought that was where it would end. However, with the passage of time and publishers such as Arkham House, the legacy of the magazine lived on, bringing greater focus on the magazine's hidden quality.

This is where the revivals come in.

Jonathan Maberry is the newest writer to buy the name and throw his own hat into the ring to cash in on the legacy of the storied magazine. Could he finally succeed where every revival attempt since 1956 has failed and bring the magazine back to its heights? According to Weird Tales scholar Terence E. Hanley, no.

Mr. Hanley keeps his writings on his blog, Tellers of Weird Tales, where he dives into biographical information, story detail, history, and general trivia one might not expect. His site has been active since 2011 and is a treasure trove for those seeking information about the legendary magazine. He has also had his work published in non-fiction, such as the revamped and expanded Weird Tales Story originally by Robert Weinberg, which covered the history of the magazine. In other words, Mr. Hanley is very knowledgeable about the subject and knows what makes a Weird Tale. According to him, this magazine falls short of the mark.

Starting in October, Mr. Hanley decided to finally tackle the new issue of Weird Tales for his blog and was less than impressed. He has engaged in a series of ongoing posts dissecting and reviewing the magazine and what does and does not work. His entries cover the art, the advertisements (and there are plenty!), and how the stories themselves do not live up to the Weird Tales spirit. His complaints include poor editing and proofreading, abundant ads, stories that are not only not weird tales but are hostile to the concept of weird, and strange decisions like increasing the font size of the final story to pad page count. Overall, the revival is a mess.

In a post, he says, “Readers seem to have become relegated to some lower status in all of this. The purpose of the magazine instead seems to be to serve the publisher, the editor, and its contributors.) Even the advertisements are self-referential, or meta. You won't see an ad for a truss or a gun or anything about the Rosicrucians. Not that we want to.”

He also accuses the magazine of using larger fonts to act like there’s more content, “I don't have word counts for any of the stories or essays, but I can tell you that they are printed in pretty large fonts with wide spacing between lines. It looks like most of the text in prose is printed in about a 9-point font. However, the last story, "Call of the Void--L'appel du Vide" by Carol Gyzander, is printed in about an 11-point font. To me that looks like an attempt to fill out the remaining page count with what would otherwise have been a shorter story.”

Finally, he criticizes the work as being a vanity project for Mayberry. In a post about issue #367, Hanley states, “we can see now that Weird Tales #367 is, more or less, a vanity project or a creation of a sort of clique. Their box is actually a sandbox. Some, though not all, of the authors in this issue are inside of it, I think. It must be cramped in there.”

The idea that Jonathan Maberry made this magazine to get his friends work, free clout, and to make a couple of dollars might be seen as a bit extreme of a charge. However, Maberry decided to advertise his officially licensed Weird Tales novel as the "First" Weird Tales novel despite that being very much not true. Why would you lie about a subject like this when the only people who would be interested are those who know the history of the thing you're selling?

The Hugo award finalist Cirsova Magazine has also commented on this iteration of Weird Tales, which is damaging the legacy of the magazine Maberry purports to love. Cirsova said, “the guy who's behind the most recent woke relaunch of Weird Tales just slapped the Weird Tales logo on his own book and called "The first Weird Tales novel. #stolenvalor”

This reboot of Weird Tales, despite employing every modern writer under OldPub's thumb, has made no splash in the industry and has more or less been forgotten in lieu of Maberry's lucrative merchandise store where you can buy a goofy shirt of Cthulu as the baby in a parody of Nirvana's Nevermind album from the 1990s. You can buy one for yourself at the Official Weird Tales store ("https://weirdtalesmerch.com/) and show everyone just how hip you are and how silly cosmic horror is. That is the intent of Weird Tales, is it not?

Some words might be gleaned from Jonathan Mayberry himself, who posted to Twitter about the topic in 2019 showing his bias against old pulp writers and a predisposition to woke content, “So, yeah, WEIRD TALES is back. I'm editorial director. My goal is to find exceptional stories from writers of all kinds. None of the racism, sexism, and homophobia that was once associated with this title. And I'm having a hell of a lot of fun.”

Will this relaunch succeed where every single other attempt has failed in the half-century since the magazine originally folded? Well, if his original quest to remove the "racism" and "sexism" from the magazine is accurate, then the answer is clear.

All signs point to Weird Tales being a hollow skinsuit of the great fantasy magazine it once was.

Guest Post by Richard Merritt

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For some great classic fantasy and science fiction that is more in line with the classic pulps, get Star Wanderers by JD Cowan.

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