This is a book about movies. Why, then, devote a chapter to magazines? As mentioned, the brain motif cuts not only across filmic genres, but also across media. Variations of the plots, characters, and settings we see on screen can be encountered in literatures of diverse kinds, long and short, high and low. Yet no connection has been stronger than that between “pulp magazines” specializing in science fiction (SF) and brainfilms of the B-to-Z sort. Popular in the United States between the late nineteenth century and the 1950s, the name by which those inexpensive magazines are known derives from the wood pulp paper on which they were printed. The New Republic in 1929 and Vanity Fair in 1933 called them “magazines for morons” and “day-dreams for the masses” (Cheng 2012, 20). Not for nothing, what the empty-headed fashion model Marion distractedly reads during a photo session in the musical Funny Face (1957) is Minute Men from Mars, a comic book whose colorful cover evokes the alien-invasion pulp aesthetic. Though in an exclusively negative mode, highbrow commentators’ disdainful assessments betray discomfort at the huge repercussion of those magazines on the individual and the collective imagination.

Pulps are “paraliterature” (Baldick 2015, 266; Boyer 2008) in the same way that so many B-to-Zs are paracinema. While, like the latter, they have become cult and worthy of scholarly attention, they are hardly known beyond fans and specialists.