What I love about Pulp‘s cover is how it both does not and does accurately convey the book’s contents:

Pulp is not a Western. It is, instead, a noir thriller set in 1930s New York City. While the story includes a few frontier flashbacks to tales of cowboying and banditry, it largely takes place in a concrete jungle, not a desert. For this reason, if you found Pulp on your local bookshop’s shelves and cracked it open, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d found the wrong story bound inside.

And yet, Pulp‘s cover does a great job of conveying the story’s mood. That mood is of a man in conflict with a world and a life that he feels has left him by. In Pulp, the past both is and isn’t romanticized, and it is always in discussion with the present. The gritty pencils, bright colors, and faded tone that the Phillipses (Sean and Jacob) chose to adorn this cover with speak to a bygone era that, while exciting, maybe wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be. Turns out, everything’s always been brutal and hard.

We discussed Pulp in more detail on our podcast, Waiting on the Trade. If this post’s got you intrigued to check out Pulp, I’d encourage you to buy the book and give our discussion a listen.

(Want to check out more posts in the Cool Comic Covers series? If so, click here.)