As I am educating myself on some of the classics, I looked up the definition of Pulp Fiction. This site had some good info:

https://vintagelibrary.com/pulpfiction/introduction/What-Is-Pulp-Fiction.php

Quoting:

What Is Pulp Fiction

Term originated from the magazines of the first half of the 20th century which were printed on cheap "pulp" paper and published fantastic, escapist fiction for the general entertainment of the mass audiences. The pulp fiction era provided a breeding ground for creative talent which would influence all forms of entertainment for decades to come. The hardboiled detective and science fiction genres were created by the freedom that the pulp fiction magazines provided.

Pulp Fiction is a term used to describe a huge amount of creative writing available to the American public in the early nineteen-hundreds. Termed "pulp magazines" because of the low quality paper used between the covers, these publications proliferated in the nineteen-thirties and nineteen-forties to the point where they blanketed newsstands in just about every popular fiction genre of the time.
Although the pages in-between the covers were a dingy cheap quality, the covers were beautifully decorated, many times with lurid portraits of pretty women in various stages of trouble, and the handsome men attempting to rescue them.
By under-paying writers and publishing on in-expensive media, pulp publishers were able to charge 10 cents for an issue containing several stories. Low prices drew in many working-class young adults and teenagers, who could not otherwise afford some of the more pricier magazines of the day.
The low price of the pulp magazine, coupled with the skyrocketing literacy rates, all contributed to the success of the medium. Pulps allowed its readers to experience people, places, and action they normally would not have access to.
Bigger-than-life heroes, pretty girls, exotic places, strange and mysterious villains all stalked the pages of the many issues available to the general public on the magazine stands. And without television widely available, much of the free time of the working literate class was spent pouring through the pages of the pulps.
World War Two brought paper rationing and increased paper prices. Also, some believe that the real horrors of the war replaced the fictional horrors found between the cover of the pulps. The once popular magazines began to lose readership and disappeared from the newsstand, one-by-one, replaced by paperbacks, comic books, television and movies.
Today, the short story has changed into a different breed of creative writing, leaving the stories found in the pulp magazines a unique offering. But, beyond the legacy of entertaining stories, pulp fiction must be given some credit for the evolution of literature and popular fiction heroes of today. Many authors that got their start in the pulp magazines grew to be great writers that changed the landscape of popular fiction. Writers such as Carroll John Daly changed the detective fiction story from the staid whodunits popularized in Great Britain to the more "hard-boiled" version where the bad guy was bad and the detective was tough and street-smart.
Edgar Rice Burroughs was another pulp writer, who helped to define the science fiction story into what it is today. The other well-known alumnae of the pulps include Max Brand, H.P. Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ray Bradbury. And of course, there were the legions of other authors, less well-known today, that had an equally important hand in forming popular fiction.
Even though some details are dated because of social, technological, and historical developments, the stories found in the pulp era are still an entertaining read. They still offer action-packed adventure, on par with any of today's television shows, and heroes who are lively, entertaining characters.
Enjoy your exploration into this vast world of fiction!"

So speaking of, I figure some of these are so old they are free to read now. Sure enough, this weird website lets you read it online and MAYBE even download it after you type in a fake email... I mean sign up for their subscription.

The Moon Pool by A. Merritt was mentioned on Wikipedia under the Pulp Magazine area or something like that.

https://manybooks.net/titles/merrittaetext96mpool11.html

Well I'm still on the hunt for that comic cover. Due to how this blog lines up, if you want the clues leading to, well, nowhere so far, then you need to go to yesterday's posts (press "control + F" and type in "December 26") and not look at the pieces in this post today. Why? Because I'm surely going to find that damned cover today if it kills me!

Here are some cool Frank Frazetta covers from Creepy that caught my attention. Saving comic covers one at a time here on this blog. ;)

And this Creepy cover I just love. Not sure who did the art, but I'm betting Frazetta, too. That guy is a giant, eh? You know I really don't know much about the comics, I just love the art and am discovering or rediscovering the art as I browse the internet. So he's a giant, Asian-looking,... or for the time maybe you'd say Oriental or Mongolian-ish (OK I made up that last one, but since Mongoloid turned into some weird racial[?] slur I'll avoid it)... and he looks like a badass with his crazy helmet and giant snake, I think that is a snake. The little humanoid guys down there don't stand a chance... they must be food. 

I should mention I found this other site that sort of kicks major butt on browsing covers. Logically enough, it is named Coverbrowser.com ... for example:

http://www.coverbrowser.com/covers/creepy

I notice some erotic ones starting around Creepy #45... so I doubt my  cover is going to be on this magazine/comic. Some are really good, but I guess I'm not going to post them here since I'm marking this blog as kid-friendly. Probably a mistake... we'll see if I can keep it as such. Anyhow, I do enjoy the dinosaur, ape-man, Tarzan/Conan type stuff. Very King Kong vs. the T-Rex type influence I would think. This cover below reminds me well of that:

Oh, and this next one, the wing-arms. I'm pretty sure I had a fascination with them back as a kid. pterodactyls being the coolest and all. These guys below remind me of the bat creatures from that 80s movie The Beast Master. What I must know is... why is one skeletal and the other muscular with horns?!

Next we have what I like to call "Hips and Lizard". I approve of both:

Update: So via Pencilink's blog, I see the Frazetta above is a reprint from an older Vampirella (#11?) comic cover. I sort of figured these got reused, so there you go.

And then we come to insect and snake-like dragon type creature. Where are all the monstrous insects in art nowadays? This guy has a reptilian/mammalian mouth, which adds another dimension, and perhaps realism since giant insects couldn't really just be over-sized bugs and physically function. I love those things. And reptiles never ever get old, just ask Godzilla. That's why I'm going back to these classics; good stuff. The red-head isn't bad, but I did have one bad experience in college with one so....

From this blog, https://pencilink.blogspot.com/2017/09/creepy-142-al-williamson-reprint.html#comment-form, I found this nice high quality image of Creepy #142. I'm a fan of the realism style, and the dinos of course. Thanks pencilink!!!:

And so this site isn't bad for browsing either. If the covers were just 50% bigger it'd be great... but since it is by YEAR that helps a ton! Strangely I can't find through their menu how to get to each section, but if you just replace that last part of the URL with the name of the comic it'll work, for instance:

http://core.collectorz.com/comics/eerie
and
http://core.collectorz.com/comics/creepy

So I thought for a minute I might find the elusive cover via http://core.collectorz.com/comics/ghosts , but alas, no luck. I did see this cover which reminded me of a crazy "vision" let's call it that somebody I know had after a pretty bad solo car wreck. Dude fell asleep driving late past midnight and hit a stationary object, then basically went in and out of consciousness. He swears to this day the flipping grim reaper (although he never called him such) was sitting in the vehicle with him after the wreck. Much unlike that tame cover below, it went something like this...

He woke at the last second to hit the brakes, but it was too late and he plowed into a tree on the side of a rural road. He woke up with severe pain in his belly and ankle. For a while he faded out then back to consciousness, till something started to disturb him. The summer air turned extremely chill inside the truck and the windows fogged up and he could see his breath in front of his face as he exhaled. From the corner of his eye he saw someone dressed in black sitting in the passenger seat, oddly still but alert... for a moment he thought his friend from earlier in the night found him and was about to help him out. As he began to glance that way he was horrified to see an extremely pale, smooth/semi-featureless face... white and grey and black swirls with black pits for eyes. Immediately he wanted the hell out of the truck and was going to walk the last mile or so home. As he opened the door he winced in pain, and kept the stranger in the corner of his eye. The stranger turned toward him, black pits for eyes stared at him hard as he moved to get out... a hand reached out as to touch him on the shoulder shortly. As he touched his right foot down on the floorboard near the door to put weight on it and slide out, the pain was too much for him... a broken foot or ankle. He looked back and that spectre was just waiting for him to step out, hand out, reaching but not touching. Well the pain took hold and he slumped back into his seat before he passed out again. Upon waking, the ghostly figure was again sitting calmly, PATIENTLY, next to him. My brother felt he knew then that if that guy had touched him, that would have been all she wrote. He went in and out of consciousness a few more times before headlights woke him to his actual friend showing up and pulling him from the wreck. No creepy figure to be found.

So I did't hear this story for weeks or months after the wreck. My brother finally decides to tell me, embarrassed though he was because be damned if he isn't convinced he "saw" this thing. Also, to add to the freakishness, the main doctor let him know that if he had walked home that night he 100% would have died from internal bleeding (he had had surgery shortly after arriving at the hospital). How weird is that? I imagine what he thought he saw was slightly like this:

...
...
As we continue on... I ran across this

Which reminds me very much of the Shang Tsung guy in the original Mortal Kombat, played by actor Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa. Always loved that angry yet relaxed menacing look he gives:

And... here we have it... after many many long hours of searching, I have found the cover that has been haunting me for nearly 40 years!~! 

Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery #87, from Dec 1978. Holy cow, I was about to give up! So how far off is my memory? Greenish and purple monster, yeah. Six fingers, count 'em, yep. I remember it's mouth being small at the top and bigger at the bottom... missed the weird red part and teeth. The dude was on the bed with some mad scientist wires attached to his head. I vaguely was thinking there was another guy there, but wasn't sure where. I'm pretty sure the monster does scratch him in the actual comic when it appears, I guess just not on the cover. I do remember this circular swirling motion with it's hand(s)... so that turned out to be the right hand and the general swirl shape of it coming out of his mind/dream/nightmare. Wooo, finally!!! 

EDIT IN 2024: more pages from #87

I'm going to put some filler her for that theoretical person who actually plays my game and wants to read all the nonsense before reading the solution (which comic cover was the 6 fingered dream monster?!?). So let's see... first off I want to thank my family... no wrong speech. Anyway, I'm just happy I found this thing, I can finally start enjoying the art again instead of rushing through it... but I will say it taught me / forced me to find a bunch of good resources for this sort of thing. 

Random - The Hildebrandt brothers did some Star Wars stuff, I recently found out:

And like... this super duper famous original poster, a copy of which is on my wall. These guys are awesome... all the Tolkien stuff, fantasy, and Star Wars. Gotta love 'em. =]

What's next. OK, I've got to find this old horror comic. I never really got comics as a kid, except when I went to the dentist. No, my parents were extra nice on dentist day... we got to sit around for 4 hours sometimes as the whole family minus-dad took turns getting poked, prodded, and scraped by an old school cigarette smoking dentist back before the helpers did the cleaning. He would get you nice and bleeding and good n' sore the next day. But hey, at least you could rinse with actual bleeping water and spit nonstop. Where do the comics come into play? This dentist was pretty cool in that he had tons of comics he'd let the kids go through, and they got to pick one or two to bring home each visit.

Yeah so... this horror comic. It had a cover with a sort of bluish werewolf hand with I think 6 fingers curled up in a swiping claw position. Actually no I think it had the monster swiping a guy and slashing him through his shirt across his chest or something. Damn it, I have to find this thing.

So as I'm googling this thing once again, I am running across all these old Weird Tales covers. Man, something about the fantasy and horror art of yesteryear just does it so much better than pop-part today.

Weird Tales, random:




Another clue... I think the monster is coming out of the guy's dream... like the guy might be sleeping and the monster is drawn small at the waist popping out of his mind/dream and then enlarging to life-sized and taking a swipe at him. I really think I found this thing at least once on the internet... time to find it again!!!!

I really like the old out of date drawings of dinosaurs from my childhood and prior eras, btw. You know, nothing bothers me more than somebody trying to say T-Rex had a bunch of feathers. BS. Anyway, this guy has class:



And while I'm changing the subject, anybody know what movie from probably the 1960s had 3 or 4 or so guys in spacesuits exploring a reddish planet where I think fleshcolored snake monsters came up out of some liquid pools to attack them? No I'm not talking about Prometheus. These things were sort of snakey/worm things and I think they tried to strangle you.

Speaking of comics from the dentist, this Hercules and Hydra cover was the stuff. I loved this thing so much... right up there with Godzilla-anything I had back then.

And this Eerie stuff... man I swear this cover art is super old but if it is Dark Horse maybe it's not. I like it! (UPDATE: Yeah this is a super old Frank Frazetta like you'd expect... really good stuff) :

Still can't find this damn 6 fingered claw dream horror comic. But I will say this... the new Grinch's scary grin in 2018:

just mother #$%@ing pales in comparison to the original:

Like big time. My kids always get worked up before this scene because, well, the son of a gun is pretty evil looking in the original. Yeah, we sang along to the Grinch song driving to and from their grandparents' yesterday... good stuff!

Holy smokes I am still looking... this is about to make me crazy. Here's my 2 minute super detailed (heheh) Windows MS Paint version of the cover... if somehow somebody sees this and knows what it might be I would be forever grateful... it was probably made around 1979, 1980, 1981... the cover was I think greys, greens, and purples mostly:

Soooo, still haven't found it, but there is a lot of cool stuff out there. Also a lot of stuff out there. This website has been the most helpful so far, just started using it... I believe if I find this thing, this site will supply the answer!!! Hipcomic:

https://www.hipcomic.com/category/comic-books_bronze-age-1970-83/?item_specifics_03_genre[]=horror-sci-fi&parent_id=110&item_specifics_01_main_character=not-specified&page=2

Right so... one old movie my brother and I watched when we were youngins during the Sunday morning Creature Feature (or similar... we had that and we had Kung Fu Theatre) was something I could vaguely remember but could never quite find on the internet. And I do mean I tried to find it several times over the years and many more years. Once in a while I'd spend hours googling "1970s horror movies insect scream kill alien" to no avail. No google, it isn't "The Fly II" or "Invasion of the Bee Girls". There were a few monsters... one was hairy, one was sort of like and insect and when women screamed it bothered it, and I couldn't recall the others. Well a few months ago in 2018, something popped up on Netflix or Amazon Video or something, and BAM!!! it was the movie I had been searching for so many years. What is this amazing piece of B-movie horror you ask? Well I'm coming up blank again, but never fear, I bought the thing on Amazon Prime so I'd "never" lose it again. It is... "Alien..." something. Hang on I'll get it in a minute.

How about this, I'll post a few pictures of random old movies and you can guess what they are. I'll find a way to put the titles near the pictures (how's that for getting fancy in blogging/html/website creation terms, huh?) so  you won't have to scratch your noggin too long.

Here's one that I have never seen, but I had to show it because my God it looks 99.9% like the Hydralisks in Starcraft, the video game by Blizzard... a game that I know too well, but never knew this old movie was an inspiration. Actually it wasn't all that old when Starcraft came out in 1997. 

So this movie is apparently called Dead Space (1991). 

Now for the one I keep talking about, the poster with the title removed: 

No, nothing yet? Let's try these picts:

Nothing eh? It's call Alien Factor or The Alien Factor, released in 1978. And yes, there is a Blu Ray of the thing now! Human memory is such a strange thing... when I watched it again probably 38 years after I had originally seen it, much of it was quite different. But then again, much of it really was as I recalled. 

Let's see what this does. Soooo... what'd I'd like to do is put up some archival stuff from around the web so stuff doesn't just get lost. I must have some innate need to save things. It's the loyal to your memories/wife/family/friends/cats/dogs/stuff in your life that you get attached to sort of thing I've got. Anyways, let's test how this works, yeah?