![]() ![]() When the pulp magazine market began to boom at the turn of the 20th century, a new, enlarged, and largely unpredictable readership suddenly had to be wooed, and the popularity of certain books or characters was no longer tied to the long cycle of book-and-review. Their ontogeny recapitulated their phylogeny all day long.From a commercial standpoint if not an evolutionary one, it only makes sense. But the pulps – and the comic books they spawned – were driven by Mammon, not God they operated as much as possible on the principle of varying duplicates of what’s already worked in the past. The idea that new organisms during their development rapid-march through all the stages in their ancestral history proved a bit too facile to stand up to genetic scrutiny - living beings, it turns out, are often too complex to be a mere sum of their parts. Gaylord Dubois (scripts), Russ Manning (art)Dark Horse, 2013 The great biologist Ernst Haeckel's celebrated egghead quip, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," might not cut any mustard in evolutionary circles anymore, but it's spot-on accurate for the 20th century pulp magazine world Haeckel didn't live long enough to see. ![]()
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