Just in time for the holidays, please enjoy this encore post tracking Santa Claus’ appearances in early pulp sci-fi and comic books, originally published December 23, 2012.
Science fiction was born in the pulps, an ingenious medium credited to Frank Munsey that utilized the then-new high-speed printing presses to print on cheap, untrimmed, pulp paper, resulting in low-priced magazines. It was by way of these cheap pulps that sf began to emerge as a self-conscious genre, despite the repeatedly recycled clichéd stories. Superhero comics evolved alongside the sf pulps. They depict latter-day surrogate gods and goddesses, whether human, alien, or mutant.
As a seasonal treat, I would like to survey the changing depictions of Santa Claus on these covers.
