Hundreds of different pulp magazine titles were launched during the first half of the twentieth century. Pulp fiction wasn’t only gangsters and detectives: it was also jungle, desert, and sea adventures; Canadian Mounties stories; Civil War, World War I and spy stories; police, courtroom and prison stories; ghost, supernatural and weird tales; frontier and science fiction; and of course Westerns. Pulp fiction magazines included Detective Story Magazine, Love Story Magazine, Doc Savage, The Avenger, and The Shadow.

Pulp fiction magazines were most popular during one of the bleakest times in American History – the Great Depression. During the 1930s, as many as 250 different magazines could be seen at newsstands, each one with a vivid, colorful cover promising unimaginable drama, suspense and romance.

Of the scores of themes offered in pulps, the Western genre was one of the most popular. Over the twenty-five year period from 1920 to 1945, at least 162 different Western magazines hit the newsstands at one point or another.

Wild West Weekly was a popular pulp Western magazine during that time. While other pulps such as Western Story Magazine strived to give the reader more ‘literary’ Western stories, Wild West Weekly entertained their loyal readership with stories of stirring drama and featuring heroes that had dead-eye aim and unequivocal morals.

Wild West Weekly was created by Frank Tousey, a veteran dime novel publisher, in 1902. It had one hero, Billy West, who was also referred to as Young Wild West and was a throwback to Buffalo Bill. The periodical did well for a while, but circulation plummeted in the 1920s. Tousey was dead and his company was struggling. In 1927, Street and Smith Publications, a behemoth company that churned out more pulp fiction than any other publisher, bought the magazine from Tousey’s company and decided to revamp it into a weekly magazine featuring a variety of stories and heroes written by different authors.

Wild West Weekly’s popularity could be credited to its strong tradition of sticking to stories that did not stray far from the standard Western story format. They were geared towards a juvenile audience and were never short of fast moving plots and plenty of violence. Romantic subplots were rarely seen: young, attractive female characters who might threaten to distract the hero from his work were strongly frowned upon by readers. Wild West Weekly also did not frustrate their readers with stories with cliffhanger endings, forcing the reader to “wait until next week” to find out what happens to their hero. The vast majority of stories were complete, a feature the magazine prided itself upon.

Another attraction of Wild West Weekly was its tradition of having and hanging on to a large stable of heroes who were there for the duration. Every other week or so, readers could count on another story featuring their favorite hero, whether it be Sonny Tabor, Kid Wolf, the Circle J Gang, the Silver Kid, or a number of others.

The two essays in Pulp Writer written by Laurie Powers offer an in-depth history of Wild West Weekly and its place in pulp fiction history.

All Wild West Weekly covers are copyrighted by
Street & Smith Publications and Conde Nast Publications.