Pulp: The Story of an Aging Antihero
Pulp is a graphic novel created by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Jacob Philips that takes place in 1930’s New York City. The protagonist, Max, is in his late 60’s and makes a living writing stories for a western pulp magazine. What his boss doesn’t know is that his 2-cents-a-word stories are based on his real experiences as a gun-slinging outlaw. He thought he left that life behind forty years ago, but a health scare persuades Max to attempt one last robbery so his partner can live comfortably after he’s gone.
Max’s age plays a significant role throughout the story, both influencing his decisions and impacting how others interact with him. The physical, emotional, and social impacts of aging propel the main story arc and contribute to a refreshingly multidimensional older character.
Aging is not the whole story
Something that stands out about Pulp is that the leading character is aging, but the story is not about aging. In the course of researching comics to include in this series, I came across a list of comics with older characters that illuminated the importance of this distinction.
Stories about aging tend to focus on topics like caregiving, dementia, retirement, assisted living, and being a grandparent. There’s nothing wrong with those topics, but when they’re the only narratives that include prominent older characters, it gives the false impression that those are the only stories where older characters belong.
What’s much more interesting, and unfortunately much more rare, are graphic novels like Pulp where an older adult plays a leading role, but aging is not their whole story.
The whole story: a life course perspective
Max’s life spans more than sixty years of not only his own personal choices and circumstances, but also the larger context in which he lived. Borrowing gerontology’s life course perspective, or the consideration of the social, cultural, and historical context that framed his life, we can better understand how his story came to be.
For example, we learn that Max lost his home and his brother during the Johnson County War, his wife and daughter died during the 1918 flu pandemic, his mid-life finances were upended during the Great Depression, and his later years were darkened by the growing terror of World War II. The creators of Pulp skillfully weave these challenges around Max’s intrinsic characteristics and social network to demonstrate how these all tie together to impact the trajectory of his life.
In the real world, the life course perspective can be a valuable way to build understanding and empathy, which is a necessary step towards dismantling ageism. I hope to see more writers consider this when developing diverse aging characters who may experience the same event in different ways depending on their gender, race, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic position.
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