Comic book illustrator Larry Nadolsky’s career started at a little book shop in Pointe du Bois.
The 56-year-old specializes in a genre known as neopulp, a visual form of art that embraces the clichés of pulp writing, complete with the “superscience of B-movies, the nefarious underworld criminal mastermind, the lone sheriff against a town of outlaws, the young woman torn between love for a mysterious stranger and respect for her fiancée, and the mad god bent on destruction,” according to Adam Ford’s The Neopulp Manifesto.
The store in Pointe was where Nadolsky’s mother worked, and she’d often bring home comic books for her young son.
“Back then all the copies they didn’t sell, they’d tear off the covers and send them back for returns. So my mom would bring back stacks and stacks of comic books that they were just going to throw out. Back then, every little store had a comic book rack. That’s how I really got into it,” he says. “Later on, I subscribed to a weekly newspaper called the Comic Buyers Guide. They had a help wanted section in the back. I would send stuff away in the mail. That’s how I got started.”
Since then, Nadolsky’s work has swung back and forth from comics to painting. He has dozens of comic book credits, both pencil and ink. His real love is painting and he’s painted many book, magazine and comic covers. His influences are the traditional illustrators of the 1940s to 1970s. He’s drawn for the likes of Heavy Metal magazine and countless comic book publishers.
“I rediscovered old pulp magazines and old movie posters. I’m a throwback, like an old-time illustrator from 50 years ago,” he says.
According to writer Natalie Baaklini, neopulp cover art as we know it today was born in the pulp era of 1920-1955, but the process of evolution actually started decades earlier in the 1800s with Scientific American, one of the longest-running science magazines still in print today.
“Underlying the academic nature of the publication is the need to entice the readership with a sense of adventure. People didn’t travel for leisure back then, but for those who bought this issue of Scientific American, a foreign land full of soldiers and their weapon-mounted camels was at their fingertips,” she writes.
Fast forward to the popular science fiction collections of the 1920s like Amazing Stories — which featured works by the likes of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne — and the genre’s legacy was cemented. The industry has changed a lot from those early days, though. Nadolsky, a former Manitoba Hydro employee, is just one of countless neopulp illustrators who make up a hugely popular industry.
He used to rely on fax machines and old-fashioned snail mail to communicate with publishers, but the magic of the Internet has made it easier than ever before to do his work.
“In the music industry, anyone can put out an album now, and art is the same way. It’s come full circle and there’s an avalanche of stuff out there,” he says. “The art industry will look down on an illustrator, but when you think about it, people like Michelangelo, da Vinci and Rembrandt were illustrators. They painted what they were hired to paint.”
On Facebook? Check out Nadolsky’s work at facebook.com/larry.nadolsky.
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