Battle Birds

It was launched at the end of 1932, but did not sell well, and in 1934 the publisher turned it into an air-war hero pulp titled Dusty Ayres and His Battle Birds.

Robert Sidney Bowen, an established pulp writer, provided the lead novel each month, and also wrote the short stories that filled out the issue.

The change was not successful enough to be extended beyond the initial plan of a year, and Bowen wrote a novel in which, unusually for pulp fiction, Dusty Ayres finally defeated the invaders, to end the series.

Steeger agreed, and over lunch they settled on changing Battle Birds, which was selling poorly, to a hero pulp with Bowen as the author.

To avoid having the war against an existing country, they decided to make the enemy a future power rising in Asia that had conquered the entire world except for the United States.

Ayres was America's top pilot, and along with three friends, Jack Horner, Curley Brooks and Biff Bolton, he fought the Asian Black Invaders.

Bowen wrote a final novel in which the evil empire was defeated (unusually for a pulp series), and the magazine ceased publication with the August 1935 issue.

[5] Sam Moskowitz, another historian of the genre, describes the Dusty Ayres series as "fascinatingly imaginative in the art as well as the stories", but considers the writing weaker than that of contemporary pulps such as Operator #5.

[12] Robert Lesser, in his history of pulp magazine art, comments that during World War II the air-war magazine artists "realized that they were no longer painting fiction but recording fact", and gives as an example Blakeslee's cover for the October 1942 cover of Battle Birds, which depicted Douglas dive bombers bombing Japanese aircraft carriers at the Battle of Midway.

[15] Bibliographic sources do not list the editor for individual Battle Birds, but editorial policy for all magazines was set by Harry Steeger,[16] and Rogers Terrill had broad responsibility for Popular Publications' pulps.