What's the secret to 400+ volumes?

[PMP Webmaster]

All right - I've read a number of original Pendleton Bolans, I've read some of the Bolan books around the beginning of Phoenix Force/Able Team, and I've read a couple recent Bolans.

Just what is it, do you think, that has kept this series going? It's easily the largest pulp series ever, and it's lasted what, almost forty years?

Is it simply that Bolan represents the perfect archtype of what we all wish would occur? That deep down, we all want to believe that there could be some unstoppable ubermench out there who could find evil and put an end to it? Or is it simply that the Bolan-verse provides us with the perfect method of setting up an ABCD of action/adventure meyhem?

[Django The Bastard]

It's really hard to figure out a definitive answer to that question...one thing it can't be is consistency of quality...the books in the past few years have ranged from incredible...i.e. Mike Linaker, Chuck Rogers, Jon Guenther, DPW, Tim Tresslar...to the mediocre...a la Andy Boot...to the plain terrible from David Robbins...

[PMP Webmaster]

I sort of obliquely asked this kind of question on the Mack Bolan yahoogroup by seeing how people pick which titles they read. Most seemed to either just buy every title as it came out, stick with a few trusted authors, or winging it off the vague back copy.

So maybe the secret is, people just don't mind the same thing (more or less) "wash, rinse, repeat"? Not that there's anything wrong with it, but four hundred books is pretty amazing.

[Doug]

Well, not everything is the same, and there are some changes. New sidekicks, new supporting characters, new villains, revisited locations or all new ones.

And not everybody gets every single book.

[ROBOT]

I like Bolan better when he was fighting the Mafia. It seems to be getting a bit far-fetched now.

[Skaramine]

I'd love to have Bolan fight the Mafia again, but there's much more important injustice for him to fight these days.

Formerly Doug, small time Executioner ritter.