- Alumnus; On Location
Although pop culture junkies often equate the phrase “pulp fiction” with a John Travolta movie, Ron Fortier ’78 is intimately familiar with the literary genre, which dates to the Great Depression.
During a 30-year career at General Electric, Fortier was a comic-book writer on the side, penning the adventures of well-known characters such as Popeye, Peter Pan, Rambo, The Green Hornet and The Terminator. Since retiring from GE in 2002, Fortier has built his avocation into a second career as a principal in Airship 27 Productions, a company that packages books of contemporary short stories featuring popular pulp fiction heroes of the 1930s.
Named for the rough-textured paper on which they were printed, pulp magazines were a cheap, escapist form of entertainment that proliferated during the Depression. After attending a pulp convention in 2005, Fortier recognized an opportunity to publish pulp fiction with a modern spin.
“It dawned on me that maybe there was market out there that would attract young readers to this genre of literature and restore some of these great characters,” he says.
Airship 27 Productions recruits writers and artists to create pulp stories that it publishes digitally and later packages for a print publisher. Since he and a partner started the company, close to a dozen competitors have emerged in the modern-day pulp space, Fortier says.
A business administration major who earned his SNHU degree at night, Fortier, who lives in Texas, touts himself as an “imagineer” but puts his education to work daily as an entrepreneur.
“Publishing is an evolving business, and the experiences I had and classes I took in self-promotion marketing have really been invaluable to me,” he says.
