Those Post-WW II Men's Magazines
My father was in the Navy during WW II. He never kept any pulps from his younger days (although he did recognize Doc Savage when the Bantam reprints started). He did amass quite a pile of Men's Adventure magazines once he returned, got married, had three sons and basically
settled into the standard postwar American life.
Beginning when I was around ten years old, I started getting into the mags. Being a proto-Dr Hermes even back then, I would read anything I could pin down in front of me. (But these sure beat BOY'S LIFE and LOOK, if you had asked me.) All these magazines had lurid painted covers by the likes of James Bama and Norman Maurer, no full-out nudity but plenty of teasing, and rip-snorting over-the-top yarns that were packed to the gills with Nazis and Japanese soldiers, sleazy escapades with exotic wimmins, and lots of hardship. I was struck by the way stories pitted men against any animal that could be considered remotely dangerous. Tigers, bears, bobcats, wolverines, rogue elephants, piranhas... you name it. There was a lot of suffering, with shipwrecks and strandings in the desert and plane crashes.
Strangely enough, although I certainly devoured these on Saturday afternoons when left alone to my own devices, I don't actually remember any of these stories. Today, decades later, when I read a horror or science-fiction story from the pulps, I can immediately recall where I first encountered it as a child (usually in a Ballantine paperback anthology). But those dozens of stories from REAL MAN and STAG and TRUE and HAIRY SWEATY GUYS seem to have faded without a trace.
These magazines faded away during the mid to late
1960s. Actual porn became easily available and the counter-culture
revolution grew to think of these tales as "Dad's generation" stories. By 1970, paperback series had come into their own, the most popular being Don Pendleton's Executioner books (but there were dozens of others.. the Death Merchant, the Destroyer, the Penetrator, Mace the Kung Fu Master, John Eagle Expeditor, the Baroness, Cabot Cain, the Phantom, on and on they rolled. Add the ongoing reprints of Doc Savage, the Avenger and the Shadow, and you can see where my spare dollars went back then!)
It's amazing how so much fiction from the pulps has been reprinted -Any pulp fan can easily find a dozen pulp writers whose tales are available on bookstore shelves today - but these Men's Adventure magazines seem to have evaporated like a sweaty dream. Maybe there's a market here waiting to be tapped. Like the boom in pulp reprints in the early 1960s, possibly these stories are just waiting to be unleashed.
Looking over various cover reproductions of NEW MAN, REAL COMBAT, MALE, MAN'S STORY and dozens more via Googlism, I see a few trends here worth pointing out. One is that (unlike old shudder pulps like TERROR TALES) women are as often the villains inflicting torture and death as they are the victims on the receiving end. I haven't seen many pulp covers with menacing females. Here, for every American redhead getting her slip torn by a Castro guerrila, there's a leather-bikini Gestapo fraulein ready to whip a captured Marine. Balances things out, I dare say.
A distinction between these postwar mags and the pulps of a decade earlier is the emphasis on non-fiction. There is heavy mention of Cold War politics, changing morals and blue laws, even an occasional reference to jazz or nightclubs. I see a lot of playing on men's fears of inadequacies or perversions; possibly advertisers in the magazines offered remedies much the same as those urged on us by spam today.
The various Nazi/Japanese/Soviet/Cuban uniformed thugs don't stir my interest as much as the rampaging animals on the attack. You can tell the artists were getting desperate when they show a shirtless man in a river being savaged by slightly large turtles! Or a hunter facing down a ferocious Panda (standing upright like a grizzly). A dozen scorpions crawling over a guy, sure that's unsettling. But seriously... "Weasels Ripped My Flesh!?" I can't imagine that phrase ever being remembered today.
I also recall that ARGOSY itself, with its long and glowing history, ended up as a similar publication. The shift in content of long-running magazines would make an interesting article in itself. Who would think that COLLIER'S once ran Saint stories by Leslie Charteris? Or that early REDBOOK published tough detective stories (as opposed to "Turn Your Man On By Wearing Uncomfortable Shoes" or "The Truth About Ingrown Bikini Hairs")
STAG (and similar magazines such as TRUE) published some Ian Fleming stories before he became quite as famous. "The Living Daylights" ran as "Berlin Escape" and "The Spy Who Loved Me" was serialized as (Lord protect us) "Motel Nymph." That issues might be interesting to see, if only for the overheated art and blurbs. Once the Bond mania really surged, PLAYBOY began running serialized Fleming books such as THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN (with art clearly depicting Sean Connery).
settled into the standard postwar American life.
Beginning when I was around ten years old, I started getting into the mags. Being a proto-Dr Hermes even back then, I would read anything I could pin down in front of me. (But these sure beat BOY'S LIFE and LOOK, if you had asked me.) All these magazines had lurid painted covers by the likes of James Bama and Norman Maurer, no full-out nudity but plenty of teasing, and rip-snorting over-the-top yarns that were packed to the gills with Nazis and Japanese soldiers, sleazy escapades with exotic wimmins, and lots of hardship. I was struck by the way stories pitted men against any animal that could be considered remotely dangerous. Tigers, bears, bobcats, wolverines, rogue elephants, piranhas... you name it. There was a lot of suffering, with shipwrecks and strandings in the desert and plane crashes.
Strangely enough, although I certainly devoured these on Saturday afternoons when left alone to my own devices, I don't actually remember any of these stories. Today, decades later, when I read a horror or science-fiction story from the pulps, I can immediately recall where I first encountered it as a child (usually in a Ballantine paperback anthology). But those dozens of stories from REAL MAN and STAG and TRUE and HAIRY SWEATY GUYS seem to have faded without a trace.
These magazines faded away during the mid to late
1960s. Actual porn became easily available and the counter-culture
revolution grew to think of these tales as "Dad's generation" stories. By 1970, paperback series had come into their own, the most popular being Don Pendleton's Executioner books (but there were dozens of others.. the Death Merchant, the Destroyer, the Penetrator, Mace the Kung Fu Master, John Eagle Expeditor, the Baroness, Cabot Cain, the Phantom, on and on they rolled. Add the ongoing reprints of Doc Savage, the Avenger and the Shadow, and you can see where my spare dollars went back then!)
It's amazing how so much fiction from the pulps has been reprinted -Any pulp fan can easily find a dozen pulp writers whose tales are available on bookstore shelves today - but these Men's Adventure magazines seem to have evaporated like a sweaty dream. Maybe there's a market here waiting to be tapped. Like the boom in pulp reprints in the early 1960s, possibly these stories are just waiting to be unleashed.
Looking over various cover reproductions of NEW MAN, REAL COMBAT, MALE, MAN'S STORY and dozens more via Googlism, I see a few trends here worth pointing out. One is that (unlike old shudder pulps like TERROR TALES) women are as often the villains inflicting torture and death as they are the victims on the receiving end. I haven't seen many pulp covers with menacing females. Here, for every American redhead getting her slip torn by a Castro guerrila, there's a leather-bikini Gestapo fraulein ready to whip a captured Marine. Balances things out, I dare say.
A distinction between these postwar mags and the pulps of a decade earlier is the emphasis on non-fiction. There is heavy mention of Cold War politics, changing morals and blue laws, even an occasional reference to jazz or nightclubs. I see a lot of playing on men's fears of inadequacies or perversions; possibly advertisers in the magazines offered remedies much the same as those urged on us by spam today.
The various Nazi/Japanese/Soviet/Cuban uniformed thugs don't stir my interest as much as the rampaging animals on the attack. You can tell the artists were getting desperate when they show a shirtless man in a river being savaged by slightly large turtles! Or a hunter facing down a ferocious Panda (standing upright like a grizzly). A dozen scorpions crawling over a guy, sure that's unsettling. But seriously... "Weasels Ripped My Flesh!?" I can't imagine that phrase ever being remembered today.
I also recall that ARGOSY itself, with its long and glowing history, ended up as a similar publication. The shift in content of long-running magazines would make an interesting article in itself. Who would think that COLLIER'S once ran Saint stories by Leslie Charteris? Or that early REDBOOK published tough detective stories (as opposed to "Turn Your Man On By Wearing Uncomfortable Shoes" or "The Truth About Ingrown Bikini Hairs")
STAG (and similar magazines such as TRUE) published some Ian Fleming stories before he became quite as famous. "The Living Daylights" ran as "Berlin Escape" and "The Spy Who Loved Me" was serialized as (Lord protect us) "Motel Nymph." That issues might be interesting to see, if only for the overheated art and blurbs. Once the Bond mania really surged, PLAYBOY began running serialized Fleming books such as THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN (with art clearly depicting Sean Connery).