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THE PULPS

MEN'S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES

Men's adventure is a genre of magazines that had its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. Catering to a male audience, these magazines featured pinup photography and lurid tales of adventure that typically featured wartime feats of daring, exotic travel, or conflict with wild animals.

These magazines are generally considered the last of the true pulp magazines; they reached their circulation peaks long after the genre-fiction pulps had begun to fade. These magazines were also colloquially called "armpit slicks", "men's sweat magazines", or "the sweats", especially by people in the magazine publishing or distribution trades.

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Notable men's adventure magazines included Argosy, the longest-running and best-regarded among them, as well as Adventure, Real, True, Saga, Stag, Swank, and For Men Only. During their peak in the late 1950s, approximately 130 men's-adventure magazines were being published simultaneously.

The tales they contained usually were written in a realistic style and claimed to be true stories. Damsels in distress, usually in various states of deshabille, were often featured in the painted cover or interior art. These often scantily clad women were notoriously depicted being menaced or tortured by Nazis or, in later years, Communists. Artist Norman Saunders was the dean of illustrators for these magazines, occupying a position similar to that enjoyed by Margaret Brundage for the classic pulps. Many illustrations, however, are credited to corporations or are anonymous. Historical artist Mort Künstler also painted many covers and illustrations for these magazines, and Playboy photographer Mario Casilli started out shooting pinups for this market. At publisher Martin Goodman's Magazine Management Company, future best-selling humorist and author Bruce Jay Friedman was a men's-sweat writer and editor, and future hit novelist Mario Puzo a writer.

Many of the stories were actual historical accounts of battles and the biographies and exploits of highly decorated soldiers. Several of the stories were combined and issued under various titles in paperback editions by Pyramid Books with the credit "edited by Phil Hirsch". Phil Hirsch was vice president of Pyramid Books from 1955-1975.^[1]

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hey were called "men's adventure" magazines, the "armpit school" of journalism, or "sweats." They had names like Man's Life, Man's Exploits, Real Men or just Male. Designed to snare the attention of the Average G.I. Joe settling back into humdrum civilian life after World War II, their gorgeously lurid cover illustrations routinely depicted buxom beauties in shredded tatters of clothes, writhing under the slathering jaws of savage beasts, wild savages or sadistic Nazis.

Cover teasers reiterated the promise of blood, sweat and sex with story titles like "Man Hungry Hussy of She-Devil Island!," "A Bonfire in Hell for the Nazis' Passion Slaves," "I Watched Myself Being Eaten Alive" and the classic "Weasels Ripped My Flesh."

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^{TASCHEN BOOKS}

This TASCHEN-published collection of pulp men's magazine artwork hits harder than a jaw-shattering left hook. Full of ripe misogyny, polarizing political stereotypes and a double-helping of delicious sexploitation, this exquisitely bound and formatted coffee-table book collects 500+ pages of the finest sweat-mag illustrations from the 50's, 60's and 70's. Equally lurid and titilating, the tome also serves to contextualize and elucidate the work through a series of informative essays and an interview with Norm Eastman, one of the genre's foremost artists. What emerges is an understanding of the artwork as a sort of hyperbolic point-of-purchase advertisement- the stories contained in these magazines rarely matched in tone or content the outrageous cover art used to sell them. In a testosterone-heavy paralell to women's romance novels, what was really being sold was a fantasy, an illusion of power, of struggle, and of victory. Seeing the work assembled so expertly here, you can easily view it as the collective id of an era- the desire for unbridled passion, violence and heroism made garishly manifest. Intervening decades of political correctness have only brought these themes into sharper relief.

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IT'S A MAN'S WORLD: Men's Adventure Magazines--the Postwar Pulps

By Adam Parfrey.

The first major book ever on this wild and sexy sub-genre of men's magazines! These magazines appeared during the years following WWII, and gained popularity during the Cold War. Lots of outstanding (albeit lurid) art by many top names from the pulp and 1950s paperback days, and a riveting history of the times.

The real meat here is the reproductions: hundreds of covers and illustrations are shown in full color, often full page, from publications like Argosy, True, Saga, Stag, For Men Only and others. Major illustrators Mort Künstler and Norman Saunders helped produce the book and are profiled; their work is featured throughout, along with George Gross, Mel Crair, Norm Eastman and numerous others, many uncredited. Saunders also shares a how-to article.

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ADVENTURE Magazine Profile

This was the canonical "Adventure" pulp; click here to go directly to the gallery of cover images. Begun in 1910 as a way for publisher Ridgway to tap into a new market, it specialized in stories of danger and thrills. At this time other pulp and popular magazines contained a wide variety of stories ranging from danger to romance (even when these are not the same thing). Its creation was a logical response to the success of pulps like ARGOSY, which by 1910 were selling hundreds of thousands of copies of each issue; but the focus on adventure was something new.

ADVENTURE was about Adventure, the chance that something unusual might happen even to you, or at least to someone you could read about. The covers reflected this. It was bought by men. However, in early 1915 ADVENTURE changed its cover designs, which had been filled with red-blooded, dangerous men and animals, often in life-threatening situations, to showing exclusively pretty women in everyday or romantic poses. At the same time they adopted a new cover slogan: "Stories of Life, Love, and ADVENTURE." Clearly they were trying to appeal to women as well as men. This did not seem to work; in February 1917 they returned to the original approach, and kept things this way until the magazine changed to a "men's adventure" magazine in April 1953. This final incarnation of the magazine lasted until 1971, sometimes emphasizing girls and sometimes carrying new or reprint fiction. In its last hurrah in 1970-1, the magazine (now in digest format) returned to its original title logo and and claimed to be "The Number 1 Fiction Magazine for Men."

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