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THE PULPS
REAL MEN
Feb. 1958 "Real Men" Magazine
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FROM THE L.A. TIMES:
The staples of publications like Argosy, Peril, Sir, Fury, Male, Men Today, All Man, Real Men, Men in Conflict, Man's Adventure and dozens of similar titles -- sadistic Nazis, menacing wildlife, headhunting natives of voodoo islands, marauding Apaches, killer Communists -- express in lurid, living color the deep wish for a morally and sexually black-and-white world. Masculinity is defined by the testing ordeal. The protagonist is typically pitted in grossly unequal, unfair combat against implacable, monstrous enemies. The comic book cousins of these magazines show evil reliably vanquished by superhuman heroes. The men's magazines suggest the possibility of unhappy or incomplete outcomes: Threats are so myriad and multifarious that the price of security is eternal vigilance, eternal grimacing, scowling and cowering.
The extreme depictions of danger the pulps trafficked in carry a freight of dread more evocative of moral twilight than triumphalism. The pictorial style on view here is virtually the same melodramatic rendering of "the dark side" associated with film noir and the early paperback novel. The iconography is one of pure immanence. The moment most often captured on these magazine covers is one in which the menaced subject has already slogged through a snake-infested swamp, been tortured in a Nazi prison camp, washed up on the shores of a cannibal island and now, in torn or shredded clothing, sopping wet or desiccated after crawling through a desert, faces decapitation, consumption by vicious marine life, amputation by hacksaw, attack by alligators, weasels, ferrets, Indian arrows or samurai cutlasses, sexual exhaustion by Nazi libertines, cigar torture at the hands of Fidel Castro and sometimes -- not often -- incineration by H-bomb.
MORE: http://articles.latimes.com/2003/jul/27/books/bk-indiana27
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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.
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 undress, 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.
MORE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_adventure
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My degree is in art education. I was supposed to teach art k thru 12. But teaching wasn't for me. And neither was the form of art embraced y the art world. I wasn't really into Monet, Kandinsky, Pollack or even Andy Warhol. That latter admission is some what ironic since I wound up as Andy's first art director for Interview magazine. I was, and still am, really into pop culture as a true art form. I'm talking, in particular, about comic books and the pulps.
It's easy to dismiss the art of the pulps as cheap and vulgar. But it also can also be argued that the amount of effort and artistry that goes into them far suppasses the art of Pollack or Warhol. Case in point: The poet, Gerard Malanga once created a "Warhol original" in his hotel room in Italy so he could sell it for plane fare back to the states.
Beyond that, the art of the pulps gives us penetrating insight into the American psyche for a given time period. Certainly it says a lot about the American men who were (and still are) attracted to the magazines lurid covers. In effect, these are portraits of the male ego on full display; revealing their conceits and fears (regarding women) and vulnerabilities. That makes pulp art worthy of analysis if nothing else.
I have no idea what Kandinsky's art, or Warhol's, tells us about who we are. --Bruce/Swapsale
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