Men's adventure is a genre of magazine that was published in the United States from the 1940s until the early 1970s. Catering to a male audience, these magazines featured pin-up girls and lurid tales of adventure that typically featured wartime feats of daring, exotic travel or conflict with wild animals. [1] 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.
Fawcett Publications was having some success with their slick magazine True whose stories developed more of a war focus after the U.S. entered World War II in 1941. Pulp magazine Argosy opted to switch to slick paper in 1943, and mix in more 'true' stories amidst the fiction. The other major pulps Adventure , Blue Book and Short Stories eventually followed suit. Soon new magazines joined in - Fawcett's Cavalier , Stag and Swank . During their peak in the late 1950s, approximately 130 men's adventure magazines were being published simultaneously.
The interior tales usually claimed to be true stories. [2] Women in distress were commonly featured in the painted covers or interior art, often being menaced or tortured by Nazis [3] or, in later years, Communists. Typical titles which relied on especially lurid and salacious cover illustrations include Man's Story, Men Today, World of Men, and Man's Epic.
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 to 1975. [4]
In the 1970s, many of the men's adventure magazines dropped the fiction and "true action" stories, and started focusing on pictorials of nude women and non-fiction articles related to sex or current events.
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. Charles Copeland [5] and Earl Norem were two other popular artists who worked for the Magazine Management stable of magazines. Many illustrations that were uncredited were done by Bruce Minney, [6] Norm Eastman, Gil Cohen, Mel Crair, Basil Gogos, and Vic Prezio among others. [7] James Bama contributed over 400 cover and interior illustrations for an approximate eight-year period circa 1957–1964 before turning to paperback cover illustration as his mainstay. Historical artist Mort Künstler 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-editor, and Mario Puzo was a contributor before he became a well-known novelist. Pierre Boulle, Ray Bradbury, Erskine Caldwell, Ian Fleming, Robert F. Dorr and Mickey Spillane also contributed short stories or novel excerpts to men's adventure magazines. [8]
Paperback novels became increasingly popular in the 1950s and 1960s, and series' such as Don Pendleton's The Executioner mined a similar vein of war story, and continued on long after the magazines themselves shifted away from such fare. [9]
The title of the Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention album Weasels Ripped My Flesh was borrowed from a man-against-beast cover story in the September 1956 issue of Man's Life, [10] and the title went through another permutation when filmmaker Nathan Schiff made the horror feature Weasels Rip My Flesh (1979).
There have been attempts to revive the Argosy title, once in the 1990s, again in 2004, and finally in 2013. Soldier of Fortune carried on the tradition of war stories for a male audience. [11] A few contemporary "lad mag" periodicals such as FHM and Maxim are somewhat similar to the earlier adventure magazines, featuring a combination of glamour photography and occasional true adventure/horror stories. Publishers such as Hard Case Crime put out new and reprint paperback novels in the hard-boiled pulp tradition. Online book vendor Amazon.com uses the genre label "men's adventure" in a general sense to categorize adventure novels where the hero is an adult man to distinguish these books from "women's adventure" and "children's action & adventure."
Pulp magazines were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 to the late 1950s. The term "pulp" derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine had 128 pages; it was 7 inches (18 cm) wide by 10 inches (25 cm) high, and 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century.
The dime novel is a form of late 19th-century and early 20th-century U.S. popular fiction issued in series of inexpensive paperbound editions. The term dime novel has been used as a catchall term for several different but related forms, referring to story papers, five- and ten-cent weeklies, "thick book" reprints, and sometimes early pulp magazines. The term was used as a title as late as 1940, in the short-lived pulp magazine Western Dime Novels. In the modern age, the term dime novel has been used to refer to quickly written, lurid potboilers, usually as a pejorative to describe a sensationalized but superficial literary work.
A paperback book is one with a thick paper or paperboard cover, and often held together with glue rather than stitches or staples. In contrast, hardcover (hardback) books are bound with cardboard covered with cloth, leather, paper, or plastic.
Argosy, later titled The Argosy, Argosy All-Story Weekly and The New Golden Argosy, was an American pulp magazine from 1882 through 1978, published by Frank Munsey until its sale to Popular Publications in 1942. It is the first American pulp magazine. The magazine began as a children's weekly story–paper entitled The Golden Argosy. In the era before the Second World War, Argosy was regarded as one of the "Big Four" pulp magazines, the most prestigious publications in the pulp market, that many pulp magazine writers aspired to publish in. John Clute, discussing the American pulp magazines in the first two decades of the twentieth century, has described The Argosy and its companion The All-Story as "the most important pulps of their era."
Lesbian pulp fiction is a genre of lesbian literature that refers to any mid-20th century paperback novel or pulp magazine with overtly lesbian themes and content. Lesbian pulp fiction was published in the 1950s and 1960s by many of the same paperback publishing houses as other genres of fiction, including westerns, romances, and detective fiction. Because very little other literature was available for and about lesbians at this time, quite often these books were the only reference the public had for modeling what lesbians were. English professor Stephanie Foote commented on the importance of lesbian pulp novels to the lesbian identity prior to the rise of organized feminism: "Pulps have been understood as signs of a secret history of readers, and they have been valued because they have been read. The more they are read, the more they are valued, and the more they are read, the closer the relationship between the very act of circulation and reading and the construction of a lesbian community becomes…. Characters use the reading of novels as a way to understand that they are not alone."
Earle K. Bergey was an American artist and illustrator who painted cover art for thousands of pulp fiction magazines and paperback books. One of the most prolific pulp fiction artists of the 20th century, Bergey is recognized for creating, at the height of his career in 1948, the iconic cover of Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) for Popular Library.
Popular Publications was one of the largest publishers of pulp magazines during its existence, at one point publishing 42 different titles per month. Company titles included detective, adventure, romance, and Western fiction. They were also known for the several 'weird menace' titles. They also published several pulp hero or character pulps.
Jove Books, formerly known as Pyramid Books, is an American paperback and eBook publishing imprint, founded as an independent paperback house in 1949 by Almat Magazine Publishers. The company was sold to the Walter Reade Organization in the late 1960s. It was acquired in 1974 by Harcourt Brace which renamed it to Jove in 1977 and continued the line as an imprint. In 1979, they sold it to The Putnam Berkley Group, which is now part of the Penguin Group.
Lancer Books was a publisher of paperback books founded by Irwin Stein and Walter Zacharius that operated from 1961 through 1973. While it published stories of a number of genres, it was noted most for its science fiction and fantasy, particularly its series of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian tales, the first publication of many in paperback format. It published the controversial novel Candy by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, and Ted Mark's ribald series The Man from O.R.G.Y. Lancer paperbacks had a distinctive appearance, many bearing mauve or green page edging.
Blue Book was a popular 20th-century American magazine with a lengthy 70-year run under various titles from 1905 to 1975. It was a sibling magazine to The Red Book Magazine and The Green Book Magazine.
Edward Mortelmans (1915–2008) was an English artist and illustrator. His primary modes of expression were watercolor and black and white line drawings. He is best known for illustrating some books by Gerald Durrell, and covers for books by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Adventure was an American pulp magazine that was first published in November 1910 by the Ridgway company, a subsidiary of the Butterick Publishing Company. Adventure went on to become one of the most profitable and critically acclaimed of all the American pulp magazines. The magazine had 881 issues. Its first editor was Trumbull White. He was succeeded in 1912 by Arthur Sullivant Hoffman (1876–1966), who edited the magazine until 1927.
Walter Martin Baumhofer was an American illustrator notable for his cover paintings seen on the pulp magazines of Street & Smith and other publishers.
Short Stories was an American fiction magazine that existed between 1890 and 1959.
Bruce Minney was an American artist who worked in a variety of media. He was a commercial illustrator for over 40 years producing paintings for men’s adventure magazines, paperbacks, and storyboards. Later he moved to ceramics and won numerous awards for his efforts. His most recent work included collages and paintings.
John McDermott, also known under the pen names J.M. Ryan and Mariner, was an American illustrator and author noted for action and adventure illustrations. McDermott worked as an in-between and effects animator for Walt Disney Studios and as a US Marine combat artist, before establishing himself as a cover illustrator for 1950s paperbacks and pulp magazines such as Argosy, American Weekly, and Outdoor Life. Under his J.M. Ryan pen name, he wrote the novels The Rat Factory (1971), a derogatory satire of Walt Disney and the Disney studio; Brooks Wilson Ltd (1967), on which the 1970 film Loving was based; and Mother's Day (1969) about Ma Barker. Under his own name, he novelized director-writer Bo Widerberg's screenplay for the 1971 film Joe Hill, which would be his final published book.
Robert Carter Stanley Jr. was an American artist famous for his works on paperback novel covers. He was born in Wichita, Kansas, and died in Big Pine Key, Florida.
Rudolph Belarski was an American graphic artist known for his cover art depicting aerial combat for magazines such as Wings, Dare Devil Aces, and War Birds. He also drew science fiction covers for Argosy in the 1930s and covers for mystery and detective novels.
Lawrence Sterne Stevens was an American pulp fantasy and science fiction illustrator.
Emmett St. Clair Watson, Jr. was an American illustrator whose works appeared in popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Judge, Collier's, and Life, and also in pulp magazines such as Argosy, Railroad Stories, and Detective Fiction Weekly.