We’ve never seen this one before. It’s the American tabloid Limelight, published today in 1966, with someone who looks quite a bit like famed nude model Margaret Nolan on the cover posing as the title story’s jilted lover. This is an example of what we like to think of as editorial economy—i.e., the process of getting from raw material to end story in the most concise way possible. You have a photo of a woman wearing a man’s suit jacket and—voilà!—you write a story that the jacket is all she has left of a boyfriend who (this is where “tabloid” comes in) changed his sex. Ingenious, really. Actually, it might have been even more economical to write that the woman used to be a man and wears the jacket out of sadness and nostalgia: Woman Who Was Once Man Says Sex Change Was a Mistake. We have a feeling sleaze publisher nonpareil Myron Fass was behind this newspaper. Limelight is not listed anywhere as one of his publications, but we doubt those lists are complete. We’ll dig for more info. 

Today we have another copy of Myron Fass’s true crime magazine Crime Does Not Pay, with one of its infamous torture covers. We thought the last one was bad, but this time the uncredited artist opts to depict the dreaded blowtorch treatment. This issue is from September 1969, and inside you get stories on Vito Genovese, Elliot Ness, Bugsy Siegel, Abe Hummel, Charles Ponzi, and various other crooks, cops, feds, crooked cops, and crooked feds. Twenty-one scans below, and you can see more gory goodness from Crime Does Not Pay here.

 

Above, a cover of Myron Fass’s over-the-top tabloid National Mirror, published today in 1969. Our choice for best story: “Crazed Firemen Put Out Fire Naturally.” How much you wanna bet the phrase “weenie roast” pops up in there somewhere? See more National Mirror here and here. 

Above is a cover of Leverett Gleason’s Crime Does Not Pay, a classic comic book—unaffiliated with Myron Fass’s publication of the same name—that launched in 1942. The comic was nominally aimed at adults, however kids bought it in droves, and parental fears about youngsters reading the violent publication helped bring about the formation in 1954 of the Comics Code Authority. Under the baleful eye of CCA censors, Crime Does Not Pay lost its edge, quickly followed by its popularity, leading to its shuttering in 1955. However it remains highly collectible today, with asking prices ranging from $30.00 to $200.00. The cover art is by Bob Fujitani, who illustrated countless comics during a career that began in the early 1940s. The example above and those below are all circa 1950 and 1951. 

Here’s yet another mid-century tabloid, the low-rent National Mirror. This one was published today in 1969, and the paper as a whole was part of the Myron Fass stable, running from 1965 to 1973. Its editorial niche was forced sex, which is to say we’ve never seen a cover that didn’t feature the words “rape,” “molest,” or “assault.” There’s even a well-known cover about an actress being raped by a gorilla. If every good outcome accidentally creates an opposite consequence, then it's easy to see how the long overdue sexual liberation of the sixties that freed women to make their own choices unleashed a backlash of male resentment personified by the audience for these tabloids. If women couldn’t be kept in their place in the real world, at least they could be controlled—indeed abused—in print. Is that assumption about Mirror readers too big of a leap to make? It might seem so, looking at just one cover. But if we posted fifteen, and you saw the rape theme repeated on each one, you’d probably say, “Ah, okay, they’ve got a point there.” The good news is these types of tabloids have all disappeared, which gives us the freedom to enjoy them as historical curiosities. The bad news is today’s sales figures for violent porn teach us that only the medium has changed, not the message. That said, we’re well aware that many people see any reproduction of female nudity as a form of sexual violence, but that’s overreaching, in our opinion. Our rule is simple: Nudity and sex good, nonconsensual nudity and sex bad. Unless you’re crazy, it’s impossible to get confused. 

Hush-Hush News is a fresh addition to the Pulp Intl. tabloid collection, and though it’s an obscure imprint, it was owned by Myron Fass, who was one of the kings of American sleaze publishing during the sixties and seventies. He started as a comic book artist in 1946, and worked in that field until the mid 1950s. The satire magazine Lunatickle was his first publishing venture, and he moved into tabloid publishing soon afterward. Fass specialized in one-offs—editions meant to be printed only once. During the height of his empire he published fifty titles a month, covering any subject matter he thought would sell—wrestling, UFOs, punk music, horror movies, conspiracy, psychic phenomena, and so forth. His celebrity mags included Cockeyed, Exposed, The National Mirror, and Pic, all of which we’ll show you later. The above paper hit the streets today in 1971, and it features the usual combination of sexual teasing and race-baiting, but the most interesting thing to us is the shift we see inside from old to new school Hollywood. People like Stacy Keach, Patty Duke, and Steve McQueen are featured, while Hollywood gods like Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant have virtually faded from the scene. But the new school stars perhaps didn’t capture imaginations like the old guard, because in a few more years, a market that had once been glutted with tabloids would feature only a few. We’ll have more issues of Hush-Hush News in the future.