Two years ago we shared five covers of women standing over men they had just killed and mentioned that there were many examples in vintage cover art of that particular theme. Today we’ve decided to revisit the idea in order to reiterate just how often women in pulp are the movers and shakers—and shooters and stabbers and clubbers and poisoners and scissorers. Now if they do this about a billion more times they’ll really be making a difference that counts.

French publishers, interestingly, were unusually fond of this theme—so egalitarian of them. That’s why many of the covers here are from France, including one—for which we admit we bent the rules of the collection a bit, because the victim isn’t dead quite yet—of a woman actually machine gunning some hapless dude. But what a great cover.

We also have a couple of Spanish killer femmes, and a Dutch example or two. Because we wanted to be comprehensive, the collection is large and some of the fronts are quite famous, but a good portion are also probably new to you. Art is by the usual suspects—Robert Maguire, Barye Phillips, Alex Piñon, Robert Bonfils, Robert McGinnis, Rudolph Belarski, et al. Enjoy.

This nice piece was painted by French artist Emmanuel Gaillard for Une femme dangereuse, which was originally released in 1940 as They Drive by Night. The movie, which is adapted from A. I. Bezzerides’ 1938 novel Long Haul, deals with two wildcat truckers caught in the American class struggle—you know, that thing all the millionaire pundits on television tell you doesn’t exist? The drivers want to rise above their station, but find many obstacles in their way, including leasing companies, fruit buyers, competing truckers, road accidents, injuries, fatigue, and eventually, murder. While the world-against-the-working-man aspect is interesting, the best part is watching George Raft and Humphrey Bogart play the two hard luck drivers. The movie also boasts the excellent Ann Sheridan, as well as film noir icon Ida Lupino in full-on crazy mode. But like the several trucks onscreen that veer off the road, the movie itself lurches into melodrama at the end. Une femme dangereuse had its French premiere today in 1947.

Today we’re back to the bodybuilding publication Tomorrow’s Man. The content of TM was health focused, but in the same way that the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is about swimwear. We’ll let a contemporary from the period say it: “When I was a closeted teenager Tomorrow’s Man was my favorite guilty pleasure magazine. I was so impressed that in 1965 I mentioned Tomorrow’s Man specifically in my first novel What They Did to the Kid.” That’s from award winning author Jack Fritscher.

So you had a health and fitness publication that—for some customers—also served as a sexual outlet, exactly like Sports Illustrated. One difference here, though, is that underaged boys were often featured in TM’s pages, and that holds true for this issue as well, in which a fifteen-year-old boy named Steve Jano poses in the woods wearing a thong and holding a spear. Of course, back then there were nudist publications that published photos of entire families—including completely naked pre-pubescent girls—so there’s nothing going on with TM that heterosexuals weren’t doing too, probably long earlier and doubtless in far greater numbers.

None of that is the reason we wanted to share this issue, but as we’ve said before, sometimes to get where we want we have to first address the elephant in the room. Okay, done. What actually struck us about this issue from May 1956 is the inclusion of Marilyn Monroe. We thought we’d seen Monroe everywhere, but no—here she is in a male bodybuilding publication. There seems to be no limit to her range. But we do think she needs to bump up the weight she’s lifting just a bit. You can check out more TM covers here.

In the summer of 1964, promoting her movie The Carpetbaggers, American actress Carroll Baker attended a premiere at London’s Plaza Theatre in Piccadilly Circus wearing a $28,000.00 transparent dress from designer Pierre Balmain. She had worn it before at the U.S. premiere in June, which means Londoners had an inkling what they were going to see, but what resulted was, well, a circus. The crowd went nuts and the situation devolved into what some newspapers described as a near riot. The above National Examiner, published today in 1972, features Baker wearing what we noticed was a similar but not identical dress. We got curious where it came from, and so we went looking.

Turns out in late 1964 designer Oleg Cassini, entranced by the Balmain dress, designed a similar version for Baker to wear at a promotional event in Las Vegas. The difference is in the placement of the beading—Balmain’s left a v-shaped peek-a-boo, whereas Cassini’s left a diagonal opening across the chest. You can see the difference below. Cassini had built his version of the dress in Baker’s absence using a model of identical size, but it didn’t really fit because bodies have all sorts of differences, even if their crude numerical aspects are ostensibly the same. Baker endured eighteen precarious hours in a gown that was so tightshe couldn’t shake hands without it shifting to reveal parts she wanted to keep hidden. She later wore the dress—hopefully altered—at a premiere of Cheyenne Autumn, and a photo of her posing with a dozen costumed Native Americans survives today in the Associated Press archives.

But the dress wasn’t finished quite yet. The next year immortal costumer Edith Head designed yet another variation on Balmain’s original for Baker to wear promoting the film Harlow. We don’t know where the previous two gowns went, but the Head version, one of several she put together, survived and has appeared in Hollywood fashion exhibitions as recently as 2003. Baker also wore a Balmain (or Cassini or Edith Head copy) during a 1966 troop tour in Vietnam, and the only reason a full firefight didn’t break out among the GIs the moment she unveiled herself is probably because that version had no cut-outs (right).

On the cover of this issue of Midnight published today in 1969, editors tell readers that presidential widow Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis hates Americans. The story extensively quotes an acquaintance named Lisa Whalley, who says at one point, “She (Jackie) thinks of Americans as a herd of mindless sheep who follow after famous personalities as though they were gods and goddesses.” It’s an interesting line, but it isn’t really news. Jacqueline Kennedy’s feelings about the U.S. were well known. After her husband was murdered, she and Robert Kennedy stated that they believed JFK had been felled by domestic opponents, the key words in there being “domestic”, i.e. American, and “opponents”, more than one person. And when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, Jackie came to the conclusion that the entire Kennedy family was a target. According to RFK biographer C. David Heymann, she said, “I hate this country. I despise America and I don’t want my children to live here anymore. If they’re killing Kennedys, my children are number one targets. I want to get out of this country.” Four months later she married Aristotle Onassis and moved to Greece. So the Midnight headline isn’t any great stretch, though to the editors’ credit, they do a pretty good job of framing it as a scoop. Inside the issue you get Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the rocks, Italian bombshell Nuccia Cardinali, Chinese beauty Irene Tsu, and a pretty nice shot of Czech-born sex symbol Barbara Bouchet. All of that and more below.

Above is a great shot of American actress and dancer Ann Miller, who was born Johnnie Collier (a much better name, in our opinion) and who appeared in many films, beginning with 1934’s Anne of Green Gables and ending with 2001’s Mulholland Dr. This shot is from her 1944 Columbia musical Hey, Rookie!, in which she had the lead role. Miller died in 2004.

The National Police Gazette devoted more space to boxing than most magazines of its time, and Gazette editors especially loved using boxing photo-illustrations on their covers. The above, from January 1953, is yet another example—albeit an unusual one. You may think that this is actually just a bad painting, but no—it’s a colorized and retouched version of a famous photograph of heavyweight champion Jersey Joe Walcott losing to younger, hungrier Rocky Marciano. It happened September 23, 1952 in Philadelphia, and Walcott—having scored a knockdown in the first round—was ahead on points in round 13 when he walked into Marciano’s right hook. Walcott was a guy who had fought hard all his life. He was the son of Haitian immigrants and had gone to work in a soup factory when he was only thirteen. He had won a lot of bouts, but had lost quite a few as well. He was also the oldest heavyweight champion ever at age thirty-seven. But even with all his experience, guile and drive, he had no chance of surviving the destructive power of a full-force Marciano right. Walcott hit the canvas, and the fight—as well as the best part of his career—was over.

But Jersey Joe Walcott didn’t just fade away—that would have been completely out of character. He had friends in Hollywood and three years later appeared on the silver screen with Humphrey Bogart in The Harder They Fall. He followed that up in 1962 when he acted in the television series Cain’s Hundred. He also became a boxing referee, and was in the ring when Muhammad Ali beat Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title in 1965. Walcott was heavily criticized for his officiating during that fight, which meant the end of his career as a ref. But he proved that some men are impossible to keep down when he became sheriff of Camden County,

New Jersey, and later head of the New Jersey State Athletic Commission, a position he held until the age of 70. In 1994 Jersey Joe Walcott died at age 80. He had been neither the greatest nor the least of boxing champions, but he had certainly been one of the most persistent.