 He promised her a smashing time on safari but this was nothing like she had in mind. 
Adam magazine's covers are nearly always the same—two to four people and a pivotal action moment. This front from February 1970 is a typical example. It shows an unfortunate hunter learning that elephants sometimes won't simply stand still and let you shoot them through the heart so you can turn their tusks into paperweights. The nerve, really. The painting is great. It's probably by Jack Waugh, but it's unsigned, so there's no way to know. He did sign a couple of the interior panels, though. The cover was painted for Ken Welsh's story, “Dirge for a Darling,” which deals with a woman on safari who wants her hunting guide to kill her rich, alcoholic husband. Risky, but when you stand to inherit fifty million dollars, what's a little risk?
We try to avoid spoilers, but since you're never going to have a chance to read this obscure story, we'll just tell you what happens. The husband is a terrible guy, and he spends his days shooting badly at wildlife, and his nights drinking himself into a stupor. The fact that he's always insensate by dark is what allows the wife to start bedding the hunter right in camp in the first place. Once the hunter has been convinced to do the job, he realizes he must devise a foolproof yet suspicion free murder. He plans and schemes for days, looking for an angle, and finally tells the wife he has an idea, but the less she knows the better. Her job is to convincingly play the grieving widow when it happens, so for the sake of realism it's better if she's in the dark.
One morning the hunter comes to fetch the husband for a foray into the bush. Elephants are near. Today is the day the husband will finally get a big tusker. But the husband is hung over like never before. He wants a trophy, but can't possibly go shooting. He asks the hunter to bag an elephant for him. As the cover depicts, the hunter gets trampled to death. When the news comes to camp, the husband smiles evilly. The hangover had been an act. He'd discovered his wife's affair and, while she and her lover were otherwise occupied, had filed down the firing pin on the hunter's rifle. The gun didn't work when needed, resulting in a squashing.
The husband has a celebratory drink and forces his wife—who hates liquor—to join him. The husband cramps, convulses, and dies in excruciating pain. The wife realizes the hunter's foolproof murder method was to poison her husband's beloved liquor in such a way as to make authorities think it had been a bad batch. Then she cramps, convulses, and dies in excruciating pain too. The story ends: “It was all very sad when you considered the talent of those involved, but there it was. The principals, no doubt, went to hell. The $50,000,000 went to charity.” We've read a lot of Adam stories, and this was one of the more entertaining efforts. We have numerous scans below, with Claudine Auger in the second panel, and more Adam coming soon.
 See you later alliga— Whoa... whoops... 
We have another issue of Adam magazine today, just because we love it so much and have dozens we haven't shared yet. Inside this one, which appeared this month in 1973, is an interesting article about the practice of scalping. Writer Paul Brock notes that English puritans scalped foes in Europe and brought the idea to North America. He says enraged Native Americans promptly retaliated by doing the same. He doesn't get this quite right, though. Scalping is not something that can be said to have been invented by anyone, because evidence of the practice goes back millennia in various parts of the world. But European colonists industrialized and monetized scalping in North America, incentivizing the mass murder of Native Americans by offering bounties, including on children. And of course, as often happens with atrocities, propagandists vilified the other side for doing it. Even during colonial times Indians were labeled as vicious savages who scalped whites, and to this day most people still don't realize that it was whites who expanded and normalized the practice. So there's a little holiday cheer for you. Elsewhere in the issue you get the usual assortment of fiction, glamour photography, and cartoons. Including today's upload we have fifty four—yes 54—issues of Adam in our website. Why? Because we think it's the coolest men's adventure magazine ever published.                              
 Junior is every bit as grown up as its father. 
From K.G. Murray Publishing Co., the group that would later produce Adam magazine, comes this October 1948 issue of Man Junior, which you may already know was the offspring of Murray’s flagship publication Man. We showed you one of those here. Both magazines featured art, fiction, cartoons, and glamour photography, but Man Junior was of smaller dimensions—in fact pocket sized. It launched in 1937 and was an immediate success. The cover art above, signed Val, is uncredited, but inside you get illustrations from Arthur Nichol, Jack Waugh, and others, plus an adventure from the immensely popular comic character Devil Doone, who was created by R. Carson Gold, first appeared in Man Junior in 1945, and was drawn during this period by Hart Amos. You also get a pretty cool photo of American actress Janet Blair, who we shared a portrait of just a couple of weeks ago, and of special note are two nude studies from famed British photographer John Everard. We’ll have more samples form Kenneth Murray’s publishing empire soon.                      
|
 |
The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1953—Watson and Crick Unravel DNA
American biologists James D. Watson and Francis Crick tell their friends that they have determined the chemical structure of DNA. The formal announcement takes place in April following publication in Nature magazine. In 1968, Watson writes The Double Helix, a non-fiction account of not only the discovery of the structure of DNA, but the personalities, conflicts and controversy surrounding the work. 1922—Challenge to Women's Voting Rights Rebuffed
In the United States, a conservative legal challenge to the nineteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution establishing voting rights for women is rebuffed by the Supreme Court in Leser v. Garnett. The challenge was based partly on the idea of individual "states rights" to self determination. The failure of such reasoning as it applied to basic human rights created a framework for later states rights losses involving the denial of voting rights to African-Americans.
|
|
|
It's easy. We have an uploader that makes it a snap. Use it to submit your art, text, header, and subhead. Your post can be funny, serious, or anything in between, as long as it's vintage pulp. You'll get a byline and experience the fleeting pride of free authorship. We'll edit your post for typos, but the rest is up to you. Click here to give us your best shot.
|
|
