| Vintage Pulp | Jul 30 2020 |
Look! Smooth as two baby peaches. Anywhere else you want me to shave?
Here's a nice cover for a Dutch paperback titled Nachtkatje, which translates as “night kitten,” written by Mike Splane, and published by Antwerp based Uitgeverij A.B.C. for its Collection Vamp in 1957. This publisher is not the same as Uitgeversmij, based in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and whose output we've shown you here and here. The cover on this is uncredited, but A.B.C.'s Vamp series often had Alain Gourdon art that had been modified from a previous form, and this piece has that look.
Everything we just wrote, we learned with minimal research. Now comes the part where our research falls short. You might guess that this is a translated Mickey Spillane novel, but we can't confirm that. If it's a translated Spillane it's mighty short—just sixty-plus pages. Which presents a problem. Spillane's short stories weren't published in book form until after 1957, at least not in the U.S. So finding out if this is a Spillane short—which we actually doubt—will have to wait for more knowledgable people than us. See more covers in the same vein here.
| Vintage Pulp | Jul 3 2020 |
They're dressed for bed but it doesn't look like sleep is the plan.
We're back to Mike Ludlow today, with these two pin-up paintings of negligée clad beauties he created for Esquire magazine. As we mentioned not long ago, Ludlow painted portraits of film stars, and as you can see here even the women that came from his imagination look a bit famous. For instance, to us these two look like Diana Dors (a little) and Elaine Stewart (a lot). Or is that just us? Regardless, they're beautiful creations.
| Femmes Fatales | Jun 26 2020 |
Our boyfriends have no clue our slumber parties involve absolutely zero slumbering.
Above is an amazing photo published in the Japanese pop culture magazine Weekly Playboy in 1972. It's uncaptioned, as you can see. Two of the women pictured are pinku actresses Miki Sugimoto and Yuri Yamashina, next to each other at bottom, looking at you rightside up. We have plenty of material on both of them in the website. We can't identify the other models. Feel free to enlighten us.
| Vintage Pulp | May 21 2020 |
That whole prison rehabilitation thing doesn't seem to be working.
Well, this completes the collection of posters we have for Zeroka no onna: Akai wappa, aka Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs, starring Miki Sugimoto as a vigilante cop released from prison to take on a gang of kidnappers. We've shown you the limited edition poster panted by Toru Shinohara, and the tateken sized promo. This is the standard sized poster and finishes up all the promo material we have on this iconic film. Don't worry, though. We have more on Sugimoto and even some rare promo images of her never before seen online. We'll get to those later.
JapanToei CompanyZeroka no onna: Akai wappaZero Woman: Red HandcuffsMiki Sugimotopinkupinky violenceposter artcinema
| Vintage Pulp | May 2 2020 |
Katayama finds herself with too much skin in the game.
Above you see two posters for the Japanese movie Tokugawa irezumi-shi: Seme jigoku, which is known in English as Inferno of Torture, and, occasionally, Hell's Tattooers. We aren't going to get too deeply into the film. It's where Japanese cinema delves into bondage and tattoo fetish layered with gore, and deals with two Edo-era master tattooists who play out a bitter rivalry on the skin of Yumiko Katayama, as well as other unfortunates. If you can tolerate the frontloaded blood and torture, the latter two thirds of the movie may be worth watching for the tattoos, which verge on magical rather than merely ornate. The set design and Teruo Ishii's direction are good too. The tateken sized promo at top is rare, if not even nonexistent online until this very moment, so we thought we'd share it. Tokugawa irezumi-shi: Seme jigoku premiered in Japan today in 1969. Below you see Katayama in a nice pose, untattooed.
JapanToei CompanyTokugawa irezumi-shi: Seme jigokuInferno of TortureHell's TattooersTeruo YoshidaMasumi TachibanaYumiko KatayamaTeruo Ishiiiposter artcinemasexploitationnudity
| Vintage Pulp | Apr 13 2020 |
She meant to cause them sorrow, she meant to cause them pain.
We just explored Mike Ludlow's pin-up work recently and here he is in paperback mode with a cover for L. Sprague de Camp's Rogue Queen, the third book in the Interplanetarias series, with this one coming in 1951 originally, followed in ’53 by the Dell paperback edition. The text on the cover is misleading. “She learned about sex from an Earth man”? Well, not really. What actually happens is humans land on a distant planet where the humanoid inhabitants have hive-like social structures, with queens, drones, and workers. One of the workers who's a sort of liaison assigned to the humans does learn about sex, but only in conversation as she seeks to compare human sexuality with that of her own species. There's no interspecies freakiness, and it's barely even hinted at. There was really no need for Dell to try to trick readers—the book is decent all on its own as de Camp explores the geopolitical relationships between different hives, and their efforts to trick the humans into supporting one side or another in an ongoing war. Many of these books from the golden age of science fiction are high concept, dramatic but not overbearingly serious, and about at the right emotional level for a high school freshman. Rogue Queen fits the bill in all respects.
| Vintage Pulp | Apr 1 2020 |
No time to wallow in the mire.
Above is a poster for the Roger Corman produced b-movie Swamp Women, which starred Marie Windsor, Carole Matthews, Beverly Garland, and Mike Connors, the latter acting under the name Touch Connors. Connors was Armenian-American and thought—correctly, we suspect—that his real name Krekor Ohanian wasn't going to help his show business career. He accumulated at least twenty credits as Touch Connors before he jettisoned it and eventually became the guy everyone remembers from the cop show Mannix.
In Swamp Women Connors plays an oil prospector boating around the Louisiana bayou who stumbles across a group of escaped female convicts searching for a stash of diamonds. Among their number is an undercover police woman charged with finding the stones and apprehending the group. It's fully as ridiculous as it sounds, and with Corman at the helm you know it's cheap, too. Plus this was only his fourth full directing gig. But we give him credit—he really made his cast slog through the Louisiana mire, which means you get realism to offset the use of stock footage.
The thing about Corman is that he always did more with less. But despite his particular set of skills, the script here hamstrings any attempt at making a decent flick. As an example of what we mean, Mike Connors doesn't go into the swamp alone. He takes his girlfriend with him, and she's eaten by an alligator. Hours later he's smooching the undercover policewoman. Not as part of a ruse or escape attempt. Just because he digs her. His girlfriend was a gold digging pain in the ass, but still, you'd think seeing her ripped to pieces would cool his ardor. But they don't call him Touch Connors for nothing. Plenty more fish in the bayou.
If you look on Wikipedia Swamp Women is classified as a film noir. That's purely comical. It's a proto-exploitation flick along the lines of what American International Pictures would routinely do fifteen years later with more skin and better efx. By the time the swamp women finally reach the site of the hidden diamonds and dig up a box, you'll be hoping they open it and find a new script and more investment money. But no such luck. Corman would do better later. Windsor, Matthews, and Garland had done better in the past. That's show business—one day you're at the top, the next you're sinking in the bog. Swamp Women premiered in the U.S. today in 1956.
ArmeniaLouisianaSwamp WomenMannixKrekor OhanianMike ConnorsTouch ConnorsMarie WindsorCarole MatthewsBeverly Garlandposter artcinematelevisionmovie review
| Vintage Pulp | Mar 25 2020 |
Can you name the five stars in the constellation Ludlow the Genius?
Above you see five pin-up paintings that came from the brush of Mike Ludlow, an artist we featured the first time only recently. He rose from humble beginnings in Buffalo, New York, to become an acclaimed figure that at his zenith painted portraits of major actresses for Esquire magazine. That's where all these pieces were originally published, and if you haven't identified them all, they are, top to bottom, Anita Ekberg, Gina Lollobrigida, Virginia Mayo, Denise Darcel, and Betsy von Furstenberg. All these stars have been featured on Pulp Intl., and you can see interesting posts on them at the following links: Ekberg, Lollobrigida, Mayo, Darcel, von Furstenberg.
BuffaloEsquire MagazineMike LudlowAnita EkbergGina LollobrigidaVirginia MayoDenise DarcelBetsy von Furstenberg
| Vintage Pulp | Jan 30 2020 |
First of all, hell no. Second, why are you wearing lipstick? And third, crushed strawberry is not your color.
When it comes to mid-century fiction, basically all the guys had problems respecting women's boundaries. There are so many covers of the above type we could curate an entire collection. We can't think of any others, however, where the guy looks like he's wearing lipstick. We checked a few other examples of this one online, just in case this look was courtesy of some kid with a crayon, but he's wearing that crushed strawberry in all of them. Not that we disapprove. More guys probably should do it. We've done it, and it was fun, if not even educational. But maybe we're drilling too deep into this subject. Boundaries we were talking about, right? So, Mike Moran was aka Ben Kerr, Jonas Ward, and Thomas Wills, and this book deals with a private eye who takes a job bodyguarding a boxer who's run into problems as the night of a big bout approaches. Reviews are mixed to middling. But this cover opens the door to all sorts of discussion, which makes it worth sharing. 1953 on this.
| Vintage Pulp | Dec 30 2019 |
Let's split up here! And in case I get killed, nice ass! Forgive the objectification, but I couldn't leave it unsaid!
Above are thirty-five scans from a December 1976 issue of Adam magazine, with a cover illustrating Mike Rader's story “Die As the Romans Do.” We made contact with Rader a while back, and he updated us on his career, and told us some fun stories about working with Adam editors back in the day. The tale he weaves in this issue concerns an Australian tourist in Rome who helps a damsel in distress, and for his kindness gets ensnared in a murder plot. The scene in the painting occurs when he and the damsel, named Claudia, flee the Roman catacombs during a Mafia-on-Mafia shootout—but only after Claudia has had her dress ripped off by the villains.
Rader's fiction is always interesting, but the highlight of this issue is a photo feature of Daisy Duke herself—Catherine Bach, three years before she became world famous on The Dukes of Hazzard—who you see just above. Since she isn't identified in the shots, it isn't like Adam knew who they had on their hands. To them, they simply had some nice handout photos of a minor actress. But that stroke of luck gives this issue extra value, at least as far as we're concerned. Believe it or not, after posting sixty-two issues of Adam we still have forty more we haven't scanned yet. Will we get to them all? We'll certainly try.
AustraliaRomeAdam MagazineThe Dukes of HazzardCatherine BachMike Radermagazine artliteraturetelevision
