Vintage Pulp

January 24 2025

MASCULINE ENERGY

There's never been a shortage of it and there probably never will.

Above: the interesting parts of an issue of Male, published this month in 1967, with a cover by Mort Kunstler, and inside art by him, Gil Cohen, Bruce Minney, and Earl Norem. The magazine launched in 1950, and though nobody knew it at the time, by 1967 the days of painted covers were numbered. By the early seventies photo covers would be routine, and in another few years the interior photo content of the magazine would shift away from cheesecake and toward pure erotica. Next stop: dissolution. But we’ll have more from Male later.

Male Magazine, Mort Kunstler, Gil Cohen, Bruce Minney, Earl Norem, Robert F. Kennedy, magazine art, literature

Vintage Pulp

September 28 2021

GYM RATS

Leave it to Nazis to turn phys ed from your favorite class into the worst experience of your life.

This cover of Male from this month in 1967 has cover art of history’s worst gym class, painted by the great Mort Kunstler, and leave it to Nazis to ruin the one thing you can get a good grade in just by showing up. Another thing ruined is the magazine. When it arrived it turned out some pages were razored out of the center. Probably the most interesting pages. It’s an occupational hazard, we suppose. We generally assume the seller had no idea, as these mags are so often the leftovers of fathers and grandfathers, but if it was in fact deliberate, well then, cocks on their house! That’s the saying, right? Or it pox? Doesn’t matter. The silver lining was that we didn’t have to worry keeping the magazine intact while scanning. We just ripped it apart, which sort of felt good.

There’s still plenty of interesting material inside this mutilated Male. There’s fiction and fact, art from Gil Cohen and Bruce Minney, plus more from Kunstler, a screed against motorcycles, a lot of pro Vietnam War content, with lots of digs at peace activists and draft fugitives. The magazine works especially hard to convince readers that draftees who fled to Canada faced lives worse than if they’d gone to Southeast Asia. We doubt quite seriously that anything could be worse than dying in a hot jungle for no rational purpose 10,000 miles from home. But maybe we’re biased—our fathers were war vets, and they had one wish in life: that the military never get its mitts on us. Also that we never do hard drugs. Well, one out of two isn’t bad. Twenty scans below.

Vietnam, Male Magazine, Gil Cohen, Mort Kunstler, Bruce Minney, magazine art, literature, nazis

Vintage Pulp

December 31 2020

MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE

60 is normally when they start to slow down, but not in this case.

Above, multiple scans from Men magazine, an issue published this month in 1960, with art by Harry Schaare, Gil Cohen, and Mort Kunstler. Time is short today, so that’s all we have to say for now, but we have another issue we can upload, so we’ll get back to it.

Men Magazine, Harry Schaare, Mort Kunstler, Gil Cohen, Louise Dixon, magazine art, literature

Vintage Pulp

January 18 2018

ADVENTURES IN FACT AND FICTION

Cover me, boys! If I can get ahold of that massive gun I think we can win this fight!

Above is a Robert Stanley cover and below are numerous interior scans from an issue of the vintage men’s magazine Adventure published this month in 1958. For some reason we don’t think of this as one of the major magazines of the type, but the masthead tells us this issue is part of volume 134. The content consists of fiction and fact from assorted authors, and a photo feature on model Virginia De Lee. The story art is by Gil Cohen, John Styga, Rudy Nappi, et al, and we should amend our cover credit—Stanley painted the western scene, but the pistol and badge plopped atop his careful work were painted by James Triggs. Wonder how Stanley felt about that? Scans below.

Adventure Magazine, Robert Stanley, Virginia De Lee, Gil Cohen, John Styga, Rudy Nappi, James Triggs, Gerald Powell, Herb Mott, Frank Cozzarelli, magazine art, literature

Vintage Pulp

January 2 2015

WAR PROFITEERS

The Male capacity for violence.

Above is a Mort Kunstler cover for Male painted for the January 1965 issue. Kunstler was famed for his war panoramas, as we’ve discussed before, and if you click his keywords below you’ll see several more martial covers from him that we’ve shared. Inside Male you also get art from Charles Copeland, Samson Pollen, and Gil Cohen. The model feature is Susan Radford, who is described as a starlet but who we’d never heard of. Turns out it wasn’t just us. We checked the usual databases and found no mention of Radford anywhere, so it seems Male editors were premature in dubbing her a major riser.

Male focused on all kinds of violent adventures, but especially those dealing with warfare. This issue has four war stories dealing with the Soviet Union, China, and the Nazis, but the most notable entry is South African author Anthony Trew’s gripping Two Hours to Darkness, published here as booklength fiction. The tale is described in the contents as “the nightmarish spine-tingler that will be the movie blockbuster of 1965,” but it looks like Male was wide of the mark again, because no film based on the book was ever released. So Trew had to settle for selling a measly 3.5 million copies of the novel in sixteen languages, the hack. We have a dozen scans below.

South Africa, Male Magazine, Two Hours to Darkness, Mort Kunstler, Charles Copeland, Samson Pollen, Gil Cohen, Susan Radford, Anthony Trew, magazine art, literature

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

July 16

1941—DiMaggio Hit Streak Reaches 56

New York Yankees outfielder Joe DiMaggio gets a hit in his fifty-sixth consecutive game. The streak would end the next game, against the Cleveland Indians, but the mark DiMaggio set still stands, and in fact has never been seriously threatened. It is generally thought to be one of the few truly unbreakable baseball records.

July 15

1939—Adams Completes Around-the-World Air Journey

American Clara Adams becomes the first woman passenger to complete an around the world air journey. Her voyage began and ended in New York City, with stops in Lisbon, Marseilles, Leipzig, Athens, Basra, Jodhpur, Rangoon, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Wake Island, Honolulu, and San Francisco.

July 15

1955—Nobel Prize Winners Unite Against Nukes

Eighteen Nobel laureates sign the Mainau Declaration against nuclear weapons, which reads in part: We think it is a delusion if governments believe that they can avoid war for a long time through the fear of [nuclear] weapons. Fear and tension have often engendered wars. Similarly it seems to us a delusion to believe that small conflicts could in the future always be decided by traditional weapons. In extreme danger no nation will deny itself the use of any weapon that scientific technology can produce.

July 14

1921—Sacco & Vanzetti Convicted

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are convicted in Dedham, Massachusetts of killing their shoe company’s paymaster. Even at the time there are serious questions about their guilt, and whether they are being railroaded because of their Italian ethnicity and anarchist political beliefs.

July 13

1933—Eugenics Becomes Official German Policy

Adolf Hitler signs the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, and Germany begins sterilizing those they believe carry hereditary illnesses, and those they consider impure. By the end of WWII more than 400,000 are sterilized, including criminals, alcoholics, the mentally ill, Jews, and people of mixed German-African heritage.

July 13

1955—Ruth Ellis Executed

Former model Ruth Ellis is hanged at Holloway Prison in London for the murder of her lover, British race car driver David Blakely. She is the last woman executed in the United Kingdom.

July 13

1966—Richard Speck Rampage

Richard Speck breaks into a Chicago townhouse where he systematically rapes and kills eight student nurses. The only survivor hides under a bed the entire night.

DON’T RIDE THE WHITE HORSE

Rafael DeSoto painted this excellent cover for David Hulburd's 1954 drug scare novel H Is for Heroin. We also have the original art without text.

BARN GIRLS

Two Spanish language digest novels from Argentine publishers Malinca Debora and Malinca Nueva Pandora.

Argentine publishers Malinca Debora reprinted numerous English language crime thrillers in Spanish. This example uses George Gross art borrowed from U.S. imprint Rainbow Books.

LOVES OF A BLONDE