A COLORFUL MAN

Interesting, full of stories, and very well read.

As much as we love K.G. Murray Publishing’s men’s magazine Adam, especially during its early 1970s period, we have to admit that the succinctly titled Man is probably the prettiest magazine ever produced by the Aussie company. Today’s issue from this month in 1964 is an example. The colors explode from the pages. The art, some of which is by Jack Waugh and the single-monikered Humph, is detailed and lovingly rendered. The format is large (so much so that we had to scan every page you see here in two parts and assemble them in GIMP). And the stories are pure male wish fulfillment.

The magazine was such a popular offering that K.G. Murray even published a pocket edition, which we’ve already shown you. In today’s full-sized edition, as always you get several beautiful models, including one supposedly named Van Leman posing on a sea turtle like it’s a coin-operated ride outside a Kwik-E-Mart. We imagine the turtle wasn’t happy about it, but how can you tell? It’s a turtle. They never look happy. Man also provides a few celebrity shots, including of British actress Gloria Paul, and Danish flash-in-the pan Heidi Hansen. All that and more in many scans down under.
Man Junior rings in the new year Down Under style.


We’ve shared a few issues of Australia’s Man and Man Junior magazines. Like all men’s publications they featured the combination of fact and fiction, sport and adventure, humor, and alluring women. And like many men’s magazines, they published annuals—year-end or year-beginning collections of the best of the previous 365 days. That’s what we have for you today—Man Junior‘s annual for 1965. It avoids any possibility of intellectual enrichment by focusing only on the primal—lust and laughs. Stripped down to nothing but glamour photos and cartoons, the magazine lays bare the fact that text is mere legitimization, a means of de-perving the visual content. Who’d buy an annual if it contained only dubious reporting and short stories? Not many people, we’d wager. These mags were all about the id. We have plenty of that below, with thirty scans. They comprise lovely women such as Betty Brosmer, Christine Aarons, and, in the final panel, June Wilkinson. The cartoons are beautifully colorful, if only occasionally successful as humor. We have more coming from Man and Man Junior in the future.

What it lacks in maturity it makes up for in exuberance.


Above you see a cover of the Australian magazine Man Junior, which hit newsstands Down Under this month in 1963. An offshoot of Man magazine, it came from K.G. Murray Publishing, along with Adam, Pocket Man, Eves from Adam, Cavalcade, Man’s Epic, et al. The Murray empire, run by Kenneth G. Murray, came into being in 1936, and the company’s various imprints lasted until 1978—though the entire catalog was bought by Consolidated Press in the early 1970s. We’ve seen nothing from K.G. Murray that we don’t love, so we’ll keep adding to our stocks indefinitely. Or until the Pulp Intl. girlfriends finally revolt, which should take a few more years. Speaking of which, it’s been a few years since our last Man Junior, but its positives and negatives are still intimately familiar to us. On the plus side, the fiction and true life tales are exotic and often good, and on the negative side the humor doesn’t usually hold up, though the color cartoons are aesthetically beautiful.

Of all the stories, the one that screamed loudest to be read was, “The Hair-Raisers,” by Neville Dasey, which comes with an illustration of a bearded woman. It’s an absurd, legitimately funny story about a con man who accidentally invents a hair growing tonic, which he then unintentionally splashes on his date’s face. By the next morning she has a beard, which proves the tonic works, but the con man lost the magic liquid when he stilled it, and he ends up losing the formula to create it. But everyone ends up happy—the con man earns a contract that pays him regardless of whether he can recreate the formula, and his date ends up marrying the owner of the hair restoration company. We weren’t clear on whether the formula wore off, or she had to shave regularly. Either way, the story is meant to be silly and it certainly achieves that goal. Twenty-eight panels below, and more from Man Junior herehere, and here.

Aussie magazine delves into love, sex, war, crime, and more.

We’re back to Man’s Epic today, a difficult to find Aussie adventure magazine published by K.G. Murray Co., the same group responsible for the amazing Adam magazine. K.G. Murray Co.’s provenance goes all the way back to 1936, when an Aussie advertising worker named Kenneth Gordon Murray launched Man magazine from offices in Sydney, and its mix of adventure, cartoons, and women caught on with readers. Murray expanded and would eventually publish Man JuniorCavalcadeGals and GagsAdam, and numerous other titles. By 1954 the company was churning out eighteen monthly publications.

Man’s Epic, which is not related to the U.S. men’s magazine of the same name, came in October 1967, and switched to bimonthly in 1971, with the above issue published to span May through June 1973. Unfortunately, Man’s Epic died in late 1977 or possibly early 1978, at the same time numerous men’s magazines were withering with the changing times. Murray’s umbrella company Publishers Holding Ltd. had become targeted in a takeover bid that resulted in K.G. Murray Co. being sold to Australian Consolidated Press, or ACP. After that point Murray’s magazines were shuttered one by one by their new owners.

We’re fans of Man’s Epic, though this is only the second issue we’ve managed to buy. Inside you get articles about practitioners of warcraft, a story on motorcycle accidents that doesn’t spare the carnage, and various models whose identities are new to us. There’s also a lengthy feature on shocking sex rites, including a bit on San Simón, aka Maximón, the Mayan trickster deity native to our former beloved home of Guatemala. We once took a long drive from Guatemala across Honduras with an effigy of Maximón in the vehicle, and we learned about his trickster nature firsthand.

That story, by the way, was penned by Jane Dolinger, a trailblazing travel writer who ventured everywhere from the Sahara to the Amazon and wrote eight books, but is perhaps a bit forgotten today. The editors make sure readers know Dolinger is hot by publishing a glamour photo of her, which is a pretty sexist move, though she posed for provocative shots often. Meanwhile her framing of other cultures’ sexual practices as abnormal is textbook racism. Abandon all hope ye who enter this magazine!

Zen and the higher purpose of men's magazines.

We’re very interested in Australian men’s magazines. Today we have a new entry for you—Cavalcade, published by Kenneth G. Murray, the same person that gave the world Adam. This issue from February 1956, has a killer cover—uncredited, which is par for K.G. Murray Publishing. There aren’t many art or photo pages inside, but we’ve posted the ones that were there. You may have noticed the somewhat weird slogan “The Know Yourself Magazine.” We guess the idea being peddled is that Cavalcade helped men become better versions of themselves. It sounds almost zen, almost like the Buddha would say it. But then you open it and see all the raunchy cartoons and bikini beauties and realize—no, it’s just a regular men’s magazine. And if you bought it, you probably knew yourself quite well already. We may get back to this one a bit later.

No, she’s not dead. She just passed out because her belt is cinched too tight.

Above is the cover of the November 1976 issue of Australia’s Adam magazine, with art for Philip Gould’s short story “Flight from Shadow.” Also in this issue is a tale from Mike Rader entitled “Wall of Fear,” a nice piece of Cold War fiction about a reporter in Germany who gets on the trail of what he thinks may be the story of his career. Unfortunately the clues lead to East Berlin and plenty of complications. We talked about Rader here and have corresponded with him, so it was nice to be able get hold of more of his fiction. It’s a shame K.G. Murray Publshing Co. never (as far as we know) collected the tales that appeared in Adam into a reader or anthology. Forty years of stories is a lot of literary output and it really needs a wider audience, not just for the entertainment value, but because the writing is an interesting window into the past. For instance Rader’s story, with its crossing into East Berlin, brings to life some details of that time that you don’t really get from just reading about the Berlin Wall. We also like the stories set in Australia and the vast spaces and isolation some of them describe. They make us want to fly down there. Anyway, below are about forty scans of the magazine’s interior, with its great illustrations, cartoons, and erotic photography. This makes twenty-five issues of Adam we’ve posted, and all of them have been a treat. We’ll have more from this excellent publication soon.


Update: This last model, just above, is German actress Andrea Rau. Didn’t recognize her at first, but it’s defnitely her

We love it when a plan comes together.

We’re excited today. The international mails worked as advertised and we have secured a new stack of Adam magazines, which you know, if you follow this site, is our favorite of the post-pulp publications. It was launched in Sydney, Australia by Kenneth Gordon Murray, whose company K.G. Murray Publishing also produced Man, Man Junior, Foxylady, Eves From Adam, Laughs and Lovelies, Girls and Gags, and a raft of comic book titles as well.

We had been looking for more K.G. Murray output for more than a year, but the prices were simply too high on the few items we found. This batch, we think, was fairly priced. Since the last issue we bought disappeared into the postal ether, we had little hope that a package this size would arrive safely. But arrive it did, and perhaps it teaches a lesson—maybe people are afraid to steal bigger packages because it seems more likely to produce consequences. Just a theory.

Incidentally, we’re not putting down our lovely hosts here. We never had more mail disappear than when we lived in the U.S. and worked at a certain famous company that has a bunny logo. Instead of the company name, we used PEGI on those packages—that’s how likely our mail was to vanish otherwise. Anyway, look for many more appearances from Adam on Pulp Intl. to go with our already large collection—24 issues posted and counting. See those by starting here. 

Waiting for her ship to come in.

From Sydney, Australia’s Kenneth G. Murray, who is the same person who published the great magazine Adam, here’s his earliest mass market imprint—the succinctly named Man. The name leaves no doubt what the magazine is about, and indeed this issue from February 1950 features cover art of an available woman strutting her stuff for some virile sailors, and inside you get pin-ups, pulp style illustrations, fiction, and humor. We found this Man and a few others in an online archive. Below are some scans from today’s, including a black and white photo about midway down of American actress Angela Greene. We’ll have more coming from the others later.

I said wear overalls so you can carry some tools, but you had to wear the strapless mini and now look at you—useless!

This issue of Kenneth G. Murray’s Adam from September 1963 has a lovely cover illustration for W. H. Percival’s tale of danger and treasure hunting in Ceylon, “Cult of the Snake God,” as well as plenty of nice treats inside. As for the cover girl’s inappropriate crypt digging garb, well, she’s a slave and as any pulp aficionado knows, they’re usually sexy and very rarely have enough clothing to wear. In the story, the main character (with the unlikely name Rex Scarbe) decides to rescue the girl Mora from her evil master, but it turns out she’s setting a trap to sacrifice him to a giant python. Scarbe kills the python only to have Mora try to stab him in the heart. So the lesson is that the trustworthiness of a woman is directly proportionate to the amount of clothing she wears. Like you didn’t already know that. 

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1937—Hitler Reveals His Plans for Lebensraum

Adolf Hitler holds a secret meeting with Nazi officials and states his intention to acquire “lebensraum,” or living space for Germany. An old German concept that dated from 1901, Hitler had written of it in Mein Kampf, and now possessed the power to implement it. Basically the idea, as Hitler saw it, was for the Nazis to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Russian and other Slavic populations to the east, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate those lands with a Germanic upper class.

1991—Fred MacMurray Dies

American actor Fred MacMurray dies of pneumonia related to leukemia. While most remember him as a television actor, earlier in his career he starred in 1944’s Double Indemnity, one of the greatest films noir ever made.

1955—Cy Young Dies

American baseball player Cy Young, who had amassed 511 wins pitching for five different teams from 1890 to 1911, dies at the age of 88. Today Major League Baseball’s yearly award given to the best pitcher of each season is named after Young.

1970—Feral Child Found in Los Angeles

A thirteen year-old child who had been kept locked in a room for her entire life is found in the Los Angeles house of her parents. The child, named Genie, could only speak twenty words and was not able even to walk normally because she had spent her life strapped to a potty chair during the day and bound in a sleeping bag at night. Genie ended up in a series of foster homes and was given language training but after years of effort by various benefactors never reached a point where she could interact normally in society.

1957—Soviets Launch Dog into Space

The Soviet Union launches the first ever living creature into the cosmos when it blasts a stray dog named Laika into orbit aboard the capsule Sputnik II. Laika is fitted with various monitoring devices that provide information about the effects of launch and weightlessness on a living creature. Urban myth has it that Laika starved to death after a few days in space, but she actually died of heat stress just a few hours into the journey.

1989—Los Angeles Herald-Examiner Folds

William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, which had gained notoriety for its crime and scandal focus, including coverage of the Black Dahlia murder and Charles Manson trials, goes out of business after eighty-six years. Its departure leaves the Los Angeles Times as the sole city-wide daily newspaper in L.A.

Uncredited cover art for Lesbian Gym by Peggy Swenson, who was in reality Richard Geis.
T’as triché marquise by George Maxwell, published in 1953 with art by Jacques Thibésart, also known as Nik.

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