Let's face it—once the wine tasting and the luau were over there was no reason to finish the cruise anyway.
Above is the cover of the August 1976 issue of the Australian men’s adventure magazine Adam, a publication we’ve featured a few times* in the past. The front illustration is an unusually colorful and evocative piece for a magazine that specialized in them. It pairs with a story by stalwart Adam contributor Mike Rader titled “The Eye of the Dragon,” which is about a magazine writer in Malaysia, the beautiful spy he encounters, and a legendary gem coveted by all and sundry. As always, Rader does pretty good work.
This issue of Adam is one in which erotica and pulp style literature coexist to nice effect, with beautiful interior illustrations by Jack Waugh and others interspersed with photos of cinema sex symbols Andrea Lau and Karin Schubert, a snippet on xxx star Marilyn Chambers, and semi-nude photos of unknown models. When people ask why we have vintage nude photos on our website this is exactly why—it’s relevant to what was produced by post-pulp publishers throughout the late ’60s and the entirety of the 1970s.
*This is the ninety-third issue we’ve shared. Click the keyword “Adam” below if you want to lose a substantial amount of your valuable time.
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.
He probably smells your cat on you. Just scratch him behind the ear. He loves that.
Above are the cover and some interior scans from Adam, published April 1977, the forty-fifth issue of this great Australian magazine we’ve shared here on Pulp Intl. This one has yet another story from Mike Rader. We can’t imagine there’s much more of his output to be found, but we’ll find out—we have more than twenty more examples of Adam to show you. The previous forty-four issues we’ve looked at are all buried inside the website but you can find them by using the search box or clicking the keywords below.
Get your filthy mitts off her this instant! I told you before—under my rules everybody gets a piece!
This issue of Adam was published this month in 1977. It has a nice cover featuring a tussle on the Hudson River with New York City in the background, and Bernie Sanders looking very pissed off. And really who can blame him? This situation is inherently unequal and there’s no need for it because, clearly, there’s more than enough to go around. The story being illustrated here is Mike Rader’s “The Man They Killed at the Waldorf,” about a murder plot with national security implications. This is probably one of the last storieshepublished in the magazine, and it’s certainly one of his most fanciful, involving a weather control device, a kindly professor, Russian spies, and a murderous femme fatale. Also in this issue you get the usual assortment of great illustrations and pretty models. Rita Pennington stars in the feature, “Wide Awake Wendy,” and in the final photo set, “Irish Eyes,” for some reason we prefer the last shot upside-down, maybe because there’s a Dorian Gray sort of weirdness to it. Scroll to see what we mean. Go on—Bernie would want you to.
Get your dress off quick! We need two floatation devices!
Above: the cover and several scans from Australia’s Adam magazine sent to us by former Adam writer Mike Rader. We’ve talked about him before, starting here. This is for sure one of our favorite covers from this great publication. As of now, we have nine more issues in hand from which you’ll see hundreds of pages as we continue into this year. See our many past shares by clicking keyword “Adam Magazine” below.
She makes a couple of convincing points in her favor.
Author Mike Rader sent us two groups of scans from his personal collection of Adam magazine a while back, and today we’re sharing the first of those gifts, the cover and some interior pages from the December 1974 issue. Most of the images he sent were of naked girls, which is fine with us, but the magazine features great illustrations and comics as well, which bears mentioning, and of course was home to many young Aussie writers. Rader also sent the back cover, which features a young-ish Paul Hogan (Crocodile Dundee) shilling for Winfield cigarettes. Scans below.
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 Raderhereand 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 defnitelyher.
Nice move, klutz. All that talk about your ship coming in and you aren’t even ready when it gets here.
Yet again we are back to our favorite men’s magazine of all time—Australia’s Adam. This issue is from August 1973, with a cover illustration for Mark Graham’s “Cruise into Danger.” We still have the scans Adam writer Mike Rader/James Lee sent in from two issues in which his fiction appeared in 1975, but we delayed putting them up because we saw both of those issues for sale at an online auction and figured we’d wait and put up thirty scans rather than five or six. But in the end, we didn’t get them because, well, embarrassingly, we stayed out at the clubs until 7:00 a.m. and the damned auction ended half an hour before we got home. Worse, it was for nine issues and they went for fifteen dollars. Just our luck. Oh well, we promise we’ll get those Rader/Lee scans up shortly. In the meantime, this issue will have to tide you over. In other news, the Pulp Intl. subscription button at upper right should be working again, so those who have written in asking about that should be good to go. Thanks for your patience.
Move your ass, Mary Ann! This lunatic has killed the Skipper, Gilligan, Ginger, and the Howells—and we're next!
So, we have four or five more issues of the Aussie magazine Adam that we’re planning to post, and above you see the cover of one of those, from July 1973. We had been searching around for more issues when out of the blue we got an email from Jim/Australia informing us that he had written for the magazine back in 1975. His stories appeared under the name Mike Rader, and we had posted three issues in which his fiction appeared. Those issues, with the stories “See Rome and Die,” “Deadline Portugal,” and “Hellbound Express” can be seen here, here, and here.
And here’s Jim: In the 1950s-1970s, most Australian writers had few opportunities to sell their work locally. They had to send their work to publishers in the UK. So local magazines like Adam, and pulp fiction houses like Horwitz, inspired and encouraged a lot of Aussie writers to take their first steps. At the time, I was working in advertising, I was time poor but dying to start writing stories, so I targeted Adam. I concocted the name Mike Rader (it sounded like a raider!) and they bought virtually everything I sent in. I found it helped to attach an idea for the illustration with each story—that way they could picture the finished product before they started reading. It was a good discipline for me; I started by dreaming up a movie poster-style scene; if I couldn’t think of anything exciting, then I scrapped the story idea and moved on. (Besides which, advertising people are trained to think visually.) What also helped my work sell was the fact I respected the craft; I didn’t look down on the genre. By the way, I never met the editor, but I had his letter pinned up on the wall—it said, “We like your stories, please send us more!” Since then, I’ve written 122 books for children, and books on advertising.
We checked out Jim’s Wikipedia entry, which led us to his publisher’s website and, sure enough, he’s put together a quite impressive bibliography. His million-selling Mr. Midnight series, and his newer Mr. Mystery collection, are both written under the pseudonym James Lee, and are described as being for Asian teens (Jim has lived in Singapore for 20 years). But they’re written in English and we suspect they have plenty of pan-cultural aspects. A few days after we first heard from Jim, he really surprised us by sending in some scans from two issues of Adam in which his fiction appeared. Since we already had today’s post ready to go, we’re going to share those a little later, so keep an eye open for them. In the meantime, enjoy the below scans from July 1973.
Update: a sharp-eyed reader informs us that the model featured in the photo series entitled “Cynthia’s Poses” is none other than Rene Bond, who appeared in about 300 x-rated loops and films during the 1970s. Thanks to Rai for soptting that.
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sails to Europe for the World War I peace talks in Versailles, France, becoming the first U.S. president to travel to Europe while in office.
1921—Arbuckle Manslaughter Trial Ends
In the U.S., a manslaughter trial against actor/director Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle ends with the jury deadlocked as to whether he had killed aspiring actress Virginia Rappe during rape and sodomy. Arbuckle was finally cleared of all wrongdoing after two more trials, but the scandal ruined his career and personal life.
1964—Mass Student Arrests in U.S.
In California, Police arrest over 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover and sit-in at the administration building in protest at the UC Regents’ decision to forbid protests on university property.
1968—U.S. Unemployment Hits Low
Unemployment figures are released revealing that the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen to 3.3 percent, the lowest rate for almost fifteen years. Going forward all the way to the current day, the figure never reaches this low level again.
1954—Joseph McCarthy Disciplined by Senate
In the United States, after standing idly by during years of communist witch hunts in Hollywood and beyond, the U.S. Senate votes 65 to 22 to condemn Joseph McCarthy for conduct bringing the Senate into dishonor and disrepute. The vote ruined McCarthy’s career.
1955—Rosa Parks Sparks Bus Boycott
In the U.S., in Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation laws, an incident which leads to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott resulted in a crippling financial deficit for the Montgomery public transit system, because the city’s African-American population were the bulk of the system’s ridership.
Aslan art was borrowed for many covers by Dutch publisher Uitgeverij A.B.C. for its Collection Vamp. The piece used on Mike Splane's Nachtkatje is a good example.
