Above is the cover of yet another magazine we’ve never seen before—Sensational Exposés, produced by New York City based Skye Publishing. We’ve scanned and uploaded a couple of other rare tabloids in the last year, including Dynamite and Nightbeat. This fits right into that group. Rarity doesn’t make it special, though. It’s a great little historical tidbit but it doesn’t compare favorably to the big boy tabloids of the era—Confidential, Whisper, Hush-Hush, et al, either graphically or content-wise.
Sensational Exposés resided near the border between tabloid and true crime. The magazine came from Skye Publications out of New York City. Inside this issue published this month in 1958, the Mafia is extensively mentioned, the psychology of arsonists is discussed, pornographic films get long look, and random bodies turn up. Since it billed itself on the covers of earlier issues as offering, “daring, hard-hitting disclosures in the world of crime,” we’re calling it mainly a true crime magazine.
That said, Croatian actress Tana Velia, aka Tania Velia, gets a deep feature as she tells of her escape through the Iron Curtain. It wasn’t as hairsbreadth as journalist Bill Wolf relates it. Velia’s home country of Yugoslavia had begun to shift toward non-alignment, rejecting both Soviet and U.S. control, and Velia was competing in swim meets around Europe. She simply didn’t go back after a competition in Graz, Austria. She took several trollies to avoid being followed, walked into a British Military Zone and turned herself over to an officer.
Even so, it remains an interesting episode. Her ambition had always been to act. She says in the article that in the U.S., “every son can hope to be a president and every girl can wish for a movie career.” Edit: *eyeroll* She got her wish, but after making Queen of Outer Space, Fiend of Dope Island, and Missile To the Moon we wonder if Velia wished she’d kept swimming. As for Sensational Exposés, it launched in 1957 and didn’t last past 1958, as far as we can tell. Scans below.
