Men's Adventure Magazines: In Postwar America

This collection of crazy sensationalistic pulpy magazine covers is amazing and almost endless. With the screaming titles (The truth about those sex fears!), blood thirsty buff men and busty women with their clothes ripped to shreds, what's not to like? They are so over-the-top that it becomes a thing of beauty. There are more covers here than in the more expensive IT'S A MAN WORLD, which is also very good but I'd rather have a thorough collection of magazine covers than a select few. Some covers that are in this book which are not in IT'S A MAN WORLD are worth the price alone: Page 109 - Eye catching pulp cover! Page 223 - The one at the bottom left, my favorite cover in the entire collection. It should have been the cover for the book. Page 239 - Flame thrower. My god! Page 242 - Jaw dropping cover. A tie with the one on page 223. Page 281 - Men in combat. Amazing art by Mort Kunstler! Page 139, the See cover, which is also in IT'S A MAN WORLD, is such a brilliant cover. Needless to say, this book will provide me with endless number of hours of enjoyment. My only complaint is the book cover. Though fun there are much better ones in the book. For the price and the collection of covers, it's unbeatable.

Excellente stuff! The whole Taschen experience is well done - colorful and great art from post-war America. Not all the damsels are in distress, but some are darn good fighters and independent. This is one of the best that I've bought from Taschen, one of my favorite publishers. I probably didn't realize it at the time while reading all my Dad's magazines in the '40's, my sense of manhood was developing and in a positive way, fighting against evil, defending the home country and of course, protecting the buxom women, and keeping myself fit and strong. I enjoyed the book -it makes me wonder how this many wonderful artists began their life-like work at the same time. Glad I didn't have to fight "Kill-Mad Cats," "Tibet's Torture People," "Vice-Kings in Persia," or "Raping Nazis!"

Appearantly Taschen publishes art books. I wasn't familiar with this particular company before recieving this book as a gift, but I found it to be a great little book of... well pulp men's magazine art from the old days. You know, the type where some adventuring Indiana Jones-esque pulp hero gets lost in some exotic locale, fights savage beasts and makes out with sexy native girls. Culled from the covers of mags with titles like 'Man's Life, 'True Danger,' and 'Wildcat Adventures,' this little book is loaded with page after full colour page of muscle bound explorers, soldiers and cowboys going head to head with man-eating tigers and giant octopi, heroically battling the Nazis and Commies alike, and rescuing sexy, overly well endowed (and scantily clad) Polynesian girls from danger! What's that you say? Sounds like it might be a little... two dimensional? Sexist? Offensive to today's sensibilities? Oh yeah, you bet... and then some! But that's part of the fun, really. These overly testosterone fueled manly fantasies were part of another era, and a fascinating one to look at at that! Besides... what man (or boy) doesn't like this sort of stuff deep down inside? It's shades of Kipling meets the Magnificent Seven and Dirty Harry mixed with D-Day, crammed with more cheap thrills, bloody violence and hot sweaty sex than you can shake a stick at! And it's all so over the top. I mean, who thinks of titles like "Those Slimy Rodents Are Eating My Flesh," "Terror in the Far East: The Wolf-Women of India," or "Aphrodisiac Scandal of the Sex Mad Intermns and the 63 Passionate Student Nurses"? Divided up into chapters based around common themes such as wild animal attacks (which include everything from panthers to enraged bull elephants to inexplicably flesh-eating swarms of iguanas and flying squirrels!), World War II, pirate adventures and "the Yellow Peril," each chapter includes a brief article (again based on the chapter's theme) in English, French and German. This is nice not only because it provides some idea of context (for instance, Tahitian and Samoan sexuality became a popular subject due to the popularity of Mead's writings), but also because of the descriptions of the stories... which pretty much match what you'd expect from the covers. Like an Old West full of American Indians kidnapping white women, voluptuous hookers/spies fighting against the Nazis, and man-eating anteaters! Again, pretty un-PC stuff, but thats par for the course. The book also includes an introduction, explaining the background, development and eventual falling out of the manly, hair-on-your-chest pulp adventure magazines. All in all, it turns out to be quite a fun and entertaining romp through the testosterone fueled, hyper-masculine adventure stories of a bygone era. Sure, it's easy to laugh at them, or get offended at the racial (sexual, political, etc) caricatures that they presented. But really, these should be appreciated for providing us with some insight into the p

This book was a trip down memory lane for me; I got a kick out those lurid men's-magazine covers in my youth, and today I get... well, a surge of nostalgia, if no longer quite the same charge. The volume is beautifully produced, like all Taschen books, though I have to add that I find it no better than a similar compendium of men's-mag art called IT'S A MAN'S WORLD, which came out six months earlier; and IAMW, it should be said, has a more extensive and entertaining text.

This latest Taschen pop culture book covers the 'armpit slicks' of the American post war years and it will most likely turn out to be the definitive guide to these magazines. The seven chapters more or less cover all the adventure any male would want (or be able to handle) ferocious animals, sex-crazed pirates, restless natives, death on the front line, Nazis passion slaves, red and yellow perils and lastly, just plain ordinary trouble down your street. All of this action is revealed in over a thousand covers, either one (almost life-size) or four to a page and they are all beautifully reproduced. The introduction reveals the history of the men's adventure mags and it seems that the 1958 Supreme Court decision to weaken the Government's ability to regulate printed obscenity encouraged this rather small corner of the media to expand the market with plenty of new titles, fortunately they only lasted a few years before morphing into 'skin' magazines of the Eighties and Nineties. Yet despite being able to be very explicit with cover art the publications avoided showing the prominent females in any situation that could be considered obscene (shock, horror!) but look through chapter five (A bonfire in hell for the Nazis' passion slaves) and see plenty of illustrations showing helpless, bound females subjected to extreme depravity and torture. As well as the garish bright illustrations, which I expect basically sold them on the newsstands, the cover lines clinched the sale, a whole bunch of men could not resist buying and reading (really!) for example, New Man's Peril, January 1965, with these lines, Crazy cats who pretend they're chicks, We smashed the nympho virgin ring of the Pasha pimps, The tattoo gang's vicious kidnap torture of the society debs and The bizarre "ugly parties" of London's kink cultists. All for a mere thirty-five cents, too. At the back of the book a short piece about the publishers of these magazines says the quality ranged from the competent to the sub-literate, how very true. This book examines the same cover material as 'It's a Man's World' by Adam Parfrey (ISBN 09229915814) which came out in 2003, it had a bit more text and a very informative title and artist listing but I prefer the Taschen book because it so visually comprehensive and looks a much better production. Besides the covers there are examples of editorial art used to illustrate the 'true' articles plus a biography of writers and thirty-five artists. These titles seem to be uniquely American and 'Men's Adventure Magazines' does a beautiful job of covering this extinct format. ***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.