Men's Adventure Magazines

[BlueTrain]

Something I was researching for another thread reminded me of something. There used to be a genre magazines that would be described as men's adventure magazines. I don't know how many there were, maybe a dozen or two, and they varied from pulp to racy. But during that period, Life and Look seemed to publish rather frequently what could only be described as pinup pictures. But Life and Look never had adventure stories.

At the time, drug stores, typically, had a magazine rack. They still do, usually, but the titles are all different and they don't have adventure magazines. Gun magazines are not adventure magazines nor are "mean's magazines" at other stores. The closest magazine I can think of today might be Soldier of Fortune magazine, which I do not read.

But I didn't read the old magazines either. I was still buying comic books then. But I would pick them up and leaf through them. They seemed to be such a part of the 1950s, like Mechanix Illustrated (also gone), the Saturday Evening Post, as well as Life and Look. Whatever happened to adventure magazines? Has reality overtaken our fantasies?

 

[Tiki Tom]

"Adventure" magazine, "Amazing Stories", and "Weird Tales" are three old pulp men's adventure magazines that come to mind. I'd love to wander into a drug store and discover a modern version of something like that. As to your twin questions, "Whatever happened to adventure magazines?" and (more importantly) "Has reality overtaken our fantasies", I'll venture some thoughts.

Probably television, racier magazines ala Playboy, and higher education levels killed the pulp adventure magazines off. At the lower end of the scale, blokes have moved on to lad mags/porn. On the other end, men started to see themselves as too sophisticated for pulp magazines full of flying fists, evil bad guys, exploding volcanoes, and lost cities. Besides, who needs stuff like that when you have electronic images beaming at you from every direction? Too bad. Although I remember picking up a vintage adventure magazine in a second hand store decades ago and being surprised at how improbable the stories were and how badly written it was. That's just a hazy memory. Perhaps there were some good ones out there. I know that Louis L'Amour got his start in the pulp adventure magazines. But back to the point: In short, tastes change.

Re: "Has reality overtaken our fantasies?", I fear the worst. Several months back, in the forum "Observation Bar" (I think) I tried to start a thread, "The Agents of F.L.A.S.K." (or something like that), which was supposed to be dedicated to all kinds of weird adventures and strange unsolved mysteries. It fell on its face despite several weeks of trying to keep it on life support. (In fairness, perhaps it was a weak attempt, purely executed. I'll take the rap.) But it may have been the same thing that led to the demise of old adventure mags: Perhaps people are too busy with real issues and real news events and tangible problems in the world to have time to deal with ---what I'm sad to admit is--- romantic nonsense.

It's too bad, because I'm the type of guy who routinely spends about fifty percent of my time daydreaming about lost cities, exploding volcanoes, rain-drenched jungles, schooners under full sail, mysterious maps, smugglers, bad guys.... errr, sorry. You get the idea.

 

[Frunobulax]

I think they've just moved to TV. Such shows as National Geographic's ''Life Below Zero,'' Discovery's "Alaska: The Last Frontier," and "Bering Sea Gold." We haven't lost our taste for vicarious adventure, it's just moved to a new medium.
Oh, and -

 

[BlueTrain]

Good post, Mr. Tiki Tom and if I might say so, your name evokes the best of our adventure fantasies, which is anything in the South Seas. I can even think of a few old movies that play up that theme.

I think several things have happened and to some extent, adventure magazines went the same way the older adolescent mystery and adventure books, of which the Hardy Boys were the best example. With magazines, though, the biggest reason, generally speaking, was that the advertising dollars dried up, following which the magazines dried up. But different kinds of magazines had different issues. Revenues and costs are always an issue, though.

There is still a market, I suppose, for escapism, only it may not now be satisfied by magazines. There are video games and television and on-line things. There are renaissance fairs, comic conventions, reenacting and living history. All good stuff. Magazine stories probably seem a little tame in comparison.

Another thing was that, I think, the adventure magazines were the thin edge of tolerated pornography and you didn't need a pornograph to play it on. There were sometimes photo spreads that were tame by today's standards. Eventually the readership outgrew that sort of thing, no doubt. And real pornography took off around, oh, about 1970, too. Literary masterpieces they were not. Playboy, by the way, probably stands--or stood--all alone in all respects. But other literary magazines have also fallen on hard times, too. Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post are gone and the New Yorker is a shadow of what it used to be. Perhaps later generations don't read as much as they used to. On the other hand, there was never anything like on-line forums, like this and lots of others. There were letters-to-the-editors, of course. But let me remind you that forums like this can be delicate creatures and need dedication and care.

The "Man's Life" cover, which is a rather strange illustration reminds me of an illustration on the cover of one of the news magazines after the Mayaquez incident. The Khmer Rouge had seized an American merchant ship and US Marines retook the ship. The illustration was done in the style of the old adventure magazines. There have been lots of incidents between pirates off the coast of Africa and several different navies but I haven't seen any good illustrations of action.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Magazines like Man's Life, True (which was a cut above most of 'em), True Men Stories, Man's Story, Male, and the like existed into the early '70s. And yes, the literary quality was poor when it wasn't plagiarism. I recall one story I saw which ripped off actual complete sentences from John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels!

I miss 'em anyway. They often had marvelously enticing cover art by people like Mort Kunstler: http://lh6.ggpht.com/-Pv0Tg-C0sO4/U...ril-1958.-Cover-Mort-Kunstler-.jpg?imgmax=800

 

[2jakes]

Magazines like Man's Life, True (which was a cut above most of 'em), True Men Stories, Man's Story, Male, and the like existed into the early '70s. And yes, the literary quality was poor when it wasn't plagiarism. I recall one story I saw which ripped off actual complete sentences from John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels!

I miss 'em anyway. They often had marvelously enticing cover art by people like Mort Kunstler: http://lh6.ggpht.com/-Pv0Tg-C0sO4/U...ril-1958.-Cover-Mort-Kunstler-.jpg?imgmax=800

I have a collection of 1930s “Weird Tales” covers in baseball card format.
I have a couple of originals & I agree, the covers are the best thing.
The content for the most part is not.

 

[BlueTrain]

From the ones I've seen (none recently), the artwork both on the cover and inside were usually pretty good. The photo layouts, if there were any, seem rather dated now. The same sort of artwork also appeared on pulp novels and I guess still does. It was generally good, always appealing to a male eye, colorful and somewhat revealing and unlike anything else. I imagine there was a certain group of artists (illustrators, they would be called) who specialized in that form.

 

[2jakes]

From the ones I've seen (none recently), the artwork both on the cover and inside were usually pretty good. The photo layouts, if there were any, seem rather dated now. The same sort of artwork also appeared on pulp novels and I guess still does. It was generally good, always appealing to a male eye, colorful and somewhat revealing and unlike anything else. I imagine there was a certain group of artists (illustrators, they would be called) who specialized in that form.

I have a couple of “Golden-Age” comics.
Although the artwork looks stiff, I actually prefer it to the modern drawings that are produced today.

 

[BlueTrain]

For what it's worth, many newspaper comics captured a lot of the little things that make up everyday life, from the kinds of jokes they told, to the way they dressed (supposedly) to household interiors and street scenes, although in all cases they were still comics. Many adhered to certain conventions (their own conventions, that is) which tended to make the characters more recognizable and probably easier to draw, not to mention caricature. Some characters, for instance always had the same profile no matter which way they faced. Some were not above poking fun at some distinctive feature within the comic, like the bow tie and dress shirt with the one big button that Dagwood always wears. In fact, Dagwood (Blondie is actually the name of the strip) is probably my favorite. It has changed over the years to be sure but nothing like some of the others have, of those that are still being published.

 

[MikeKardec]

There are a lot of good points made here, I especially like that one about the reality TV shows.

My ever evolving opinion is that Men's Adventure morphed out of the prewar Adventure Pulps and morphed into Paperback Originals like the Micky Spillaines and, after many years stuff like "The Executioner." But I've always felt that they were sort of the Male version of the supermarket tabloids, outlandish but often somehow reliant on their claims of "truth." Many did publish exposes on the seamier sides of life.

My theory, backed up by knowing a number of the people who were there at the time but never having had the chance to ask them, goes like this: The Adventure genre was HUGE in the pulps, it evolved out of Western dime novels, and extended its reach into Science Fiction (and quasi SF like a lot of the Edgar Rice Burroughs and Doc Savage stories), but the straight Adventure that was based in the time period and the world in which it was written was dealt a death blow by WWII. Before the war no one traveled and the greater world was exotic, exciting, and a place you could dream of traveling. After the war too many men and women had seen to much of the East Indies or the Sahara. They had seen their friends and loved ones suffer and die in those exotic places. The market began to wane somewhat.

After the war Westerns took OVER. This was because they were SAFE; safely at home and safely in the past.

This did not mean that there was no market for Adventure stories but the conflicts changed. The "Men's Adventure" magazines specialized in 1) Delirious fantasies about WWII often mixed with aspects of the growing Cold War. 2) Stories about manly men doing manly things, like building bridges and dams and such. In these the conflicts often resembled Westerns but the writing might be a bit more risque. 3) Man against nature. "Weasels Ripped My Flesh," or a guy who supposedly survived on a desert island or walked out of the Amazon. 4) Pretty tame sexual adventures exploited by killer art work; an affair with a nympho mafia princess, things like that. There was also sometimes a bizarrely homoerotic or S and M or some odd sexual aspect to any or all of the above ... you can see a touch of it in that Man's Life cover.

The point being that the genre had shifted a bit. Society was changing. Norman Mailer may have been in touch with the upscale crowd aspect of those changes, the Men's Adventure mags were the low grade end. I've always felt that the preference in movie stars, the shift from Cagney and Bogart to guys like Rock Hudson and Robert Mitchum (scrappy to beefy) and Hepburn and Bacall to Monroe and Mansfield (slender to voluptuous) were aspects of this shift. The actress shift also had the disturbing aspect of going from WOMEN (even at 19 Bacall was a woman) to GIRLS, curvy high voiced airheads, is indicative of something. This is not intended to be an exact prewar/post war set of examples, just that something ... I don't quite know what ... was up. Some weird post war over compensation, the barest outlaw beginnings of the sexual revolution, something.

The Men's Adventure pulps can't really be said to have died off on their own. The reasons for their demise maybe hidden in the crash of ALL magazine fiction. By '52 the last of the pulps were dropping like flies. The Paperback Original had opened a gateway to slightly larger paychecks but also to the sale of foreign rights, easier movie sales, and the potential for a title to live longer than 30 days on the rack. MANY of the Paperback Originals sold in the 1949 to 1954 time frame were unsold magazine novels. Many of the writers simply leaped sideways into the paperback arena.

Early Paperbacks and ESPECIALLY Paperback Originals were fantastically controversial in publishing circles. Many hardback publishers were convinced that "the public" didn't read. Many wanted to ban them, many thought they were a fad, all wanted a piece of the sales action though and eventually after a lot of hand wringing most publishers got on board.

Paperbacks were sold through what is called the Mass Market Sales Channel, meaning to a great extent magazine distributors ... to a great extent the distributors (not necessarily the magazine publishers) were complicit in the change over. It revolutionized the book business and killed the fiction magazines. Before the war a good hard back sale was maybe 5000. After the war a good paperback sale was in the millions.

It is EXACTLY like the revolution that is going on today in the realm of self published E-books. Though the paper publishers refuse to admit it, HALF of Amazon's book revenue is from their Kindle Direct program ... half of their REVENUE! These are books that often sell below $3. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

 

[EngProf]

My dad in the mid-fifties bought those "Men's" magazines ("True", etc.) and I'd get to read the ones that didn't have too many pictures (that came later).
I remember that there were a lot of WWII stories in those - many were made-up hooey, but some were at least somewhat fact-based. I was pretty young then, but even today I remember one story about the interception and shoot-down of Admiral Yamamoto. That was likely the direct cause that my first airplane model (at about the same time) was a P-38 Lightning.

A female friend who was a fan of the recent TV series "True Detective" didn't realize that there was a magazine of the pulp-era named "True Detective". It had all sorts of weird/creepy crimes pictured on the cover and contained inside.

 

[BlueTrain]

Good replies. I think one aspect is that a certain generation patronizes a certain group of magazines and stays with it. That generation dies off and so do those magazines. There are other and probably more important factors but the others are all on the producing side rather than the consuming side. Economic factors trump everything.

I've never seen any pre-war magazines like these, so I don't know what they were like. In fact, I've only seen a few of the later ones. I was still reading the Hardy Boys then and even those were mostly pre-war stories. Magazines like these go back a long ways, too. I think one of the early ones was the Police Gazette, if I'm remembering the name correctly, but I've never seen one. It probably disappeared before WWI. I also had the impression that, aside from Western stories (which almost pre-date the West), most of the adventure stories were related to or inspired by WWII, but what do I know. Likewise, there are all sorts of fantastical movies that are about WWII, too, only loosely based on fact. About the only factual basis for some of them was that, a. There was a war; b. Germans were the enemy; c. They wore black uniforms; and d. All German women have blond hair. Actually, that's all 100% true except that only some of them wore black uniforms.

 

[MikeKardec]

Anyone who hasn't enjoyed the exuberance of the classic pre war pulps owes it to themselves to dive in. There are lots of anthologies of pulp stories (often more identified with the magazines like Black Mask or Astounding Stories) but if you've read short stories by Chandler or Hammett or Heinlein or Robert E Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs, you've already begun to enjoy some of the best of the era. Almost all of the authors of paperback bestsellers in the 1960s got their start in the pulps.

There are a few still around, I worked for the Dell Magazine Group in the 1990s and they still publish Alfred Hitchcock's, Ellery Queen's, Asimov's and Analog. Dell was founded in the 1920s and they are the last trace of a bygone era, sort of the Morgan Car of the magazine business. There are FAR fewer short story writers these days and so it is very hard to publish as much quality stuff. We used to joke that we still paid the same cent and a half a word that we paid in the 1940s, and it's nearly true. That said, there are very few places to unload a short story these days.

From an author's point of view, back in "The Era" there were three general grades of fiction magazine: the Pulps, the Slicks and the Quality or "Literary" journals. The Pulps were named for the rough pulp paper they were printed on, much like an old paperback. They didn't pay much but they paid immediately on acceptance of your story so they were a godsend for a writer living hand to mouth. The Slicks were named because of the expensive glossy paper they used (which allowed them to run color ads as well as just look nice) and they paid really well but there were far fewer slots for fiction, fewer magazines over all, and the only paid on publication so you had to wait until they decided which issue to put your story in and then for it to come out before you got your money. Needless to say they catered to the more well off writers many of whom were successful in other areas of publishing or came from money. The Literary Journals often paid nothing but, supposedly, were so prestigious that they could attract writers because of that fact ... the prestige was often a myth but they did publish some good stuff.

There's a lot more to the old school magazine business but a lot of times people don't know why the Pulps were called that and what role they played in publishing. It's important to realize that before WWII there were fewer than 500 real bookstores in the whole country and most of them were in the northeast or major cities. People got their reading material from libraries, book of the month clubs, and magazines.

 

[BlueTrain]

Chances are, all the real bookstores are still in the northeast, only not as many. I was surprised that the Police Gazette continued publication until 1977, although there were changes in ownership over the years. It began in 1845. I was also more astonished to realize that 1977 was almost 40 years ago. Seems like only yesterday or maybe the day before yesterday.

It almost seems like there used to be a fair number of writers and composers who may not have been of the highest quality but made up for it in quantity, supplying all the b-movies and radio shows with stories and scripts, many of which were admittedly very similar. The joke was the composers were paid by the yard. For all I know, that may still be true, with the vast numbers of TV shows that are on.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've never seen any pre-war magazines like these, so I don't know what they were like. In fact, I've only seen a few of the later ones. I was still reading the Hardy Boys then and even those were mostly pre-war stories. Magazines like these go back a long ways, too. I think one of the early ones was the Police Gazette, if I'm remembering the name correctly, but I've never seen one. It probably disappeared before WWI. I also had the impression that, aside from Western stories (which almost pre-date the West), most of the adventure stories were related to or inspired by WWII, but what do I know. Likewise, there are all sorts of fantastical movies that are about WWII, too, only loosely based on fact. About the only factual basis for some of them was that, a. There was a war; b. Germans were the enemy; c. They wore black uniforms; and d. All German women have blond hair. Actually, that's all 100% true except that only some of them wore black uniforms.

The "adventure" magazines of the prewar era were primarily pulps like "Argosy" or "All-Story Weekly." The Police Gazette, a smeary pink-faced tabloid, was primarily a crime/sex/scandal sheet found mostly in barbershops and such.

"True Detective" was an interesting anomaly -- it was an outgrowth, not of the pulps, but of the "confession" magazines published by Bernarr Macfadden in the late 1910s. His idea was that the stories would be presented, not in an authorial voice, but in the voice of an actual participant -- this made "True Story" the magazine hit of the day, and "True Detective" was an attempt to apply the same formula to a male audience. Macfadden later in the 1920s became the publisher of the New York Evening Graphic, perhaps the most scrofulous tabloid newspaper ever published, where he carried this strategy forward to achieve astonishing levels of muckiness.

Aside from "adventure" and "detective" magazines, the most popular pulp magazines directed to men in the 1930s were what were called "smooshes." These were pulp magazines containing lurid, violent crime stories heavily seasoned with sex, which sometimes approached soft-core pornography in both their text and their illustrations. A man named Harry Donenfeld, owner of Independent Distributors, a mob-connected firm which distributed many low-end magazines to newsstands and drug stores around the East Coast, was the king of the "smooshes," with titles like "Spicy Detective" and "Spicy Adventure" his top sellers until his mob connections and various moral crusaders caugh up with him -- and he decided to go into another line of work, buying out a struggling publisher of comic magazines and turning it into what eventually became DC Comics.

 

[filfoster]

Don't these magazines capture the era of the '50's and '60's? What barbershop in Middle America didn't have a stack of these, along with hunting and car magazines? Wouldn't these be a highlight in any 'man cave' dedicated to that era?
I remember my dad's dad spending an hour or so after supper, propped in his corner easy chair, 'anti- maccassar' doily on the chair back to 'protect the chair' from his slicked-back Vitalis (pretty sparse hair anyway, combed back like a balding Dracula), with a long-neck bottle Stroh's beer and a panatela cigar, reading True Detective! Great memories.

 

[BlueTrain]

That did not describe my father in any way, except maybe for the hair "tonic." It just shows that not everyone growing up in the 1950s had parallel experiences. If those were innocent years, they were a lot more innocent for some kids than others, not to mention their fathers. In like fashion, of all my relatives of my father's ages (my uncles, in other words), none served in the armed forces in WWII. Only my father served. It may or may not have been the greatest generation but it doesn't follow that everyone served in the armed forces.

 

[filfoster]

Not to hijack the thread (always inserted when the thread is hijacked) but the TV shows of that time mirrored the taste for sensationalist crime stories. I love 'Highway Patrol" (Broderick Crawford was one of the highest functioning alcoholics ever); Perry Mason (Raymond Burr-who knew!?), Checkmate, Dragnet, The Beachcomber, Peter Gunn, I'm sure there were others I can't recall, too lazy to Google. Yeah, I guess I'm lucky to have great memories of the Fifties and early '60's and wish everyone else did, too.

Googled and refreshed my memory of Richard Diamond, Private Detective.

 

[MikeKardec]

If those were innocent years, they were a lot more innocent for some kids than others, not to mention their fathers.

I know the point you are making and agree with it in a way but I'd also say that, from my own perspective and strictly related to the content, there was nothing innocent about the Men's Adventure genre (as opposed to the straight pulps) or that there is something disturbing in it's eroding innocence. I find it downright creepy, creepier than some pretty explicit stuff today. Maybe that's because the times were innocent in other areas, maybe because it showed disturbing qualities in our culture that surround us today (and I admit I enjoy some of them and don't feel they are that creepy because they are no longer hidden or "implied"). Certainly I'd rather see a pretty woman with her clothes off as in Playboy or experience a character who is gay than deal with the odd tinge of S and M and homoeroticism in a lot of these magazines.

As a writer I'm interested in and would use without compunction many of the tropes of the post war "Men's Adventure" pulps but I would do it as say, James Ellroy does it; in a way that was intended to make you uncomfortable with how society was changing. I'm glad I've lived in a changed society, I'm also glad I missed most of the process of changing that went on in those days.

Not to say that things aren't changing again or that I'm comfortable with the new changes either ... the current era informs my vision of the earlier one.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The "smooshes" were very, very disturbing from a female point of view. They were very much like the kind of swill Mickey Spillane wrote in the postwar years -- violently sexual in a way that made the author's contempt for women all too apparent. That the stuff in the smooshes was ground out like meat for a penny a word by low-level hacks doesn't make it any more palatable. Much of the pornography of the 1930s had this same hateful edge.

S. J. Perelman wrote a lacerating satire of the smooshes in his famous New Yorker piece from 1938, "Somewhere A Roscoe." Perelman captured the essential ridiculousness of the stuff, which was perhaps its only saving grace.