It's A Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps, Expanded Edition

They may seem like artifacts of an alternate reality now, but at one time pulpy "true-life" adventure mags were pretty popular in the downscale publishing market. These lowbrow mags entertained the same type of demographic that are drawn to Facebook conspiracy theories today and, as such, were mostly ignored by upscale publishing types. (Until recently, pulp sci-fi and comic books - so called "nerd culture" - fell into the same category). These mags are remembered today (if at all) as one of the last venues for commercial artists to sell painterly illustrations and it is for this reason that this book found its way into my library of books on illustration and figurative art.And the book does a great job of presenting these illustration in full-color and often at full-page as well! The subject matter is definitely tawdry, lurid, sensationalistic, and prurient but the artists who painted these illustrations usually possessed a technical ability that elevates this artwork into compelling storytelling. The best of these artists (Saunders and Kuntler, among others) combined tight composition skills with dynamic posing, vivid color, and superior understanding of anatomy to create illustrations that transcend the magazines they were intended to sell. Even a casual leafing through this book will enlighten anyone jaded by the state of much of today's more regimented fantasy artwork and provide a lot of composition ideas. The artwork really benefits from the oversized format.There are also several informative interviews with artists, writers, and editors associated with this genre. These interviews were old at the time the book was originally published, and I wish that Adam Parfrey had done a better job of framing these interviews within the body of the text. (It isn't clear that these weren't fresh interviews). The behind-the-scenes professionals associated with these magazines had no illusions about their subject matter but did the best they could to satisfy their audiences.Parfrey's own text is bizarre, largely consisting of pseudo-academic analysis, wild speculation, and an occasional dose of judgementalism directed at these mags' long-dead consumers. Some of it is politically correct for its own sake. The "bonus" opening chapter, which focuses on the sort of wartime propaganda that was highlighted better in the old sociology book "Faces of the Enemy" seems particularly out of place, and its tone is so confusing one is left wondering if Parfrey is aware that he implies that somehow the fascists were "victims" of American propaganda. This is similar to the revisionist, faux-intellectualism that pervades much of academic writing on popular culture. Regardless, no one would buy this book for Parfrey's text. They would buy it for the reproduced artwork.Parfrey seems to want to place the work of the men's magazine illustrators in a continuum with that of WWI and WWII poster artists, when they actually stand more comfortably alongside horror comic books, movie serials, grindhouse B-movies, spaghetti westerns, circus posters, and other escapist lowbrow pop culture. I wish the book had made this connection explicit. I also wish the book had a different cover, with something that stressed the adventure aspect of these illustrations rather than the Nazi imagery and sexual fetish content. I bought this book despite the cover, and that cover is going to require some explaining when I share this book with friends.

This book, and several others out there like it would not make it in the America of the 21rst century. It's that simple. As I near age 60 I think back to when as a child I would see these magazines on the high shelf, out of my reach, but I wondered what was in them. Sometimes I could see the back cover too and the artwork made me wish I could reach them. Had I know that inside were just black and white stories I might have lost my interest at that age, but now I care just as much about that content as I do the artwork. There are lots of things I have seen in my travels around the world that help me to understand who was targeted in these magazines of yore. The American servicemen who returned from war and had to transition back into civilian society that is. These magazines were basically "war stories" that took them back into their memories, and helped them to reimagine themselves as the hero that saved lives, or otherwise saved the day, even if they had not had the opportunity to be quite so heroic themselves. If you look at the artwork and the stories in that light they make more sense. But they would also be offensive to many in today's world. Women are not cherished as they should be in many of the stories, or they are taken advantage of simply because they were placed in a position of poverty that required them to do things they otherwise would never wish to do. The bottom line is we have evolved, and a study of these magazines provide us with a good sociological reference point that illustrates this perfectly. We can all clearly see the advances made in technology over the years, but cultural changes and attitudes are not nearly as obvious. Reading these stories and absorbing the artwork from this time in our history makes me appreciate humanity's progress a bit more, and these days that's the sort of food for thought that gets me there.

My family used to go to PX and commissary every Saturday when I was a kid, and I remember I wanted to see these or similar magazines but obviously I couldn't! These photos bring so many memories from back then, 7 cents per gallon for the gas, $1 for the carton of cigarets...

This book is absoloutly essential! In this case, you can judge this book by it's cover, because it's full of fantastic, under appreciated and underrated Men's Adventure magazine works of art, all the way through! You even get the backstory and business side of these great mags in the text...super cool!

The additional material in this edition reinforces the context that produced this genre.

Brilliant illustrations, love this kind of artwork...

A fun look at the old men’s pulp magazines