 "It's
A Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps"
by Adam Parfrey
Feral House, 2003
After World War Two,
the pulp had died off giving way to a new generation of magazine geared
toward men. The pulps were seen as too blue-collar and Madison Avenue wanted
to appeal to the new middle class male and his disposable income. So, gone
was the pulp paper and in its place was a larger, slicker magazine. These
new men's adventure magazines still told stories of men fighting for survival,
but there was a new twist. The noir-styled pulp covers became realistic
paintings of sweating men fighting wild beasts, or the elements, or Nazis.
For nearly 20 years, these magazines (also called "The Sweats" due to the
aforementioned sweaty men on their covers) were newsstand favorites for
the former G.I. anxious about rejoining the normal world. Instead of being
fearful of bullets, they now had to worry about the battles of the workplace
and the war of the sexes. In order to escape, these vets turned to stories
that celebrated the triumph of the he-man.
It's A Man's World
tells the history of these magazines through interviews of the men who
wrote for and created artwork for them. And it is the artwork that really
jumps out. It's A Man's World shows cover after glorious
cover of these classic magazines and even categorizes them into recurring
themes. One of the most popular and potent of them was that of the sadistic
Nazi. These covers usually show some ghoulish Nazi soldier on the brink
of torturing a beautiful woman in some strange and fiendish way. There
are several pop-psychology reasons why these appealed to the men reading
them including anxiety towards women and the transition from the violent
world of war back toward a peacetime routine. Regardless of the reasons,
these covers are visually stunning and unmistakably alluring.
Sadly, men's adventure magazines
could not last through what writer Mario Puzo called the "non-fun wars"
in Korea and Vietnam as well as the trend of men's magazines becoming more
focused on hard-core sex. It's A Man's World is an amazing
time capsule of the rugged world of men’s fiction.
You can hear a radio interview
with the author Adam Parfrey here.
It's the third feature on the program. (This is from the August episode
of Sidetrack,
a features magazine done by yours truly on WILL-AM,
Urbana, Illinois.
Here are some samples
of those classic magazine covers. (Click to enlarge.)
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