I remember growing up as a kid in the 1960’s and 1970’s and seeing the many different “men’s adventure” magazines. These were usually called “pulp” magazines, and they always had covers depicting, as Jay leno once quipped: rag tag bunches of GI’s risking their lives to rescue their comrades from Hitler’s elite D-Cup Brigade. These magazines were also sometimes referred to as “sweat magazines” because the men depicted on the cover were usually covered in sweat from fighting off Hitler’s D-Cup girls or wild beasts. My grandfather had a subscription to one or more of these pulp magazines and I remember sneaking a look at them when we would go visit him and my grandmother. I also remember seeing these magazines along with the piles of hunting and fishing magazines at the barber shop.
These men’s adventure pulp magazines were very popular in the 1950’s-1960’s, before Playboy and Penthouse came along (and later, magazines like Maxim and Men’s Health). They were popular for several reasons. For one, they were cheap, usually costing only a quarter. For another, they were pretty much all that was out there for the “adventure seeking man” of the mid-20th Century. But mostly, these magazines were meant to appeal to a different generation of American male – one not concerned at all about physical fitness and how to achieve six-pack abs or the best way to remove their chest hair. These were men who (mostly) served in World War II and Korea and saw themselves as rugged individualists who knew danger, death, fear, and survival (or at least fantasized that they had experienced it ).
For each magazine, a brightly colored magazine cover was created by artists in such a way as to appeal to these male fantasies – rescuing scantily clad and always well-breasted women from savages or Nazis, surviving in the wilderness, going on African adventures, fighting Indians and cattle poachers in the old west, and my most favorite of all magazine cover topic – surviving attacks by vicious animals!
There were, at the peak of pulp magazine popularity, about fifty such magazines, but my favorite has to be “Man’s Life” mostly because it seemed to specialize in all manner of crazy animal attacks. The trick was always the same, get an artist to paint a compelling and evocative cover and then get a writer to create a “true life” story around it. And the artists seemed to get more and more creative in trying to top the previous month’s animal attack, year after year. But always, there were familiar themes in every cover involving attacks by animals. So here are ten of the very best “man versus animal” covers from the classic, Man’s Life magazine.
