Men's adventure magazines were a form of pulp publishing which flourished in 1950s and 1960s America, pandering to the cruelty and lust of young men with luridly illustrated stories of war, sleaze and savagery. As with pulp magazines from earlier decades, scantily-dressed women-in-peril were a favourite subject for cover designs; but in the early 1960s, magazines such as Man’s Story and Men Today saw sales rocket when they mixed this staple imagery with a new, fetishistic and taboo element – the swastika. The frisson of seeing half-naked, large-breasted females in bondage being menaced and tortured by evil Nazi doctors and henchmen was one which persisted throughout the 1960s. Man’s Story magazine alone published at least 50 covers featuring scenes of Nazi horror between 1961 and 1969. This decade-long deluge of exposed soft flesh, extreme torture, and the all-pervasive sign of the swastika represents a never-to-be-repeated cultural phenomenon in US publishing and art. The 65 examples displayed in this special ebook presentation stand as testament to this phenomenon, and also as a reminder to the lurid but innocent fun which people once enjoyed, before the invention of “political correctness” by repressive bodies bent on pulling popular culture - and life - back into the dark ages.
