Title: Men’s Adventure Magazines The Rich Oberg Collection
Text: Max Allan Collins & George Hagenauer w/an essay by Steven Heller
Taschen 25th Anniversary Publication
The most complete (or only) book I’ve found that collects the “Men’s Adventure” magazines from the 30’s up to the late 70’s. Obviously, there were several publications such as “Tales of Danger”, “Stag”, & “Mystery Tales” just to name a few. Depending on the country you lived in, different publications or spin-offs. Germany had “Man’s Story” magazine, while France had “Wildcat Adventures”, etc. They were extremely popular with the soldiers of the time on either side of the world, giving them a much needed escape from the agonies of war. Young kids were also fascinated with these magazines. They provided insight to “how to” with women; beautiful pictures of women, & of course, a cheap fantasy thrill that you could rarely find in much other than comics in the day.
It was really amazing to see all the artwork from the covers from page to page. Artists like Will Hulsey fuckin killed it! Good color, realistic expressions, & heartfelt despair best describes the majority of the work. Unfortunately, it mainly shows the covers from the magazines. Not to be taken too seriously though, between the years 1958-1974 they centered on animals/creatures attacking! Holy shit, I found myself laughing so hard from the excerpts and pictures that followed.
Men’s Adventure (and like publications) also showed just how racist the world was with each other as well as sexist. It wasn’t till around the 60’s did you see a shift to females being treated with a little more dignity. They would have guns blasting Nazi’s or a sailor ship wrecked on an Island of bikini wearing red-heads who wanted nothing, but sex. I suppose that’s a little classier than “Argosy” headline on their cover “Sex Outrages By Jap Soldiers” where it shows your traditional 40’s German women being held at gunpoint while a Japanese man “totally stereotyped” undresses her.
If nothing else, you owe it to yourself to add this to your book collection for the awesome cover art loaded between 352 pages! With headlines like “Island of Love-Starved Women” & “The Atom Bomb Can’t Kill You” I’m sure you’ll be searching for these magazines on their own for oodles of cash on EBAY why not do yourself a favor and cop the book instead?