Love Street, June 1968 / Happy Birthday, America!

Well, once again, I've been neglecting my blog for Summer play and Summer chores, but so it goes. Today, I thought I'd share an interesting underground with a topical cover, Happy Birthday, America.

 

I don't know much about this publication and take the date from the gentleman that sold it to me. Coming out of the Haight-Ashbury, this pub shows a tendency towards art and poetry. There is some political content (including a grisly page reprinted from Vietnam GI) but the emphasis is towards the arts and maybe towards pages that can be used as posters. I love the red and blue inks on this issue. I do not know any details about this paper other than the fact that I found reference to issue 2 from September of 1967. They must be somewhat scarce, as I've only ever run across this single issue on ebay.

I offer two versions of the scan. Here is the edited version, and here is the raw scan. It was so highly processed, I offer the raw scan in case it better captures the feel of the pub.

A few samples. The back side of the centerfold, a Declaration of Cultural Evolution.

And the centerfold, a great printing of Wally Wood's Disneyland Memorial Orgy 

Wally Wood is bar none one of my favorite comics (and pulp!) artists and I get a real kick out of this piece, Disneyland Memorial Orgy (wiki). He did not admit to drawing this poster til years later. After sitting through Cinderella 3 (a straight to video item I believe, along with such ill advised sequels as Dumbo 2, Bambi 2, etc), I smile at the dollar signs emanating from the castle in the background. The underground had some other run-ins with Disney including a suit over Air Pirate Funnies, though I think it's only natural to play with such weighty and weightless icons. Today, I see artists tooling around with the Simpsons in such a fashion, perhaps Mickey has lost some of his centrality. (There will be some lampooning of Disney's characters in the Ballyhoo I share next time, so Disney had inspired dirty lampooning for decades before the underground got to him).

And lastly, the back cover

 

Next: Ballyhoo!!!

Hey Ladies

Sigh, I spent too much of a beautiful Sunday trying unsuccessfully to unclog a drain that managed to cover my laundry room with debris from the kitchen sink, but here I am, as promised, to continue a short tour of some vintage girlie magazine scans. Again tonight, click on the issue title to download the scan.

I'll kick off tonight with what is probably my favorite of these magazines in my collection.

My wife likes to tease me about my affair with my scanner - and here is a fine Mistress indeed. A very well-done magazine.

Mistress v01n04 (1966-04.D and R)

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Another excellent magazine full of cuties. I think the cover design is absolutely outstanding.

California Girl 08 (1973-01.Phenix)

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Here's a neat one that is a bit experimental. The cover does not extend all the way to the edge of the magazine (leading to a fold open front cover) and there are some strange brownish graphics pages.

Mister Cool v01n01 (1960.Billingsley)

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And issue one and three of Rapture (love the name), a pre-Parliament magazine from Milton Luros.

Rapture v01n01 (1959.Tower)

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Rapture v01n03 (1959.Beacon)

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And lastly, two magazines I think are somehow related though I can't pin that down. I had an uncle who liked to talk about handing out wolf-tickets, so I'm completely loving this magazine.

Wolf Bait 02 (1959.Zee Zee)

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This is a "pitchbook," sort of an advertising pamphlet for performers, published by Zee Zee Martine, a dancer featured within, and it features a number of famous burlesque artists of the day. A very interesting little pub, wider than a pocket magzine but tall (like Fling) with an amateur feel that was nonetheless very well done. A mix of pics, cartoons, jokes, articles, a bit of fetish material, and more. This last magazine is full-sized but shares a pic or two with the last magazine and sports a very similar look. And with a title like Scandolls, well, it was just begging to meet my scanner.

Scandolls v01n01 (1959)(D&M)

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I probably won't be posting every one of these mags I do here on my blog, but for certain you can catch them at vintagegirliemags.com, and we welcome all there who'd care to share their magazines or just to discuss topics of interest regarding the mags, the girls, photographers and artists, the publishers, etc. I'm a few volumes into Dian Hansen's volumes of The History of Men's Magazines and have only recently begun collecting more of them, but I can safely say there are so, so many forgotten titles that deserve to see the light of the digital age. Scan em if you got em...

Next time on volunteer radio, a Mae West Number! I'm oh-so-close to beginning the series of posts on the birth of the girlie pulp I've been threatening forever, but I keep coming across items that I just have to have to include! (last it was a beautiful trio of La Vie Parisienne from the collection of Francis Smilby, now it's a curious little 1925 jazz mag called Hi-Jinks) In the meantime, we'll run with a post or few on varied subjects and magazines while I try and get my ducks in a row...

Vintage Girlie Magazines / The Land of Milk and Honey

Something a little different tonight. A parade of girlies. I usually keep it pretty toned-down on Darwination Scans, and I'm not ready to start posting scads of naked womens, but I feel like it's time I give the girlie magazines their due. There was a time not so far back when I wouldn't have considered scanning girlie magazines from prudishness and some ill-formed conceit that such material is not worthy of digitization, but just a cursory exploration of the girlie magazines of the 50s and 60s has cleared the fog. Many of the competitors of Playboy were very well done, and any cursory dismissal of the whole genre as mere smut ignores the fact that much excellent fiction was printed in these magazines and that the production of many of the hundreds of titles over the years was performed with utmost care. And before I go justifying or apologizing or whatever this foot-shuffling I'm engaging in is, smut has its charms, too.

But, really, in the age of XXX & internet porn, these magazines are downright quaint, a wholesome appreciation of the female form. Playboy and Penthouse these days don't seem much different to me than a Maxim or FHM. They are all glossy and polished with sanitary and conventional graphics layout and the magazine content is barely distinguishable from the advertising content. The girls tend to be stick-skinny and all reality-airbrushed from the whole thing and they are trying very much to keep the amplifier at 11. It's hard to call out the modern girlie magazines as being more objectified, but I can say unequivocally that I find the magazines from the 50s and 60s to be sweet and intimate, something you just cannot say about modern productions.

I probably won't be blogging that many of these, but I'd direct those with an interest in exploring the wide world of vintage girlie magazines to this site:

http://www.vintagegirliemags.com/

You won't find runs of Playboy or Penthouse here, but you will find a wide variety of gentleman's magazines from pulps to pockets to sweats through a wide variety of pin-up and nudie publications. I post regularly there and think the site has a lot of potential as a library and database of a whole variety of magazines. You can find any of these issues I'm posting tonight there with further detail as to contents as well as many other magazines from other scanners, so check it out. But onto the parade of magazines, you can click the issue title and number to go to the download link for each magazine. And before I forget my silent partner here, thanks to McCoy for the edit work on many of these issues. I'm sure he would agree with me that editing this type of magazine is a pleasure. Let's kick it off with a smokin' issue, I can almost feel the hellfire ;)

Sizzle v01n01 (1959.Spice)(DOM)

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Featuring Tura Santana of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! fame. Watch out, boys.

21 n04 (1956.Monogram)

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Featuring an article with a psychological approach to spanking with many panels from Eric Stanton's Madame Adista, illustrated fiction, burlesque ads, a neat article on the girlie pulps of the 20s and 30s (which makes a convincing argument that the mags from the 50s were no naughtier than their predecessors), poetry, cartoons, and more.

Beau v01n03 (1966-08.PDC)

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With features on Jayne, Alan King, Rolls-Royce, Will Bardot Be Another Monroe?, Sybil Burton and the Wild Ones, Ann Austin, rock climbing and more.

Jayne Mansfield for President (1964.Books, Inc.)

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Not exactly a girlie magazine exactly, but a novelty publication, and a nice companion to this last issue. The thriftstore-in-the-hood where I got it wanted way too much for this not-so-great copy, but I drove all the way back to the store to get it the next day after a sleepless night. I'm happy to have it now and to share the scan with you. I scanned it back during the election, and I still say Jayne for President.

Escapade v01v06 (1956-03.Dee) (McNation)

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This mag included illustrated fiction, articles, poetry as well as pictorials. There is a feature on Corliss Archer along with a few photos of Bettie Page taken by Bunny Yeager.

French Frills v02n02 (1962.American Art Agency)(D&M)

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An early-ish magazine from Milton Luros' American Art Agency that is now more commonly known under the Parliament banner (the company that distributed the magazines). The Parliament mags are still highly prized by collectors for the great girls and great photography.

And one last magazine, I'll have to get up the rest I'd planned on posting tonight tomorrow. Much yard work, two soccer games, two birthday parties, and two chocolate brownies have me ready to curl up in bed early with a paperback, so I'll finish up with another handful of these tomorrow.

Nugget v01n02 (1956-02.Nugget)

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I became interested in this magazine from my interest in Archer St. John's comics. Early in life he and his brother, Robert, tangled with Al Capone when they ran a small newspaper rallying against the mob. Before he died perhaps of a speed OD, the comics industry had started to falter,and Archer St. John had been putting a lot of effort into this stylish men's magazine and the classic crime magazine Manhunt. After his death, Archer's son stepped in to see this published. On the contents page there is even a reference that the magazine was founded by Archer. Running mostly literary reprints and photo shoots, this is a neat magazine with cool photos and illustrations. This a classy magazine, from when we could mix a little playful nudity in with literature and esoterica. Nugget is still around (um in a far naughtier form), but it has surely been bought and sold many times since back when.

More tomorrow!

Crack Detective Stories, May 1949 / Ten Detective Aces, November 1945

And lastly in this series of posts on detective pulp, I offer two of my earliest pulp scans. It's sort of painful for me to look at some of my earlier scans with uneven color and jacked contrast, etc., but it is what it is.


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Get the scan here.

Here's one of those covers I'm embarrassed to admit to liking. There's something more than a little bit unwholesome in the faces of the terrified girls that endured all sorts of rough treatment on pulp covers. They were at the art of the scream long before the modern horror film. What this says about the male attraction to sex and violence, I can't say, but these covers are certainly rich in Freudian subtext and charged imagery.

Contents:



I particularly enjoyed "Murder in Small Packages" and "Deuces Dealt for Death". A lot of the stories seem to have a sort of gothic inner-workings of terror thing going on.

Splash samples:





A couple of ads within:



The simplicity of that. Send me a dollar please and I'll fill you in on life's big secrets. There are also all sorts of self-help, weight-loss, marital aid, and other types of ads for the insecure. I find it reassuring to know some of this cultural anxiety has been around for a while. But on to tonight's second issue:


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Get the cover to cover scan here.

contents:


samples:

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Next time on Darwination Scans, a quick sojourn in the land of milk and honey, a look at a selection of vintage girlie magazines from the 50s and 60s and more than likely a few words in adoration of the full-figured female.

Detective Fiction Weekly, March 19, 1938 / Cleve Adams' Punk

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Get a cover to cover scan of the issue here.

Detective Fiction Weekly was one of the longer running pulps, previously titled Flynn's Weekly, a Munsey pulp. Flynn's ran from September of 1924 to August of 1927, a total of 193 issues and then continued on as DFW until May 1942 another 704 issues. The mag then continued for 26 issues as Flynn's Detective until 1944 and would resume 7 years later with the same volume numbering as Detective Fiction for 6 issues. That's a total of 929 issues of this pulp of which this is the first scanned example. Grab a shovel, peeps, lots of pulp to digitize here. Writers on this pulp included Agatha Christie, Carroll John Daly, Gaston Leroux, Day Keene, Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, Erle Stanley Gardner, L. Ron Hubbard, Raymond Chandler, Judson Phillips, Frederic Brown, John D. MacDonald, and many, many more.

Besides the fiction and true crime stories, this pulp has a couple other neat features including an Illustrated Crimes spread depicting a historical crime as well as a puzzle section, a confidence scheme investigator, and some nice letters from fans. I particularly enjoy the letter from the reader who writes how a friend of his claims that the pulps are "an opiate" devoid of literary merit and distracting from higher concerns.

To be honest, I was a little disappointed with this ish as the first of this title I've read, but one story in here makes it all worth it. As any pop culture archaeologist knows, you have to dig for the nuggets, and for me the standout story in this issue is "Punk" by Cleve F. Adams. I'm not familiar with this writer, and like many pulp authors, can't find much about him. I did find a bit of a bib here, and the magazine uber-resource philsp.com lists his pulp appearances and also gives a pseudonym of John Spain here. It looks like he was pretty active in the pulps from about 1935-1940.

Also of note is that it looks like he worked alongside William Faulkner on the 1944 film adaptation of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not which I recall as a pretty good Bogey/Bacall film.

Some internet definitions of the word "Punk":

-noun---

1. Slang.
a. A young person, especially a member of a rebellious counterculture group.
b. An inexperienced young man.
2. Music.
Punk rock.
A punk rocker.
3.
a. Slang. A young man who is the sexual partner of an older man.
b. Archaic. A prostitute.

[Origin unknown.]

or

Today's first meaning of punk, a small-time hoodlum, developed in the period between the World Wars. And in the late 1970s punk came to designate bizarre clothing and body decorations associated with loud and aggressive rock music. To the general public, it still has an unpleasant taste.

I thought it might have a 19th century street origin, but this small-time hoodlum definition that pops up between the wars seems closest. Of course, if you read the story, you'll come to a fuller sense of who a punk really is.

I just love this story. Alcoholism, rackets, trampy broads, and smash-mouth violence. I've got low tastes, I suppose, but this is the type of Pulp Fiction Tarantino was trying to evoke with his film. The story rotates around a group of three guys that grew up together on the wrong side of the tracks. One's become a weak alky married to a money-grubbing tramp, one has become an honest but run-down cop, and the last is a successful mobster. The dialogue is excellent and the story is gritty and realistic. The pace of the thing gets awkward at the end (I think he had to just finish this one up to get it in the right number of assigned pages - these guys were getting paid peanuts per word after all), but overall this story is a great read that would make a nice hard-boiled noir flick. I also enjoyed the glimpse of the era's prison culture in the true crime piece "Big House Cats."

Enjoy!

Contents and samples:



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Detective Tales, October 1944 / Day Keene

There were two pulps under the title of Detective Tales. The first was a bedsheet sized pulp from Rural and ran for 16 issues between 1922 and 1924. The second series was very successful and seems to be a spin-off title from Dime Detective at Popular Publications. This pulp ran for 202 issues between 1935 and 1953. Cover artists like Walter Baumhofer, Rafael De Soto, and Norman Saunders put hard-boiled covers on stories from the likes of Robert Leslie Bellem, Carroll John Daly, Cornell Woolrich, Fredric Brown, Ray Bradbury, Day Keene, John MacDonald, Louis L'Amour and others.

My pal, golden age comic and pulp scanner Cimmerian, told me a while back to check out Day Keene, and I finally took the time with this here pulp,


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I was not disappointed, a very nice pulp. I think the cover is Rafael DeSoto but that's totally unconfirmed. Though Bradbury is listed on the cover, he's not present inside (although he did write for this title during this exact period). No Matter though, because this pulp was a great ride. Excellent throughout with only a couple slight dips in the fun and action with breakneck plots and tough guy dialogue to boot. The contents:



Here's a nice bibliography of Keene's work, starting with the paperbacks and their seedy covers and going on to list all of his pulpwork followed by a little biographical information.

It looks like Day did some writing also for Kitty Keene, a private eye soap opera on CBS from 1937-1941. A bit of info on the program:

http://www.thrillingdetective.com/kitty.html#anchor412904

And lastly, this page has a snippet of a portrait and little more bio:

http://www.oivas.com/pointblank/keene.html

His entry in today's issue involves a farmer's daughter, but those farmer's daughters are rarely so simple as one might think. The splash:


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The story opens with detective Tom Doyle confronted by a tough warning him off a case from the old farmer. And Doyle is just the sort of ornery character that won't be told to lay off. The farmer shows up with the story of his imminent death and a long lost granddaughter his daughter shunned for her wild ways. Doyle chases down the leads meeting up with an old actor, novice but weasel-type lawyers and getting wires crossed with a dame in the death house of the state prison for murdering her rich hubby. Nothing and no one is what it seems, a nice read. Second is "Voice of the Dead." Two cops on stakeout duty of notorious gangsters foul up and the subject under surveillance turns up dead. Who could have gotten by these street-wise detectives? Third up, a story that starts fast and doesn't let up until the conclusion, "How Many Cards for the Corpse?". Jake is married now and through with cards. But he can't help but stop by the old table, and trouble is waiting. The bets build, but Jake has an unbeatable hand. Or does he? I like the illustration:



Next up, "Play the Game with Poison" by F. Orlin Tremaine, concerning the exploits of Professor E.Z. Bart a mystical and contemplative detective, always two steps ahead of his opponent and his leggy companion, a bit slow witted but fast on the draw. A strange detective type to say the least in this tale of a series of deaths of affluent men at different times at many points about the city. How is the killer achieving his ghastly purpose? E.Z. is on the case.

The next story is "Once There Was a Wolf" that starts in a very typical way for a detective story:



The damsel in distress needs a favor, and though the dick knows better, she's instantly found her knight in shining armor. A fun take-off on the little red riding hood story, the story is full of fun dialogue and quick action. Granny is just too funny. Another story I found pretty intersting is the next tale, penned by Dane Gregory, "Save a Grave for Me!." About a school teacher whose neighborhood is wiped out by an epidemic. Her children die and the neighborhood is abandoned, but she remains in the Summer of the epidemic, mentally stuck in time, as the world moves on about her. She cashes her support check and spends nothing, over the years her horde becomes too much of a temptation for a would-be killer. What sort of depraved individual would go after the helpless old crazy woman, and can he be redeemed? Though perhaps a bit convoluted, this story might be my favorite of the lot. Also, "A Drink for Aunt Louisa"? A greedy heir can't wait for Aunt Louisa to die, so he acts to move things along. Is there a flaw in his perfect crime? What sort of scumbag kills his aunt who has raised him:



And "Homefront Target", back from the war but at war on the streets, can Joe Jeremy face his captain and tell him he is quitting the force so he can marry his daughter? Is Joe just an adrenaline junkie or do his brothers in blue need his help tracking down domestic agents of the reich? Last up "The Four Merchants of Menace" regarding a bundle of 300,000 gone missing during a murder/robbery. Two years later, all the criminals are dead, but the money is nowhere to be found. But fresh murders put Dave Stone back on the case and under suspicion as the bodies start to pile up and the cops on his trail. Frantic detective work and a fast moving plot makes this a fun detective story. The author does a great job of putting the reader at the center of the action as the walls start to fall in. The splash:


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Enjoy the pulp you louses, hours of entertainment in a little rough magazine:

Get the cover to cover hi-res scan here.

Popular Detective, November 1949

So I was talking about crime fiction last post, annd I happen to have completed a scan in the genre last week, so I think I'll go with a little selection of detective pulp scans over the coming days. McCoy did the edits for this issue, so big thanks to him. He makes these covers and spines look like they just hopped off the shelf.


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Get the scan here.

The cover painting is a nice take on the second novelette, the yellow pajamas are unmistakable. I can't identify the artist.

Contents


The rundown-

The pulp opens with "Murder Off Honduras," a nice whodunit in exotic locale. The captain of a small fishing boat takes a group of clients on a trip for tarpon, fishing all night (night fishing for tarpon is truly a thrill if you ever get the chance) and playing poker by day. The game's big winner turns up dead, the dough is gone, and the killer must be one of the clients, crew, or captain. Mix in a little romance, a squall, and the island alcade, and you get a unique yarn. Next up, "The Only Way Out." The reform candidate has just swept into city hall, and a police crackdown is coming. Can our mob accountant get out while the getting is good or must he cave to the cops trying to get him to squeal? The hypothetical moves quickly into the brutal, an interesting turn of events. A nice page on the author, Bruno Fischer, here.

Next up, the other novella, "The Dead Don't Die". A bit of eerie fiction here, a ghost story. Set on the windblown cliffs on the family estate of his newlywed friend, our protagonist wades into an argument on whether it's a good idea to go hunting the cursed family jewels. A haunted past echoes into the present, supernatural goings-on? Maybe, maybe not... Next up, "A Heel and his Loot," in which our man Dooley a ship cook ashore discovers his friend The Swede a baker who shares his galley in a bar despondent, having been suckered by a dame. Can she sucker Dooley too? Next up, "An Eye for an Eye," a witness to murder catches a bullet and survives. The bad news? The cops want to use him for bait. Then, "Fists for Mercura," how do you take down a killer without drawing blood? It takes an engineer...and lastly, the piece I might have enjoyed most, Joe Archibald's "Cheesecake and Willie," a comedic caper in which Detective Willie thinks fast, too fast. I laughed my way through this one, maybe Archibald picked up a knack for comedy from his days working on The Funnies at Dell.

Enjoy! More dicks and dames coming your way next time.

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