Here we have the second issue of this new fanzine focused on “men’s adventure magazines”: Men’s Adventure Quarterly. This time the focus is on espionage. Think James Bond and the various “spy-fi” that came out in fiction, movies, TV, and even comics.
As before, publisher is Bob Dies (Men’s Adventure Library) and graphic designer Bill Cunningham (Pulp 2.0 Press) have put out an excellent issue with guest editor Tom Simon (Paperback Warrior blog and podcast).
This is another well-designed issue, with both color and black-&-white artwork, articles, and reprints that include fiction, non-fiction, cartoons, ads, and pictorals. It comes in at about 150 pages, and is 8.5×11-inches in size, similar to the first issue.
Full disclosure, I was sent a copy to review.
For those not aware, here’s a little bit on men’s adventure magazines (or MAM): These were an outgrowth of the pulps, with many of the first ones being pulp magazines that changed their focus and format. Paper changed from pulp to slick. So MAMs are not pulps, but a replacement of them in popular literature. Focus was on what interested men: pinups of girls, and stories of lurid adventure, as well as non-fiction. Many claimed to be “true life” adventures, but probably most were not, or were heavily exaggerated. These magazines ran from the 1940s until the ’70s, and I view the numbered men’s adventure paperback series were one of the replacements of them.
Now the focus on this issue is “espionage.” For me, I remember the multi-media impact of James Bond in the 1960s when I was a kid. While the books were popular in the ’50s and ’60s, the movies made them more so. From this we got a slew of works inspired by them in movies, books, TV, and comics. We got rival movie series like Flynn, TV shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and much more. I remember watching many of these as a kid (I Spy, The Avengers, U.N.C.L.E., Lancelot Link Secret Chimp, etc.). I even had a pair of 007 swim fins!
So certainly espionage would be part of the MAM. Espionage did exist in the pulps, even having pulp heroes like Operator #5 and the like. But MAM has to do it in their style with “realistic”/”true life” articles, spy adventures in the “MAM style,” and more. And this issue certainly shows that.
As before, the sidebar articles that lead off many of the reprints are great reads in their own right. I got a kick out of several of them that covered topics I was already familiar with. One touched on the German Mistel planes from WWII, which were fighter planes that released unmanned bombers in flight. I was big into WWII aircraft for many years as a kid, so was already familiar with them.
Another article spoke of cover artist Vic Prezio, who also did covers for paperbacks, comics, and other magazines. Gold Key Comics used painted covers for its adventure comics, and Vic did the Magnus Robot Fighter covers, using Steve Holland — model for Doc Savage and several other paperback covers for pulp heroes — as the model for Magnus, which I wasn’t aware of.
So what else do we get? For fiction, we a variety of tales dealing with Russians, Chinese, Cuba, and the like. Sex is part of many, and one is done as more of a “true life” tale.
For non-fiction, we get a piece on being a CIA spy. It’s unclear who the author of this piece really is. It seems on spot. I would be interested to know how realistic it is, and who wrote it. Another article looks at someone who might be the model for James Bond, though most of what I’ve been hearing is that Ian Fleming based Bond on basically himself.
There is another great gallery of MAM covers. The pictorial section gives us several girls, including Diana Rigg (Emma Peel from The Avengers), Ursula Andrews, and Monica Vitta who did the Modesty Blaise movie. I’m a fan of Modesty, having read both the books and comics, and the movie was a big disappointment because the main characters where just out of character. We also got a section of undergarments with spy stuff. Weird.
It’s another winner from Bob and Bill! I hope they can keep it up. I would really love to see a similar magazine aimed at the classic pulps that could combine the artwork, fiction, and non-fiction. Sadly, I know that while the covers of the pulps were often great, the interior artwork is just not at the level of what we’d see in MAM in later years. This is another aspect that separates the two mediums.
Again, if MAM is an area of interest to you, please check out the many works from Bob Deis’ Men’s Adventure Library. The next issue of MAQ will focus on vigilante justice such as Don Pendleton‘s The Executioner, which launched the numbered men’s adventure book series that gave us series like The Destroyer and more. It should be another excellent issue.
