Here we are with another collection of works from men’s adventure magazines from the folks at Men’s Adventure Library, this time focused on sharks: Maneaters: Killer Sharks in Men’s Adventure Magazines.
This collection looks similar to two prior volumes from them: I Watched Them Eat Me Alive and Cuba. Edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, the book includes articles, stories (both “real” and not), and artwork. Like all their works, this is another well-done volume. It’s available in both paperback and hardback, however the hardback is 191 pages and the paperback is 172, so would I recommend getting the hardback.
Full disclosure, I was sent a copy of the hardcover.
For those not aware, men’s adventure magazines (or, MAM) existed from the 1940s to the ’70s, and was one of the replacements of the pulps, but they are not pulps. Several of the major pulp magazines became MAMs, including Argosy, Adventure, Blue Book, and Short Stories. But there were over 150 MAMs. The target audience was working-class men, and the magazines combined fiction and non-fiction (including fiction claiming to be non-fiction), lurid covers, and high-quality interior artwork and photos/pictorials, all on slick paper. Later on, they went all non-fiction.
Sharks are something I am familiar with. I grew up in Florida and went to the beach often, spent a week in the Keys diving each year, and watched Jacques Cousteau on TV. So I am well aware of sharks, though I never saw one in the wild, despite years of this. So I can get the appeal of sharks as a threat in MAMs.
As I was about to flip through this book and thought about how MAMs would use them, I figured it would somehow fall in between Discovery’s Shark Week and the over-the-top shark movies on SyFy like Sharknado. How appropriate that they got the creator of Shark Week to write the foreward and the writer/director of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus to do the afterward. Great!
After a preface by Deis and an article by Doyle on MAM and their use of sharks that do a great job of setting the stage, we get several fiction and non-fiction pieces. Each provides us associated cover and interior artwork. And they are followed by a commentary. What I thought was great was that each commentary is different.
Many of the commentaries are from experts in regards to sharks: ecologists, naturalists, scientists, etc., who comment on the reality of that particular work. For a few others, we get shorter blurbs on factual information. While not at the level of the forward we get with each piece in the Men’s Adventure Quarterlies, they provide something similar but in a different way. It’s probably a good way to differentiate the two series of works.
We do get some galleries, such as one on rafts. Another is on Mort Kunstler‘s cover artwork, which they have put out a volume on just his work. I did like the photos of Mort doing his own modeling for some of the divers he used. And you might be surprised on how he did this. And I thought the pair of covers we get at the end were pretty interesting, as the sharks are mirror images of each other, but the covers are by different artists!
This is another great work from the folks at the Men’s Adventure Library. If MAMs are an interest of yours, check out their volumes, as well as the Men’s Adventure Quarterlies. As MAQ issues are themed, at some point they will probably do sharks as well. I would think of the wealth of MAMs that they can hopefully not overlap this collection. But everything I’ve seen from them are excellent, and have yet to be disappointed.
