‘Weasels Ripped My Flesh!’

I have posted several times on the various collections taken from the men’s adventure magazines (or MAMs), which succeeded the pulps. The folks who put out the excellent Men’s Adventure Quarterly, Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, have been putting out volumes in the Men’s Adventure Library, reprinting art and fiction (and nonfiction, some of which was actually fiction).

One of their first collections was Weasels Ripped My Flesh!, a title taken from an actual MAM article that was also used as the title of a Frank Zappa album. And, yes, that story is included.

The first edition came out in 2013, but they released a new, better edition in 2024. The new edition updates the cover and interior artwork and adds some additional sidebars. They note what is new for those who want to know. But as I’ve been impressed with the level of quality of MAQ and their other recent works, I know this new edition is a great improvement over the original. It comes in at about 450 pages.

Full disclosure, I was sent a copy of the paperback version of the new edition.

Now, for those who haven’t read my other MAM-related postings, let’s talk a little about men’s adventure magazines (or MAMs). These were an outgrowth of the pulps, with many of the first ones being pulp magazines that changed their focus and format. The paper changed from pulp to slick. The focus was on what interested working-class men: pinups of girls, stories of lurid adventure with wartime feats, exotic travel, or wild animals, as well as nonfiction.

This mixture of fiction and nonfiction would change over time to all nonfiction (and fiction presented as nonfiction). Many claimed to be “true-life” adventures, but probably most were not, or were heavily exaggerated.

This started in the 1940s, and several pulp magazines changed over to this, including Argosy, Adventure, Blue Book, and Short Stories. Plus new magazines like Cavalier, Swank, and Stag along with titles like Man’s Life, Men’s True Adventure, Male, For Men Only, and many more — more than 150. For some pulp publishers, I think switching over to publishing men’s adventure magazines was how they stayed in business.

One could almost say they were a replacement for the prior spicy pulps. However, I find the quality of the artwork in MAMs much higher than the spicies and the pulps in general. While cover artwork is similar, even having the same artists, the interior artwork of the spicies were pen-and-ink line work and of poor quality, while the interior artwork in the MAMs was high-quality paintings, usually monochromatic, along with pictorials.

The men’s adventure magazines were one of the formats that replaced the pulps, along with digests and paperback books. They died out in the early 1970s, by which time the “true-life” fiction had been dropped for more nudie pictorials and nonfiction pieces.

So, what do we get in this massive volume? More than 20 reprints from various MAMs, most of which have an accompanying sidebar article on the author, story genre, or story itself. We also get a few extras, such as interviews, as well as a preface, foreword, and introduction by the three editors: Deis, Doyle, and Josh Alan Friedman. And we get some notable authors that people might be surprised wrote for MAMs, such as Mario Puzo, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block, and more.

With so much in this volume, I will comment on some of the more interesting, to me, items in this collection.

And it’s apropos that the first item reprinted is the original “Weasels Ripped My Flesh!,” which first appeared in the September 1956 issue of Man’s Life by Mike Kamens, whoever he is. This is one of the many “killer creature” stories that ran in MAMs. We also get a sidebar on how this story came to fame, and it’s interesting that until this collection was done, the story had apparently never been reprinted.

There are two other such stories. One is “Chewed to Bits by Giant Turtles.” And then the last story in the collection is “Monkey Madness” by Carl Evans, about a trio of men in a life raft attacked by a hundred small monkeys. What was interesting to me was that it has been reprinted five times, and we get to see all the new covers used for the story.

It is interesting to learn that some notable authors actually wrote for the MAMs. Mario Puzo, better known for The Godfather, wrote quite a bit there. While we don’t get any of his fiction, we do get an interview with him on this. Harlan Ellison I know from his science fiction writing, including TV scripts. But, again, he did some writing for the MAMs. We get one of these pieces, a crime-fiction work named “Death Climb,” along with a nice sidebar on his career.

A grandmaster of science fiction, Robert Silverberg wrote quite a bit of work for the MAMs, all under pseudonyms. Enough that Deis and Doyle have put out a whole book reprinting a lot of this. In this volume, we actually get two examples of his works, both bizarre, as well as an excellent sidebar on him. Lawrence Block is similar. A grandmaster of mystery writers, he also wrote for the MAMs earlier in his career. And Deis and Doyle have put out a book reprinting his work. Here we get two of his stories, along with a sidebar on him.

Some of the other selections I thought interesting included the one that tried to push the idea of calypso music as some kind of moral hazard for people. Really?

We get a couple of the more “spicy” types of MAM stories. I did like that we got a sidebar and examples of the work of a pair of “characters” from the MAMs: Jane Dolinger and her husband, Ken Krippene. Jane was a pinup model who became a writer of exotic travel and adventure, being called “Jungle Jane.” Ken was a travel writer for not just MAMs, but also National Geographic. One of the MAQ issues has material on them as well.

While we don’t get a large portfolio on MAM artwork, I did enjoy the short one on the reuse of artwork, both cover and interior, for the MAMs. I’ve seen similar articles on pulp cover art re-use and always enjoy them.

Overall, this is a great collection of MAM stories and art that shows the breadth of what was published in them, though some genres were missing here, like western and science fiction.

If you’re looking for a more general overview of them, rather than a focused collection, this is a good one to get. While I think I prefer the more focused collections, seeing the various authors and reading the excellent sidebars (always a bonus in MAQ and the various Men’s Adventure Library volumes) makes this a great collection. Do take a look at their other works, which include volumes on artists, authors, and story themes.