I recently received the 14th issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, the excellent magazine series focused on men’s adventure magazines, now into its fourth year of publication. This is one of the issues I’ve been looking forward to, as they focus on “Bigfoot.”
As a kid in the 1970s, Bigfoot was everywhere. The Six Million Dollar Man went up against him. We had a Saturday morning TV series of Bigfoot and Wildboy. Being from Florida, we had talk about his “cousins,” like the Swamp Ape/Skunk Ape here, and in other areas, like the Fouke Monster in Arkansas (aka The Legend of Boggy Creek), when I was a kid in the ’70s.
The cover by Earl Norem is from the fifth issue of Charlton’s Six Million Dollar Man magazine, but with a four-armed yeti.
Now MAQ has been available in three formats: the full-color printed version, a black-and-white “noir edition,” and a full-color “digital replica edition.” However, looking at Amazon, it appears there are no “noir editions” beyond #11 or digital editions beyond #10. I’m not sure if they have stopped doing this or if they are just behind in putting them out. As I have the full-color edition, and it states this on the cover, I expect we will see a noir edition.
Full disclosure, I was sent a copy of the full-color edition. And I would encourage people to get this one over the noir edition because of the great color artwork.
Again, publisher Bob Deis (Men’s Adventure Library) and graphic designer Bill Cunningham (Pulp 2.0 Press) have another great issue. And their excellent intros to each piece are a big reason why this magazine series is so great. These intros get into the author, artist, and sometimes publisher behind that particular work, and here, often, the “story behind the story” is tied to the particular item. For me, I sometimes enjoy these more than the articles.
This time, they are joined by guest contributors Loren Coleman, who runs the International Cryptozoological Museum, writer and artist Stephen R. Bissette, and author Keith Roysdon. All are introduced in a great intro by Deis. So what do we get this time?
From the MAMs themselves, we get five “articles” (or are they really fiction?) related to Bigfoot and related beasties. And each one has a great introductory article that is just as interesting. We start off with two important historical pieces.
John W. Burns may be responsible for promoting the term “Sasquatch,” and he had been writing about them for decades. Here we get his article “I Hunted Prehistoric Men” from Courage in January 1958. He had lived with an Indian tribe in British Columbia, which led to his writing about Sasquatches.
Ivan T. Sanderson was an early pioneer in cryptozoology. After reading reports of Bigfoot in the Humboldt Times and Humboldt Standard, two newspapers in Eureka, California, he looked further into this. This led to his book on Bigfoot, Abominable Snowmen, Legend Come to Life, and this article from True in December 1959. A nice bonus is we get scans from the Humboldt Standard and other newspapers.
Rounding this out are three further articles. The first is “I Found Africa’s Man-Beast” from Men in 1969, a clear fiction piece presented as nonfiction. The next may be something else. “I Killed the Ape-Man Creature of Whiteface” is by Frank Hansen, regarding something exhibited at fairs: the frozen corpse of a man-ape. Or is it all a hoax? He puts it forth as real. And the final one is based on claims of the sighting of such a creature in Illinois, which has now become known as the Big Muddy Monster.
We also get several original articles on Bigfoot. First up is a list of the top 10 books on Bigfoot by Coleman. In regards to The Six Million Dollar Man, we get a great article by Keith Roysdon on his encounters with Bigfoot. I was watching the series at the time, and I think those episodes were among the ones I most remembered. I knew that the series was based on the books by Martin Caidin, but I didn’t know he had written for MAMs as well.
And Bissette gives us two articles. One is an exhaustive coverage of the pop culture around Bigfoot in the 21st century, something I was pretty much oblivious to. Certainly, I knew none of the foreign and lesser-known films he noted here. About the only movies I was aware of were The Legend of Boggy Creek, which I saw as a kid. He does cover the sequels to them. The other is an interview with fellow comicbook creator Steve Niles in regards to his own Bigfoot comic book done with Rob Zombie and Richard Corben. While I’m fairly familiar with Corben’s work, I don’t recall hearing of it. As Dark Horse Comics is reprinting all of Corben’s work, will they also reprint this? I hope so.
We get two articles by Bill Cunningham. The first is on the short-lived Saturday morning TV series Bigfoot and Wildboy, which appeared in the late 1970s. This originally ran in TwoMorrows‘ RetroFan magazine, though much improved with the graphical layout here. I don’t recall watching this one when it came out.
The second is a gallery of Bigfoot-related media, including MAM articles and covers, along with various movie posters and the like, which all contributed to, or created, the buzz around Bigfoot at the time.
And things wrap up with a short afterword by Deis on the Patterson Bigfoot film.
The only thing missing might have been stuff on the Swamp Ape/Skunk Ape in Florida, but I don’t know if that has been written up in MAMs. We have a research center/museum you can visit east of Naples, Fla. I’ve been there, and it was worth a visit if you’re in the area.
Toward the end, we get ads for a couple of volumes in the associated Men’s Adventure Library: Atomic Werewolves and Man-Eating Plants and Cryptozoology Anthology, both of which I’ve reviewed here.
This one is another great issue, and I especially look forward to the next one. It appears that the next issue focuses on astronauts. I assume both fictional and nonfictional. Maybe it’s appropriate with the recent Artemis II mission.
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