What’s the ugliest part of your body?
Some say your nose,
Some say your toes
But I think it’s your mind…
-Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention
Earlier this week I posted the story, "Hot Fangs Tore My Flesh!", from MAN'S LIFE (January 1959). While repeated often in men's adventure magazines, the trope of Man vs. Beast is best associated with another tale published in the same title a little over three years earlier. Indeed, it has come to be adopted as the cornerstone of this particular thematic cycle that runs through the heart and soul of these obscure -- and now expensive -- gems.
The following missive was first posted over a dozen years ago and I've edited it considerably, adding additional details and images that weren't originally included.
It was 1968, one year after the so-called “Summer of Love”. While my friends and I were very aware that the times, they were a-changin', we largely ignored such goofy social events. Instead, we were busy enjoying the last of the innocent fun that we sensed was fast slipping through our young, collective fingers. The days of awkward puberty were behind us, and we were on the cusp of that big Scary and Exciting Thing called Adulthood. This feeling, of course, made “adult stuff” all the more exciting. We still reveled in “spazzing around”, a term we used often that would eventually disappear along with much of the rest of our slang lexicon from a bygone age that has since been long locked up deep within the Hallowed Bowels of the Politically Correct. Nevertheless, we were content in our never-ending quest for cheap fun and a good laugh.
Yes, the flower children were in full bloom and their music was as heavily sweet and seductive as the scent of jasmine and patchouli. We, on the other hand, were a little more interested in kooky stuff of an entirely different kind: Dr. Demento was in full tilt, busily unearthing crazy tunes from the past (once you’ve heard it, you won't forget Benny Bell’s “Shaving Cream”), DJ Nevada Smith would be playing “Boobs A Lot” by the Holy Modal Rounders from her call letters KPPC in Pasadena, CA, and Cheech and Chong would be supplying their own unique brand of stoned humor, albeit sans music. Who needed music, anyway, when you were too busy laughing?
All these sixties shenanigans had their roots and could be traced back to one seminal, genius loci . . . Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.
I was first asked if I was “hung up” and introduced to Suzy Creamcheese by way of my cousin while on vacation in Sacramento, CA in the summer of ’66, not long after the double-LP FREAK OUT by a loony by the name of Frank Zappa had been released. It was 60 minutes of pure mind warp mixed with ‘50s Rock ‘n Roll. It was strange, bizarre, but I loved it!
Zappa's Zanies followed with album titles such as WE’RE ONLY IN IT FOR THE MONEY (my personal favorite), HOT RATS, and LUMPY GRAVY, and I was schooled on such imperatives as mud sharks, the perils of eating yellow snow, and what the ugliest part of my body was.
One of Zappa's records stood out from the rest (if that was possible!) with the stark and shocking title of WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH! Man, we cracked up over that one, I tell ya. However, it wasn’t until some years later that I learned the title had originated from an even more bizarre source -- a men’s magazine!
The album cover was painted by an artist by the name of Neon Park (b. Martin Muller). Known for his surrealist style of work, Park was busy in San Francisco creating posters for the music promotion company The Family Dog when he got a phone call from Frank Zappa asking him to design the cover for his new Mothers of Invention LP. When he met Zappa in L.A, Zappa showed him a magazine cover. "It was one of those men's magazines like SAGA," Park later said. "The cover story was 'Weasels Ripped My Flesh' and it was the adventure of a guy, naked to the waist, who was in water. The water was swarming with weasels, and they were all kind of climbing on him and biting him. So Frank said, 'This is it. What can you do that's worse than this?' And the rest is history."
Park chose a Schick electric shaver ad as the basis for his design. He roughly traced over it and replaced the razor with the body of a weasel.
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Schick razor ad from The Saturday Evening Post, October 3, 1953. |
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Weasels Ripped My Flesh LP cover, released August 10, 1970. |
The cover art was met with disgust by Warner Brothers, then Zappa's record label. Even the printer was horrified by it. Zappa was happily satisfied that it had these reactions, all of them before the album was even released!
However, despite its legendary status, Neon Park is better known as the primary LP jacket artist for the rock band, Little Feat, doing all of them except one. Among the other artists that used his work were David Bowie, The Beach Boys and Dr. John, known then as "The Night Tripper". Park also sold illustrations to PLAYBOY and NATIONAL LAMPOON, among others. He died from Lou Gehrig's Disease in 1993.
Men's adventure magazines were, during their heyday, an extremely popular form of men's entertainment. Much like their ink-relative, the pulp magazine, titles like STAG, BLUEBOOK, MAN’S WORLD, SOUTH SEA STORIES, and EXOTIC ADVENTURES were printed every month on cheap paper and delivered by the truckload to newsstands, drugstores, and liquor stores for over 20 years. While generally not relegated to being held “under the counter” like the girlie mags, they were many times tucked underneath the top tier of the magazine rack. At the Anchor Liquor store where my neighbor (the one who introduced me to monster magazines) bought his FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND, MAD MONSTERS, HORROR MONSTERS and Tarzan paperbacks, they were sold this way.
These ‘zines were read by thousands of men (and maybe 3 or 4 women), then cast off into the trash, which is where a lot of people (mostly wives, I’d surmise) thought they ought to have gone in the first place. Consequently, it is estimated that about only 1% of men’s adventure magazines, from the 50s through the 70s, remain.
Still, the stories and articles found in these "throw-aways" all have a brusque sort of charm. They may be relegated to the legacy of trashy pulp pabulum, but they are a rare sort of treat, nonetheless -- the kind that you really shouldn’t eat, but enjoy anyway; a guilty pleasure as it were.
The covers -- again much like the earlier pulps -- were painted in the bold, lurid colors of their predecessors, and depicted such titillating tableaux as G.I.’s in do-or-die action, headhunters chasing down their next victim, and half-naked girls being tortured by crazed Nazi scientists.
A common theme used by many titles was that of a man, a woman, or both being menaced by such unsavory things as river monsters, flying reptiles, blood-thirsty amphibians, and a host of other nasty critters, all hatched by Mother Nature, all hungry for human flesh . . . and, yes, all purported to be true! These cover images became widely available during the advent of the Internet. Web sites began to pop up that featured cover scans and some interiors (rarely the entire article or issue). One of these images that I came across stopped me in my tracks when I saw it; here was a man, waist deep in water, warding off a slew of pissed off-looking furry rodents. The title on the bottom right of the cover read: “Weasels Ripped My Flesh!”
The story itself turns out to be a manic, nerve-wracking journey into one man’s nightmare, as the reader is immediately thrown into the middle of a tale about a horde of nocturnal weasels bent on killing, maiming, or otherwise destroying the poor narrator’s entire stock of breeding ducks (!). Told in the first person, he describes his fruitless attempts at fending off wave after wave of the horde, and is torn to shreds in the process. His “duck house” is eventually destroyed and our hapless victim must suffer the additional indignity of plastic surgery to reconstruct his ripped up face to the point of it being turned into an entirely different visage.
Talk about a horror story! This is low-brow, flash fiction at its fiercest, and an exemplary example of the types of stories and articles that a reader back in the day would likely come across on any given month in any given title.
True, any resemblance to high art here is purely unintentional, if indeed, any exists at all. More interesting is the fact that an alarming number of noted and popular authors cut their literary teeth in the sweat and blood-soaked pages of the men’s adventure magazines (hey, you gotta make a living, right?). Well, writers like Lawrence Block, Mario Puzo, Harlan Ellison, and Robert Silverberg did, as all of them contributed at one time or other to ‘zines with titles like MALE, FOR MEN ONLY, and PERIL.
MAN'S LIFE happened to be among the longest running of the men’s adventure mags, with a life-span of over twenty years, from 1952 to 1974. Along with its companion title, TRUE MEN STORIES, they were originally published by Crestwood Publishing, then both later sold to Stanley Publications/Normandy Associates.
Comic fans may recognize these two companies as comic book publishers. Crestwood was founded in 1940 and is best known for Prize Comics, Dick Briefer's FRANKENSTEIN and work by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. They stopped publishing comics in 1963, selling what was left to DC, but kept on with humor magazines such as SICK (edited by Joe Simon) and ARMY LAUGHS, edited by Samuel Bierman and containing cartoon gags by Don Orehek, Vic Martin, Bob Tupper and good girl artist Bill Wenzel.
Stanley Morse is second only to Martin Goodman for publishing the most comics and magazines during this period. Morse is infamous for publishing some of the most notorious Pre-Code horror comics, including MISTER MYSTERY and WEIRD MYSTERIES (the first issue of this title will be posted soon at WOM's companion site, FEAR IN FOUR COLORS). A late-bloomer, Morse founded Key Publications in 1951 and launched a number of imprints under its banner, such as Aragon Magazines, Gillmor Magazines, Media Publications, Stanmor Publications, and Timor Publications.
Morse was a maverick and one of Pre-Code's "shady characters". Comics historian David Hadju said Morse "produced several acutely vile horror comics".
Author and historian Lawrence Watt-Evans went even further by writing in THE SCREAM FACTORY and ALTER EGO:
"[Morse published 'some of the grossest and most vile' [comics]. His titles often changed publishers from one issue to the next as he dodged creditors or changed partners, and would sometimes have cover art taken from a story from a different issue as deadlines were missed. If he came up a story short, he would simply reprint something. If he couldn't get an artist for a particular slot, he'd have his editor cut up and rearrange the art from an old story to make a new one."
Morse shuttered Key Publications' in 1956 after the Comics Code Authority lorded over exactly the type of books he printed. But he didn't stop there; he went on to dodge the Code and publish more scandalous magazines, such as the lurid, full-size 'zines ADVENTURES IN HORROR, and HORROR STORIES, as well as his line of Pre-Code horror comics reprints such as his Eerie Publications ripoffs, GHOUL TALES and CHILLING TALES OF HORROR.
This issue of MAN'S LIFE is staffed with what appears to be a number of individuals who found employment after bailing out of the comic book industry when the Code was instituted. Harold Straubing was a writer and editor who collaborated with Leslie Charteris to create a comic about his famous detective, The Saint. Joe Genalo was the editor and colorist of Prize Comics. Don Orehek is a well-known and well-traveled artist who, in his career, claimed to have drawn over 33,000 cartoon gags. I was unable to find any information about Ed Gerard, but there is a Dave Gerard who was a cartoonist (one and the same or related?). Information on Art Director Milton Louis is also scant, but I did find a reference to him photographing the legendary Zombie mask sold in Warren's magazine for the cover of the CREEPY 1972 ANNUAL. Last but not least, Art Associate Nick Frank was a comic book artist who worked for Stanley Morse.
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Photography by Milton Louis. |
So, after all the build-up, are you ready to finally read the story? Well, here it is, in all its frenetic and bloody glory. An admittedly crappy scan, but it's all I've got. It's written by Matt Kamens and the cover is by Will Hulsey (under the American Art Agency), who was quite proficient at painting exciting Man vs. Beast covers.
See more MAN VS. BEAST posts HERE.
Read the horrific "The Coming of the Rats!" HERE.
Highly Recommended Reading:
WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH: THE ILLUSTRATED MEN'S ADVENTURE ANTHOLOGY
Edited by Robert Deis, with Josh Alan Friedman & Wyatt Doyle
New Texture, 2024
450 pg.
Softcover: $39.95
Hardcover: $46.95
From Amazon.com:
From the jungles to the deserts to the mean city streets, the men's adventure magazines of the 1950s, '60s and '70s - pulpy periodicals like Real Men, Male, Man's Life, True Men Stories, Untamed, Exotic Adventures and Gusto - left no male fantasy or interest unexplored. War stories, exotic adventure yarns, "true, first-hand" accounts of white-knuckle clashes between man and beast, and spicy tales of sadistic frauleins and tropical white queens hungry for companionship ... topped off with salacious exposés of then-shocking subjects like free love, the Beat Generation, homosexuality, LSD and the secret horniness hidden in calypso lyrics.
Josh Alan Friedman (Black Cracker) and Wyatt Doyle (Stop Requested) join collector and historian Robert Deis of MensPulpMags.com for a guided safari through a jaw-dropping collection of classic men's adventure magazine stories in the first anthology from the genre ever published.
Packed with pulp fiction created by writers who later went on to greater fame, sensational illustrations by masters of men's pulp art and wacky ads taken from the magazines' back pages, Weasels Ripped My Flesh! is your passport to a gonzo world where every dame was a femme fatale or a scantily-clad damsel in distress and manly men fought small mammals bare-handed.
Also highly recommended is Robert Deis' Men's Adventure blog. Visit his site HERE.
I learned a lot about an artist I was pretty much unaware of. I have several Little Feat albums but only on CD where the art is constricted. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI believe Park designed all of Little Feat's album covers except for their first. He also did Lowell George's solo album. George was a Mothers of Invention alumnus.
ReplyDelete