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Cover Star: Poptastic covers of vintage British TV comic ‘Look-In’

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Get them young and you’ll have them for life. That was the maxim when I worked in television. It was called “creating brand loyalty,” which probably explains why the bloke who was then Chief Executive of the broadcaster who occasionally employed me, was responsible for making “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” a big success in the UK. I suppose, this maxim was a more cynical variation of the Jesuit saying, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.” Brand loyalty was a way of ensuring the audience stuck with the channel and watched the adverts. Programs were the wrapping paper for the advertisements. Advertisers in a way dictated the kinds of things that could or could not be seen on commercial TV.

In the seventies, creating early brand loyalty saw the publication of children’s magazine Look-In in January 1971. Look-In was the equivalent of kids’ TV Guide or as it was known “The Junior TVTimes.” The TVTimes was the rival listing publication to the BBC’s Radio Times. There were basically two broadcasters back then—the BBC which was financed by a compulsory license fee payable by anyone with a TV set; and ITV, or independent television, which was financed by advertising.

Look-In was ITV’s kids comic or teen magazine. It contained a mix of cartoon strips based on popular ITV broadcast shows like Benny Hill, Man About the House, Kung Fu, The Six Million Dollar Man, Sapphire and Steel, Freewheelers, and Catweazle. There was also sports, puzzles, crosswords and plenty of pictures and pullout posters of pop stars like Marc Bolan, Debbie Harry, David Cassidy, Donny Osmond, Slade, David Bowie, Suzi Quatro, Roy Wood and so on.

If memory serves, the very first issue of Look-In contained a free, cut-out and make your very own TV studio which featured the set, presenters and a camera from ITV’s hit kids show Magpie—rival to BBC’s more mild-mannered Blue Peter. Perhaps my interest in TV started then? Who knows. Look-In was a strangely appealing magazine, for it always contained something of interest—whether a pop star interview or favorite comic strip, or just the double-paged regional listings for the week. I lived in Scotland which meant watching local programming like Knot-Tying from Drumnadrochit or Haggis Farming from Pittenweem, while the rest of the country enjoyed Captain Scarlet or Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).

Look-In also had fabulous cover artwork featuring portraits of pop stars, DJs, and actors as painted by Arnaldo Putzu. These covers made the magazine instantly recognizable and iconic. A bit like Richard Bernstein’s covers for Andy Warhol’s Interview which followed in 1972. Putzu had a career painting movie posters, most notably for the Carry On films and Get Carter. His paintings were featured on the cover of Look-In until the 1980s when they were sadly and unimaginatively replaced with photographs.

Look-In lasted from January 1971 until March 1994 and here’s a small selection of the cover artwork from the 1970s to early eighties.
 
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More poptastic covers, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.22.2020
09:08 am
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Satan is back! With boobs, pubes and rock and roll

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In the world of adult magazines, the devil girl has always been one of the standby icons. And not just there, but in comic books, film, art, tattooing and just about anywhere else you might look. Almost always a positive thing and a fantasy bigger than all the Bettie Pages, Marilyn Monroes and Jayne Mansfields combined. By the 1950s fantasy and reality started having blurred lines. Oh it always existed, but in the late 1940s when John Willie created the first full on fetish magazine, Bizarre, the devil girl was made flesh. This magazine influenced Irving Klaw and all the publishers of the now beloved “vintage smut” (a major hashtag on Instagram and other hashtaggy photo display sites). Magazines like Exotique, the art of Eric Stanton, Gene Bilbrew (Eneg), and others became a long running mainstay. Many of these magazines existed to display personal ads for things, even now, that many people just couldn’t come out and say they were into. Even today, the bizarre content of these 50, 60 and 70-year-old magazines is truly BIZARRE! These are the most collected adult magazines the world over.
 
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When the 60s rolled around and free love, paganism, communal living, more open nudism and—furthest from center, Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan—split the population in two as far as people interested in these activities. In pre X-rated adult films, adult magazines were approaching porno rapidly. There were the people that actually lived this stuff and even more people who wanted to know about it, but couldn’t possibly do it! This audience created the massive business we are about to discuss.

The slightly older suburban set (not the wife swappers and swingers, but the lonely uptight fellas) really wanted a glimpse into this other world, and there became the essence of adult and underground film and publications, especially the kind you could secretly take home. This audience is what is known in the adult film world as “the raincoat crowd”—horny guys who went alone to the theaters in Times Square and other places like it around the country. Many of these films are so insane they must be seen to be believed and most of them, literally thousands of them, can be bought or downloaded from Something Weird Video.

There was a great interest in the Church of Satan as they used nudity and sex magick and weren’t just some stuffy new religion, but seemed like the ultimate party! LaVey and his church got so much magazine play (they’re in movies as well including a documentary on them, Satanis The Devil’s Mass, just reissued on Blu-ray). This subject proved so popular that a cottage industry of Satanic porn magazines, some lighthearted, some very dark popped up. As innocence ended with the advent of mass-produced, readily available porn, everything rushed out the door as fast as it could be printed. These particular magazines are just about the rarest, most collectible and most expensive porn mags on the collectors market.
 
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I had heard about an underground cult of collectors putting out a compendium of these almost secret magazines and set out my feelers to find and talk to them. When I found them I had to agree to their terms and be put in a car, blindfolded, and driven to an amazing space where I sat with a man in a leather mask. Offered a drink, I steadfastly refused. Here’s the interview…
 
So…do you represent some newfangled vintage smut collecting anonymous devil cult?

Vintage smut collecting is a solitary path. There is no unity or group activities that we promote. While we often encourage collectors to communicate with others regarding the titles they are actively hunting since this sort of networking may aid the buyer in searches, our sense of community does not proceed much further than communication among peers to meet collecting milestones. Sharing this material with others, is often beneficial for amorous rituals. So, it is advisable to view with one or more partners in a sensual setting to facilitate sexual rites. Publishing this book allows us to share our unholy sacrament with the chosen few. So, these interested individuals can finally obtain the hidden knowledge and elusive ritual tools that will allow them to explore this realm for themselves.

I hear just a lucky few get the wild evil record made in conjunction with this book. What does one have to do to get it and what’s on it?

To spice up this already mega tasty publication we wanted to include one of our favorite bands; the mysterious slime hard rock psycho band Ball. In the past Ball has really managed to summon the crazy satanic and murky occult vibe of these mags, in their song and video “Satanas” for example. So, we bribed them with smut and asked if they to record a new song that could be featured on an exclusive flexi-disc single for a few select copies of the book and they came up with the crazed “Horny Highlights from Debauched”. The ways to actually procure a copy are most mysterious but probably includes a solemn request directly to Ball.

How long did it take to amass this incredible collection & what else do you collect? Are there more volumes in store?

The collection has been growing in size for roughly seven years. Satanic Mojo Comix and Jason Atomic was the catalyst that first awakened our interest in these devilish artifacts. Collecting vintage magazines currently consumes most of our waking hours. All other pursuits have been obliterated to focus on “adult slicks.” The records, jukeboxes, Italian horror fumetti, and original art acquisitions are all currently sidelined and paused. Magazines reign supreme in the top collecting spot, draining bank accounts and sending us scrambling like rabid addicts to our local post office whenever a delivery is missed. There are more volumes currently in the works, and we are more than excited to continue sharing the wealth with open minded adults over the age of 18, seeking to learn more about vintage smut. There have been numerous recent 60s and 70s magazine discoveries by our acquisition team that will blow minds and leave the reader breathless and begging for more. At this precise moment we look forward to continuing and enhancing our current exploration of witchery and devilry in the next volume, being assembled in our labs.

 
Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Howie Pyro
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12.26.2019
09:27 am
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Cult Movies and Big Screen Idols: Covers to ‘Films and Filming’ magazine
01.11.2018
12:35 pm
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Joe Dallesandro, April 1971.
 
Films and Filming was a middle-brow, high-quality monthly movie magazine published in the UK between October 1953 to March 1990. It was a special interest magazine for film-lovers who thought “Picturegoer unsatisfying and Sight and Sound unintelligible.” Set up by publisher Philip Dosse Films and Filming was a stablemate to his other mags like Books and Bookmen, Dance and Dancers, Plays and Players, Art and Artists, and so on. It was, in many respects, one of the best and most subversive film magazines around as Dosse had an agenda of promoting difficult and controversial subject matter, in particular, homosexuality which was then a criminal offense in Britain punishable by imprisonment or chemical castration.

Films and Filming or rather F&F’s first editor was Peter Brinson, a smart young man who made no attempt to disguise his sexuality. He successfully edited the magazine to woo the gay market by including pictures of beefcake actors and personal ads for lonely bachelors to hook-up. It was the magazine’s second editor, Peter Baker, that moved F&F away from a coded gay film zine to a thoughtful, glossy, and well-written magazine that became the must-read of every serious cinephile.

I knew fuck all about any of this fascinating backstory when I picked secondhand copies of F&F up in the seventies and eighties from Bobbies Bookshop. I bought the magazine because it featured the movies, writers, and directors I liked: Ken Russell, Lindsay Anderson, Stanley Kubrick, Fellini, Derek Jarman, and Martin Scorsese. It also boasted several great photospreads per issue usually lifted from some of the strangest movies on release that month and some very good writing by the likes of Raymond Durgnat—though there were some reviewers who always seemed to focus on every movie having a homosexual subtext whether it was valid or not. F&F’s covers eschewed the usual box office fodder—though occasional they did feature the odd one like Star Wars—and instead focused on gay/cult films like Myra Breckinridge, The Night Porter, Lisztomania, Loot, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Last Detail, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Salo: 120 days of Sodom.

I have a stack of old F&F’s stored away, and have previously shared some of the magazine’s photospreads of my favorite films/directors, but the following largely comes from the Twitter feed of Films and Filming, which I suggest you follow if you have an interest cult and classic films, big screen stars and memorabilia from a golden age of movies.
 
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Monica Vitti, April 1966.
 
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Donald Sutherland, May 1975.
 
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Bridget Bardot and Jeanne Moreau, March 1966.
 
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Batman and Robin, October 1966.
 
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Sophia Loren, September 1966.
 
More classy covers, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.11.2018
12:35 pm
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Jingle all the way: Joan Collins, Burt Reynolds, & Jayne Mansfield selling sex mags at Christmas
12.22.2017
09:26 am
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Hustler, 1976.
 
I’ve never quite bought into the idea that red is always a color of sex and desire. Not that I give a fuck or have any scientific evidence to back up my uninformed opinion other than the anecdotal prejudice that if red was a color of arousal then we’d all cop off at stop signals and dear old Santa Claus would be a sex god.

Maybe he is.

And maybe this explains why porn mags get into spreading some Christmas cheer every December by getting a little festive with their covers.

Such naive and dot-to-dot thinking led me to browse (ahem—for research purposes…of course!) through a fine selection of vintage, glamor mag covers just to get the inside skinny on how they once celebrated the Holiday Season. For if there is one thing I do know, thanks to analytics, is that our dear readers like stuff that says “NSFW” with a hint of the naughty, the naked, and the red.

So maybe red does mean sex?

I mean just look at the amount of red splashed out on the following selection of covers—it’s enough to give one hypertension. And note too how it was once seemly for megastars like Jayne Mansfield, Burt Reynolds, and Joan Collins to appear on the cover or even naked in the centerfold of such glossy, adult entertainment mags.

And last but certainly not least, these covers offer a potted history of porn mags. From when once adult magazines were about artful erotic photographs and great writing (by the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, George V. Higgins, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, interviews with writers like William (Lord of the Flies) Golding, and articles on the threat of the impending devastating weather changes and corruption in politics) the adult mag soon became just a selection of close-up hardcore pix which might not have looked out of place in a medical textbook (Gynecology 101?) and very little readable content. It was, I guess you could say, rather prescient of how our world has moved from text to pictograph and hieroglyph (emoji) via technology.

But, anyway, this is all a by-the-way to sneak in a few saucy vintage covers for your seasonal entertainment.
 
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Joan Collins on the cover of Playboy, Xmas 1983.
 
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Don’t be fooled by technical side of Practical Photography, 1965.
 
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Jayne Mansfield on the cover of Variedades, 1956.
 
More saucy covers, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.22.2017
09:26 am
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Sexy Beasts & Monster Cartoon Freaks: The weirdo art of ‘Heaven’s Favorite Man’ Matt Crabe
11.07.2017
08:55 am
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‘Bury Death on a Full Moon.’
 
Artist Matt Crabe is one helluva prolific guy. He makes paintings, prints, drawings, ‘zines, books, pins, death threats, t-shirts, and giant hanging paper demons which all feature his beautifully grotesque and NSFW creations.

Crabe draws intricate Day-Glo colored monsters, ravenous demons, and deformed super freaks that burst off the page like some weird unnameable creatures from the very worst kind of nightmare. As you can tell, I dig Crabe’s work a lot. He’s tapped into something that connects trippy childhood cartoon figures with a scatological glee for sex and bodily functions.

Based in Asbury Park, NJ, Crabe drops his work down from Heaven—or so he says, indeed he calls himself “Heaven’s favorite man”—and sells it via his online store, and shares through his Instagram and Tumblr. Check more of Matt Crabe’s work here.
 
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‘The End of the Drought.’
 
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‘When water isn’t enough for the flowers anymore.’
 
See more strange monstrosities, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.07.2017
08:55 am
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CB Action: (Apparently) CB radio wasn’t just for sad, lonely middle-aged men?
09.18.2017
01:10 pm
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Okay, I’ll admit it. Everything I know about CB Radio comes from that episode of Family Guy where Peter Griffin sat naked in his basement talking dirty to truckers on the freeway. I honestly had no idea CB radio was mainly used by scantily clad ladies talking about UHF, antenna tuning, and license fees. If I had, well hell, I’d have become a truck drivin’ man and got myself a big rig a long, long time ago.

Breaker. Breaker. Nudge nudge, wink wink

Somehow, I’d (deliberately) forgotten that CB radio was the Twitter of the seventies. No, it was more popular than that. In fact so unbelievably popular that it spawned (and I use that word advisedly here) a string of trucker movies like White Line Fever with Jan-Michael Vincent and Kay Lenz. Smokey and the Bandit with big Burt Reynolds, little Sally Field, and sweaty Jackie Gleason. Maybe hard to believe now but Smokey and the Bandit was the second highest grossing film of 1977 beaten only by Star Wars at the box office.

If that weren’t enough to block your rear view mirror, then there was also Breaker! Breaker! with Chuck Norris, Jonathan Demme’s Citizens Band AKA Handle With Care and something called High Ballin’ with Jerry Reed, Peter Fonda, and Helen Shaver. Even the great Sam Peckinpah (perhaps surprisingly) got in the act with Convoy starring Kris Kristofferson, Ali MacGraw, and Ernest Borgnine, based on that unforgettable “classic CB radio” song “Convoy” by C.W McCall. Yeah, that one.

Breaker. Breaker.

Not only were their CB radio/trucker films and records but a whole slew of magazines for the CB enthusiast which generally featured young happy women on the covers with a hot speaker microphone in their hands. Just like these racy covers to Australia’s former #1 citizen’s band radio magazine CB Action. If this doesn’t make you want to take up CB radio immediately then I guess I don’t know what will…
 
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More glossy covers featuring CB enthusiasts, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.18.2017
01:10 pm
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Monsters from Outer Space: Glorious covers for German sci-fi magazine ‘Terra’
03.30.2017
12:31 pm
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After the Second World War, when everything was all kinda, um… shook-up and most people feared imminent nuclear annihilation, or World War Three with Russia, or maybe even just a little old flying saucer invasion from Mars, there came outta Germany a glorious science-fiction magazine called Terra.

Terra or Terra—Utopische Romane / Science Fiction to give it its full name made its debut in 1957. It was published weekly by Arthur Moewig Verlag until 1968. Together with its rival sci-fi mag Utopia, Terra has been described as “the most important science fiction work in the early years of West Germany.”

One look at these glorious Terra covers explains just why that might be so. Look at these fabulous mutated alien creatures doing battle with strong-jawed astronauts, or killer robots about to off some unlucky human, or just shudder at the slithering rapacious monsters about to devour a tasty spaceman breakfast. These are just awesome, thought-inspiring mini-masterpieces that made Earth seem pretty safe at a time when it could have gone up in a nuclear flash.
 
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More awesome Terra covers, after the jump….

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.30.2017
12:31 pm
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Killer clowns: Kooky pulp novels & magazines featuring gun-toting, knife-wielding circus clowns
03.16.2017
10:26 am
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The cover of ‘Uncensored Detective’ 1946.
 
Oddball vintage publications are one of my favorite things to write about here on Dangerous Minds—and like many of you just when I think I’ve seen it ALL (whether I wanted to or not), some “new” vintage weirdness comes across my radar. People often ask me how we find all the high octane, low brow goodness that we feature here on the blog every day. Unfortunately, the answer to that question is also the same as the answer to the first and second rules of Fight Club. Besides, you should consider yourself lucky as these eyes have seen some really, really weird things. (Things no one should see!) Which is a perfect introduction to the subject of this post—bizarre vintage pulp novels and magazines that feature circus clowns gone bad on their covers. And when I say bizarre I mean gorilla-shooting, sneaky, knife-throwing, clowns.

Though most of the fictional clowns on the covers of the various pulp novels and magazines posted below are up to no good, there is at least one that preferred to behave like a Robin Hood of sorts known as “The Crimson Clown.” Created by playwright, novelist and screenwriter Johnston McCulley—the man behind masked swashbuckler Zorro—the Crimson Clown stories were really popular with the detective lit-lovers set since his first appearance in Detective Story Magazine back in 1926. The Crimson Clown would steal from people he deemed “too rich” giving half of his booty to charity and keeping the rest for himself. He was also known to carry a syringe full of some sort of drug that would render his victims unconscious. But just because he was vigilante who liked to help out the needy doesn’t necessarily make the idea of a clown with a syringe full of cuckoo-juice running amok any less terrifying. Nope. Nothing creepy about that at all. I’ve posted the covers of all the clown-oriented vintage pulp I could dig up and man, there was a lot. Of course, if you are at all coulrophobic, you might want to look at the images below in your “safe place.” See you under the bed!
 

‘Detective Magazine’ 1948.
 

‘Detective Novels Magazine’ February 1944.
 
More killer clowns after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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03.16.2017
10:26 am
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Pleasure Goat: The art of the fake magazine cover
02.23.2017
08:26 am
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A fake magazine designed by Sean Tejaratchi.
 
Many of you may be well acquainted with the brilliant work of graphic designer and writer Sean Tejaratchi—and as it had sadly been a while since I had visited his awesome Liar Town USA Tumblr. When I did I found it hard to stop clicking on his ludicrous faux books and other odd yet authentic looking magazines and found myself wishing that there was a website that featured photos of things that Marilyn Monroe kicked.

As couldn’t stop yucking it up over at Liar Town USA I thought I’d share a few of my favorite fictional magazines that Tejaratchi put together, most of which center around inappropriate knitwear and unexpected orgasms. Two things that when they appear in the same sentence sound like a great premise for a publication, don’t you think? Someone, please get on that immediately. That said many of the images that follow are NSFW.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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02.23.2017
08:26 am
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Drag-tastic covers from vintage crossdresser magazine ‘Female Mimics’
01.16.2017
01:34 pm
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A fantastic, gender-bending cover of ‘Female Mimics” magazine, 1971.
 
Launched in 1963, Female Mimics magazine was the very first glossy covered cross-dressing publication of its kind. In the past magazines of this sort tended to be the size of “digests” so this was a rather significant advancement for a magazine catering to the crossdressing/transgender community.

The first issue featured Kim August a popular drag performer at the equally popular 82 Club located in the East Village of New York City. August was well-known for his spot-on impersonations of Bette Davis, drag icon Judy Garland and the then emerging star (and another drag favorite) Barbra Streisand. The cover of Female Mimics debut featured opposing photos of August as a man and all dolled as his female alter-ego with a blonde wig, red bustier and leather skirt. Over the course of its first few years of publication the magazine routinely homaged other stars of the professional female impersonator nightclub scene not just in the U.S. but all over the world such as the renowned Madame Arthur’s in Paris and Le Carrousel. When it came to the “writing” inside the pages of Female Mimics it was as over-the-top as the flamboyant entertainers it featured, though it’s important to note that much of the editorial information wasn’t necessarily based in fact and, as you will see in the images from the magazine in this post, Female Mimics tried very hard to assert a strong “heterosexual” vibe when it came to how their drag-loving subjects were presented.

Here’s more on how FM walked that “straight” line direct from the pages of the magazine discussing the case of “Joi Fulnesee,” who was allegedly an autoworker in Detroit who liked to dress like a woman after-hours:

Recently Joi Fulnesee’s wife gave him a Dior gown for a birthday gift. Joi spends his evenings gloriously gowned female attire. Can you imagine how surprised his co-workers at the auto plant would be?”

Any “writing” in FM was generally not credited although I did come across a name that was familiar to me, Carlson Wade. If you follow my ramblings here on Dangerous Minds you may also recall Wade’s name as it is attached to many salacious publications on the subject of cross dressing, transvestism, fetish and the “dangers” of homosexuality. Given Wade’s track record (he also published trashy literature under the name of “Ken Worthy”), it’s not surprising that the background information on the performers and drag enthusiasts in the magazine were perhaps spurious at best, if not just totally made up. FM would continue to publish its provocative content under different names for sixteen years until 1979.

I’ve included many images of the colorful covers of Female Mimics for you to peruse below. Some are slightly and delightfully NSFW.
 

The premiere issue of ‘Female Mimics’ magazine featuring entertainer Kim August, both as a man and in drag, 1963.
 

1965.
 
More female mimicry after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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01.16.2017
01:34 pm
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The Reich Stuff: The grim Nazi propaganda magazine aimed at women


An issue of ‘Frauen Warte’ a Nazi magazine marketed to women, 1940.
 
Frauen Warte (or “Women’s Worth” at least when translated using Google) was a women’s interest magazine put out by the Nazi party starting in 1935. Published twice a week Frauen Warte was full of recommendations and “advice” on how to properly raise children so they would be strong enough to “defend their fatherland with their lives,” how to clean and maintain their homes, and fashion advice that fell within the Führer’s tastes of respectability. Frauen-Warte even went so far as to include specific sewing patterns for clothing for women to make for themselves and their children. In more than one issue during the magazine’s run, a school set up by the Nazi party called the Reich Brides’ and Housewives’ School in Husbäke in Oldenburg was discussed in great, rather enthusiastic and misogynistic detail.
 

A page from ‘Frauen Warte’ detailing the activities at the Brides’ and Housewives’ School in Husbäke in Oldenburg.
 
Brides and aspiring housewives (according to Nazi doctrine a woman’s place was to get married, have children and care for their family) would attend the school for a period of six weeks during which they would learn various skills to help them succeed as they embark on their “careers” as housewives, such as cooking, sewing, how to properly decorate their homes, creating and maintaining a household budget, and of course, how keeping their hardworking German men “comfortable” when they comes home from work. During this time women were also told to adhere to the following guidelines in order to ensure they would emulate the “ideal” German woman:

Women should not work for a living
Women should not wear trousers
Women should not wear makeup
Women should not wear high-heeled shoes
Women should not dye or perm their hair

Various articles in the propaganda masquerading as a magazine included such topics as “The Expert Housewife of Today,” the bleak sounding “Ready to Die, Ready to Live” (whose focus was to encourage women to propagate even during wartime), and “Strength from Love and Faith” that stated that all Hitler really wanted for his birthday was for his followers (in this case specifically women) to work hard. To reinforce Hitler’s feelings about the role of women, the failed painter and leader of the Third Reich even wrote for the rag about the importance of a woman’s role when it to the advancement of the Nazi’s quest for global domination.

What a man proves through heroic courage, the woman proves in eternal patient suffering. Each child that she brings into the world is a battle she fights for the existence or nonexistence of her people.

This feel-good article finishes up with a passage seemingly straight from Satan’s own playbook requesting that anyone reading the magazine (which had a circulation of 1.9 million readers by 1939) follow Hitler “on this path through the raging fire of war.” Which as we know was what the Germans figuratively and quite literally did. A large volume of detail including covers of the magazine, numerous articles and photos from the magazine (which you can see in this post) have been cataloged by Randall Bytwerk, a Professor Emeritus of Communication Arts and Sciences Calvin College in Michigan in the German Propaganda Archive hosted by Calvin College’s website. Issues of Frauen Warte published between the years 1941 and 1945 (which put out its last issue shortly before the Nazi’s unconditionally surrendered in France in May that same year) can be seen over at The University of Heidelberg website. If this is of interest to those of you that collect these kinds of artifacts copies of Frauen Warte are fairly easy to come by online.
 

1939.
 

1939.
 
More good housekeeping tips from the Nazis, after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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09.28.2016
09:14 am
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Perversion for profit: Girlie mags from the 1960s
08.17.2016
10:00 am
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After the launch Playboy in 1953 a deluge of adult entertainment magazines spilled across America. A “flood tide of filth” as one critic described it. Magazines like Adam, Dude, Rogue, Gent, Torchy, Candid, Twilight and Sultry filled the magazine racks. These girlie mags were blamed for the “promulgation of decadence” intended to corrupt America’s youth and make it impossible “for men to revert to normal attitudes in regard to sex.

Adult magazines were deemed as great a threat to the American way of life as Communism.

Compared to today’s porn industry—these jazz mags are tame. Codes of censorship meant models were more artfully photographed. Full nudity was forbidden—well, until Penthouse broke that ban in the late sixties and Playboy followed with its first full-frontal centerfold in 1972. The focus was mainly titillation or T & A.

There was always some moralizing religious do-gooder (like future financial felon Charles Keating, see below) who claimed these images encouraged perversion, fetishised breasts and were intended to “appeal to the sodomist.” With all this in mind, it’s quite remarkable that our baby boom grannies and grandads grew up to be average, run-of-the-mill, suburbanites.

Or did they?
 
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More from this ‘flood tide of filth,’ after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.17.2016
10:00 am
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A Covers Album: Front covers of New York Rocker, 1976-1982
07.26.2016
09:44 am
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The New York Rocker was a punk/new wave magazine founded by Alan Betrock in February 1976. It was produced by a dedicated, tight-knit group of young men and women—a “remarkable breed” of contributors—who had a passion for music that was outside the mainstream. They wrote feisty, opinionated reviews. They took their subject matter seriously, giving it the respect the well-financed music press gave to say Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Genesis, The Eagles or any other stadia-filling corporate-backed band. The New York Rocker was hugely influential early on in identifying and promoting American indie rock.

A total of 54 issues were published between 1976 and 1982 when the magazine folded. It was briefly revived in 1984 but never achieved the same success.

Just looking at these covers for New York Rocker there’s a great sense of the history and in particular the incredibly high quality of new music that came out of punk and new wave each week during the late 1970s and early 1980s—the likes of which we may never see again.
 
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More covers from the New York Rocker, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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07.26.2016
09:44 am
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Hara Kiri: The magazine so ‘stupid and evil’ it was banned by the French government
04.27.2016
08:46 am
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The cover of Hara Kiri magazine #132
The cover of ‘Hara Kiri’ magazine #132.The text reads: ‘What young people want? Eat the old.’
 
French adult satire magazine Hara Kiri, was one of a few magazine published back in the early 1960s that helped further along the proliferation of adult-oriented satire magazines like its American counterparts MAD and National Lampoon. Since the European outlook on humor was, let’s say, much more “open-minded” than in the U.S., Hara Kiri was able to blaze a trail bound straight for the gutter when it came to its unique brand of depraved comedic imagery.
 
A page from Hara Kiri magazine depicting a BDSM equipment salesperson
A page from Hara Kiri magazine depicting mother introducing her young daughter to BDSM ‘equipment.’ The sign reads ‘The Little Whore.’

So boundary-pushing were the staff of Hara Kiri (that for a short time included an illustrator revered by Fellini, Stan Lee and Hayao Miyazaki, Jean Henri Gaston Giraud who drew cartoons for the journal under the name “Moebius”), that it was banned from being sold to minors by the French government after the magazine lampooned the death of former President of the French Republic, Charles de Gaulle in November of 1970—suggesting that the press coverage his demise was excessive compared to the news reports surrounding the deaths of 146 people (most of them just teenagers) at the infamous fire at the French disco, Club Cinq-Sept eight days earlier.

Full of sharp and demented political satire, and gleefully dark, observational humor (such as portraying a child being usefully reappropriated as a broom, or the mother introducing her young daughter to BDSM equipment, pictured above), Hara Kiri never stopped going after organized political or religious institutions in the most inexplicable ways. To this day the decades-old images still resonate the rebellious, non-conformist spirit Hara Kiri embodied during its heyday.

I’ve included many images from the strange covers of the magazine (who enjoyed referring to itself as a “Journal bête et méchant” or “Stupid and evil journal”), as well as some of Hara Kiri’s perplexing pages from the magazine. What I wasn’t able to include in this post were some of the magazine’s best known images that are simply so perverse it’s just not possible for me to show them to you here in a family publication. But that’s what Google’s for, right?
 
The cover of Hara Kiri #186
The cover of Hara Kiri #186. The text reads (in part) ‘Pope condemns hammer blows to the mouth.’
 
A page from the French magazine Hara Kiri
A page from Hara Kiri. The text when translated reads: ‘Your child is stupid? Make it a broom!’
 
The cover of Hara Kiri #17
The cover of Hara Kiri #17. Text reads: ‘Beat your wife.’
 
Much more from the deviant pages of Hara Kiri, some which might be considered NSFW, follow after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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04.27.2016
08:46 am
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A brief history of 90s Britpop as told through the covers of ‘Select’ magazine

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Selective memory can be a marvellous thing. It ensures we are never wrong, always right and (best of all) that we have always had such impeccable taste in music.

In Britain there were a lot of drugs about in the nineties—a lot of bad drugs—which might explain why so many of us—who lived through that heady decade—only recall the really good stuff rather than all that crap we apparently really enjoyedMr Blobby? Babylon Zoo? Rednex? Will Smith?—well, somebody bought this shit, how else did it all get to #1?

Personally, I have no recollection (officer) as to how all these records charted, but I can certainly give you a brief illustrated history of what we were actually listening to and what we all supposedly liked.

Exhibit #1: Select magazine

Select was arguably the magazine of the 1990s—the one that best represented (or at least covered) what happened during that decade—well, if you lived in the UK that is. Select had attitude, swagger and wit and was very, very opinionated. It didn’t tug its forelock or swoon before too many stars—though it certainly had its favorites.

Select kicked off in July 1990 with his purple highness Prince on the cover. It was a statement of the kind of magazine they were going to be—cool, sophisticated, sexy, sharp. Prince was good—everybody loves Prince. It didn’t last long. Over the next few months, the magazine struggled to find a musical movement it could wholeheartedly endorse. In its search for the next big thing—even The Beatles (rather surprisingly) featured on its cover.

Select threw its weight behind such bands as Happy Mondays, Primal Scream, Blur and most significantly Suede—who never quite managed the level of success the magazine hoped for. Then Select did something remarkable—rather than follow the trend the magazine decided to shape it.

In April 1993, Select published an article by journalist Stuart Maconie entitled “Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr. Cobain?” In it Maconie made a very convincing case for abandoning the influence of American music (grunge) and taking up with the “crimplene, glamour, wit, and irony” of local British talent.

Maconie offered up a list of bands he thought would make it big—Suede, Saint Etienne, Denim, The Auteurs and Pulp—lumping them together under the title “Britpop.” Within a year—the idea of one journalist had become a movement of disparate bands, genres and styles—from Oasis to Blur, Elastica to Pulp, Sleeper to The Verve.

Maconie’s idea gave Select their drum—one they were going to bang until everyone was deaf or the thrill had gone.

Select lasted for just over a decade 1990-2001. Its final cover featured Coldplay—which might explain where Britpop had gone wrong. Some kind soul has scanned all of the back issues—inside and out—and a trawl through their covers tells the story of what was in, what was hip, and what was “going on.”

If you’ve a hankering for the past or just want to relive the heady days of the 1990s, then check here to read, view and enjoy the whole archive of Select magazine.
 
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Prince on the very first cover of ‘Select’ July 1990.
 
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Something old, something new… a taste of what’s to come…
 
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Something very old: The Beatles—but a hint of what this magazine hoped to find in the 1990s…Britpop. November 1990.
 
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You get the feeling this bloke’s gonna feature a lot in this magazine…Happy Mondays’ Shaun Ryder, January 1991.
 
More Select covers for selective memories, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.24.2016
01:01 pm
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