Immortalizing the “Armpit Slicks”

(This post is for Rap Sheet contributor Dick Adler, who cut his editorial teeth working for such classic men’s magazines as Argosy.)

Today we welcome to this page’s extensive blogroll a new site called Men’s Pulp Mags, apparently put together by a 60-year-old Key West, Florida, resident who signs himself “Subtropic Bob” and claims to have worked as a writer--“in one form or another”--for three decades. In an introductory note, Bob explains that his obsession with so-called “sweat mags” or “armpit slicks” of the mid-20th-century began when he acquired a 1956 edition of Man’s Life. After that, he writes,

I was hooked.

I started buying men’s adventure magazines through eBay and other sources. I read the two most authoritative books about the genre: It’s a Man’s World: Men’s Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps, by Adam Parfrey, and Men’s Adventure Magazines: In Postwar America, by Max Allan Collins and George Hagenauer.

More recently, I started looking for blogs dedicated to discussions of the men’s postwar pulp magazines. I found posts about them on some blogs. I found blogs that focus on related but different genres, like the great pre-war pulp magazines of the ’20s, ’30s, and early ’40s and the men’s “girlie magazines” of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.

What I didn’t find was what I really wanted--a blog that focuses on men’s adventure magazines of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s and the various aspects of the genre: the covers, the artists and writers, the pulp-fiction style stories and “true” non-fiction articles (which often severely bent the meaning of the word “true”), the vintage ads, and the other interesting and amusing things “the sweats” tell us about the men, women, history, and culture of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.

I didn’t find a blog like that. So, I decided to create one myself.

We very much look forward to seeing what outlandish tales, cruel monsters, muscled he-men, and invitingly underclad women Subtropic Bob can dredge up from print’s past.