Basil Gogos “Good Girl Art” – and a shout out to artist and author Kerry Gammill

Recently, I was pleased to see that artist and author Kerry Gammill dropped by the Men’s Adventure Magazines Facebook group.

Kerry is a multi-talented Texan who has provided artwork for Marvel and DC Comics, special effects and storyboard art for movies such as Phantoms and Virus, and concept and storyboard art for many animated features and TV shows. (Check out his page on IMDb.com.)

He is also the co-author of an excellent, lushly-illustrated book about Basil Gogos.

Gogos is a legendary artist best known for his movie monster portraits. But he also provided artwork for vintage men’s magazines in the 1950s and 1960s.

Kerry Gammill’s book — Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos— focuses on the popular cover paintings Gogos did for Famous Monsters of Filmland, Creepy and Eerie. Those magazines featured portraits of monsters from classic horror films.

As I noted in a previous post on this blog, some of the covers paintings Gogos created for men’s adventure magazines also had a horror film feel.

However, Gogos also did some great “Good Girl Art” for men’s pulp mags, such as the painting on the cover of the August 1966 issue of True Adventures magazine shown above. 

The term “Good Girl Art” was coined in the early 1970s by David T. Alexander, a renowned comic book and magazine collector and dealer.

It’s now commonly used by fans of men’s magazines, pulp magazines, comics and cartoon art.

Many call it “GGA” for short and apply this acronym broadly to vintage artwork featuring scantily-clad babes in various types of scenes and situations.

By the way, David T. Alexander also helped create the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide and the more recent Old Magazinesprice guide.

And, if you are a collector of either old comics or magazines, you really must check out the D.T. Alexander "”Culture and Thrills” website. It’s one of the best sources of both on the Internet.

If you search for in the Men’s Adventure section of that site, you may be lucky enough to find some old men’s pulp mags with great “Good Girl Art” by Basil Gogos — like the examples shown below.

One more BTW: if you’re into illustration and cartoons, you should also check out Kerry Gammill’s other book — Kerry Gammill's Drawing Monsters & Heroes for Film & Comics.

Rich Oberg’s gives us the first online glimpse of his awesome men’s adventure art collection

One of the must-have books for fans and collectors of men’s pulp mags is Men's Adventure Magazines, published by Taschen.

It features hundreds of men’s adventure magazine covers from the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s.

It also shows some examples of what the original cover paintings and interior art looked like and has interesting background text written by the prolific novelist Max Allan Collins, the pulp and comic art expert George Hagenauer and the illustration art expert Steven Heller.

The images in this lushly illustrated book come from the Rich Oberg Collection — the world’s largest collection of men’s adventure magazines and the original artwork created for them.

The collection’s owner, Rich Oberg, is justly proud of the Taschen book, which was reprinted in 2008 as part of Taschen’s special 25th anniversary series. (If you’re a true fan of the genre, you’ll also want to seek out and buy a copy of the original 2004 edition of the book, with the scorpion menace cover, shown at left. It’s now out of print, but you can still find used copies on eBay or AbeBooks.com.)

The original edition is larger in size than new edition. It also has more cover art and more chapters, including a whole chapter about the Nazi torture and bondage subgenre that’s missing from the current edition, plus an interview with artist Norm Eastman, the master of evil Nazi cover art.

Amazingly, what’s shown in both the original and current editions of the Taschen book is only a small part of Rich Oberg’s collection.

Last December, when I talked to Rich for an interview that I posted on this blog, he told me he was thinking about creating a “virtual museum” online to showcase more of the great original artwork that he owns.

Recently, Rich let me know that he’d put up the initial framework for that virtual museum on the website www.MensAdventure.com.

So, I called him at his home in Tennessee to talk with him about it.

He said it’s “a work in progress” that currently has just a taste of what he ultimately plans to show after he finishes digitizing his collection and works with a web designer to flesh out the site.

To me, what Rich has already posted there is very cool. It’s the first online glimpse into a unique collection of art that few people have ever seen.

In the “Original Artwork” section, you’ll find some examples of what is to come on Rich’s site — beautiful, high resolution scans of original cover paintings side-by-side with the covers they were used for.

Viewing the original artwork, without all the titles, headlines and photo insets used on the magazine covers, is extremely interesting.

It makes it easier to see just how dramatic and well-executed the cover paintings were.

Below are a few examples from Rich’s website, shown here with his permission, including: a great “snake menace” painting by Vic Prezio for Battle Cry; a classic Nazi bondage and torture painting by Norm Eastman for Man’s Epic; and, a gonzo teen gang cover done by Norman Saunders for New Man magazine.

“Over time, I’ll add more and more images,” Rich told me. “I’ll also post comments and anecdotes about the artists. I’m pretty familiar with their work now and I’ve met many of the artists who are still alive or were living when I started my collection in the 1990s. I’d like their phenomenal art to be seen by more people and I want to pass on some of the knowledge I’ve gained about it. Most of this artwork is an embodiment of certain aspects of American popular culture from the 1950s through the mid-1970s. And, even though the subjects are often wild, the artwork represents a fascinating style of ‘realism.’”

“It’s a style of pulp art that’s different from, though influenced by, the earlier pulp magazines published in the decades before World War Two,” Rich noted. “It extends into the cover art for paperback books and comics from the Fifties and Sixties. Indeed, many paperback and comic covers from that time period were done by the same illustrators who did the best covers and interior artwork for men’s adventure magazines — artists like James Bama, Gil Cohen, Charles Copeland, Mel Crair, Raphael DeSoto, Clarence Doore, Mort Kunstler, Bruce Minney, Earl Norem, Vic Prezio and Norman Saunders.”

“My collection includes hundreds of original cover and interior art paintings by all of those artists and many others. Most of the artwork they created for the men’s adventure magazines has never been shown in any books or online. And, as far as I know, I have more of it than anyone. So, I want to make it available on my website and increase public awareness and appreciation of these great artists and their work.”

Rich added: “My special thanks to you and your terrific blog, Bob, for helping motivate me to share more of this fantastic imagery — and have some fun doing it.”

You’re very welcome, Rich, and thank you! It’s going to be great fun for me and other men’s pulp mag fans to see more of your incredible collection as you post it on your new website.

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Girl-crazy gorillas, men’s adventure magazine style...

In the first half of the 20th Century, tales and scenes of gorillas who carried away white women were fairly common in magazines, books and movies from various genres — including adventure, horror and comedy.

Well known examples include the Tarzan stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and the film with the biggest girl-crazy ape of all time, King Kong.

Beyond these, there’s a long list of vintage adventure, horror and comedy films with guys dressed in gorilla suits trying to carry off some screaming damsel. (Check out the eBay Guide to Ape and Gorilla Movies of the 1930s, ‘40 and ‘50s.)

After writing my recent post about “Monkey Madness,” I decided to climb out on another branch of the simian family tree and feature some men’s adventure magazine covers in the girl-crazy gorilla subgenre.

Two of them are Will Hulsey animal attack masterpieces (and I use that word seriously). Hulsey painted the one at left on the cover of the October 1956 issue of True Men Stories.

It features a fierce-looking ape menacing a manly man and a gorgeous babe. He is trying to save her by fighting the huge beast with a knife. She is looking distressed, as damsels did, and wearing one of Hulsey’s trademark red blouses. (Conveniently unbuttoned to show some damsel cleavage.)

At right is another Hulsey gorilla attack cover painting.

It’s on the March 1958 issue of Man’s Life, the men’s adventure magazine that probably featured more Hulsey animal attack covers than any other from the early-1950s to the late 1960s.

The scene on the Man’s Life cover almost seems like a continuation of what’s happening on the True Men’s Stories cover.

It shows a menacing gorilla holding a similar-looking babe in a red blouse, while a similar-looking manly hero plunges a knife into the ape’s neck.

True Men Stories was published from 1956 to 1965 by Feature Publications, an affiliate of Crestwood Publishing, which also published Man’s Life.

In 1966, True Men Stories was bought by Stanley Publications and stayed in print until 1973. Stanley, and it’s affiliate Normandy Associates, were second only to Martin Goodman’s Magazine Management in the publication of men’s pulp magazines in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s.

In addition to True Men Stories, Stanley and Normandy published All Man, Battle Cry, Champion for Men, Man’s Adventure, Man’s Best, Man’s Look, Man’s Prime, Men in Combat, Men in Conflict, Real Action, Real Men, Real War, Rugged, Rugged Men, Spur, True Battles of World War II, War Criminals and Women in War.

Below are two more of my other favorite girl-crazy gorilla covers, both of which have classic images of apes toting away busty babes. (To satiate their brutish, animal lust, no doubt!.)

The artist who did the wild gorilla cover on the March 1961 issue of Stanley Publications’ Man’s Adventure is uncredited.

The cover art on the April 1957 issue of Rage for Men was painted by Clarence Doore, one of the greatest American pulp artists. (Rage for Men was a short-lived title published by Arnold Magazines in 1956 and 1957.)

Ah yes, those were the days. When we assumed that gorillas were more dangerous than humans.

Today, of course, most of us humans — and the remaining gorillas that are left in the wild — know it’s the other way around.