I have a love-hate relationship with the men’s adventure magazine Wildcat Adventures, one of the men’s adventure magazines published in the 1950s and 1960s by Candar Publishing.
I love its gonzo artwork and crazy, campy stories. But I hate the fact that it almost never provides artist credits for the covers or interior artwork.
For example, one of my favorite cover paintings in the exotic bondage and torture subgenre of men’s pulp mag art is the cover of the April 1960 issue of Wildcat Adventures.
It’s for the story “DEATH ORGY OF THE LEOPARD WOMEN.”
I’m not the only fan of the Leopard Women cover. It’s featured in one of the best books about men’s adventure magazines, It’s a Man’s World by Adam Parfrey, and on one of my favorite blogs, Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire – both of which I highly recommend to anyone who likes this blog.
Unfortunately, there’s no artist credit for the Leopard Women cover, so I don’t know who painted it. If anyone out there does, please let me know.
The Leopard Women story itself is nearly (though not quite) as wild as the cover painting. It’s mixes together a Zurich asylum and an Abyssinian cult to create a tale that would have made a good episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery TV show.
If that description intrigues you, you can read the entire story in PDF format by clicking this link.
There’s a lot more cool pulp art and pulp fiction inside the April ‘60 issue of Wildcat Adventures, like “THE NAKED FEAR OF THE TATTOOED GEISHAS.”
It’s enticingly subtitled on the contents page with the line: “Their bodies were works of art and to touch them meant death.” The interior duotone illustration done for it is terrific (and again, unfortunately, uncredited).
This is the second Geisha story I’ve run across in vintage men’s pulp mags I bought recently. I mentioned the other one – “S-E-X! I Was the Love Slave of the Geisha!” – in another recent post here.
Hmm. Perhaps I need to create another subgenre name for this. Maybe the “Geisha menace” subgenre. Must do more grueling research. Back soon…
