The “WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH” issue of Man’s Life (September 1956, Vol. 4, No. 5) has achieved cult fame, thanks to Frank Zappa’s use of that gonzo headline as the title of a 1970 Mothers of Invention album.
The cover painting artist Wil Hulsey made for the weasels issue is undoubtedly the most widely-seen of all his works.
And, many of his other cover paintings for that classic men’s adventure magazine also featured wild killer creature scenes.
Indeed, they were a particular specialty of Hulsey’s.
Another Hulsey man vs. critter cover painting that’s familiar to aficionados of men’s pulp mags is the painting he created for the September 1955 issue of Man’s Life.
It features a swarm of venomous sea snakes attacking a hapless swimmer, whose fate is told in the story inside, “RED TIDE OF DEATH.”
That cover painting was also used on the cover of the 2008 edition of the popular book Men's Adventure Magazines — a must-have for fans of the genre that features covers and paintings from the Rich Oberg Collection and text by writer Max Allan Collins and comic, magazine and paperback art expert George Hagenauer.
“Snake menace” covers were common on vintage men’s adventure magazines and Hulsey did quite a few for Man’s Life.
One of my personal faves is the one he did for the November 1956 issue of Man’s Life, a rattler-filled Western scene that goes with the story “DEATH WAVES A RATTLE.”
Another is the cover he did for the July 1958 issue, for the cover story “THE RIVER OF CRAWLING DEATH” (which I featured in a previous post about “snake menace” cover art).
Hulsey did several other cover paintings that show really big snakes, such as the babe vs. boa constrictor scene on the cover of the September 1957 issue.
That one goes with the story “Crushed by 20 Feet of Coiling Death” — not to be confused with “CRUSHED BY 30 FEET OF WRITHING HELL,” the cover story from the November 1959 issue, which features another distressed damsel in one of Hulsey’s trademark tattered red blouses trying to avoid becoming a boa’s next meal.
The animals in some of Hulsey’s killer creature covers for Man’s Life are not species you’d normally think of as being particularly dangerous or likely to mount vicious attacks on humans, either singly or in swarms.
In addition to his famed flesh-ripping weasels cover painting, Hulsey did several others that featured unlikely killer creature scenarios. One is the horde of bloodthirsty rats on the cover of the May 1956 issue of Man’s Life, for the story “THE ISLAND OF MAN-EATING RATS.”
Equally fantastic (in both senses of the word) is Hulsey’s killer crab painting on the cover of the January 1958 issue. It goes with the story “TRAPPED IN A SEA OF GIANT CRABS” (which is almost as good as the killer crab story I featured in one of my early posts on this blog back in 2009, the “CRAWLING DEATH OF BAD LUCK ISLAND.”)
Distant relatives of those killer crabs are featured in the painting Hulsey did for the March 1959 issue of Man’s Life. It shows big scary spiders attacking one of Hulsey’s iconic babes in a torn red blouse and a buff, manly man (bare-chested, of course) who are “TRAPPED IN THE WEB OF CREEPING DEATH.”
A different type of “spider” is attacking in the Hulsey cover painting on the November 1957 issue of Man’s Life — vicious, killer spider monkeys! Hulsey created that one for the cover story “SPIDER MONKEYS TORE ME APART.” (You didn’t know they could do that, didja?)
Of course, some of the killer creature covers Hulsey did for Man’s Life featured animals that might pose a bit more threat to humans in the real world.
I’ll show examples of those in a future post.
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