Our new art book MORT KÜNSTLER COVERED, VOLUME 1 is now available on Amazon worldwide and from my MensPulpMags.com bookstore in softcover and deluxe, expanded hardcover editions. This blog post and others coming soon provide a look inside. Click this link or the image below to buy a copy directly from me, with free shipping.
Mort Künstler was one of the greatest of the many great illustration artists who did cover paintings and interior illustrations for men’s adventure magazines (MAMs) published in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
When Mort passed away on February 2, 2025, at age 97, many obituaries for him were published in newspapers and on the internet. Most focused on his hugely popular historical artwork—paintings depicting people and events from various eras of American history, especially the Civil War.
Those paintings sold in galleries for tens of thousands of dollars, filled the pages of dozens of books, and gave Mort a reputation as America’s “premier historical artist.”
That phase of Mort’s career started after he had worked as an illustrator for MAMs.
That’s the genre I collect and write about. And it was the jaw-dropping cover and interior artwork Mort did for MAMs that inspired me to contact him in 2011 to ask if he’d do an interview with me for my MensPulpMags.com blog.
He graciously agreed. That led to an ongoing correspondence with Mort, his daughter Jane Künstler, and his official archivist Linda Swanson.
Jane and Linda manage Mort’s official website, MortKunstler.com, which provides an overview of Mort’s long career and sells prints, books, calendars, and gifts featuring his artwork.
With the help of Jane and Linda, Wyatt Doyle and I published an art book showcasing some of Mort’s best original MAM cover paintings. It’s titled MORT KÜNSTLER: THE GODFATHER OF PULP FICTION ILLUSTRATORS.
The book got its title from an exhibition of his original MAM art, Mort Künstler: “The Godfather” of Pulp Fiction Illustrators, which ran at The Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York from August 24 to November 17, 2019.
One of the greatest thrills of my life was flying in to meet with Mort, Jane and Linda that year at his home in Oyster Bay, New York. We also had the pleasure of meeting Mort’s beautiful wife Deborah, his Pratt Institute classmate and wife of more than 70 years, who was a frequent model for female characters he painted early in his career.
Mort was not an artist for the traditional pulp magazines that flourished in the decades before World War II.
But he was one of the best and most prolific artists who did artwork for their descendants, the MAMs that published pulp fiction-style action/adventure and war stories and carried on the pulps’ tradition of painted cover art. In fact, he was one of the few artists who worked for the genre through all three decades of its existence.
Most of his MAM art was for magazines published by Martin Goodman’s Magazine Management company (which was also the parent company of Marvel Comics).
Several months before Mort passed, Wyatt and I asked him if he’d allow us to publish a series of books that would showcase the many MAM covers that feature his artwork.
The Goodman MAMs are among my personal favorites. Although some were short-lived, they also include some of the best and longest-lasting MAMs, such as ACTION FOR MEN, FOR MEN ONLY, MALE, MEN, STAG, TRUE ACTION and MAN’S WORLD.
Mort gave us his blessing. In late 2024, we started working with him, Jane and Linda on MORT KÜNSTLER COVERED, VOL. 1. During 2025, our production plans got sidetracked by my wife BJ’s treatments for breast cancer. Thankfully, they were successful. But scanning MAM covers and fine-tuning them for publication took a back seat in my life.
After BJ was declared cancer-free early in 2026, I got back to work with Wyatt on MKCV1 (as I refer to it for short). It’s now published and available on Amazon worldwide and from my online bookstore and eBay listings. There’s a softcover version and a deluxe, expanded hardcover version that includes 10 additional pages.
In this post and several to follow, I’ll give you a look inside MKCV1. The scans I’m showing here have a “frame” added noting what they come from, so people will know what they’re seeing as the images float around on the internet.
The concept for the MORT KÜNSTLER COVERED series is to show virtually all of the several hundred MAM covers that have artwork by Mort, organized by magazine title. For each magazine, the scans are in chronological order.
The book starts with a reprint of that 2011 interview I did with Mort. It’s the only interview with him I know of that focused primarily on his MAM artwork. As Mort told me:
“There’s no way I could have done what I’m doing today if I hadn’t had all that men’s adventure magazine work in the 1950s and 1960s. I learned how to compose, how to tell a story.”
The interview with Mort is followed by cover scans from six of the MAMs he worked for, arranged in alphabetical order: ACTION FOR MEN, ACTION LIFE, ADVENTURE, ADVENTURE LIFE, BATTLEFIELD, and FOR MEN ONLY. Future volumes will feature covers from the other MAMs he worked for.
Each magazine section begins with a short introduction providing background on the title. The “stamped” dates at the beginning of each section are the earliest and latest dates when covers with art by Mort appeared (not the years when the title ran).
Each cover is shown full page, with the date of the issue shown at the bottom of the page.
Over the years, Mort did cover paintings depicting almost every kind of story that appeared in MAMs: from exotic adventure, animal attacks and war stories to stories about spies, heists and biker gangs. They include early examples of Civil War scenes and other American history events that Mort later became famous for.
The covers you’ll see in MKCV1 highlight the two biggest factors that led to sales of MAMs on newsstands, whose shelves often held hundreds of different magazines. The factor Mort and other MAM artists excelled at was creating eyeball-grabbing scenes.
The sensationalized headlines on covers were the other factor. They were an art in themselves, crafted by the editors to pique curiosity about the stories inside.
If you take time to read the headlines, I think you’ll see why I consider MKCV1 interesting as both an archive of classic men’s adventure mag pulp art and an entertaining reading experience.
ACTION FOR MEN was launched by Goodman’s Magazine Management company in June 1959, at the end of what could be called the company’s first MAM era. The first era started with STAG, in December 1949. During the next five years, Goodman created four other long-lasting flagship MAMs, MALE, MEN, FOR MEN ONLY and MAN’S WORLD. He experimented with six other variations on the MAM template in the late 1950s. However, only those five titles, ACTION FOR MEN, and TRUE ACTION survived into the late 1970s, when the MAM genre morphed into HUSTLER clones and, by the early ’80s, essentially disappeared.
Like those other MAMs, ACTION FOR MEN combined eye-catching painted covers touting lurid headlines, sensational “true” adventure yarns, war stories, survival tales, sex exposés and cheesecake photography into a potent mix aimed at male readers.
The cover art and interior illustrations were provided by some of the most accomplished MAM illustrators. The primary cover artists were Charles Copeland, Gil Cohen, Rafael DeSoto, Bruce Minney, and Earl Norem. Although Mort Künstler was the go-to artist for Goodman’s flagship MAMs, only seven ACTION FOR MEN covers feature art by Mort, and two of those are reuses.
ACTION LIFE was one of the shorter-lived Goodman titles, running for six issues between August 1963 and August 1964. Mort only did one of those covers: a classic over-the-top World War II scene.
The title of the story it goes with is even wilder—“U.S. Frogmen Who Raided Mussolini’s Underwater Call-Girl Barracks.” I’m gonna have to reprint that one in some future Men’s Adventure Library anthology or MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY issue.
ADVENTURE was one of the earliest and most widely read pulp magazines in American publishing history, with roots dating back to 1910. It was also one of the first pulps to adopt the more modern men’s adventure magazine format in the 1950s. Mort Künstler did nine covers for ADVENTURE in 1956, 1957 and 1958. The first four were classic man vs. animal paintings.
His painting for the April 1956 issue features a hunter with a rifle facing a herd of elephants. The painting he did for the May 1956 issue shows a guy with a pistol facing a rhinoceros attack.
His July 1956 cover art features a pair of tigers stalking a hunter (or maybe vice versa). In Mort’s painting for the October 1956 cover, there’s a hapless guy surrounded by crocodiles while also being eyed by a leopard in a tree above him. Will he survive? You’d have to buy and read the issue to find out.
After 1958, Mort was essentially the top house artist for the Goodman MAMs and was too busy—and too well paid—to do much artwork for their competitors. In 1967, ADVENTURE switched to using cheesecake photos on its covers instead of painted covers to try to compete with PLAYBOY and its imitators, which were increasingly dominating the men’s mag market.
However, between 1954 and 1967, cover art for ADVENTURE was provided by many top illustration artists other than Mort, including: Doug Allen, Walter Baumhofer, Tom Beecham, Rudolph Belarski, F. Bolivar, Mel Crair, Rafael DeSoto, George Eisenberg, Fred Freeman, William George, Basil Gogos, George Gross, Jack Hearne, Roger Kastel, Bob Kuhn, John Leone, Joe Little, Frank McCarthy, Herb Mott, Victor Olson, Vic Prezio, Jack Rickard, Phil Ronfor, Doug Rosa, Norm Saunders, Harry Schaare, Bob Schulz, Syd Shores, Robert Stanley, Shannon Stirnweis, John Styga, and H. R. Van Dongen.
The June 1957 painting with the red-bearded sailor and his exotic girlfriend is one of my favorite Mort Künstler cover paintings. As we note in the caption on that page, it was credited to “Emmett Kaye.” That was a pseudonym he sometimes used that was a play on his initials. You can see the rest of Mort’s ADVENTURE covers in MKCV1. One of the most notable is the June 1958 cover. It features a Civil War painting done decades before he made Civil War art a major part of his post-MAM art career.
BATTLEFIELD was a short-lived men’s adventure magazine published by Newsstand Publications—one of Martin Goodman’s many corporate imprints. Nine issues were published between February 1957 and November 1959. It came at a time when Goodman was experimenting with different variations of the MAM format, and was one of the experiments that did not catch fire.
Cover art for the first seven issues was done by several good artists, including Stan Borack and Mort Künstler’s mentor George Gross. (See our book GEORGE GROSS: COVERED to read Mort’s remembrance of George and reprints of virtually all of the MAM covers Gross did.)
Mort did do the cover art for the final two BATTLEFIELD issues: the July 1959 issue shown below, with the GI pulling the pin out of a grenade, and the November 1959 issue. That last issue reused the painting by Mort that’s on the cover of FOR MEN ONLY, May 1958. (See below.)
FOR MEN ONLY was one of the best and longest-lasting men’s adventure magazines published by Magazine Management or any other publisher, and Mort was its most frequent cover artist. Nearly 300 regular issues and more than a dozen annuals were published from May 1954 to January 1981. Every issue from May 1954 to September 1969 featured painted cover art. By my count, 113 of the 196 issues published from May 1954 through November 1970 have full or partial cover art by Mort Künstler. From October 1969 on, FMO primarily used photos on its covers.
Like his first covers for ADVENTURE in 1956, Mort’s first cover paintings for FMO were man vs. animal scenes. That was an especially common topic in MAMs in the 1950s. His first FMO cover, February 1955, shows a hunter facing off with a tiger in shallow water. The next, July 1955, is a classic 19th century whaling scene.
Mort’s cover for the December 1955 issue is especially interesting because the scene and the title of the story it goes with—“THEY WANTED MY FLESH (AN AMBUSH OF RABID MINKS)”—are precursors of the famed “WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH!” issue of MAN’S LIFE. That issue, published in September 1956, features artist Wil Hulsey’s iconic painting of a man battling a horde of killer weasels for a story that is indeed titled “Weasels Ripped My Flesh!”
Did Mort’s killer mink cover and the FOR MEN ONLY rabid minks story inspire the more famous MAN’S LIFE weasels cover art and story published nine months later? I think that’s quite possible. And, interestingly, Mort and Wil Hulsey both used the same legendary male model for their killer critter paintings—Steve Holland. (For a definitive overview of Holland’s career and the thousands of magazine illustrations and paperback covers he modeled for, see the must-have book my friend Michael Stradford published about him, STEVE HOLLAND: THE WORLD’S GREATEST ILLUSTRATION ART MODEL.)
As noted in my blog’s ABOUT page, it was the MAN’S LIFE issue with the flesh-ripping weasels cover and story that inspired me to begin collecting men’s adventure magazines and launch the Men’s Adventure Library book series with Wyatt Doyle. Naturally, our first MAM story anthology included the weasels yarn, along with many other classic MAM stories. And, naturally, we used WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH! as the title, since that phrase had been made highly familiar to millions of people because Frank Zappa borrowed it for an album title. “THEY WANTED MY FLESH!” just wouldn’t have had the same cachet.
We’ve published 19 other illustrated story anthologies and art books in the Men’s Adventure Library series in the years after we published that first one. And, a couple of years ago we gave it a fresh, upgraded incarnation by publishing a new, expanded, full-color edition in softcover and deluxe hardcover editions.
During the years when FOR MEN ONLY was a true MAM and used painted covers, its issues featured paintings by many of the top MAM illustration artists, including: James Bama, Jim Bentley, Stan Borack, Gil Cohen, Charles Copeland, Rafael DeSoto, Clarence Doore, John Kuller, Joe Little, and Harry Schaare. But Mort did far more than any of those other artists.
That’s why so many of the covers shown in MORT KÜNSTLER COVERED, VOL. 1 are FMO covers—and we only got as far as 1967 in this first volume. I’ve shown some of those covers in this post. I’ll show more from MKCV1 in my next post.
Future volumes of the MORT KÜNSTLER COVERED series will feature the rest of his FOR MEN ONLY covers, plus his covers for KEN FOR MEN, MALE, MAN’S WORLD, MEN, MEN’S PICTORIAL, SAGA, SPORT LIFE, SPORT TRAILS, SPORTSMAN, STAG, and TRUE ACTION. In other words, there are plenty more great Mort covers to come.
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