OUT NOW! GIL COHEN: INSIDE/OUT—THE ARCHIVE COLLECTION

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My Men’s Adventure Library co-editor Wyatt Doyle and I are proud to announce the release of GIL COHEN: INSIDE/OUT—THE ARCHIVE COLLECTION.

This new deluxe, full-color hardcover is the first book in a four-volume series we plan to publish this year.

The GIL COHEN: INSIDE/OUT series will ultimately showcase virtually all of the hundreds of classic men’s adventure magazine covers and interior illustrations created by artist Gil Cohen.

It’s the most ambitious illustration project we’ve undertaken to date.

With Gil’s participation and support—and with access to both archival magazines and surviving original artwork—these books will preserve and celebrate a major body of illustration art that is not widely known, but deserves to be.

Today, Gil’s MAM artwork is less widely known than his paperback cover and military aviation art. Tens of millions of readers are familiar with the iconic paperback cover paintings he created in the 1970s and 1980s for Don Pendleton‘s novels featuring “The Executioner”—Mack Bolan—even if they don’t know Gil by name. His original paintings for those novels are showcased in our book ONE MAN ARMY: THE ACTION PAPERBACK ART OF GIL COHEN.

Gil Cohen is far better known by name to collectors of military aviation art. The large-scale paintings of American pilots and aircraft he did for galleries and prints starting in the late 1980s are famous in that realm. They’re featured in the book GIL COHEN: AVIATION ARTIST, published by Boston Mills Press.

GIL COHEN: INSIDE/OUT—THE ARCHIVE COLLECTION is the first book to focus on the men’s adventure magazine artwork Gil did in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. It includes more than 160 high-resolution scans of his cover and interior illustrations.

Unlike later volumes in the series, which will present original paintings alongside published versions with commentary by Gil, THE ARCHIVE COLLECTION provides a broad visual overview of his men’s adventure magazine work from the 1950s through the 1970s. This post provides an initial look at some of the pages from that book. In future posts, I’ll show more page scans and talk more about Gil and his career.

At age 94, Gil Cohen is the last surviving artist who produced MAM cover paintings and interior illustrations during all three decades of the genre’s existence. During those years he created more than 500 illustrations for major MAMs like ADVENTURE, ARGOSY, FOR MEN ONLY, MALE, MAN’S WORLD, MEN, STAG, and others.

They depict virtually every type of subject found in the often wild stories published by MAMs, ranging from Westerns, exotic adventure yarns, and war stories to tales about seductive women, motorcycle gangs, and spies (including one of the first depictions of James Bond in an American magazine, in ARGOSY, December 1961).

Most of the illustrations featured in GIL COHEN: INSIDE/OUT—THE ARCHIVE COLLECTION have rarely been seen since their original publication. Artwork by Cohen and other talented illustration artists were a major factor in sales of MAMs at newsstands and stores, as they were for mid-20th century paperback novels.

Often, it was the eye-catching artwork and intriguing story titles and teaser headlines on a cover that led men to purchase an issue. In a quick flip through of the pages, the interior illustrations in MAMs also helped make a sale. In some cases, they were more dramatic and sensational than the stories themselves. Sometimes, they showed things that were not actually in the stories.

The artists were not given much to go on when they received assignments for cover art or interiors. Editors typically gave them only a two- or three-sentence description. But talented artists like Cohen turned those few words into amazingly evocative images.

For Cohen and many other illustration artists, those men’s adventure assignments were important sources of income in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, as mainstream magazines increasingly used photos for cover and interior illustrations instead of artwork.

In the 1970s, due to changing cultural trends and competition from magazines like PLAYBOY and its many imitators, the MAM genre faded away. By 1980, it was essentially extinct.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Cohen began focusing more and more on doing paperback cover art. He became especially well known for the fan-favorite cover paintings he created for Don Pendleton’s hugely popular novels featuring the character Mack Bolan, the Executioner.

The Men’s Adventure Library has previously published a book featuring his original paintings for those novels: ONE MAN ARMY: THE ACTION PAPERBACK ART OF GIL COHEN.

Starting in the late 1980s, Cohen gained new worldwide renown for the large military aviation paintings he created for galleries and prints. He focused on those for the next several decades.

The skills Cohen used to create his paperback and military aviation art were initially developed by doing cover and interior illustrations for men’s adventure magazines. (In fact, his MAM artwork includes early depictions of Mack Bolan he created for “Book Bonus” versions of the first two Executioner novels, as well as many examples of military aviation combat scenes he illustrated for MAM stories.)

“All the work I did for men’s adventure magazines—whatever the subject—honed my skills,” Gil told us. “It honed my talents and helped give me a solid grounding in the technical aspects of my later work.”

GIL COHEN: INSIDE/OUT—THE ARCHIVE COLLECTION is the first major collection of Cohen’s men’s adventure magazine art ever published. It includes carefully-made scans of Cohen’s cover and interior artwork drawn from my collection, officially dubbed The Robert Deis Archive by Wyatt Doyle. It’s one of the world’s largest private collections of vintage men’s adventure magazines; maybe the largest. (Few other people would be crazy enough to spend as much time and money collecting them as I have.)

Each scan has been digitally restored by me to remove tears and age discoloration. For illustrations that span two pages, I took the magazines apart to create scans that show them without any page seams.

The next three volumes in the GIL COHEN: INSIDE/OUT series, scheduled for release later in 2026, will go even deeper into Cohen’s MAM artwork. They will include hundreds of additional scans of Cohen covers and interiors, plus photographs of the original paintings from Cohen’s personal archives and private collections—accompanied by Gil’s own commentary about the paintings, the magazines, and the era. Taken together, the series will form the definitive visual record of Cohen’s men’s adventure magazine illustration career.

The initial volume, THE ARCHIVE COLLECTION, is the only book in the series to include examples of Cohen’s men’s adventure magazine work from all three decades in a single book.

The regular hardcover edition of GIL COHEN: INSIDE/OUT—THE ARCHIVE COLLECTION is now available from Amazon worldwide, Barnes & Noble, and directly from me with free shipping via the MensPulpMags.com bookstore.

In addition, while they last, you can buy a copy of a special limited edition of THE ARCHIVE COLLECTION signed by Gil Cohen. This special signed edition is currently only available from Wyatt Doyle’s New Texture website here: https://bit.ly/GilCohenArchive-Signed. I’ll have signed copies available in my bookstore soon.

You can read more about our previous book featuring Gil’s original cover art for the Executioner series and its spinoffs, ONE MAN ARMY: THE ACTION PAPERBACK ART OF GIL COHEN, in my blog post at this link. We hope to release the next volume in the GIL COHEN: INSIDE/OUT series at PulpFest 2026, which runs from July 30 to August 2, 2026, in Pittsburgh.

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Comments? Corrections? You can email them to me, or join the Men’s Adventure Magazines & Books Facebook Group or the MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY BRIGADE group and post them there.