My very first post on this blog, back in 2009, was about the magazine cover that sparked my initial fascination with men’s adventure magazines: the cover of the September 1956 issue of MAN’S LIFE, Vol. 4, No. 5.
That’s the cover that features the famous “WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH!” headline and painting.
Some 6,000 or so issues of men’s adventure magazines were published between the late 1940s and the late 1970s, before the genre faded away.
The “WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH!” issue of MAN’S LIFE was the first MAM I bought. It turned me into a collector of MAMs, led to the creation of this blog, and then to the series of books and magazines about MAMs I co-edit.
I now own over 6,000 MAM issues (counting duplicates). But MAN’S LIFE, September 1956 is still my sentimental favorite — and, it’s undoubtedly the most famous MAM issue, thanks to the late, great musician Frank Zappa.
In 1970, he used WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH as the title of an album. It was the last album he recorded with the original lineup of his band The Mothers of Invention.
Back around 2008, I was listening to a CD reissue of that album and decided to search for some more info about it on the internet. I learned that Zappa had a copy of the MAN’S LIFE, September 1956 issue and the absurdity of the story title about flesh-ripping weasels appealed to his unconventional sense of humor.
He borrowed it for the album title, but didn’t use the MAN’S LIFE cover painting for the cover art. Instead, as recounted on various Zappa-related websites, he showed a copy of the issue to a hip young illustration artist who called himself Neon Park. (His birth name was Martin Muller.)
Park had done a number of cool cover paintings for The Mothers, Little Feat, and other rock bands.
According to legend, Zappa said to Park: “What can you do that’s worse than this?”
I assume that by “worse” Zappa meant something even more over-the-top than the wild scene on the magazine cover, which shows a horde of vicious, apparently aquatic weasels attacking a screaming, bare-chested, bleeding man who’s waist deep in water.
Neon Park came up with his own bizarre image for the album cover. Inspired by a vintage Schick Razor ad he found in the October 3, 1953 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, he created a cartoony painting of a guy in a suit and tie who is shaving with a weasel-shaped electric razor.
The weasel’s teeth and claws are ripping bloody gouges in the guy’s cheek, but he’s smiling blissfully. A word balloon next to his head says “RZZZZZ!” Others show the name of the band and the title of the album.
The album’s memorable title intrigued Frank Zappa fans. At some point, the word spread that Zappa borrowed it from the September 1956 issue MAN’S LIFE. “Killer creature” covers and stories were common in MAMs in the ’50s and ’60s. The weasels variation was painted by artist Wil Hulsey. It illustrates the “killer weasels” story inside with the title that caught Zappa’s attention.
Whoever first noted that Hulsey did the painting had to know something about men’s adventure mags, because there’s no artist signature shown on the cover and the contents page doesn’t mention Hulsey. It says: “Cover by AMERICAN ART AGENCY.” That was a company was founded by Hulsey’s mentor, artist-turned-publisher Milton Luros, who served as Hulsey’s agent early in his career.
To aficionados of vintage men’s pulp magazines, Hulsey’s work is very recognizable. His style is smooth and realistic, even though the scenes he depicted are often fantastic. His colors are especially lush. In most Hulsey cover paintings, the focus is on a person or people in the foreground. Unlike some men’s pulp mag artists, such as Mort Kunstler and Basil Gogos, Hulsey didn’t do panoramic images, like big battles scenes.
Many of Hulsey’s cover paintings are animal attack covers, in the “WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH” vein. I’ve featured some of my other favorites in that subgenre in previous posts here, such as his classic killer turtles cover, “CHEWED TO BITS BY GIANT TURTLES” (MAN’S LIFE, May 1957) and his “LIZARDS FROM HELL” cover (TRUE MEN STORIES, February 1957).
Hulsey did a lot of great killer creature covers. He was a master at it. But he also did covers in several other categories, including exotic adventure scenes, sexy Civil War scenes, and Westerns.
Most of Hulsey’s cover paintings appeared on issues of the Crestwood Publishing’s MAN’S LIFE and TRUE MEN STORIES men’s adventure mags from the mid-1950s up until about 1962. His cover scenes that include women tend to be examples of what collectors call “Good Girl Art,” or GGA for short — images of beautiful, well-endowed, scantily-clad women. The term is applied to artwork used for magazines, comics, cartoons and paperback covers.
Some Hulsey women are damsels in distress being attacked or menaced by evil critters or evil men. But he also did covers with badass women attacking men. And, unlike several other famous men’s adventure mag artists, such as Norm Eastman, Norman Saunders and Basil Gogos, he didn’t do bondage and torture covers with Nazis, bikers, or psychos doing heinous things to women.
Regardless of the scene, many of the women in Hulsey’s covers are wearing (barely) a blazing red blouse or other piece of clothing. Sometimes, the color is bright yellow. Using hot colors on busty babes with ample cleavage showing enhanced the eyeball-grabbing potential of the magazines’ covers and helped ensure that an issue would stick out on newsstands — in more ways than one.
Wil Hulsey’s artwork is one of the things that made me a MAM fanatic. I love his work and rank him among the best artists who worked in the men’s adventure magazine genre. A lot of other collectors agree. Magazines with Hulsey covers are some of the most sought after. The rare examples of his original paintings that show up on sites like the Heritage Auction Galleries sell for thousands of dollars.
So, it’s has always been a bit surprising to me that information about Hulsey is very scarce. There’s no informative bio about him online or in any books I’ve seen. And, sources that do mention him often incorrectly give his first name as “Will.” I referred to him as “Will Hulsey” myself until I got an email from his granddaughter in 2010.
She’d seen a post I did mentioning her grandfather and wanted me to know that his first name is Wilbur, so he’s a “Wil” — not a “Will” — for short.
In her email, she told me: “It’s a common misconception that his name is William, but it is actually Wilbur. He was born in Kansas but moved to New York where he met my grandmother. From there they moved to the San Fernando area. They still live there in the same house that my father and two aunts grew up in. Wil is still alive and is 84. He will be 85 in March.”
That was pretty exciting news to me. Finally, I had some biographical facts about Hulsey and confirmation that he was still alive. And, his granddaughter gave me his phone number.
It inspired me to take a shot at getting him to do an interview for this blog. To my knowledge, no one had done an interview with Hulsey for any book, magazine or website. It would be a real coup if I could snag one. So, I called Wil at his home in California. He answered and I explained that I was calling because I wanted to do an interview with him about his work for men’s adventure magazines.
There was a long moment of dead air.
Then Wil said: “Well, you know, that was a long time ago and I’ve been happily retired for many years. I’ll have to think about it. Call me back in a few days.”
When I called him back a few days later and repeated my request for an interview, Wil said: “Well, I don’t know. That was many years ago. I’ll think about it. Call me back in a few days.”
I did. He didn’t want to talk then either. I tried again a month later. His wife answered and called out to him. I heard him say he didn’t want to talk with anyone. At that point it seemed pretty clear to me that not much is known about Wil Hulsey because he prefers it that way.
I gave up on trying to talk to Wil and he passed away passed away in 2015 at the age of 89. I’ve noted more of what I’ve learned about Hulsey and show more of his artwork in various posts on this blog.
If you’ve ever wanted to read the story that inspired his famed flesh-ripping weasels painting and don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars to buy a copy of the rare MAN’S LIFE issue it originally appeared in (if you can even find one), there is a way. Here’s how that came about…
As I was learning about MAMs, I read the two most authoritative books about the genre: IT’S A MAN’S WORLD: MEN’S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES, THE POSTWAR PULPS (first published in 2003) by Adam Parfrey, and the Taschen book MEN’S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES: IN POSTWAR AMERICA by Max Allan Collins, George Hagenauer, and Rich Oberg, first published in 2004.
Both of those books provide a great overview of the MAM genre and are lushly illustrated, but they don’t include any MAM stories. In fact, although there are many books that reprint early pulp magazine stories, I discovered that there were no modern books collecting men’s adventure mag stories. There were paperbacks published in the ’50s and ’60s collecting MAM stories, but no recent ones. I also noted that the old ones were not illustrated and didn’t provide any background information about the writers or magazines to put the stories in context.
In 2013, I was inspired to fill that gap. I envisioned creating a book collecting MAM stories and artwork that would also include background information about the writers, artists, magazines and publishers, and I decided to reach out to writer and musician Josh Alan Friedman to discuss that idea.
I learned from the books I mentioned above that his father, the famous playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Bruce Jay Friedman, had been an editor of men’s bachelor and adventure magazines published by Martin Goodman‘s Magazine Management company in the early 1960s. I also found out that interviews Josh had done with Bruce and other former writers and editors for the Goodman MAMs were featured in a special issue of SWANK in 1984. Coincidentally, I was fan of Josh Alan’s music and his recently published semi-autobiographical book BLACK CRACKER, published by Wyatt Doyle Books/New Texture.
I contacted Josh and asked if he’d be willing to contribute an introduction to the MAM story anthology I envisioned, allow me to reprint one of his interviews in it, and put me in touch with his father. He said yes. I also asked if he thought New Texture might be interested in publishing it. He said maybe, then put me in touch with publisher Wyatt Doyle.
Wyatt was enthusiastic about the idea. He said he’d co-edit it, design and publish it and help contact the living writers whose MAM stories we wanted to reprint, or their estates, to get their permission. So, over the next few months, Wyatt, Josh and I worked together to create a men’s adventure magazine story and art anthology we titled WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH! In it, we reprinted 25 classic men’s adventure magazine stories from periodicals like REAL MEN, MALE, MAN’S LIFE, TRUE MEN STORIES, UNTAMED, EXOTIC ADVENTURES and GUSTO.
Among them are stories by writers who later became famous, such as Lawrence Block, Harlan Ellison, Bruce Jay Friedman, Robert Silverberg, Jane Dolinger and Walter Wager.
The WEASELS anthology also includes: a preface by Josh and a reprint of his interview with Mario Puzo, who worked for men’s adventure magazines before THE GODFATHER made him famous; introductions Wyatt and I wrote for the book and for each story; plus a reminiscence by Bruce Jay Friedman about his years as a MAM editor, titled “Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos.”
And, of course, one of the stories included is the “WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH!” story from MAN’S LIFE. Like many stories in men’s adventure magazines, it’s portrayed as a true first hand account. In fact, it’s pulp fiction and the name used for the author, Mike Kamens, is equally fictitious. The real author behind the pseudonym is unknown.
Naturally, we used Wil Hulsey’s weasels artwork on the cover. I later learned that Wil often used photos of himself as references for the men in his cover paintings. That’s him being attacked by the weasels.
Our 2013 WEASELS anthology is a 436-page paperback. It’s illustrated with cover scans of the magazines the stories come from, the interior illustrations and photos used for them, and examples of the wild ads that appeared in MAMs printed. The interior pages are printed in black-and-white. It got many nice reviews and sold well enough to encourage Wyatt and I do more MAM-related books, creating a series we call the Men’s Adventure Library.
Since 2013, we have co-edited 17 more illustrated MAM anthologies and art books and, except for WEASELS and one other, they’re all illustrated in full color inside. Most come in both softcover and hardcover editions.
Among our books is an anthology of man vs. critter stories and artwork, with a special section featuring Wil Hulsey covers. It’s titled I WATCHED THEM EAT ME ALIVE: KILLER CREATURES IN MEN’S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES.
We’ve also published collections that feature MAM stories by some of the writers who we first contacted when we did the WEASELS book, such as Lawrence Block, Robert Silverberg and Walter Kaylin, who Mario Puzo and Bruce Jay Friedman considered to be one of the best of all MAM story writers. Along the way, we’ve done art books featuring top MAM artists, like Mort Künstler, Samson Pollen, George Gross and Gil Cohen.
I love all of our Men’s Adventure Library books, but I’ve always had a special fondness for WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH! — the one that started it all. And, for a long time, I’ve wanted to do a new edition of WEASELS in full color. Early in 2024, Wyatt and I decided to do it.
I rescanned and finetuned all the covers, interior illustrations and photos, something I’m much better at than I was in 2013. Wyatt updated and added to the text and created an eye-poppingly awesome new layout. And, he created both a full color softcover edition and a deluxe, full color hardcover edition with a wraparound dust jacket.
As I write this post, the new, full color, expanded editions of the WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH! anthology are now listed for sale on Amazon worldwide.
The softcover and hardcover editions are both 6″ x 9″ in size, 450 pages long, and feature the same content. In addition to having an awesome, wraparound dust jacket, the back, spine, and front of the hardcover’s boards are also illustrated.
I’ll be doing preview posts showing story spreads and artwork from the 2024 version of WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH! on this blog soon. In the meantime, you can see a mini-preview in the listings for the hardcover and softcover editions in my bookstore.
The old 2013 edition of WEASELS will not be reprinted. If you have one, it may be a collector’s item someday. A couple of indie booksellers still have copies and I’m selling the last copies I have in a listing in my bookstore.
But the new 2024 edition is much cooler. Or, as my co-editor Wyatt put it in a graphic he created, it’s “BIGGER. TOUGHER. MORE WEASELLY.”
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IF you want a copy of the new, expanded, full color 2024 edition of WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH! click the image below to go to the listings for the softcover and deluxe hardcover editions on Amazon US.
