Wait! You misunderstood! What I said was why don’t you give a girl a break! Sometimes when we stumble across vintage magazines they’re in bad condition. Such is the case with this July 1964 issue of Man To Man, which has had all the pictorials were scissored from it and is so brittle it fell apart as we scanned it. But it is readable, and read it we did. We were titillated by C. H. Cash’s “Nude Crossing of East Germany’s Death Strip,” and fascinated by Bill Austeen’s “Sex on the Straw Hat Circuit,” but the prize winner here is “I Suffered the Electric Snake Torture” by Connie Edison. The title character is a woman framed by a British drug dealer named Harry Lasker and tortured at the hands of Chinese secret police. Not satisfied with a simple cattle prod, the cops attach a snake to the end of it, so that each jolt of current causes the snake to strike. We’d think that would simply kill a snake, but maybe they adjusted the voltage to just the right level to cause the snake to, er, well anyway, we really enjoyed the villain’s explanation for using this baroque device: “We do not like to borrow from the capitalists, but sometimes it is to our advantage.” He goes on to explain that, while various capitalist dictatorships in Latin America used the cattle prod alone, he and his cohorts added a snake because, “being Chinese, we are naturally more creative.” In the end she’s tortured and vows revenge against the man who set her up. With all the electricity flying around, the humor in the pseudonym Connie Edison becomes clear. This was our first Man To Man, but we liked it. And yes, we’re aware of how that sounds—nearly all the names of these vintage hero magazines sound sexual today, although this one perhaps more so than most. In any case, we’ll keep our eyes out, and hopefully the next issue of this we locate will be intact.
|
|
The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1939—Batman Debuts
In Detective Comics #27, DC Comics publishes its second major superhero, Batman, who becomes one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, and then a popular camp television series starring Adam West, and lastly a multi-million dollar movie franchise starring Michael Keaton, then George Clooney, and finally Christian Bale. 1953—Crick and Watson Publish DNA Results
British scientists James D Watson and Francis Crick publish an article detailing their discovery of the existence and structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, in Nature magazine. Their findings answer one of the oldest and most fundamental questions of biology, that of how living things reproduce themselves. 1967—First Space Program Casualty Occurs
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when, during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere after more than ten successful orbits, the capsule's main parachute fails to deploy properly, and the backup chute becomes entangled in the first. The capsule's descent is slowed, but it still hits the ground at about 90 mph, at which point it bursts into flames. Komarov is the first human to die during a space mission. 1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot.
|
|
|
It's easy. We have an uploader that makes it a snap. Use it to submit your art, text, header, and subhead. Your post can be funny, serious, or anything in between, as long as it's vintage pulp. You'll get a byline and experience the fleeting pride of free authorship. We'll edit your post for typos, but the rest is up to you. Click here to give us your best shot.
|
|