Todd, I wonder if INTIMATE LOVE is like the full-length picture romance magazines I used to read in my teens. Those magazines had colour photographs of actual people posing sequentially in comic strip format with speech bubbles and all that. A few of the models were common to most of the magazines whose names I don't recall offhand. My sister used to borrow them from the local circulating library.
Prashant--actually, no...despite this and some other photo covers, apparently INTIMATE LOVE was a typically drawn-comics book of the sort that (among others) the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein used to emulate/rip off. Though that kind of photo-comics approach has also been common, at least from time to time, in the US as well as the rest of the world...the Italian term for comics, or at least certain sorts of comics, "fumetti" (for the smoke-puff-like dialogue and interior monolog balloons) has stuck in the US to that kind of photoplay, when offered in photography-heavy magazines such as LIFE or KEN or LOOK, or in the attempt to import to the US in the late 1940s the hugely popular Italian magazine INCANTO as FASCINATION by Edizione Mondiale, or World Editions--the European translated editions had worked well, but the US market was hugely resistant...so World Editions settled for publishing something called GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION magazine for a brief while, which turned out to be an instant success...which they promptly sold to its US printer, when they had a cashflow crunch. MAD magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman's HELP! magazine was, like other magazines such as Forrest Ackerman's FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND from its publisher James Warren, awash in fumetti (featuring a raft of people engaged by Kurtzman's assistants, Gloria Steinem and Terry Gilliam, early in their respective careers), and HELP!'s example probably helped inspire the amount of devotion that NATIONAL LAMPOON had to the form, as well...while FAMOUS MONSTERS and others like it might've helped inspire such latter-day expressions as Topps' monster-movie trading cards with fumetti jokes, and STAR TREK "foto-novels"...meanwhile, INCANTO was probably an ancestor of the magazines your sister brought into your house.
Brian: Well, I suspect the expressions on their faces might inspire such notions...I'm struck by how certain enthusiasts would find his helping her with her skates far sexier than that prospect, even with her vaguely Mennonite outfit. (I'm always impressed when engine-searching images for the actor posts, how often "[woman's name] feet" comes up as a default for even nude shots...I can understand, but not viscerally "get," why that would be the first thing certain fans might focus on, but I am the opposite of a foot fetishist.)
All told, George, in terms of romance, I think I'm glad I missed those years (I had and have enough trouble in less constrained times)...unless you refer to that stage of everyone's life when young love might spring forth..."spung" as Heinlein might put it...driven by hormones and that New Stage of Life scent (so much nicer, sometimes at least, than New Car scent)...
Todd, thanks for the rundown on the photo covers and photo magazines. I still read MAD, an eternal fixture in my reading list. Over the past one year, I have also been reading GALAXY SF (that you mentioned), ASTOUNDING SF, AMAZING SF STORIES, and ANALOG, a fair amount of which is available via copyright-free ebooks. I like the covers and the full-length black-and-white illustrations, especially those by Virgil Finlay, of whom I read about in a 1978 edition of STARLOG and wrote about last year. Frankly, I am too overwhelmed by all this fantastic material to be able to write about it consistenly. I think I'll read some more! I have only heard about the other magazines you mentioned, certainly NATIONAL LAMPOON.
After I read your post and comment, I searched the internet for the comic-format romance magazines I was referring to and I think they were called KISS, PHOTO OR PICTURE ROMANCE (or both), and DARLING among a few more of the kind. They were quite popular among teenagers here. I'm going to check out a few of these if I can.
Well, Prashant, there's certainly a lot of good, great, bad and indifferent fiction in the backfiles of GALAXY, AMAZING, and ASTOUNDING/ANALOG (these last two titles refer to the same magazine, which changed its name in 1960...Ziff-Davis's AMAZING SCIENCE FICTION STORIES became AMAZING: FACT AND SCIENCE FICTION STORIES that year, and its stablemate became FANTASTIC: STORIES OF IMAGINATION, and over at Conde Nast, they similarly "upgraded" the title of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION to ANALOG: SCIENCE FACT -> SCIENCE FICTION. Some of the stuff you're seeing in ebooks might be pirated, but I suspect some of it did not get its copyright renewed...and MAD had many descendants and, of course, imitators, of which NATIONAL LAMPOON was the most successful of its somewhat more sexually and otherwise button-pushing offshoots...only Paul Krassner's THE REALIST and CRACKED, in one form or another, have managed to last longer (unless we count the HARVARD LAMPOON, which directly gave birth to the off-campus title), though THE ONION should be given a nod in this competition, as well (and no humor magazine in the States is close to lasting as long as the UK's PUNCH did, and the fellow Brit PRIVATE EYE has weathered not a few decades, now).
PICTURE ROMANCE has been an international title, I think...or just one used internationally, I suspect...
Todd, I have been reading sf magazines like Galaxy, Astounding Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, and Astounding Stories of Super-Science at Archive and a couple of other sites, presumably under Project Gutenberg, which I think is legal. The site also has scores of National Lampoon issues right up to 1991 including some real vintage issues of Punch (the erstwhile London Charivari). These are very early issues and I don't know if they require a renewal of copyright. I am, of course, not aware how Punch (or the latter-day satirical Private Eye, for that matter) have evolved over the years. I haven't read Private Eye in years though I found it too British-centric at the time, as it was meant to be. I once worked with an editor who was obsessed with Punch and Private Eye and used some of the ideas in his own paper.
You can do worse than Project Gutenberg...and it won't surprise you that all those ASTOUNDINGs were the same magazine under varying editors and publishers as well...and, indeed, PRIVATE EYE with its close, well, eye, on Brit politics could be a bit recondite to we outlanders. I genuinely liked the issues of PUNCH I could read in the nearby university library around the turn of the '80s...
Todd, I wonder if INTIMATE LOVE is like the full-length picture romance magazines I used to read in my teens. Those magazines had colour photographs of actual people posing sequentially in comic strip format with speech bubbles and all that. A few of the models were common to most of the magazines whose names I don't recall offhand. My sister used to borrow them from the local circulating library.
ReplyDeleteWhat makes this cover intimate is that the woman isn't wearing underwear underneath her skirt.
ReplyDeletePrashant--actually, no...despite this and some other photo covers, apparently INTIMATE LOVE was a typically drawn-comics book of the sort that (among others) the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein used to emulate/rip off. Though that kind of photo-comics approach has also been common, at least from time to time, in the US as well as the rest of the world...the Italian term for comics, or at least certain sorts of comics, "fumetti" (for the smoke-puff-like dialogue and interior monolog balloons) has stuck in the US to that kind of photoplay, when offered in photography-heavy magazines such as LIFE or KEN or LOOK, or in the attempt to import to the US in the late 1940s the hugely popular Italian magazine INCANTO as FASCINATION by Edizione Mondiale, or World Editions--the European translated editions had worked well, but the US market was hugely resistant...so World Editions settled for publishing something called GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION magazine for a brief while, which turned out to be an instant success...which they promptly sold to its US printer, when they had a cashflow crunch. MAD magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman's HELP! magazine was, like other magazines such as Forrest Ackerman's FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND from its publisher James Warren, awash in fumetti (featuring a raft of people engaged by Kurtzman's assistants, Gloria Steinem and Terry Gilliam, early in their respective careers), and HELP!'s example probably helped inspire the amount of devotion that NATIONAL LAMPOON had to the form, as well...while FAMOUS MONSTERS and others like it might've helped inspire such latter-day expressions as Topps' monster-movie trading cards with fumetti jokes, and STAR TREK "foto-novels"...meanwhile, INCANTO was probably an ancestor of the magazines your sister brought into your house.
ReplyDeleteBrian: Well, I suspect the expressions on their faces might inspire such notions...I'm struck by how certain enthusiasts would find his helping her with her skates far sexier than that prospect, even with her vaguely Mennonite outfit. (I'm always impressed when engine-searching images for the actor posts, how often "[woman's name] feet" comes up as a default for even nude shots...I can understand, but not viscerally "get," why that would be the first thing certain fans might focus on, but I am the opposite of a foot fetishist.)
Those were the days...
ReplyDeleteAll told, George, in terms of romance, I think I'm glad I missed those years (I had and have enough trouble in less constrained times)...unless you refer to that stage of everyone's life when young love might spring forth..."spung" as Heinlein might put it...driven by hormones and that New Stage of Life scent (so much nicer, sometimes at least, than New Car scent)...
ReplyDeleteTodd, thanks for the rundown on the photo covers and photo magazines. I still read MAD, an eternal fixture in my reading list. Over the past one year, I have also been reading GALAXY SF (that you mentioned), ASTOUNDING SF, AMAZING SF STORIES, and ANALOG, a fair amount of which is available via copyright-free ebooks. I like the covers and the full-length black-and-white illustrations, especially those by Virgil Finlay, of whom I read about in a 1978 edition of STARLOG and wrote about last year. Frankly, I am too overwhelmed by all this fantastic material to be able to write about it consistenly. I think I'll read some more! I have only heard about the other magazines you mentioned, certainly NATIONAL LAMPOON.
ReplyDeleteAfter I read your post and comment, I searched the internet for the comic-format romance magazines I was referring to and I think they were called KISS, PHOTO OR PICTURE ROMANCE (or both), and DARLING among a few more of the kind. They were quite popular among teenagers here. I'm going to check out a few of these if I can.
Well, Prashant, there's certainly a lot of good, great, bad and indifferent fiction in the backfiles of GALAXY, AMAZING, and ASTOUNDING/ANALOG (these last two titles refer to the same magazine, which changed its name in 1960...Ziff-Davis's AMAZING SCIENCE FICTION STORIES became AMAZING: FACT AND SCIENCE FICTION STORIES that year, and its stablemate became FANTASTIC: STORIES OF IMAGINATION, and over at Conde Nast, they similarly "upgraded" the title of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION to ANALOG: SCIENCE FACT -> SCIENCE FICTION. Some of the stuff you're seeing in ebooks might be pirated, but I suspect some of it did not get its copyright renewed...and MAD had many descendants and, of course, imitators, of which NATIONAL LAMPOON was the most successful of its somewhat more sexually and otherwise button-pushing offshoots...only Paul Krassner's THE REALIST and CRACKED, in one form or another, have managed to last longer (unless we count the HARVARD LAMPOON, which directly gave birth to the off-campus title), though THE ONION should be given a nod in this competition, as well (and no humor magazine in the States is close to lasting as long as the UK's PUNCH did, and the fellow Brit PRIVATE EYE has weathered not a few decades, now).
ReplyDeletePICTURE ROMANCE has been an international title, I think...or just one used internationally, I suspect...
Todd, I have been reading sf magazines like Galaxy, Astounding Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, and Astounding Stories of Super-Science at Archive and a couple of other sites, presumably under Project Gutenberg, which I think is legal. The site also has scores of National Lampoon issues right up to 1991 including some real vintage issues of Punch (the erstwhile London Charivari). These are very early issues and I don't know if they require a renewal of copyright. I am, of course, not aware how Punch (or the latter-day satirical Private Eye, for that matter) have evolved over the years. I haven't read Private Eye in years though I found it too British-centric at the time, as it was meant to be. I once worked with an editor who was obsessed with Punch and Private Eye and used some of the ideas in his own paper.
ReplyDeleteYou can do worse than Project Gutenberg...and it won't surprise you that all those ASTOUNDINGs were the same magazine under varying editors and publishers as well...and, indeed, PRIVATE EYE with its close, well, eye, on Brit politics could be a bit recondite to we outlanders. I genuinely liked the issues of PUNCH I could read in the nearby university library around the turn of the '80s...
ReplyDeleteArchive.org, however, does wait to see if anyone will object, rather than seek out copyright questions itself...
ReplyDelete