My original tumblr post was here, from a tweet by 1whoknewcthulhu. There is a gallery of pulp and men’s magazine art by Walter Popp here which I strongly encourage you to visit. If you don’t thrill to a piece illustrating “Italian Nudist Girls Who Knocked Out Germany’s Underground Tank Depot,” perhaps you should check yourself for a pulse, just to be sure.
Some really wonderful stuff on that linked page.
Here’s a question: whatever happened to the people who read men’s thriller magazines? Has their market been taken over by internet porn, or are they reading something else, or nothing else?
The rapid decline in social and legal prohibition on more explicit materials that begins in the late 1960s probably has a lot to do with it. I have a pet conjecture (I’m unsure how sound it is) based on chronology and the prevalence of WWII villain imagery in this material (leering Nazis are very prominent and there are a lot of evil Japanese as well, all devoting improbable ingenuity and resources to various projects of tormenting pretty women in various states of bondage and undress) that it might have flourished at the approximate historical time when the generation of American men who served in the Armed Forces during the war began to hit middle age.