Tuesday, February 08, 2022

Men's Adventure Quarterly #4: The Jungle Girls Issue


I’m running out of superlatives to describe what a beautiful publication MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY is. Every issue lovingly reprints great covers and interior art from the men’s adventure magazines of the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, along with stories and features from those magazines, all of it enhanced by well-written and informative editorials and introductions from editors Bob Deis and Bill Cunningham. The fourth volume is out now, and it’s yet another fantastic issue, this time focusing on a subject near and dear to my heart ever since I first watched those early Tarzan movies (the ones with a very scantily clad Maureen O’Sullivan): jungle girls.

About half of this issue is devoted to Jane Dolinger, a top-notch travel and adventure writer who contributed many stories to the MAMs. But she was also a lovely young woman who posed for many photo features in those same magazines, making her unique among their contributors. Deis and Cunningham deliver plenty of excellent examples of all of Jane Dolinger’s talents, along with an interview with her biographer, Lawrence Abbott, that provides a lot of insight into her life and career.

There’s also a feature on Marion Michael, the star of two German films in which she played Liane, Jungle Goddess (that’s also the title of the first film). I’d never heard of Marion Michael or these movies, so I found this quite interesting. Looks like at least the first movie is available to watch on-line. I probably won’t get around to doing so . . . but I might.

This issue is rounded out by four mostly fictional stories with jungle girl themes, and my favorite, not surprisingly, is Donald Honig’s “Yank Explorer Who Ruled Guatemala’s Taboo Tribe”, from the August 1959 issue of FOR MEN ONLY. There’s been a Donald Honig story in every issue of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY so far, and for good reason. He’s an excellent writer and always delivers an entertaining, fast-moving yarn, no matter what the subject matter.

As I may well have mentioned before, I used to eye those magazines every time I went to the drugstore to buy comic books and paperbacks, and I really wanted to buy some of them, but I knew I could never get them into the house past the eagle-eyed gaze of my mother. I had enough trouble with paperbacks. (Ah, Robert McGinnis!) Now, thanks to Deis and Cunningham and MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY, I can at least read some sterling examples of what I missed back then. Issue 4, THE JUNGLE GIRLS ISSUE, gets a very high recommendation from me. You can buy it directly from Bob Deis in his eBay store.

4 comments:

Jeff Meyerson said...

My first thought was, Bill Crider would have been all over this.

James Reasoner said...

Oh, yes, absolutely!

Fred Blosser said...

Not only past Mom's eagle eye, but also past the inevitable church lady staffing the cash register.

Adventuresfantastic said...

Gonna have to check this out.