Review: Mort Künstler: Covered, Volume 1 - Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, eds.

The men’s adventure magazines are very well remembered for their great covers, and for my money, no artist was ever better at painting those covers than Mort Künstler, who produced scores of them, usually signing his own name to them but occasionally using the pseudonym Emmett Kaye. Künstler’s absolute mastery of the genre is amply demonstrated in MORT KÜNSTLER: COVERED, VOLUME 1, the latest beautiful volume from the Men’s Adventure Library and #new texture.

Editors Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle lead off with a lengthy, informative, and very entertaining interview with Künstler before diving into the meat of the book, more than 100 full-page, full-color reproductions of covers Künstler did for various men’s adventure magazines, mostly FOR MEN ONLY but other magazines, too. These are just gorgeous and prove that Künstler could paint almost any kind of action and adventure scene, from war to Western, from jungle thrills and man against nature to hardboiled crime. Interspersed with these covers are sidebars about the history of the men’s adventure genre and background about each of the magazines featured.

I’ve mentioned before how I used to see those magazines on the racks at the drugstores and grocery stores where I bought comic books and paperbacks, and I always wanted to buy some of them. I was especially drawn to FOR MEN ONLY for some reason, so I’m very happy to see it featured in this volume. In looking through the covers Künstler did in the late Sixties, some of them looked familiar to me, but I honestly don’t know if I was actually recalling them from those days or if nostalgia was just kicking in. I do know that I love looking at them now and remembering those times.

For what it’s worth, I never bought an issue of FOR MEN ONLY or any of those magazines until I was in college in the Seventies, and by that time, they were a mere shadow of what they had been in earlier days. I was an expert at smuggling paperbacks with racy covers into my house, but a full-sized magazine was more of a challenge than I wanted to take on.

But I digress, as I often do. MORT KÜNSTLER: COVERED, VOLUME 1 is a terrific book, and if you’re interested in men’s adventure magazines or just in great artwork, I give it a very high recommendation. The best way to buy it is directly from Bob Deis. The softcover edition and the deluxe hardcover edition are both available. You can get them on Amazon as well. Wherever you buy them, you’re getting some great artwork, I can guarantee that.