'I Fight With Killer Snakes!'

 

For a magazine titles Men in Conflict, this men's pulp seems to obsessed by sex rather than war - although the main cover painting (recycled from an earlier pulp, as was the custom with this title's latter days), pays lip service to the title's implied theme.  Still, it was May 1966 and this type of magazine was in decline.  The increased emphasis upon sensationalised sex-related headlines was a last roll of the dice in terms of attracting readership.  Of course, as it was now the supposedly sexually liberated 'swinging sixties', those headlines could be more forthright than ever before, hence a hinted excursion into S & M: 'Pain - The Key to Sex Happiness'.  Likewise, while all those old covers showing women in their underwear being menaced by Nazis/Commies/Japs/Red Chinese implied that all the painful tortures included rape, now they could finally say it: 'Rape is a weapon of Terror!'.  

Alongside the amped up kinkiness and sexual abuse implied in the cover stories, we also have ever more sensationalised versions of some of the favourite old men's magazine tropes: the 'man in conflict with animals' theme, for instance, with 'I Fight With Killer Snakes'.  Satanism and black magic is present with 'The Terrible Truth About Devil Worship', (that 'truth' presumably being that it is all a load of old bollocks and simply a pretext for some old pervs to get naked and shag young women while wearing a pair of goat's horns).  As for 'The Blood Crazed Mob Was Bent on a Massacre - Watch the Vice Girls Die' mixes together prostitution, sex violence and crime - all recurring themes in these sorts of publications.  As a footnote, the recycled cover painting doesn't seem to illustrate any specific story - these sorts of generic cover paintings became ever more common during the declining days of the men's pulps, before they eventually gave way to cheaper photo covers.