"Subways Are For Killing"

There's something about the style of that cover painting that screams 'late sixties!'.  Possibly it is simply the style of the clothes, but I also feel that there's something about the dynamic, not to mention the subject matter that reflects the era.  It illustrates the 'Exciting Book Bonus', "Subways Are For Killing", which headlines this May 1967 issue of For Men Only.  The 'Book Bonus', basically a condensed or serialised version of a recent novel, increasingly became a feature of the men's magazines during the sixties.  If nothing else, they filled a lot of pages, reducing the number of original stories and articles that had to be commissioned, (or older stories that had to exhumed from the archives and reprinted).  They were also a selling point, offering something unique to readers, (many of whom were unlikely to read an entire novel in book form).  "Subways Are For Killing", as both the cover synopsis and cover painting indicate, about urban crime, specifically that perpetrated by youth gangs in public places, like the subway.  It seems clear that story concerns vigilantism, with at least one citizen deciding to do what the authorities seemingly can't and 'take back' the streets, or subways in this case, through committing violent crimes themselves.  A sort of proto-Death Wish.  

The idea of out-of-control youth intimidating 'honest citizens' became something of a theme in US popular culture during this period, as young people acquired more of an identity as a distinct social group and began to 'rebel' against established values.  Variations you could find in men's magazines of the era included  tales of biker gangs and surf gangs terrorising communities (and inevitably tying up and menacing half naked women).  The rest of the stories featured on the cover are pretty much standard fare for a men's magazine of the time: 'exotic' sexual practices of foreigners ('Foreign Love Practices They Don't Dare Tel You'), medical malpractice, ('The Scandal of Our Don't Give a Damn Hospitals') and nudity ('"Come and Get Me" Nude').  That staple of the men's magazine, the war story, is represented by 'The Quiet Heroes', at tale of 'The Daredevil Yanks of Vietnam's No Man's Land'.  Which sounds like another attempt to glamourise the conflict in South East Asia, to which younger readers could doubtless expect to be drafted into at any moment.  

For Men Only was, by 1967, a venerable publication, having first appeared in 1954 and was a mainstay of the men's magazine genre.  It was o continue publication until the early eighties, although, by then, in common with other surviving men's magazines, it had transformed into softcore porn nudie magazine.  That said, For Men Only held out until the mid seventies in retaining a version of its more traditional men's magazine format, albeit with increasingly explicit and sex orientated in its content.