'The Nudist-Cult Blackmail Ring'

Back in the mid-fifties, at the height of its popularity, Stag featured dome of the more restrained covers in the men's magazine market, clearly aiming for some kind of 'respectability'.  Featuring full page cover paintings with only one or two stories highlighted there, usually of the factual kind and using non-sensational language, Stag obviously saw itself as a cut above the other sex and violence obsessed men's magazines.  By the late sixties, however, with magazine sales falling in the face of competition from other media, the magazine was going for broke, with cluttered covers clearly aimed at out sensationalising rival publications.  Hence, the bewildering array of outrageous sounding story synopses covering the full gamut of men's magazine subject matter on this cover for the October 1969 issue.

 Sex and the Red Menace combine for 'I Ran Castro's 6000-Girl Sex Ring', while we have sex and!crime in 'The Nudist Cult Blackmail Ring' and sex and bogus medical advice in 'How to Stop a Fight - Make Love!'.  Jungle adventures and white explorers asserting their superiority over stereotypical 'primitive savages' feature in 'The Amazing Adventures of John Goddard', while we have more alarmist anti-Commie rhetoric in 'New Kremlin Purge: Strange Deaths of 34 Soviet Generals'.  The only thing missing is a straightforward war story, although the 'Extra Book Bonus' (which is in addition to that issue's 'Exclusive Book Bonus') 'Bastard's Revenge' could fall into that category, (or just about any other with such a generic title).  We also mustn't forget that there's more sex and medicine in 'My "Very Private" Nurse', (which could also be the synopsis of a seventies British sex comedy).

Crowded though this cover might seem, it is actually one of the restrained examples from the late sixties/early seventies era of Stag.  This one features only two illustrations, a main one illustrating the featured story (albeit squeezed onto the cover's edge) and a subsidiary image illustrating a supporting story.  Many covers from this period feature multiple paintings, (usually reduced size versions of older cover paintings), sometimes accompanied by photos, (by the latter half of 1970, photographic cover panels were starting to be favoured over paintings ).  As the cover illustrations got smaller, they tended to be replaced by garishly coloured text panels carrying story titles and synopses in large sized fonts.  The intent was obviously to try and make the magazine's cover and content as eye-catching as possible so as to stand out from competitors on the newsstand.

As the seventies progressed, the magazine, like many other men's magazines drifted into softcore territory, increasingly featuring photographic covers of women, at first in their underwear, later topless or fully nude, (but carefully posed so as to show nothing more than breasts and buttocks).  The late seventies saw a change in ownership and a move into full on pornographic content.