Man's Wildcat Adventures

 

Late fifties America was clearly a hotbed of lust and kinky sex - if this cover from the August 1959 issue of Man's Wildcat Adventures is any indication.  Even the magazine's title is evocative of 'untamed', sexually provocative women - 'wildcats'.  The stories trailed on the cover are clearly designed to back up this idea - 'Lash of desire' conjures up all sorts of images of whips and sadomasochism, for instance.  The cover story is likely 'Sgt Duran's Secret Sex Invasion' - even the war in the Pacific was fuelled by sex it seems.  Those were the days when the only liberation wartime invasions had in mind was liberating young women of their virtue.  There's more exotica with 'The Nympho Huntress of Buckoo Reef' - one can make a pretty good guess at what she was hunting and how eager her 'prey' were to be caught.  Best of all is 'Erotic Picture Clubs are Sex-Urbia's Latest Kick', a story doubtless designed to reassure readers that you didn't have to fight the Japanese in the Pacific campaign or seek out tropical reefs in order to get yourself some erotic thrills.  You could just stay at home in middle class suburban USA and cop an eyeful of some home made porn involving your neighbours' wives.  

This was only the second issue of Man's Wildcat Adventures, one of only three that carried the prefix 'Men's' - from the fourth issue in January 1960, it became simply Wildcat Adventures, with the 'Adventures' suffix becoming smaller and smaller with each issue.  At the same time, the cover paintings became ever more lurid, focusing on semi-naked women in various states of bondage being variously menaced by Nazis, Reds, spear wielding natives, gangs, wild animals or some combination of these.  In January 1965 it became one of the first men;s magazines to transition completely into a 'girly' mag, featuring photo covers, which became ever more softcore, contents that tended more obviously toward sex and erotica than action and adventure and a further contraction of the title to simply Wildcat.  In this form it survived until the mid seventies.  By the last issue, in 1976, the girls on the covers had gone completely topless, with even their nipples on show.  Interestingly, despite, in its original format, being one of the more downmarket men's adventure magazines, its very first issue contained a condensation of William S Burroughs' 'Junkie'.  In its later Wildcat incarnation, when it became yet another downmarket Playboy clone, it published Barry N Malzberg's first story.  These literary milestones, however, were only isolated aberrations.