True Weird and True Strange

True Weird was a short-lived men's magazine which put out three issues between 1955 and 1956.  While most regular men's magazines included a smattering of supernatural, occult or just weird themed stories, True Weird was an attempt to fill an entire magazine with them.  Perhaps its publisher drew inspiration from the success of such occult orientated titles as Fate, but decided to add the twist of orientating the stories to the men's magazine market.  Unfortunately, the magazine's quick demise would seem to indicate that it simply didn't find a market.  Which is a pity as, judging by the cover to the first, November 1955, issue, it had some magnificently lurid sounding 'true' stories of the weird.  That cover painting alone would have been worth buying the magazine for.  'Fish With Human Hands Attacked Me!' - one can't help but suspect that the author of this 'true' story had seen the recently released Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) and had decided to make the sexual undertones of the movie more explicit.  The other titles quoted on the cover - 'The Man Who Lived 4,000 Years' and 'The Cane That Kept on Dancing' - sound like the sorts of story you might find in fantasy pulps of the day, albeit here presented as 'true'.

While True Weird had clearly not been a success on the newsstands, the publishers, undeterred, swiftly put out a follow-up, True Strange:

This incarnation of the magazine lasted for seven issues, published between 1957 and 1958.  It's link with True Weird can be seen in its strap line: 'Incredible - Weird - And Factual', while the earlier magazine had described itself as being 'Strange..Fantastic..True'.  The big difference this time around was a focus on celebrity and popular culture - an attempt to cross-pollinate the 'weird' fiction magazine with contemporary scandal mags.  True Strange's approach can be seen in the June 1957 issue's cover, featuring Elvis Presley - 'Did the Devil Send Elvis Presley?', a title designed to tap into yet another market, namely the 'moral majority' types decrying the evils of rock and roll.  The other titles quoted on the cover represent the regular types of subject matter found in mainstream men's magazines - 'primitive' cultures, Hitler and strange religious cults - but with a weird twist: 'The Shrunken Heads That Talk', 'The Strange Mystic Power of Hitler' and 'Snake Worship in America'.  The other issues of True Strange followed a similar pattern, their covers featuring stars such as Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren and James Dean, all headlining stories about their supposed occult or weird links, (in Dean's case, he was apparently 'speaking from beyond the grave' - one heck of an exclusive interview).  

Arguably, True Weird and True Strange were ahead of their time and can perhaps be seen as precursors of the supermarket tabloids of recent times, like the Weekly World News, with their outrageous and obviously made up stories, (many focused on celebrities), presented as fact.  The magazines' publishers, Weider Periodicals, tended to specialise in body building and men's fitness magazines, but also put out some other hybrid men's magazines, which combined the regular genre content with more specialised material like male fitness or outdoor sports, as well as Fury, a more straightforward men's pulp.  True Weird and True Strange were an interesting, if short-lived, attempt to do something different during the peak years of the men's pulp genre, where publisher's increasingly needed to offer something 'different' to have any chance of standing out in an overcrowded market.  Lovers of the weird, however, were already well catered for, either in the form of magazines like Fate, or in fictional form with the various science fiction and fantasy pulps.  When it came to male adventure, however, it seems that werewolves, ghosts and fish men just couldn't complete with the sex, violence and sleaze being served up in the regular men's pulps.