I Watched Them Eat Me Alive is the first installment of The Men's Adventure Library Journal, a series focusing on specific facets of the vintage men's adventure magazines stories, artwork, and history.
Dedicated to exploring the lost world of vintage men's adventure magazines (aka MAMs), The Men's Adventure Library chronicles the mags' three decades on American newsstands, from the early 1950s through the mid-1970s. Mixing elements from many sources--early pulp fiction, detective stories and true crime, mystery and noir films, exotic travel magazines, celebrity scandal rags and bachelor mags--MAMs ratcheted up the tension and amped up the testosterone to create explosive, entertaining, and often outrageous reading for millions of American men. Though long extinct and mostly unseen for generations, their pervasive influence continues to shape some of the most popular and enduring pop culture tropes and trends.
Curated by MAM historian/collector Robert Deis and writer Wyatt Doyle, The Men's Adventure Library reprints and provides context for classic MAM stories and artwork drawn from the mags' rich history of gonzo pulp, with releases available in full-color trade paperback and deluxe, expanded hardcover editions. Each volume is a vivid reminder that MAMs were extremely cool, unexpectedly influential, and still pack a bare-knuckle punch. Read 'em all...if you've got the guts!
In his younger days, ROBERT DEIS explored various options for making a living. Among other things, he worked as a teacher, an artist, a musician, a logger in the Maine woods, a magazine writer and a state government bureaucrat. Eventually (by accident rather than design) he fell into a long-lasting career as a political consultant. Nowadays, he blogs and writes about things that interest him, such as famous quotations and men's adventure magazines. Bob grew up in the decades when men's adventure magazines were flourishing, but he didn't take much notice of them until he read the 2004 book MEN'S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES IN POSTWAR AMERICA, which features the amazing art and magazine collection of Rich Oberg. That inspired him to start collecting and studying men's adventure magazines. In 2009, he created the MensPulpMags.com blog. Through that, he met other fans of the genre, including Rich Oberg, Wyatt Doyle and Josh Alan Friedman, who all agree that what the world needs now is greater exposure to the wild, weird world of men's adventure pulp fiction and pulp art.
WYATT DOYLE is co-founder of New Texture, and launched their publishing imprint in 2006. He assisted Georgina Spelvin in the publication of her memoir, THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT, and served as editor and publisher of BLACK CRACKER by Josh Alan Friedman for his own imprint, Wyatt Doyle Books. He is co-editor and designer of The Men's Adventure Library series of pulp fiction anthologies. A collection of his stories illustrated by Stanley J. Zappa, STOP REQUESTED, is available from New Texture, as are his photography collections, DOLLAR HALLOWEEN and I NEED REAL TUXEDO AND A TOP HAT! A collaboration with Jimmy Angelina, THE LAST COLORING BOOK, was released in 2016.
