Men’s Adventure Paintings By Gil Cohen

The PopCult Bookshelf

Gil Cohen: Inside/Out Archive Collection
Covers and Illustrations From Vintage Men’s Adventure Magazines 
Art by Gil Cohen
edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle
New Texture
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1943444731
$45.95

Gil Cohen: Inside/Out is an unexpected treat. It’s a treasure trove of the work that celebrated Aviation Artist, Gil Cohen, created from the 1950s to the 1970s when he was a freelance artist working for several of the top Men’s Adventure Magazines.

The Men’s Adventure Magazines were something that probably has to be explained to most folks younger than fifty. These sucessors to the vaunted “Pulp” magazines of the 1930s and 40s were magazines aimed at men, but they weren’t quite porn. In hindsight, they seem raunchy and innocent at the same time. Most of the time they told testosterone-fueled stories of big, strapping men fighting against all odds, much of the time accompanied by a dame in a bikini or her underwear.

They were soaked with a type of salaciousness that, by today’s standards, seems almost wholesome. This much over-the-top masculinity, which wasn’t quite as toxic as what we see today, is sort of charming. Aside from the more lurid stories, there was a lot of WWII adventures, and fighting wild animals. It’s fun stuff if you don’t mind the total lack of political correctness and the delightfully dated references.

But this book is not about those magazines, per se. The one feature that the Men’s Adventure Mags had that makes them so remarkable was that they featured spectacular painted covers and inner illustrations. This is where commercial art elevated itself to the level of fine art, and in the Men’s Adventure Mags, they did it without the pretentiousness or marketing savvy of the Pop Art movement, which was happening concurrently to the heyday of this type of adventure illustration.

This book is dedicated to one of the top Men’s Adventure Magazine illustrators, Gil Cohen, who went on to do several movie posters and over 100 paperback covers for the Mack Bolan: Executioner series, before turning his focuse to Military and Aviation Art, where he is considered a master, with several works hanging at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, as well as at the Pentagon.

This book, the first in a projected series, is an overview of Cohen’s work in the Men’s Adventure field (there have been several collections of his other art), and it’s stunning.

This is work that was created under intense deadline pressure. Yet, Cohen’s artistic ability and professionalism shine through. He managed to take deliberately sensational stories, filled with lurid details and PG-rated prurient interests and illustrate them with beautifully-composed and expertly-deliniated flash.

Most of the time, the illustrations were much, much better than the stories they depicted.

Cohen is 94 years old, and I believe he’s still painting. He’s been interviewed extensively for future volumes in this series, which will present his work in chronological order, but this first entry is an incredibly generous sampler of his entire Men’s Adventure career.

We get to see how Cohen manages to tell a story in a single illustration that conveys more emotion and attracts more readers than the prose that accompanies it. This book opens the door to a whole world of amazing art that hasn’t been exposed to enough people.

Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle have curated a wonderful collection of Cohen’s art, and I’m really looking forward to see more entries in this series.

Fans of fine illustration, great art and retro pop culture will love this book.

You can order Gil Cohen: Inside/Out directly from the publisher (along with a vast array of other books devoted to Men’s Adventure Mags) or from Amazon, or try ordering it from your local bookseller using the ISBN code.

We’ll leave you with the publisher’s blurb:

Planes, combat, intrigue, action, and exotic adventure of every kind!

Archive Collection is the opening salvo in the Men’s Adventure Library’s most ambitious endeavor yet: Gil Cohen: Inside/Out, a multi-volume series collecting the men’s adventure magazine (aka MAM) work of legendary illustrator Gil Cohen.

Most famous for his aviation art masterpieces and cover paintings for Don Pendleton’s Mack Bolan / The Executioner series of action paperbacks, Cohen began his career as an illustrator working for the wildly popular men’s adventure magazines (aka MAMs) of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, where he cut his teeth illustrating some of the wildest and most explosive adventure fiction of the era.

The first installment in the Inside/Out series is the Archive Collection, is a deluxe hardcover packed with some of the most explosive work Cohen created for the magazines, spread across three decades of publication. All images are drawn from the famed MAM archive of the book’s co-editor, Robert Deis, and the book is printed using the finest paper and printing options available to us.

This big, beautiful 8.5″ x 11″, 148-page full color casewrap hardcover launches our Gil Cohen: Inside/Out series, with further deluxe volumes to follow.