CHARLES COPELAND MAGAZINES

MAGAZINES SECTION DIRECTORY

II. MEN'S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES

MEN November 1956

There are over 500 magazines with Copeland illustrations on this checklist, but the editors at Magazine Management recycled art (and stories) wherever and whenever they could, so some of that number are duplicates.  When Heritage Art Auctions offered Copeland's original art for "House of Hostage Frauleins" from MALE June 1966, the notes in the margins of the painting showed three different magazines the same art had been used in. (ACTION FOR MEN May 1968 and TRUE ACTION December 1970 are the other two.) Later, a fourth appearance turned up on the cover of a 1971 MALE ANNUAL.

Charles Copeland started working for publisher Martin Goodman at Lion Books in 1955.  As far as I've been able to discover, this was his first credited job as a commercial artist after moving to New York City. He was soon offered work as an illustrator for Goodman's men's adventure magazines like MEN and MALE and STAG.  With his versatility and speed, Copeland was a good fit for this assignment. He turned out a wide variety of illustrations over the next 18 years.  He left the world of the men's adventure magazines only when the genre began to die out in the mid 1970s.  A few of the other regulars like Norem and Minney held on but gradually all art was replaced by color nude photography as the very nature of these unique magazines changed.

This is the first draft of a work in progress.  As I learned from longtime collectors, nobody has seen every one of the thousands of men's adventure magazines churned out during the decades after World War II.  I am sure there are Copeland appearances I simply have not encountered yet, so if you have or find any other magazines with Charles Copeland art, please contact me. 

With a list of this size some semblance of order is necessary, so I've chosen to list the magazines alphabetically instead of in the order Copeland painted them all. 


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