Fish With Human Hands Attacked Me! (True Weird magazine)
As cartoon Leonard Nimoy said in an episode of The Simpsons: “The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth?” The word “true” is frequently used in marketing to literally add a veneer of verisimilitude to whatever is being sold. Magazine titles with “true” in the title include the long-running True, True Action, True Confessions, True Crime, True Detective, True Experience, True Love Stories, True Romances, True War, and True West, to name a few. Also, True Weird and True Strange, the subjects of today’s desconstructive criticism.
Setting aside the odd-sounding titles, which consist of two adjectives but no subject (the titles aren’t True Weird Stories or True Strange Tales, for instance), these two relatively short-lived magazines are notable chiefly for their provenance (published by a body-builder), their prescience (foreshadowing future publications dealing with “weird but true” events), and their interesting covers (of primary interest to us).
True Weird and True Strange were published by Joe Weider, a body-builder and fitness guru born in Canada in 1919. In the 1930s he started selling nutritional supplements and in 1940 began his magazine career with Your Physique. As time went on, he sold body-building books and courses, and expanded his publishing empire with physical culture magazines like Mr. America, All American Athlete, Muscle Builder, American Manhood, and Junior Mr. America. Weider branched out into other genres as well, issuing Animal Life, Fury, Outdoor Adventures, Jem, and Monsieur (the latter two were Playboy-esque girlie magazines), and historical magazines such as Armchair General and Civil War Times in the 1980s . He died in 2013 and is survived by his wife Betty (who, as Betty Brosmer, was an incredible glamour model in the 1950s).
True Weird lasted 3 issues, and was apparently (if not strictly technically) succeeded by True Strange, which ran for 7 issues. True Strange followed mostly the same format as its predecessor: “true” stories about historical oddities, ghosts, and so forth. The cover of True Weird’s second issue depicted Abraham Lincoln (the other 2 covers are the one we’re looking at today, and the one with a large image of the Devil), while 6 of the 7 True Strange covers (all painted by Thomas Beecham) featured contemporary celebrities: Elvis Presley (twice--one solo cover and sharing a cover with Bill Haley), Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg, Bill Haley, and James Dean. This was probably an attempt to improve newsstand sales, although trying to connect these people with the supernatural was a stretch in some cases (“Did the Devil Send Elvis Presley?”, “The Weird Sex Magnetism of Anita Ekberg” and “The Miracle That Made Sophia Loren a Star”) but easier in others (“James Dean Speaks from the Grave”). True Weird’s covers, on the other hand, seemed aimed at readers interested in more esoteric topics.
True Weird’s first issue, shown here, was dated November 1955. One writer calls it “an exuberantly trashy magazine that offered articles on historical oddities and mysteries.” The cover is a trash-literature classic, showing a bikini-clad woman surrounded by “Fish With Human Hands.”
This cover was painted by Clarence Doore (who also painted the “Abraham Lincoln’s ghost” cover for True Weird #2). Doore, born in Montreal in 1913, moved to the United States with his parents as a child (his parents were both U.S. citizens). Doore began working as an illustrator in the late 1930s, serving in the Army during World War II. He painted covers for pulps, comic books, paperback books, and men’s magazines, retiring in 1966. Doore died in 1988.
Doore, although not a household name (not even in households where pop culture artists’ names are common currency), has a solid reputation even today: a cursory online search brings up a number of references to him and examples of his work. His cover painting for True Weird’s first issue is quite popular on the web: numerous bloggers snark on it and numerous image sites reproduce it. It was never immortalised in a song by Frank Zappa in the manner of Wil Hulsey’s painting “Weasels Ripped My Flesh” (first seen on the cover of Man’s Life, September 1956), but it’s still well known among aficionados of such things. The original painting sold for $18,750 in a 2015 auction (none of 7 other Doore paintings sold by Heritage Auctions went for more than $3,000 and several sold for less than $1,000).
The True Weird cover is fine, well-rendered and dramatic. It combines horror and sex, a familiar and effective combination in popular culture. “Nature attacks” covers on men’s magazines--like Man’s Life mentioned above--seem to be slightly tilted towards rugged outdoorsmen battling hostile weasels, crabs, turtles, rats, bats, sea snakes, spiders, baboons, wildcats, scorpions and so on. On some of the covers a woman-in-peril is also present, and a relatively small percentage feature a woman as the primary or sole target of ferocious fauna. “Monster attacks” artwork, on the other hand, often specialises in female victims. Doore’s cover shows only one person, a young woman wearing a red bikini, confronted by 2 fish-men. “Nature attacks” covers, even those featuring a female victim, usually portray the predators as solely interested in killing the human(s) in their midst, whether to eat them or simply out of savage spite. “Monster attacks” illustrations, on the other hand, often have an inherent undertone of sexuality. So file “Fish With Human Hands Attacked Me!” in the “Monster attacks” genre.
The fish-men on the magazine’s cover are partially obscured by water and mist; the story’s main illustration (drawn by Warren Knight, scroll down) inside this issue of True Weird shows a single fish-man--who does resemble Doore’s version--standing upright, suggesting the creature is a true fish-man (with arms and legs), not just a “fish with human hands.” As I discussed in a previous post, 1954’s Creature from the Black Lagoon helped popularise the fish-man (or frog-man) in popular culture.
One odd point is the fish-men’s eyes. Those horizontal, slit-like pupils give me the creeps. Seriously, goats have pupils like that, and they bother me as well. The Creature from the Black Lagoon has round pupils, why don’t these fish-men? The interior illustration depicts its creature with similar eyes, suggesting either the original story describes them thusly, or Doore & Knight collaborated on the imagery of the fish-man (i.e., one of them used the other’s artwork as a model).
The cover painting differs significantly from the interior artwork: Doore’s woman-in-peril is clearly a contemporary skin diver, given her bikini, face mask, and spear-gun, whereas Knight’s drawing shows a single monster grabbing a woman in 16th -century (I’m guessing) garb, as an armour-clad conquistador and four other men attempt to rescue her. The caption says the scene takes place on a “lonely Nicaraguan beach,” during the Spanish Conquest period. None of this is reflected in the cover painting, of course, presumably because the editors figured a modern setting for a fish-man assault on a woman would sell more copies of True Weird. However, Knight’s interior drawing does make the fish-man’s intention slightly clearer: he’s abducting the woman, possibly for nefarious & sexy purposes, whereas the two menacing fish-men on the magazine’s front cover might only be considering murdering the young woman (and then eating her, or not).
In Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Gill-man’s attraction to Julia Adams is romantic, if not (for biological reasons) sexual. Humanoids from the Deep (1980) depicts fish-men who kill men and rape (some) women, romance be damned. Having not read the “Fish With Human Hands Attacked Me!” story, I don’t know what the fish-man’s purpose was, but some human-like motivation is assumed. It’s not just their hands that are human, if you get my drift.
It’s a bit of a mystery why the first issue of True Weird has a gaudy, exploitative cover, and the second and third issues have more strait-laced artwork on their covers (if you can call a giant Devil looming over a stylised medieval city “strait-laced”). True Weird almost appears to have deliberately walked back from the policy of their eye-catching first issue, choosing a more sedate, “serious” tone. Sales may have played a factor: issue 1 was cover-dated November 1955, #2 February 1956, and #3 May 1956, giving the editors enough time to review the sales figures for each preceding issue. One supposes the news wasn’t good--True Weird folded, and True Strange wouldn’t appear until October 1956, at which time the Weider group made the decision to showcase current celebrities on the covers (James Dean, on the cover of the March 1957 issue, had died in September 1955 but was possibly even more famous after his death than while he was alive).
If you ask me, a more powerful sales gimmick would have been to showcase publisher Weider’s wife Betty Brosmer on every cover. One month she could have been a sexy witch, then a sexy vampire, then a sexy werewolf, then a sexy zombie, then a sexy ghost, then a sexy fish-woman…
