Pulp Resurrection, Slick Death, Bad Mags Remembered

 

 

Details Magazine, DOA.

The world of neo-pulp stand alones has continued unabated during the past few months. Taking up the spaces where real magazines were once slotted are celebrity memorials and other instant books covering whatever happens to be public’s passing fancy. The advantage of these neo pulps is an extended shelf life, a higher than normal mark-up  and a business model not dependent on the plunging advertising market.

It’s a remaindering trend, one which will continue as long as there is still an infrastructure of racks at retail check-out lanes and some population of real magazines to fill in the fakes. Many, including the Wonderblog, have predicted a dismantling of the entire magazine distribution system for some time. And paperbacks and newspapers are going to die, too.

There’s only one problem with this prediction. It hasn’t happened. In fact, there’s been something of a halt to the migration to digital. In general, web things have remained web things and those paper things which have marched off to web land have done so primarily to die.

Case in point is Details, in its last throws a men’s fashion magazine. Details has published its last print issue and is now emailing me. There’s some sort of web thing at the end of this email, but whatever it is seems not to be for long.

In Details place, the fine people at Advance Magazines (also known weirdly as Conde Nast) have offered subscribers an equivalent number of issues of GQ. There are also plans to add four additional issues of GQ, arguably a quarterly, as GQ Fashion. So they’re killing their fashion magazine and doubling the issues of the directionless GQ in even more vapid Fashion Knock Off form. One wonders, if they wanted a men’s fashion magazine, why not stay with the one they had? Seemingly something somewhere has told them that taking a chance on expanding the GQ brand has more value than continuing the Details trademark in even reduced form.

But never fear, Details fans, all of the people behind the print magazine are now safely unemployed. Have been since December. As for the folks at the Details website, the one’s sending me emails, those are GQ staffers. Eventually the Details site will be renamed GQ Fashion and then be subsumed by all that is wonderful on the GQ site.

At the time of its demise, Details was averaging 500K paid circulation, which isn’t bad for a magazine of any kind, but seemingly not up to snuff in Conde Nast land. Obviously I don’t know all of the numbers.  One assumes there is some justification behind ideas such as killing a magazine which half a million people are willing to part with money for ten times a year. Given what the magazine was at the end, it’s amazing that anyone read it. Scuttlebutt in the trades said it was being propped up by a giveaway subscription rate.   

Details problems can be boiled down to three words: Men’s Fashion Magazine. No one wants one. Few men seek out fashion in any form. Those who do, usually like to couch their exposure, getting it in bite sized pieces tangentially. Making men interested in the subject itself, as a focus, has not happened at any time during the industrial age. Hence men’s fashions have not changed that much since the dawn of mass produced photographs. *

The entire appeal of the Men’s Fashion Magazine is to advertisers exclusively. And the idiot idea of doing a women’s magazine for men has been tried before and died before. So why do it again? So why do it at all. Face facts, if you want the eyeballs, you need to give them something they are interested in.

Details did not start off as a fashion magazine. No one with real money on the line would launch in such an obvious non-starter genre as men’s fashion. And Details did not achieve its short-lived critical mass in that guise. Instead, it was an up-scaled bar rag, a what’s happening now publication catering to the New York hipster scene. The elevator pitch is that it was a New York Magazine for the twenty-something set, with more of an emphasis the local music scene and less on real estate.

It should be said that it showed up a tad late to the New Wave party. At that point there were any number of local zines doing pretty much the same thing. If anything, Details was a fat cat funded by fat cats hoovering up a proven formula and spreading it to all of the Big Apple. When the New Wave scene up and died, Details perhaps should have gone with it.

And it sort of did. It stayed relevant by following the audience it attracted as they aged out of hipsterdom. As opposed to a guide to what’s happening now, it became a diversion form itself. It stuck with music and low brow entertainment coverage as its leads, but bulked up with features somewhat patterned after the Village Voice and free weeklies. Details even glommed onto the discarded funnies section of the National Lampoon, which had headed for the exits just as Details was gaining some national traction. Details emerged from its survival dance as a slightly tamer version of Spy Magazine with occasional nods at consumerism.

At that point I think the operators sniffed the wind and sold it out. That’s when the nasty hands of Conde Nast took hold of Details and shook it free of anything interesting it might have accidentally picked up. Conde Nast clearly wanted the demographic and thought they could make it national. The first amputation was New York itself. Instead of attempting to cover the live music scene from coast to coast, they essentially jettisoned the music focus. Then the comic section, at one time popular enough to spawn a television show, was turd canned.** Departments not related to the direct selling of goods (meaning advertising pages) went by the wayside one by one.

All of this left Details as a container for advertising sans contents, save disguised advertorial about the advertising.  That’s not a magazine, that’s junk mail. It made sways at being a younger person’s Rolling Stone sans music and a unisex lad’s mag. To my eyes, it seemed to be targeted at the closeted homosexual. (Much like GQ, in my estimation.) If that was the intent, then it was a poor market choice, since that demographic went into headlong decline.

Much like Details previous evolution, its progress under Conde Nast seems to have been accidental. My thinking is that Details got slated into a channel, forced to triangulate away from the audience served by Conde Nast’s other titles.  It could not be like GQ, Vanity Fair or the New Yorker, could not step on their turfs.  For reasons I cannot fathom, Details halted its swing in the direction of Rolling Stone and Maxim, titles not owned by Conde Nast. (Arguably Vanity Fair covers Rolling Stones’ turf and GQ in some way emulates Maxim.) Since Details had become second string and Conde Nast has a perceived aptitude in selling fashion ads, they went in the direction of least resistance. And that’s how flops are born.

Conde Nast would have been better off leaving Details the way they found it.

Pulp Resurrection

When last we left the story of Dorchester Media, the last pulp publisher of note, they had filed for liquidation. The firm had continued on for years by stiffing the writers of its paperback line out of royalties and shovel-waring reprints into its field of pulps. A major magazine distributer had folded shop, owing Dorchester two million dollars. A new CEO had been brought into Dorchester to ring out the till one final time and sell its assets. The website no longer worked. Even the person who answered their phones had no idea what was going on.

Discontinued were the last of the pulps, long running romance titles True Story, Secrets, True Experience, True Confessions and True Love. In the end these titles were shunted off, along with an unsold inventory of paperback novels, to something calling itself True Renditions. And for a time a less than dynamic website was all that remained.

They’re back!

I would have announced this earlier, but I had no evidence until last week. I have spent the better part of three years looking for these titles on newsstands from sea to shining sea. Last week True Confessions finally made a showing at the Walgreens in Palatine, IL. And I dutifully scooped myself up an issue.

At the time they went dark, the collective now dubbed “The Trues” had a combined circulation of two million copies a month. Split between five magazines, it’s nothing on a Conde Nast scale, but when compared to Ellery Queens and the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, it’s a giant. They were the highest circulation short fiction magazines in the United States, the top five, each larger than all of the other magazines in the field combined.

And yet they had still died. As with the True Crime pulps, the fault was not in their appeal, but rather in their owners. The True Crime pulps folded because they were all owned by a single publisher. When that publisher’s other interests went sour, all of the True Crime pulps were cancelled. Unlike the True Crime titles, now owned by Macfadden successor American Media/National Enquirer, the True Love pulps have found themselves a white knight.

As white knights go, True Renditions is a tad slow footed. It’s a little unclear what business they are in. They seem to have loped around in the no profits ever e-book business, then meandered on over to the selling Dorchester’s inventory of old paperbacks and have now gotten around to actually issuing the magazines again. Money is money and they didn’t seem to have much. No one is going to lend you money to print magazines. So if it has taken them a number of years to get solvent enough to print, it’s no sin. I am hoping that they can recapture some of their previous circulation.

True Renditions has only revived True Story and True Confession, thus far. They seem to have rights to Best of Secrets, but it’s only being offered as an e-book archive. *** From what I can tell, they seem to have been printing for about a year. These magazines have historically been subscription driven, so they may have started out attempting to reactivate their old rolls. Actually appearing back on newsstands, at least as far as Illinois, seems to be a new advent.

Both True Story and True Confessions are making it a point to run new material and the website is soliciting submissions. All of this is a vast improvement over the performance of the previous custodians.

Traditionally magazine lines are built by coming up with a formula that works and then knocking off enough of it to fill demand. When it comes to True Confessions, it’s a venerable and proven genre—and not one likely to be spirited off by other media. For True Renditions, the challenge will be in determining how many titles the market will accommodate. Like comic book readers, True Confessions consumers will buy more than one magazine a month. To get the most out of this potential wallet, you need at least two titles on the stands at all times. True Confessions lists itself as monthly currently. Historically these magazines have been eight times a year. The weird arithmetic of pulps is that you are better off with three eight issue a year titles than you are with two monthlies. We will see how their experiment pans out.  It might also help them to pick up a national bookseller.

Dorchester seemed to have been fixated on getting as much out of their trademarks and old story inventory as they could. Where they seem to have gone wrong was with the paperback format. Paperbacks aren’t doing any better than magazines currently. And short story collections have seldom sold on a retail level. True Renditions doesn’t seem to be getting that much mileage out of its e-book format, either. Given the value of their flagship titles, there seems to be plenty of opportunity for themed, reprint filled anthologies in one shot neo pulp format.. Examples: True Confessions Political Scandals. True Story Girls In Crime, Best of Secrets Alien Romantic Encounters.  The sky’s the limit.

True Story and True Confessions are the obvious choices to lead a revival in the field. True Story is the oldest of the titles and the one with the most historic draw. True Confessions has the strongest title, axiomatic with the entire genre. Both magazines are essentially the same, chock full of sob story girl glop topped with salacious and off color detail. They are wall to wall politically incorrect melodrama in twenty minute to an hour chunks. It’s the formula that floated a hundred titles at one time and one hopes that there is room in this world left for two. We here at the Wonderblog root them on with vigor.

Remembering the Bad Mags

We’re not quite as optimistic about the direction of Lad Mags like Maxim. Even now that Maxim seems to be the only one left (excluding Hooters). At first the Lad Mags started to look like what the old Men’s Adventure pulps did in their final phases, sans fiction. They all featured not quite naked women flouncing around amidst text touting motorcycle accessories and the latest innovations in craft beer. We kept waiting for the emergence of a fiction section, perhaps to give the not quite clad ladies something to illustrate. Or the occasional long form war correspondence or expose. None of that has appeared. Instead, Maxim has reacted to Playboy putting clothes on their women by having Maxim’s models being clad in less and less. Nothing full frontal, but plenty of unclad buns. As trends go, I am not sure what it means.

Maxim at least has also become the repository of article work which can’t seem to find a home anywhere else. Sadly this stuff gets shoved to the rear of the rag and printed in a type font size reserved for boxed cake mix ingredients. Some of it has been war coverage, but most of it has been oddball pop nostalgia.

The current issue of Maxim carries just such a feature on the old Bad Mag Soldier of Fortune.  For those of you who don’t remember it, Soldier of Fortune was sort of a war pulp. It was arguably aimed at professional mercenaries, but actually had a readership of security guards, military men and off balance gun knuckleheads. Besides glamorizing murder for hire, the magazine provided gonzo like coverage of dirty little wars in Central America and Africa. For foreign affairs fans, it disclosed the other side of the diplomatic policy coin. To that extent, it had a lot of value.

It had a fandom consisting mostly of the mentally ill. Like High Times and Hustler, being caught reading a copy of Soldier of Fortune marked one as a special kind of person. I hadn’t seen a copy of the thing in years and assumed that it had dried up and blown away.

Well, as Maxim’s fine piece discloses, it mostly has. The fine founder of the rag has now found himself a position in the upper reaches of the NRA.  The magazine itself has a staff of three and has taken to reprinting web blogs for its features. Soldier of Fortune’s current circulation wasn’t disclosed, but it seems to have been having newsstand distribution problems for the last decade or so.

A somewhat dismal end to a dubious enterprise. The entire piece is a nostalgic saying good bye to something that wasn’t all that revered in its heyday.  In the end it read like a version of What If Hugh Heffner Had Been A Failure. And it might have been the most interesting thing in Maxim that issue.

Notes:

*Changes in Men’s Fashion over the past one hundred or so years can be boiled down to whether or not to wear a hat and what kind of hat to wear and whether or not to wear a tie and what proportions the tie should be. In the end, the hats lost. Tie wearing is dependent on economic conditions. While Men’s Fashion isn’t entirely static, when compared to the routine head to toe upheavals on the female side of the rags biz, it is downright stationary. The typical man’s enthusiasm for such is fairly minimal.

**The comic strip was called Wild Palms, which spawned a mini series  of the same name starring… Jim Belushi. Remember mini-series? Remember Jim Belushi? (The joke in Hollywood was that he was the luckiest man alive.) The strip itself was near future science fiction, using the premise that the Japanese would soon be taking over the world. (This was a popular notion at the time and also part of the back story for the role playing game Shadowrun.) It was a fine piece of America in decline paranoia, with plenty of odd ball and freighting scenes all of which led to a climax which unraveled into gibberish, Watchmen style. It certainly brought a lot of attention to Details. No sooner had the series aired when Details started shedding its more entertaining features, including the comics section.

***I do intend to follow up with True Renditions to get the entirety of their story. I’m not sure if they own True Experience, True Romance or True Love.

Final Note One: I am going to give GQ a chance. I like the layout, even though it is a tad Vanity Fair sub literate. The cover feature Starring Nobel Prize Winner For Physical Perfection Ronaldo is not promising, however. “Super-Size Me! We Have Huge News About Your Manhood” had better be actionable.

Final Note Two: We are going to be doing some follow up postings in the next few weeks. I’ve let an assortment issues drop. And I’ve been quite wrong about a few things so it’s time to fess up.