Weasels Ripped My Flesh

Weasels Ripped My Flesh was the cover story and art for the September 1956 issue of Man's Life magazine.

As crazy as this magazine cover may sound today, this kind of heavily illustrated pulp tale was the staple of Outdoor Life and Field and Stream in my youth, and was pretty common in Reader's Digest as well .



I suppose in the minds of New York City magazine editors, contract writers, and professional illustrators, a hunter was supposed to be equal parts Daniel Boone, Frank Buck, and William Tell.

All you had to do was cobble up a story, add a jaw-dropping illustration, and presto-change-o, you had an epic tale of Dominion Over Nature.

The secret to sales, of course, was that a lot of Men's Magazine readers had actually spent very little time in field or forest. In central Ohio, no one was getting eaten by Grizzlies, but maybe in Idaho or Alaska that was occurring on a daily basis. In the era before the Internet, who knew?

For the record (pun intended) the magazine illustration at top was riffed into an album title by Frank Zappa and the The Mothers Of Invention.