Chicks with guns

Spicy-Adventure Stories, August 1937

The guys that ran the European-Sino-Japanese wars definitely had the right idea of how to go about a conflict. I'd re-enlist today if I thought I'd be fighting along side really gorgeous, nearly-nude babes firing machine-guns.

You can tell she's a Spicy-Adventure heroine who don't take any crap. Her clothes are dramatically torn to shreds while GI Joe next to her looks like he just got his uniform out of the cleaners.

The Spicy magazine titles, of which there were several, usually depicted a woman in some state of undress beyond what was normally appeared on the cover art of other pulp magazines. From late 1935 through late 1937, most issues appeared in two different versions. One uncensored and the other self-censored. The censored version was identifiable by a star within a box located at the top of the cover. The story is that many of these type of pulps were sold behind from behind the counter and were not openly displayed. Apparently a few years before, thousands of pulps were seized and destroyed as obscene by a crazed minority of busy-bodies forcing their false Victorian-era double-standards of morality on the majority.

A majority who, by the way, were free to work, pay mortgages & bills, raise families and send those family members off to a foreign war but can't be trusted to read a book with a risque cover.

Much like today...

The Spicy (name changed later to Speed) line:

• Spicy-Adventure
• Spicy-Detective
• Spicy-Mystery
• Spicy-Western