Much as once a week I like to take time off to cover warships (Wednesdays), on Sunday, I like to cover military art and the painters, illustrators, sculptors, and the like that produced them.
Combat Gallery Sunday : The Martial Art of Bruce Minney
West Coast artist Bruce Minney was born October 2, 1928 and in 1946 was accepted to the prestigious California School of Arts and Crafts. However, after graduation work as a firefighter left him unfulfilled artistically so in 1955 he packed up the family and moved to the mecca of advertising, paperback and pulp publishing production– New York City.
Soon he began producing cover and illustration art for a number of men’s magazines ranging from Stag, For Men Only, Male, True Action, Man’s World, New Man and later National Lampoon while also churning out a staggering 400 paperback covers over the next 30 years.
His populist hyperrealist style, while similar to that of Mort Knustler and others, is unique although sadly some of Minney’s work has actually become kinda synonymous with 1960s kitschy kink— but in the end has been embraced and preserved, so put that in your politically correct pipe and smoke it!
Voyage to the Forgotten World, Mens magazine cover
Stag cover, June 1959
Cover for “Voyage to Somewhere” 1970 paperback
Last Man on Luzon
The Boston Medic Who Wrecked Germany’s Slave Colony – For Men Only, May 1961
Homestead steel strike STAG-Dec-1965
MALE – 1960
The Wild Raid Of Gibbon’s Lace Panty Commandos, Mans Book cover
Tonight We Hit The Nazis’ Torture Train 3695, New Man cover
Vile Secrets Of Hitler’s Hideous Torture Rites
The winner of numerous awards and the shaper of men and boys for a generation or better, he died on August 5, 2013.
Extensive collections of his work are online at Mens Pulp Mags and Pulp Covers while (Bruce’s son-in-law) Thomas Ziegler’s Bruce Minney: The Man Who Painted Everything book is about the best source of information there is on the man and his works.
Thank you for your work, sir.
