THE ART OF SAMSON POLLEN

Men’s adventure magazines (MAMS, for short) and paperback books were two of the best markets for illustration artists during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

- Robert Deis

Samson Pollen, who passed away in December of 2018 at age 87, was one of the grandmasters of both MAM illustrations and paperback cover art.

A few years before he died, I contacted Pollen to ask if he’d be willing to let me publish a book showcasing his original illustration, as part of the “Men’s Adventure Library” book series I edit with Wyatt Doyle. He was, and we soon discovered that Sam had done enough MAM and paperback artwork to fill several books.

We published two before he died: Pollen’s Women, which focuses on MAM artwork he created that features images of alluring female characters, and Pollen’s Action, which focuses on scenes he painted for some of the wild action/adventure stories that appeared in the MAM genre. He also gave us scores of examples of his paperback cover art.

There were two periods in his career when Pollen did paperback cover paintings. The first was from the early 1950s to 1960. During the ’60s, he primarily did artwork for MAMs. As they began to fade away, he focused on paperback covers again from the late ’60s to the mid-’90s.

Pollen was born in the Bronx on March 19, 1931. His family moved to Brooklyn when he was 11. From an early age, he showed a talent for artwork. This was noticed by a high school teacher who helped him get enrolled at the venerable National Academy of Design in Manhattan. There he was taken under the wing of the school’s Dean, Charles Louis Hinton, a legendary painter, sculptor, book illustrator and muralist.