Blokes Mags

LADS MAGS: UK Mens Magazines Subscriptions
Phew ok, it was a tough task but I did it. There’s loads of mags for blokes out there and oddly enough they tend to be a tad more interesting than girls magazines that go on about hair, makeup, who has a sweat rash or who cheated on who. Here are a few personal favourites that you can subscribe to online and conveniently get them delivered straight to your door!

2009 Subscriptions

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About FHM:

FHM or For Him Magazine is an international monthly Men’s Lifestyle magazine. The magazine began publication in 1985 in the United Kingdom under the name For Him and changed its title to FHM in 1994, although the full For Him Magazine continues to be printed on the spine of each issue. Founded by Chris Astridge, the magazine was a predominantly fashion-based publication distributed through high street men’s fashion outlets. Circulation expanded to newsagents as a quarterly by the spring of 1987. FHM was sold from EMAP to Bauer in December 2007.

After the emergence of James Brown’s Loaded magazine (regarded as the blueprint for the lad’s mag genre), For Him firmed up its editorial approach to compete with the expanding market and introduced a sports supplement. It then went monthly and changed its name to FHM. It subsequently expanded internationally.

The magazine is printed on high quality glossy paper and the photography is of high technical quality.[1] FHM became one of the best-selling magazines in Britain during the mid to late 1990s, selling more than 700,000 copies per month by 1999[1]. Towards the end of the decade the lads’ culture in which the magazine thrived began to die off and publishers turned to celebrity-oriented titles to boost overall sales.

In December 2006 it was announced that FHM will be discontinuing its United States print edition after the March 2007 issue, turning to an all-digital format with the launch of FHM Online.

About GQ

(originally Gentlemen’s Quarterly) is a monthly men’s magazine focusing upon fashion, style, and culture for men, through articles on food, movies, fitness, sex, music, travel, sports, technology, and books.

It is generally perceived as upscale and more sophisticated than lad mags, such as Maxim or FHM.

About Loaded

Loaded was founded in 1994 by James Brown, a former deputy editor of the music weekly New Musical Express. In its early days, the magazine’s readership was once memorably described as “50% Sun readers and 50% Guardian readers”. Brown has described the irreverent comic Viz as an inspiration for Loaded (and he later bought the comic when he founded the company I Feel Good). Brown’s fanzine ‘Attack On Bzag’ can be seen as a precursor for ‘Loaded’ and music journalist John Robb’s ‘Rox’ fanzine which heavily influenced Brown and ‘Loaded’ with its frenetic style and full on humour with endless captions underneath photos.

Loaded captured the lad culture of the 1990s like no other magazine; its glorification of British male “rogues” (Liam Gallagher, Oliver Reed, Paul Gascoigne etc.) was only outstripped by its fondness for titillating photoshoots with nubile C-, B-, and occasionally A-list celebrities. However, early covers led on male icons for film and TV – Gary Oldman was on the first cover.

The Loaded style has been cloned numerous times, most obviously by Emap’s FHM and Maxim, which became the biggest-selling men’s magazine in the US for Dennis Publishing. Loaded also influenced women’s monthlies, with Emap launching Minx, “For girls with a lust for life”. In January 2004, IPC launched the weekly Nuts, announced as the world’s first men’s weekly, and Emap quickly followed with Zoo.

In 2007, Loaded was voted 49th in Industry website goodmagazine.com’s Top 51 Magazines of All Time list, for the “Smartest, Prettiest, Coolest, Funniest, Most Influential, Most Necessary, Most Important, Most Essential, etc.” Despite its influence, sales have dropped in recent years. In the first six months of 2007, Loaded recorded a 35% drop in circulation compared to the first half of 2006.

Deputy editor Tim Southwell wrote about the early years of Loaded in Getting Away With It (Ebury Press, 1998). James Brown discussed the title at length and the impact it had on ’90s culture in the documentary Live Forever: The Rise and Fall of Brit Pop.

About Nuts

Nuts is a weekly lad mag published in the United Kingdom. It was the first weekly lads magazine to be published in the UK and is sold every Tuesday (originally every Thursday). The marketing campaign cheekily claims “Women, don’t expect any help on a Tuesday”.

This magazine has no connection with the former US satire magazine or Japanese manga magazine of the same title[citation needed].

Many notable journalists make up the Nuts editorial team, including editor Dominic Smith (FHM), Deputy Editor Nick Soldinger (Now, Loaded), Art Director Simon Freeborough (FHM), Editor-At-Large Pete Cashmore (Loaded, The Guardian, NME, Marie Claire, Eve) and Frank Tennyson (Shoot).

About Zoo

Zoo Magazine is a magazine based in Berlin, Germany and was created in 2004. It focuses on fashion, art, literature and architecture and is published four times a year. The predominantly German based subject matter has recently expanded into a more international context and the magazine is now published in both English and German.

Its support for photography has attracted the some of best fashion photographers in the world, such as: Steven Klein, Donald McPherson, David La Chapelle, Terry Richardson, Nobuyoshi Araki, Hedi Slimane and Karl Lagerfeld. Bryan Adams photographs for the magazine as well.

About Bizarre

Bizarre is a self-described “alternative” and “non-mainstream” magazine. It is a sister publication to Fortean Times. It has no connection to the fetish publication also known as “Bizarre” published between 1946-1959.

The magazine has a wide variety of features and articles which include unusual news events from around the world, drug usage, different types of fetishistic and deviant behavior, interviews with famous counterculture figures and showcases of cult directors, musicians and authors. Bizarre has also covered legislation regarding sex offences and civil liberties (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, the fallout from Operation Spanner, legislation banning “extreme pornography” and The Terrorism Act 2000, for example ) , along with issues issues like censorship and human rights abuses, both domestically and abroad. It has also started a campaign to raise awareness of prejudice towards subcultures following the murder of Sophie Lancaster.

However, from the start the publication had much in common with more mainstream lad’s mags, typically featuring a semi-nude female model on the front cover, gratuitous nude photography (overwhelmingly of women) in special sealed ‘x rated’ sections inside, and frequent reviews of weird gadgets, films, music, and websites. Though the gadgets in question are more likely to be items like flickknives, strap on dildos, whips, drug paraphernalia and fetish clothing, among other things. They also regularly cover outsider art, the avant-garde and the Cinema of Transgression in their art and music reviews.

Bizarre was launched as a bimonthly title by John Brown Publishing in February 1997 and was edited by Fiona Jerome. It was an immediate success and changed to monthly issuance a year after its launch. Circulation peaked at over 120,000 in 2000 but has since declined. In 2000 the title was sold to “I Feel Good” (IFG), a company founded by former Loaded editor James Brown (no relation to soul music icon James Brown), for approximately £5million. When IFG collapsed, Bizarre was acquired by Dennis Publishing. Its current editor is David McComb.

About Viz

Viz is a popular British comic magazine which has been running since 1979.

The comic’s style parodies the strait-laced British comics of the post-war period, notably The Beano and The Dandy, but with incongruous language, crude toilet humour, black comedy and either sexual or violent storylines. It also sends up tabloid newspapers, with mockeries of articles and letters pages. It features competitions and advertisements for overpriced ‘limited edition’ tat, such as a cat which “shits its own weight in gold”, as well as obsessions with half-forgotten celebrities from the 1970s and 1980s such as Shakin’ Stevens and Rodney Bewes. Occasionally, it satirises current events and politicians, but has no particular political standpoint. Its success has led to the appearance of numerous rivals crudely copying the format Viz pioneered; none of them has managed seriously to challenge its popularity. It once enjoyed being the fourth most popular magazine in the UK, but circulation has since dropped to just over 300,000 (from 1.2 million). This is mainly because its comic remit has become broader and its format more commonplace, but also partly due to the fact that price has increased sharply to £3 (as of issue 178) and it is now published ‘monthly’ ten times a year. The falling circulation and rising cover price are often referenced in the comic itself, often by disgruntled contributors to the letters page.

Some of its comedic devices, for example, generating the illusion of an entire comic-strip “universe” with a “one-off” strip, often based on a surrealistic pun, were widely employed in the earlier and now-defunct American humour magazine National Lampoon, which was itself more or less a sophisticated version of Mad Magazine.

In a recently released coffee table book celebrating 25 years of Viz, cartoonist Graham Dury is quoted as saying: “We pride ourselves on the fact that you’re no cleverer when you’ve read Viz. You might have had a few laughs, but you’ve not learnt anything”.