Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: Matt Baker, St. John Publications

Matt Baker Artwork in St. John's Nugget Magazine #1, Up for Auction

St. John launched men's magazine Nugget shortly after publisher Archer St. John's death in 1955. The debut issue included Matt Baker artwork.

Typically referred to as "a sort of high-class Playboy," Nugget magazine, as developed by Archer St. John, included photos of beautiful women along with illustrated fiction, cartoons, and other features targeting a male audience.  As the magazine's submission guidelines in Author and Journalist stated, Nugget's fiction material focused on "off-beat stories with strong writing an plots to appeal to adult male audience, also earthly and humorous stories." Of course, Matt Baker was an obvious choice for providing illustrations for a men's magazine, and that's why Nugget V1#1 (Flying Eagle Publications, 1955) is highly sought after by Baker collectors.  There's a copy available in the 2024 July 18 The Matt Baker Comics Showcase Auction #40267 at Heritage Auctions.

Nugget had been a longtime project of Archer St. John according to his son Michael, as related in Confessions, Secrets, and Temptations: Archer St. John and the St. John Romance Comics. "I came in and worked with my father for about a year before he died, Michael St. John recalled. "Nugget was a long-time project of his, but he had never been able to find a distributor interested in it until after Playboy came out. In fact, the first issue of Nugget actually came out after his death. Then I carried on. I carried on for about ten years."

Author John Benson adds, "Michael took over as editor and publisher of Nugget, and ran a prominent line on the masthead, 'Created and founded by Archer St. John,' a credit that was and is certainly an unusual tribute in commercial publishing. Michael St. John continued to publish Nugget and Manhunt for about ten years, then left the field. The ultra-sleazy Nugget that you can still find on the newsstands is a direct descendant, the title having been sold by Michael and probably having passed through several hands since then."

Of course, Archer St. John had been a magazine publisher before he got into the comic book field.  Archer became an advertising executive for Lionel sometime around 1930 (plus or minus a few years), and got into publishing, initially with Air News Publishing Co. in 1941 while seemingly still a Lionel executive.  More famously, he launched the magazine Flying Cadet (1943) which contained some comic-style content, particularly with the final issue.

After entering the comic book field, St. John hired magazine industry executive Richard E. Decker, who had previously worked at American Mercury.  With Decker's help, St. John launched illustrated hardboiled fiction digest magazine Manhunt in 1953, and was compelled to license the title from fellow comic book publisher Magazine Enterprises who held a registered trademark for the title due to the comic book of the same name.

As we've discussed previously, Archer St. John had been developing a long term response to the rising moral panic era that his romance and crime line faced.  In 1953, he set up a Beverly Hills office under Disney animator and cartoonist George Crenshaw, with the apparent intent of getting West Coast animation industry artists to work on the likes of the Terry-Toons comic books.  Much of the rest of his comic line shifted to reprints in early 1954.  Part of the plan seemed to be to expand back into magazines.  The Diary Secrets comic book series ended with issue #30, with the non-comics magazine Secret Life taking over its numbering, and the first issue hitting newsstands just days before Archer St. John's death.  The first issue of Nugget was well into production by that time.

On August 13, 1955, St. John Publications owner Archer St. John was found dead in the apartment of a former Powers model, with the NY Daily News proclaiming, "A couple of shadowy West Side characters, a man and a woman, suspected of feeding dope pills to magazine publisher Archer St. John, were being hunted last night by detectives investigating St. John's mysterious death in the penthouse apartment of a former Powers model."

In the Robert St. John biography Merchant of Worlds, it is noted that during this period Archer had been engaged in a pitched legal battle against the FBI in an attempt to get his brother Robert's passport reissued. Robert had been working as an investigative journalist for the Associated Press and NBC Radio during the war era, and by the 1950s was based in Switzerland and writing books and articles about various matters of global affairs. In 1954, his passport had been seized by the U.S. Consulate in Geneva on order of the State Department because of purported Communist Party activity, based on FBI reports. This prevented Robert from leaving Switzerland or returning to the United States. Archer began exhaustive legal efforts to resolve this issue beginning in April 1955, and phoned Robert on the day prior to Archer's death, apparently to discuss his frustration at the current state of the matter.

Michael St. John would publish Nugget,  Secret Life, and Manhunt for about the next decade, and Nugget itself would continue on via other publishers through 2006.  Nugget might best be remembered today for its rare published nudes by Matt Baker, among some other Baker art, and there's a copy available in the 2024 July 18 The Matt Baker Comics Showcase Auction #40267 at Heritage Auctions.

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