Imaginative Tales, July 1955

A painted cover advertising Robert Bloch's novelette The Big Binge, featuring a giant woman in a yellow and red outfit towering over a suited man with a raygun and a pink elephant. The cover line promises "Here's a Sure Cure for Inhibitions!" typical of 1950s pulp sensationalism. Imaginative Tales was a digest-sized science fiction magazine that competed in the crowded post-war pulp market, relying on eye-catching cover art to stand out on newsstands. Such magazines inherited the tradition of lurid painted covers from earlier pulps, using exaggerated imagery—oversized figures, impossible scenarios, suggestive situations—to signal adventure and transgression to readers seeking escape from postwar conformity.