Manpower! · No. 1 / 1969

This is where Colt starts. Jim French, working as Rip Colt, founded the Colt Studio in New York in late 1967 with Lou Thomas, and Manpower! number one was its first magazine, published in 1969 from a Village Station post office box. The introduction is pure late-sixties optimism: it announces that "today, 1969, an enlightened society" is finally ready for the male nude, and credits Rip Colt as a man equally at home behind a camera or at a drawing table.

The cover proves the point, a booted, cigarette-chewing hunk drawn in Colt's slick, heavy style and signed "COLT 68." Before the Colt Man became the studio's trademark, this little orange digest set out the template: big, mature, masculine men treated as serious objects of art and desire. French moved Colt to Los Angeles in 1974 and ran it for decades, but this is the issue where the name first entered the record.