TRIUMPH NEWS COMPANY/DOMINION PUBLISHING
Triumph News Company (TNC) of Van Nuys, California, was the distributor of Dominion Publishing Company’s mags and paperback books as well as publishing adult slicks of their own from a P.O. box in North Hollywood.
The Seven Seventy youth-run-amok mags such as Way Out, Love-In, Sunset Strip Revolt, The Outlaws, and The Daring Breed were essentially “primary documents” which were photo essays on the various youth sub-cultures that made up the L.A.–Hollywood–Sunset Strip scene with the strange, almost surreal, blurbs and clip-art thrown in. Photos of Zappa and the Mothers playing at various “freakouts” around L.A. can also be found scattered throughout a few of these adult slicks. They were the printed equivalents of movies like Mondo Mod (1966) and The Hippie Revolt (1967). In fact they were so similar, that I wonder if the people that produced The Hippie Revolt had something to do with these mags or vice versa. If not, the film crews and photographers were covering the same beat.
TNC published their own expose on the youth of the time called Psychedelic Hippie which appropriately had Carl Franzoni on its cover. Franzoni was an L.A. scene maker and Mother’s of Invention Auxiliary member, who was also the inspiration for their song “Hungry Freaks Daddy,” and can be seen in The Hippie Revolt in a hippie wedding ceremony presided over by Vito Paulekas, the grand-daddy of all that was beat and hip. Psychedelic Hippie was advertised in some of Dominion’s titles together with Seven Seventy’s mag Love-In.
The interest in the hippie scene by these publishers is made more evident by a full page ad in Dominion's Tomcat #2 for the paperback Electric Tibet by James N. Doukas which was published by Dominion and offered by their Spitfire Book Club. Another full page ad for Triumph's different paperback lines, again offered by the Spitfire Book Club, includes Ed Wood's Drag Trade.
TNC occasionally pulled out all the stops and rightfully boasted on the cover of Kitten v2 #3 Feb. 1969 - "Entertainment For The Aware Male" - and the fact that the issue featured Erle Stanley Gardner, Rod Serling, and Peter Fonda. Gardner was featured with an essay on gun control, Serling's short fiction, "Dust," was included, and "Peter Fonda My Story" as told to James Foreman with cool opening page artwork topped it off.
Small one inch ads in the back of the mags offered such things as "Orgy of the Macabre - Weird 'Pleasures' of the Damned" an 8mm film brochure, "Raised Skirt Photos," "Rubber Garments," nudist calendars, swingers ads, and so on. Also advertised together again, in a different ad than mentioned above, were the two mags Love-In and Psychedelic Hippie which had the heading, "Spitfire Club Winners!" The blurb explained that "Spitfire once again provides the key to the new scene! The swingin' scene! Don't miss the newest in provocative magazines!!"
Dominion/TNC titles included: Celluloid Capers, Shocking Screen, Belles, Stormy, Kitten, Copper Cuties, X Films, Mate, Psychedelic Hippie, Black Hose, Tomcat, Lucky, Salty, Cheeky, Flaming Films, Sun Lane, Broad Tales, Sol Quest, The Hippy Story, etc.
