Avert Your Eyes! And Your Brain!

Here's some good news for the Fourth of July: America now has a gutsy new monthly photo magazine called Shock, which dares to show us the stuff we really want to see -- a corpse rotting, an elephant sitting on a toilet, a dead kidnapper lying on a sidewalk with blood pouring out of his head.

All that -- plus pictures of Serena Williams's butt cleavage and Alicia Keys's chest hair and celebrity fashion tips from "Goddess Bunny, the fashion-savvy polio-stricken dancing transvestite" -- for only $1.99!

God bless America! Finally, a magazine for those of us who feel that Us Weekly is just a tad too highbrow. Shock is the kind of mag you'd get if the producers of the TV show "Fear Factor" bought National Geographic, then fired the staffers and brought in a new team headed by Larry the Cable Guy.

Shock is not for the squeamish. For example, it loves barfing-celebrity photos. The first issue had a picture of tennis player Andy Murray losing his lunch. The second issue had a picture of Keanu Reeves ralphing out of a car. I can't wait to see which celeb will toss his or her cookies in the third issue!

Shock doesn't coddle celebrities, like those suck-up magazines that allow the stars to choose who will photograph them. Shock has guts. If singer Keys wears a low-cut white dress that reveals a couple of chest hairs amid her lovely cleavage, Shock will not airbrush them. Oh no. Shock will circle those chest hairs with a yellow crayon so we're sure not to miss them. And then Shock will run that photo right next to the photos of five stars with mouth sores, which appear under the headline, "Hurt or Herpes?"

Your highbrow intellectual magazine reviewers will probably call Shock sleazy. But I'm here to say they're wrong. Shock is not schlock. It's the product of a high-class, big-time magazine publisher, Hachette Filipacchi Media -- the folks who put out Woman's Day and Car and Driver and Road & Track and Elle. This is a high-tone outfit, not some cheese-ball bottom feeder.

If you don't believe that Shock is classy, just look at the small print at the bottom of the masthead. It says "Shock is a trademark of Societe de Conception de Presse et D'Edition." That's French, mon ami . How classy can you get?

You probably assume the name Shock refers to that certain frisson you get when you see a photo of, say, one wrestler gouging out the eyeball of another. Well, you're wrong. Actually, Shock is an acronym. According to Hachette Filipacchi's news release, Shock stands for "Startling, Humorous, Outrageous, Controversial and Kommanding."

Aren't those Hachette Filipacchi people clever?

They've thought a lot about this magazine. You can tell by reading the next paragraph in that news release, which contains this quote from Shock's editor in chief, Mike Hammer: "Shock is filling a void for today's consumer whose visual appetite has grown but has not been effectively served by other media properties."

Hey, wait a minute. Did they say the editor in chief is named Mike Hammer ? Could he be the same Mike Hammer whose amazing exploits were chonicled in all those Mickey Spillane books? You remember him -- the hard-boiled private eye who would put a .45 slug right between the eyes of a busty, leggy, hot-blooded bottle-blonde if the situation called for it.

Actually, it turns out that the editor is not the same guy as the gumshoe. I checked it out: The gumshoe was a fictional character, and you have to be a real human to edit a magazine, even at Hachette Filipacchi.