After Dark was an entertainment magazine that covered theatre, cinema, stage plays, ballet, performance art, and various artists, including singers, actors and actresses, and dancers, among others. First published in May 1968, the magazine succeeded Ballroom Dance Magazine. In the late 1970s Patrick Pacheco took over the editorship from William Como and strived for a time to make the magazine a more serious critical monthly with a greater emphasis on quality writing, abandoning color printing inside and reducing photos to a few inches square. This was a reaction to Como's "eye-candy" thrust, but sales were low and in 1981 Louis Miele replaced him at the helm and returned to the full-color format with plenty of skin on show. It seemed however that the day was done for After Dark, perhaps because several newer magazines were now doing a better (and more explicitly targeted) job of appealing to the magazine's original readership, for Miele's incarnation of After Dark folded after only a couple of years, this time permanently.

The first issue does not say "Volume 1, no. 1", it says "Volume 10, no. 1". This numbering continues through volume 13, no. 8, Dec. 1970, which is followed by volume 3, no. 9, Jan. 1971. (Volume 3 is thus actually the fourth volume.)