your favorite monster magazines...

[joe kurtz]

Yeah, I'm a little bit ( or more likely, a LOT ) older than most folks here, but I'd like to hear what your personal favs were in respect to genre magazines when you were growing up.
Me? I started with the one that began it all, the wonderful FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND.
I caught the horror bug when I was probably still wearing nappies!
Seriously, I can not remember a time when I wasn't facinated by things that went bump in the night. Both of my parents were genre film fans as well ( though not to my own obsessive compulsive degree ) & one of my earliest memories is of staying up with them to watch a showing of Bava's BLACK SUNDAY on the late show when I was five back in 1966.
It was a local TV station's Friday night staple THE FRIGHT NIGHT LATE SHOW that got me hooked & provided me with all my initial viewings of the classics ( many of the best Universal & Hammer films ) & not so classics ( THE BRAINIAC, ROBOT VS THE AZTEC MUMMY, THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE & all sorts of others... ), all of which I adored.
Friday nights at 11:30 remained "appointment viewing" in our household right up into the mid '70s when FRIGHT NIGHT went off the air with it's final broadcast of VAMPIRE CIRCUS.
Anyhow, as a wee lad of just 5 or 6, I was poking around my uncle's bedroom one day while we were visiting my grandparents & he was off at college.
He had alot of books & model cars & stuff, but nothing that really captured my interest until I discovered a pile of magazines at the bottom of his closet.
Playboys perhaps?
Nope. Something much, MUCH better ( c'mon now, I was only just in kindergarden after all... ). It was stack of FAMOUS MONSTERS.
I was in awe.
Looking back, there were probably only 7 or 8 of them in the stack, but it seemed like an entire bloody library to me at the time.
Thus began my love affair with the genre film magazine. One that still exists to this day.

[joe kurtz]

C'mon now,NO ONE here has a "thing" for monster/horror mags?:confused:
How is that possible? :eek:

Seriously, maybe I should have placed this in the books/magazines section, but it seems to get so little traffic over there.
Oh well, being the weekend, perhaps there's just not many people lurking about these forums like my this pathetic geezer is! :p Honestly though, I've just had my knee reconstructed,so there's not much more for me to do BUT this. I've already filled up on my reading & watching for the day...
So, I'll just bore the lot of you some more on this subject I suppose.

As I said, FAMOUS MONSTERS was my first love.
Begining with that stash that I discovered in my uncle's closet, I began a nice collection that lasted right up until the final issue of it's publication by Warren in '80 or '81.
Though I didn't ever come close to acquiring a complete collection, I had my fair share of early issues & then a complete run from the late '60s - early '70s on...
FM was far from the only genre film magazine that I collected though. I also bought whatever "stray" non-Warren mags that were published during this period & graduated up to the serios stuff like Cinefantastique by the late '70s.
The one that proved really elusive to me though, was CASTLE OF FRANKENSTEIN.
Though I was able to get my hands on a couple of issues over the years, it's infrequent, irregular publication schedule & poor distribution in some parts of the country ( apparently including mine ) made it far too difficult for me to collect like I wanted to.

Then came a a dicision that I've regreted almost from the very moment I made it.
I was seeing this girl & we were having some problems, you see. The sort of problems that I got the brilliant idea that a nice diamond "pre-engagement" ring would remedy.
As you've already guessed I'm sure, I took a major portion of my magazine collection ( including every last one of my FAMOUS MONSTERS :( ) to a local dealer in order to score some quick cash & promptly got screwed. And NO, I don't mean by my girlfriend in appreciation either!
While I got enough to buy the bloody ring, it wasn't NEARLY what the collection was worth money-wise OR to me emotionally. I should have let the girl walk & kept my collection that I'd spent so much time & effort on building.
As it turned out, the ring didn't do a thing to improve our relationship, especially when I discovered that she was out running around on me with some other guy!
If I remember correctly, that relationship only wound up lasting another two weeks after I sold my stuff & gave her that silly ass ring. Then she was out the door, with her new boyfriend ( whom she wound up marrying about a year later BTW, something I'm not sure if it was supposed to make me feel better or worse about the whole thing ) AND my ring which she never bothered to return to me.
Shit, now that I think of it, 1985 was a pretty shitty year for me! LOL

Oh, I actually got over her soon enough, but I never really got over parting with my FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND collection.

[joe kurtz]

I didn't give up everything though.
Far from it (Thank God!).

While I sold off my prized collection of FMs & a stack or two of other pretty much irreplaceble goodies, I never even concidered selling off my Fangoria collection. Which, back then in '85 was only about 6 years into it's run, but at the time, it & Cinefantastique were the only genre magazines being published in the States. The fact that they were current & that I loved 'em both kept me from ever thinking of parting with them. Then, now or at any time in between.
Infact, one of the absolute essencials to my collection of genre ,uh, collectibles is my complete collection of Fangoria. It's right up there alongside my DVD collection in importance. More so actually, since it would be a lot easier to replace all my DVDs that it would be 26 - 27 years worth of Fangos.