As I may have mentioned before, my childhood LCS had an island in the middle of the shop where they kept off all of black and white magazine back issues. This is where I got my first exposure to the Warren mags, Savage Sword of Conans and other goodies targeted to a slightly older audience. I started spending much of my allowance on these mags back in 1980 or so. Of the the books that really caught my eye was
Monsters of the Movies #4. Like any 8 year old boy, I was nuts for monster movies and especially the classic Universal Monsters. This was pre-VCR in my household, so I got my horror fix either through Saturday afternoon TV (that's how I saw classics like
Trog and
Legend of Boggy Creek) or the myriad of horror movie and monster books at my local library.
I saw this gorgeous Bob Larkin cover, with the 1941 Wolfman staring out at me and handed over my $1.25 (hey, this book was already 6 years old by then!). What a strange treat. It looked like a comic book, but inside were various articles and still photos about both old and current horror movies. This is a werewolf-centric issue and it included articles on both Lon Chaneys , featuring a couple of rather sad looking photos from late in Jr's career. There's also a piece on some lesser known werewolf movies, including some Spanish stuff I still haven't seen. I really dug the piece on a young Rick Baker and all the stills from various nutty Mexican and European movies. I'm still a bit intrigued by the 3-page story "Bello Ordloff is a Monster", written by Jim Harmon with Mike Royer art. Did these strips appear anywhere else? Did every issue of Monsters of the Movies have a comic strip or two. The only other one I owned was #6 (the Mummy cover), but that's been lost to the sands of time.
As I may have mentioned before, my childhood LCS had an island in the middle of the shop where they kept off all of black and white magazine back issues. This is where I got my first exposure to the Warren mags, Savage Sword of Conans and other goodies targeted to a slightly older audience. I started spending much of my allowance on these mags back in 1980 or so. Of the the books that really caught my eye was Monsters of the Movies #4. Like any 8 year old boy, I was nuts for monster movies and especially the classic Universal Monsters. This was pre-VCR in my household, so I got my horror fix either through Saturday afternoon TV (that's how I saw classics like Trog and Legend of Boggy Creek) or the myriad of horror movie and monster books at my local library.
I saw this gorgeous Bob Larkin cover, with the 1941 Wolfman staring out at me and handed over my $1.25 (hey, this book was already 6 years old by then!). What a strange treat. It looked like a comic book, but inside were various articles and still photos about both old and current horror movies. This is a werewolf-centric issue and it included articles on both Lon Chaneys , featuring a couple of rather sad looking photos from late in Jr's career. There's also a piece on some lesser known werewolf movies, including some Spanish stuff I still haven't seen. I really dug the piece on a young Rick Baker and all the stills from various nutty Mexican and European movies. I'm still a bit intrigued by the 3-page story "Bello Ordloff is a Monster", written by Jim Harmon with Mike Royer art. Did these strips appear anywhere else? Did every issue of Monsters of the Movies have a comic strip or two. The only other one I owned was #6 (the Mummy cover), but that's been lost to the sands of time.
2 comments:
>>Legend of Boggy Creek
Ah, memories! The alleged incidents on which this one was based occurred one county over from where I grew up, & they were all over the area headlines when I was in, I believe, 7th grade. The movie came out roughly a year later. It was sort of off-putting to realize that the director had been Mayor Chuckles of the Laff-a-Lot Club, the regional NBC affiliate's after-school cartoon show, & that the narrator was that station's weatherman & ubiquitious advertising pitchman.
Dunno how many issues of Monsters of the Movies I bought, but the cover of this one & its immediate predecessor ring a heck of a bell. Of course, at the time there was lots of like-minded competition for my too-few dollars -- Famous Monsters (which I probably stopped buying around the time this ish came out), Castle of Frankenstein (very close to its last gasp, though apparently at least one issue was still in the offing) & even Atlas Seaboard's Movie Monsters).
I LOVE this stuff. The Universal monsters rock!
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