Famous Monsters #251: Get Thee A Designer, Please

An ambitious launch (or relaunch) of a genre magazine is always welcome, as far as I'm concerned. And with IDW's relaunch of Famous Monsters of Filmland – which created the market niche that would later be populated with Cinefantastique, SFX, Starlog, and more – we get ... I'm not quite certain what.

It's ambitious, all right. At 128 pages (plus covers), it's a heavy magazine. As we used to say in the technology magazine business, it feels substantial when you plop it down on your desk. Printed on heavy paper, with a heavy cover, you can plop this down on your desk, or use it to clobber zombies over the head. Either way, it's impressive.

Famous Monsters of Filmland's 251st issue is also ambitious in its pricing. The cover price is $12.95. Not only that, there are four variant covers; do they really think someone's going to pay $26 or $39 or even $52 for multiple copies of this?

Now, I'm actually a proponent of magazines charging higher cover prices, if it frees them from a corrosive addiction to advertising-fed revenues. The key is providing enough quality content in the magazine to make it worthwhile. That shouldn't be difficult; people gladly pay $9 or $10 to see a two-hour movie; they'll pay twice that to buy it on blu-ray. But a really good magazine can provide many hours of enjoyment, and they can be priced that way.

But the writing has to be good, intriguing, and original. Plus, the design should be pleasing, including the use of excellent illustrations and photos.

I don't mind the $12.95 cover price of this magazine; as a quarterly publication, it's not going to drain anyone's wallets very quickly (well, unless they're drunk and they're buying all four variant covers, which they'll be able to sell on eBay for $5.00 each). My problem with Famous Monsters #251 is that it's just not intriguing. Too much space is given over to self-infatuation; I mean, 26 pages of people remembering Forrest J. Ackerman? Look, this has nothing to do with respect for the man. I've heard lots about him, I've read interviews with him, and I've read articles by him. He was a towering figure in genre publishing, and he sounds, truly, like a prince of a man. But to devote one-fifth of a magazine to memorials for him is a waste. Give us instead six pages or, if you must, 10; but Forry's memorial is the magazine itself, which inspired generations of young genre film fans (some of whom went on to become genre professionals).

The rest of the magazine is very uneven. It's always a great idea to interview Ray Bradbury, and the inclusion of a new short story by him is a nice touch. But throw in a few current-movie previews, profiles, and what must be the weirdest photo/ad layout in human history, and you get a magazine that doesn't have a definition, even as quirky.

And that's all before we get to the design. There's nobody in the staffbox listed as designer or art director, so I feel a bit better about criticizing this. But the page layouts are simply ghastly. The text is all in paragraphs separated by a blank line, with no indentations at the beginnings of the paragraphs. Yes, like this and every other blog. We do it on blogs because we are forced to by the HTML gods, who abuse us so. But magazines should not look like amateur web productions. And – remember the $12.95 price tag – we're paying for a deluxe product here, and we're not getting it. Add to all of this the heavy-handed use of dark patterned backgrounds on many of the pages, and you get articles that are not easy to read, not pleasant to look at, and don't look like they were assembled with care and skill.

I wish I could write nicer things about this product, but let's stick with my comments about high prices. Paying $12.95 means I also expect it to deliver. If it were a $3.50 or $4.95 magazine with 88 pages, and only one article in the magazine was worthwhile, I wouldn't feel disappointed. That's what keeps GQ and Esquire publishing, after all. And granted, I was never an FM reader (as readers of this blog know, I was always more of a Starlog and Fangoria reader), but that doesn't mean I'm not open-minded about the publication. But it's got to meet me halfway.

I'll still look forward to how this magazine evolves. First issues are often over-produced or beset with problems as the machinery gets up and running. And there's certainly room for competition in the genre magazine marketplace. But for now, this is a vanity magazine that needs to sharpen its act.

Famous Monsters' Revival Issue Cover Revealed

The reborn Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine has released a photo of the cover of its first issue (#251, July 2010).

I'll be there to buy it when it goes on sale, but I must say, it looks like they're playing it depressingly safe, using that corny old font for the the cover blurbs. I'd be much more interested in seeing them do a better mix of the classic logo with a fresher outlook. After the previous rebirth of the magazine was nothing more than an embarrassing attempt to reanimate a dead corpse, I am hoping the people putting out this version will try to produce a good monster magazine and worry less about aping the exact cover text of the Warren copies.

After all, the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie was a hit when it threw out the rule book and was willing to mess with the formula.

True, a cover is only one page of a many-leafed magazine. But it is the one that sets the stage for the rest that follow. I hope the inside demonstrates fresh thinking and design.

Famous Monsters Given New Publishing Lease on Life by IDW

Famous Monsters of Filmland, the pioneering horror movie magazine, is coming back to publishing life thanks to IDW Publishing. It will relaunch as a quarterly magazine in the summer of 2010. 

FM, the brainchild of Forrest J. Ackerman and publisher James Warren, began life in 1958 as a one-shot magazine that proved so popular that it became a staple of the genre publishing world -- and the foundation of Warren's stable of magazines -- for decades, until Warren's company went bankrupt in the early 1980s. The magazine was revived in the 1990s in a rather odd fashion that ended in acrimony and lawsuits.

IDW will probably fare better than the previous owner. Whether it will fare well in the competitive marketplace remains to be seen; that is an iffier guess. The horror publishing field in the United States is pretty well dominated by Fangoria these days, and Fango seems intent upon spreading its market coverage to include the family friendly Monster Times and the more-extreme Fangoria Gorezone. But anything's possible. Fan tastes and company capitalization will win out in the end!

James Warren Loses Famous Monsters Court Case

Abandoned. That's the ruling of a recent Philadelphia court hearing the case from legendary publisher James Warren, seeking to assert copyright over images of his former monster movie magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland.

Famous Monsters ceased publication in 1983 when Warren's publishing mini-empire went out of business. Later, the title was revived by publisher Ray Ferry, who published it for a number of years before ending in a legal free-for-all. At issue in the court case was whether a book, Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos, had violated Warren's copyrights on the cover paintings by the famed Gogos by reprinting images of the covers in the book.

The court said no. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports:

[The federal judge ruled] that James Warren - the publisher who created Famous Monsters of Filmland - had effectively abandoned any claim to the title of the magazine that began the horror-fan magazine genre 51 years ago.

Warren's association with the magazine ended in 1983, wrote U.S. District Judge Michael M. Baylson, and since then, "Warren has taken virtually no action to retain his common-law ownership of the mark. Indeed, for almost 25 years, he has not published another issue of the magazine, and has not engaged in a substantial attempt to sell memorabilia or anything else with the Famous Monsters name."

The Legal Intelligencer notes:

Baylson also rejected Warren's contention that publication of the book interfered with Warren's plans for a coffee-table book on his magazines, noting that Warren had taken no significant steps to produce a book until after Spurlock's book was published, and that witnesses had testified that Spurlock's book would not adversely affect the market for Warren's book if it were published.

Frankly, I hope Warren does plan such a book, especially if it only focuses on Famous Monsters. That could be quite a book. On a different track, other Warren titles -- the comics magazines Creepy and Eerie -- are being collected and republished by Dark Horse in a series of deluxe coffee table editions. Could Warren also (or instead) publish a collection of reprints of Famous Monsters? I think they'd have a good chance at finding an appreciative audience.

All of which does suggest I just might have been correct when I wondered on this blog many moons ago whether Starlog was keeping its claim alive to discontinued print titles (Comics Scene, Future Life, Cinemagic, Fantasy Worlds) by using them as headers for special sections of that magazine. Just wanted you to know how darned perceptive this blog is ...

Imitation Is the Best Flattery: A Tale of Starlog, Famous Monsters, Playboy, & Esquire

Learn from your elders. That's not a bad idea, and it's an idea I heard long ago from a magazine and newspaper editor to whom I may or may not be closely related.

What it means in practice in the publishing arena is to not be afraid to see what works in other publications and adapt those ideas to your publication.

This did not become clear to me until I visited a little bookstore in San Francisco called Kayo Books, which focuses on (and sort of fetishizes) the 1950s and '60s. I saw some inexpensive copies of '50s-era Playboy magazines, and I bought some.

It was fascinating to see the early years of a magazine that became a behemoth of the periodicals industry (and several other industries). Reading the editorials and subscription ads and the text that referenced its readership made it very clear that the magazine had pretensions -- pretentions it had not yet met; but issue after issue, it improved and got closer to that manufactured self-image.

In short, Playboy was aping Esquire in many ways, even while it was clearly going beyond and above it in terms of quality and success. Playboy has a long history of award-winning and stunning cover treatments, but it was only when I saw those early issues of Playboy and then -- wow -- saw contemporary issues of Esquire that I realized that Playboy's (and, by that, I assume I mean Hugh Hefner, the former Esquire employee who started his magazine after being denied a raise; but it might also include his art staff) view of its audience and itself owed an immense debt to Esquire.

It's not just the cover designs that were clearly done with an eye to the market leader. Those '50s issues of Playboy were almost painfully earnest in their attempt to reach the ivy league young professional, the educated "gentleman" (oh, if only either magazine tried to reach educated gentlement today, the world would be a better place) seeking to learn what it takes to be independent and successful in the post-war world. That was Esquire's market.

I saw something similar when I spent more time looking into Famous Monsters, the Jim Warren-published movie monster magazine that paved the way for such competitors as Fantastic Films, Starlog, Fangoria, and others. Like Playboy, Starlog was known for years as a creative and confident powerhouse in its publishing market. In its first half-dozen years, in addition to its monthly magazine and its many spinoffs, it published poster magazines, best-of collections, LP albums of movie music, high-quality paperback books, photo collections, foreign editions, a children's book by Boris Vallejo, calendars, t-shirts, licensed movie magazines, and more, and would soon launch live conventions. It was a great time to be a science-fiction geek.

But Famous Monsters had done a number of those things first (such as best-of "yearbook" collections, licensed movie mags, and conventions), and that realization has only fairly recently come to me. After all, I was too young to appreciate Famous Monsters; I found it to be juvenile and low-quality; as a 'tweener in the late '70s, early '80s, I much preferred the Starlog approach that inspired me to play with ideas and controversies, and that also gave me lots of color pages and professional-quality features.

But Starlog-partisan that I am, I have to admit now that the magazine would have been radically different had FM not existed. That's not to take anything away from all of the people who worked hard on Starlog -- or, for that matter, on Famous Monsters or Playboy or Esquire. It's just a recognition of when a great title is more an evolution than a revolution.

What interested me about it is that both Playboy and Starlog came to dominate the markets created by the magazines from which they were drawing ideas. And noticing their creative debt to other magazines is both disconcerting and a little endearing.

Playboy borrowed a lot of ideas from Esquire; Starlog borrowed a lot from Famous Monsters. It's not just a matter of taking from what came before. Starlog wasn't stealing very many ideas from Cinefantastique, another pre-existing competitor. Playboy certainly was avoiding the men's adventure mags that also flourished before it came to dominate the market.

And that is the point, and I think the lesson for magazine creators today: Starlog and Playboy borrowed from the leading publications in their fields, not just any publications in their fields, because both Hugh Hefner and Starlog's Norman Jacobs and Kerry O'Quinn had expectations of great success and of leading their respective fields. So why not learn from, and imitate, the best?

Magazine News Updates

Phil Kim is clarifying earlier reports that he won a "summary judgement" in his -- let's just say "interesting" -- legal battle with Ray Ferry over the rights to the legendary Famous Monsters of Filmland title. On his web site, he writes that the judge handed out a "temporary injunction," not a summary judgement.

He adds that he, Ferry, and Connie Beane came up with their own mutual agreement to settle the matter. Kim writes that "at the request of all parties involved," he is clarifying the earlier report. Sounds like legal hell to me, but hey, a clarification's a clarification.

This updates a previous post here.

Famous Monsters' Famous Mashup

Publisher Ray Ferry, who licensed the rights to produce new issues of famed horror film magazine Famous Monsters from original publisher Jim Warren (following the bankruptcy of Warren's firm in 1982), has lost rights to the title.

Robert Greenberger, writing in ComicMix, reports that the District Court judge issued a pretty clear-cut ruling enjoining Ferry from doing any business with the Famous Monsters moniker, and even issued some pretty tart language ordering Ferry not to, well, bother the court with ridiculous claims.

You can six-degrees-of-separation all you want, but with genre magazines, pretty much everything ends up back at FM: For example, Greenberger was the founding editor of one of my favorite -- albeit long defunct -- magazines, Comics Scene. CS was published by Starlog -- several times; it's a long story -- and Starlog and its sister mag Fangoria have long openly named Famous Monsters as the magazine that created the market niche they later took over and improved.

Is that complicated enough? Well, wait until you get into the mind of Ferry, who, according to Wikipedia (and, well, it is, after all, the changed-by-the-whim-of-the-day Wikipedia) has made odd claims about being persecuted by the legendary FM editor Forry Ackerman and al Qaida.

Ferry lost the case to Phil Kim, who created a new Famous Monsters web site last year and who sounds refreshingly, um, not loopy. I don't know if he plans on ever relaunching the brand as a print publication, but the web site offers nice daily reports on the horror news of the day. (As a more family-friendly horror news outlet than the harder-core –– and more popular –– Fangoria, FM might have created a void that I wonder if Fango itself is planning on filling with its new Monster Times franchise.)

Nothing, it seems, is clear-cut and simple about Famous Monsters these days. Rather odd, for a magazine that was always rather simple in its presentation.

Forrest J Ackerman, RIP

Back to the topic of magazines. A real path-breaker passed away this past week, Forrest J Ackerman. The founding editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, the creator of Vampirella, the literary agent who brought us Ray Bradbury and others, the man who (with his wife Wendayne) brought us the U.S. versions of the German Perry Rhodan science fiction novels, passed away at the age of 92.

There are obviously lots of fans of his in the filmmaking world -- Steven Spielberg, Steven King, etc. But there are also lots of fans of his in the magazine world, or at least in the science fiction and horror magazine world. That's because Famous Monsters was a groundbreaking magazine devoted to horror films, their stars, and not much else. It was presented in an unabashedly enthusiastic way, and I think people of a generation or two before me loved the magazine for that.

It's not an appreciation I can claim to share. When I got into reading science fiction books and magazines, there was a magazine called Starlog that captured my attention, love, imagination, and weekly allowance. Starlog also produced a sister publication, Fangoria, to cover horror movies and related topics. Starlog and Fangoria are still being published, though Famous Monsters died along with the rest of the Warren magazine publishing empire in the early 1980s.

I didn't pay attention to Famous Monsters much at the time, because whenever I took a look, I found it to be lacking in substance, intelligence, and quality. I've occasionally bought an issue (thanks, eBay) in recent years to test my original reactions, and if anything, my views then were overly charitable.

But Ackerman himself (in an interview in Fangoria after he was ousted from his Famous Monsters position just a couple issues before the magazine's death) has lamented the chains with which his publisher, James Warren, shackled him with the magazine, and he apparently couldn't produce the magazine he would have liked. That's a shame. Warren, after all, produced some incredibly fun and exciting magazines like Creepy and Eerie during the 1960s and 1970s. If Famous Monsters had been allowed more freedom, then perhaps Ackerman would be remembered not only as a groundbreaking editor but as a great one.

But Ackerman's triumph is most likely his ability to transmit his enthusiasm to young science fiction and horror fans, through his magazines, books, and personal appearances (for many years, he allowed fans to tour his legendary collection of science fiction memorabilia in his homes, on Saturdays). I never had the opportunity to meet him, but if I had, it wouldn't have been magazines of which we would have spoken, it would have been Rhodan, movie monsters, film directors, and deep space shows. I would have liked that a great deal, and I feel bad that we've lost such a personality and talent.

RIP