Fangoria Censored in 1980?

I had known that Fangoria #9 was one of the best horror film magazine covers ever (along with the previous Zombie cover on Fangoria #8). I had not known, until some serendipitous googling this evening unearthed it, that #9 was censored on American newsstands.

But The Daily Beast, the pop-y news and opinion site run by the legendary Tina Brown, includes Fango #9 in a photo essay of 10 magazine covers that were censored. It says Fangoria #9 was pulled from newsstands because people were disturbed by its cover imagery.

The poor dears.

Fangoria, of course, is a horror film magazine, and it is still the leading magazine in its field. So one would expect that it would cover, well, horror movies. It is amusing to me that back in 1980, when Fango was finally hitting its stride after an uneven start, that it would have to clear the hurdle of people freaking out over a cover that frankly isn't particularly graphic. Look at it below. There's no actual violence on the cover; there's some fake blood on a chainsaw being wielded by a pig-headed human, which is not something one sees everyday on a magazine cover, not to mention the streets of Dallas.

I remember that the magazine became a coveted (and expensive) collector's edition, costing several times what any other issue of the magazine cost. I had always assumed that it had either sold out or that the print run hadn't been adequate, so remaining copies were sold at a premium. But if The Daily Beast is correct, then we know that it was all due to the never-ending American strain of hypocrisy and fear.

Still, it's a damn cool cover. Speaking as a magazine professional, of course.

From WEIMAR WORLD SERVICE

Sarah Palin, by the Numbers

Over at The Daily Beast, novelist/satirist Christopher Buckley provides a handy index to Sarah Palin's book. Who knew Plato was in the book? We knew God would be a major recurring character, though.

Larry Flynt on Obama

Hustler publisher Larry Flynt writes a short item on today's Daily Beast urging Obama to toughen up and, er, "bitch-slap" the Republicans to "put them in their place."

When I interned one summer in the vice president's office back in 1990 (oh, leave me alone), one of my more-interesting regular tasks was to compile a collection of articles from newspapers and magazines for the vice president to read. In one of those compilations, I included an article Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote for the New York Review of Books, in which he called for the end of the national security state in the wake of the Cold War's demise.

You can assume, even without reading the two pieces, that Moynihan's was the better written piece of prose.

The VP didn't take Moynihan's advice then, and I doubt, even if some intern puts Flynt's article in Obama's daily news briefer, that the president will take Flynt's advice today.

Christopher Buckley to Push the Obama Lever

Christopher Buckley, the libertarian conservative satirist and author of such gems as The White House Mess and Thank You for Smoking, has announced that he's going to vote for Democratic Sen. Barack Obama for president. So what, you say? After all, so is everyone else.

But the reason this is significant is not what Buckley himself declares in his blog posting to be the reason, namely that he is the son of William F. Buckley Jr., the man who resurrected conservatism in the United States. Actually, I think it's all the reasons Buckley includes in his posting (plus a few from fellow conservative David Brooks, who in the New York Times lambasts Sara Palin and the modern GOP as anti-intellectual populists who have sunk the party to its depths). Buckley explains his disenchantment with the new John McCain, who sold his soul and his authenticity so that he could sit atop a party now known mostly for its meanness and dimness.

Read Buckley's article. in today's Daily Beast.(Photo by Amanda Leung; from Buckley's Sept. 18, 2008, speech to The Commonwealth Club.)