Get Back to the Point

Note the image above. That's from the homepage of USA Today (at least at mid-day August 25, 2010). The main story is about a film (a bad enough omen, but that's not at issue here), The Social Network. But the story that the newspaper decides to tell (again, as its main story) is about how the company's "brand" might be affected by the film.

First of all, I don't care. Facebook is what it is: a way-overhyped social network that exists to connect people and mine the hell out of their information for commercial gain. It is inevitable that someone would try to make money by trying to make Facebook sound like it has an interesting story. (And I am not sure that it does; the groan-inducing previews are so over-the-top melodramatic that at first I thought I was seeing a parody, then I began to grow a bit horrified as I realized that people really thought a film about spoiled rich boys at Harvard getting richer was a story with which all Americans could identify.)

Whatever. Just become my Facebook friend, okay?

My real complaint is with this type of journalism, represented by USA Today's report. Why are we supposed to care about Facebook's balance sheet? Why is that the most important thing about this silly movie? Good lord, why is it the most important news thing of the day?

It's not just USA Today and Facebook. Sports journalists do it all the time. Athlete So-and-So says something racist/misogynistic/criminal or is filmed doing something racist/misogynistic/criminal, and faster than you can say, Who is this guy and why should I care? we get the news stories about how this will hurt his ability to negotiate a new contract with the sports team that was daft enough to hire him in the first place. Or how it will affect his sponsorship deals, Jesus be praised.

Oh, entertainment journalists do it, as well. Actor So-and-So says something (or screams it on a secretly recorded phone) that is racist/misogynistic/criminal, and we have to endure not intelligent discussions about So-and-So's pathology, but rather easy-to-report "news" about how this could hurt So-and-So's box office or ability to get financing for his next movie.

These journalists who do this are missing the point. I know America is often one big get-rich-quick scheme, and half of the population would sell their spouse into slavery if it increased the odds of their getting a discount on Google stock or whatever. But journalists are supposed to have some news judgment, and they should recognize that, if stories with these angles are valid at all, they should come very late in the news cycle and be given low billing.

Because in the end, it just is not going to affect you or me one bit if Athlete So-and-So makes $14 million rather than $22 million next year. It won't affect us, it shouldn't affect us, and we shouldn't have stories pitched at us as if there is some unspoken agreement among all Americans that we should automatically put the monetary success of famous people ahead of their crimes or even their professional performance.

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.

Magazine Logo Matches: Famous Monsters and Monsterland

After Famous Monsters of Filmland's longtime editor Forrest J. Ackerman left his job at the Warren magazine, he clearly was not ready to retire. Competitor Fangoria had a field day with the personnel turmoil at Famous Monsters, and they made the most of it by publishing a tell-all interview with Forry in Fango #24 (December 1982, see photo below); Forry's final, unpublished editorial (Fango 25, February 1983); as well as a couple original articles by Ackerman in later issues.

But I don't think Forry wanted to be Fango's favorite guest star, paraded in front of its fans like Augustus wanted to do with Cleopatra in Rome. So he must have kept looking for a magazine home, and before he ended up with the ill-fated and somewhat bizarre Famous Monsters revival, he was involved with a magazine called Monsterland. He exited that publication by issue #10 (the issue pictured above), but at least one aspect of that magazine surprised me when I recently came upon a copy of Famous Monsters and Monsterland. The "Monster" word in the logos of each is either identical in design or close enough that I certainly can't tell the difference. Go ahead, click on the photos above to get larger images. Can you spot any difference?

Why the copying? It's not as if "Monster" in that exact font and treatment was an automatic newsstand draw. Before he left, the magazine was known as "Forrest J. Ackerman's Monsterland," and I would think his name had more to do with whatever sales there were than the "Monster" name design.

And if you've never heard of Monsterland before, don't despair. I only vaguely recall seeing it on the stands at the time and I did not buy an issue. It was produced by Hal Schuster and James Van Hise, who also took the Trek-heavy Enterprise Incidents magazine and turned it into SFMovieland (see photo, right) -- another magazine that somehow managed to never be purchased by yours truly.

Today, of course, Ackerman is no longer with us, and neither is Monsterland. With a little more creativity and quality and originality, maybe Forry would've found it to be his long-term home, but that was not to be.

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 ...