Dan and Bands at Brat's Tinderbox,
Cinema 57 Part Three,
and Some Thoughts on
George Romero and Diary of the Dead...

My son Daniel called me from Boston earlier this week, in part to let me know about an upcoming Brattleboro, VT concert venue he'll be part of -- The MAJESTY FOREVER GLOWING MUSIC AND ART SHOW!

Here's the Tinder Box MySpace page, which will provide directions, info, and all you need to get there --

and here's my earlier Myrant writeup about the Tinder Box (scroll down a bit for text, pix and more).

So, if you're in the area this weekend, rush on over to The Tinder Box on Elliott Street in downtown Brattleboro on Saturday, February 16th at 8 PM. Playing are Colin Ahern aka Flash 'C'; Jeremiah Crompton aka Jeramigo, 'Kyle Thomzo' and finally the trio of Sam Phillips, Zach Phillips and my son Daniel Bissette.

Marge and I can't make it -- we'll be away -- but if you can, please, go! $5 donation at the door, more if you can afford it (support the musicians, folks), all big fun for a few bucks.

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Yesterday was the shits weatherwise -- a few inches of snow overnight Tuesday into Wednesday AM, light and crisp, which then turned into almost 20 hours of rain, freezing rain, sleet and slush. Marge and I had no school at either of our places of employment, so we were home. We stayed put, pretty much, too, except for shoveling/scraping/salting late afternoon so Marge could make it to her late afternoon appointment, by which time the roads weren't as hazardous.

Today, it's all glittering cement, rock-hard ice and our driveway is a steeply pitched ice rink, narrow and black-iced. I've spread salt (environmentally sound salt in 50 pound bags -- and get this, it's been dyed a light green) and the sun is already beaming, so the day's looking good.

We've already exchanged Valentine's Day gifts and had a pretty sweet evening together, once I wrapped up work on the Gaiman book. Life is good -- Happy Valentine's Day, one and all; if it's a day you'd rather not have to deal with, well, then, the hell with it. It's Thursday, is all.
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The first two images in the pages of Cinema 57 #20, the historic horror film issue, are telling: a shot from Frank Tashlin's Artists and Models (including the Bat Lady wall-size painting ostensibly credited to Bob Kane) and a Charles Addams cartoon. From the outset, the French cineaste's orientation to the horror film was more exploratory, more expansive, and far more mature than that available to the hungriest American devotee of fantasy, sf and horror. (Again, I'll humbly ask Classic Horror Film Board posters not to just cut-and-paste this info to that board; please link to this blog post, and bring some eyes here. Thanks, and hope this offers insights to the merits of this vintage magazine.)

Pierre Billard's introductory text immediately evokes Buchenwald and Hiroshima; the first article, Jean Loth's "Le Fantastique Erotique ou L'Orgasme: Qui Fait Peur" further codifies the decidedly adult orientation of this first digest dedicated solely to the genre -- for one issue, at least. Loth's essay is peppered with evocative stills, all now familiar images to devotees of the genre: the night shot of beauty and beast in a Florida lagoon from Revenge of the Creature (1955, the caption citing director Jack Arnold), 'la Belle' walking up a dark corridor lit only by hand-held wall-mounted candles in Cocteau's La Belle et la Bete (1945), RKO's mockup of Kong clutching a dangling Fay Wray, both impossibly gigantized over a NYC cityscape from King Kong (1933), and Leslie Nielson embracing Ann Francis in a posed MGM shot from Forbidden Planet (1956). Not a bad four-image summary of the theme, eh?

A cropped (the right half only) of this now-iconic, then-rarely-seen artfully composed but absurdly proportioned publicity shot of King Kong appears in Cinema 57, already a mythic image of horror, power and eroticism.

It's a grand lineup. As promised, I'm listing the zine's contents today to wrap up this snapshot of a historic bit of horror movie history.

Loth's article is followed by:

* "Mephisto, Ce Martien" by Robert Benayoun, an overview of the devil in fantasy films (and more).
* "King-Kong Magicien" by Jean Boullet, which concludes with a tantalizing three-panel sequence from what appears to be one of Boullet's silhouette animations in which a Tyrannosaurus rex-like dinosaur devours the Statue of Liberty!
* "La Mise a Mort Dans le Film de Terreur" by Andre S. Labarthe, with a focus on the then-recent 3-D feature House of Wax (1954).

The giant of the snows from Georges Melies's La Conquete du Pole/Conquest of the North Pole (1912) was first seen by most American monster movie fans in 1967's An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, but Cinema 57 readers were familiar with it a decade earlier.

* A three-page, three-image piece "Les Createurs de Monstres" showing Jack Pierce applying the Frankenstein monster makeup to Boris Karloff in Son of Frankenstein (1939), an unidentified ("l'anonyme createur") Bud Westmore posing with six different Metaluna mutant maquettes and the mask used in This Island Earth (1957), and a perversely amusing shot from the filming of the dinosaur episode of The Animal World (1956) showing producer/director Irwin Allen behind the animation camera, pointed at the table-top set sporting a stop-motion Brontosaurus [sic] (now Apatosaurus) while a rather zonked-looking Ray Harryhausen (unidentified in the caption, but the real 'createur de monstres' on Allen's film) looks on behind Allen, looking for all the world like he was just another studio carpenter, with two other unidentified technicians in the background.
* "L'Humour Chasse les Ombres" by Armand J. Cauliez, companion piece to:
* "La Comedie Fantastique dans le Cinema Americain D'Avant-guerre" by Etienne Chaumeton, a great overview of the 1940s and early '50s comedy-fantasies like the Topper films, A Guy Named Joe, Here Comes Mister Jordan, etc.
* Ado Kyrou's "Le Merveilleux de la Realite," which I'm eager to translate and read.
* "Le Fantastique de la Realite" by Jean Thevenot, a companion article to Kyrou's.
* "Le Cinema Interplanetaire" by Remo Forlani, an analysis of sf films featuring a cool comparative shot of Kirk Alyn as Superman (from the Columbia serial) next to a Wayne Boring panel of Superman from the comicbook series and a similar panel-to-still comparison of Alex Raymond comic strip art and the Universal Flash Gordon serial (1936).
* "La Science Fiction Trahit L'avenir" by Raymond Borde, opening with a vertical still of the 'faceless' alien from Harryhausen's gem (ahem, I mean, uh, Fred Sears's) Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956).
* The most 'monster magazine' like piece in the magazine is the 24-page "Galerie des Monstres" by Pierre Philippe. This was the model for Forry and Famous Monsters of Filmland, showcasing lots of the creatures soon to lurk on the pages of Famous Monsters stateside: the Universal monsters from Frankenstein's Monster to the first mutant from Tarantula (1955), King Kong and the pteranodon (1933), Charles Laughton's Dr. Moreau from Island of Lost Souls (1935), Caligari and his shadow (1919), Charles Gamora's martian from the George Pal/Byron Haskin War of the Worlds (1954), etc.

Director Tod Browning and the cast of Freaks (1933), still shunned, unloved and essentially unknown in 1957 -- except by the editors of Cinema 57 and writer Jacques Pinturault!

* The highlight of the issue for me: Jacques Pinturault's essay on Tod Browning's Freaks (1933), written and published at a time when Freaks was still a 'lost' aberration in American (probably still road-showed by Dwain Esper or his successor under the title Nature's Mistakes) and still banned in Britain. This is the major find here, and the piece I'm most eager to translate and clear the rights to reprint -- in English, at last.
* "Catalogue du Fantastique Americain" by F. Hoda and L. Seguin, a concise 11-page capsule history of the genre in the US cinema. A curious one-page cameo piece interrupting the article spotlights Curt Siodmak's weird cheapie Bride of the Gorilla (1951).
* "Paul Leni, l'Inventeur de la Terreur," with filmography (two pages total), the first horror auteur essay.
* "Y a-t-il un Cinema Fantastique Francais?" with a four-page filmography of French fantasy/horror/sf films, accompanied by a half-page piece "Quand les Martiens Sont Japonais" citing the then-in-it-infancy Japanese sf films (remember, this was 1957!), illustrated with a shot of Gojira and Angilus/Angurus facing off in Gojira no gyakushû/Godzilla Raids Again/Gigantis the Fire Monster (1955). With the Japanese genre a mere three or four years on at this point, one can see the editors were paying attention, no two ways about it!
* Another historic piece: Lotte H. Eisner's "Le Fantastique dans le Film Allemand," covering the silent German fantasy-horror classics.

There you have it, cover to cover coverage of Cinema 57! The Metaluna mutant adorns the back cover as well as the interior pages, the very year he appeared onscreen for the first time.

* "Helas! Le Cinema est Devenu Intelligent!" by Jean-Louis Caussou -- Melies, Ziegfeld Follies, The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Tales of Hoffmann; music, dance and fantasy film.
* "Comment Peut-on Faire l'Impossible Pour Vous Satisfaire?" by Andre Martin, an expansive 10-page essay embracing current animation and the genre, including everything from Walt Disney to Karel Zeman, Ted Parmalee's UPA cartoon The Tell-Tale Heart, Robert Cannon's Gerald McBoing-Boing on the Planet Moo, and Norman McClaren's Phantasy experiments at the National Film Board of Canada; this is a terrific piece, well-illustrated article.

Two short Cinema 57 non-genre pieces follow, with a few pages of ads, but as you can see, this gem of a digest is far more ambitious and wide-ranging in its exploration of the genre than anything we'd see in the US until Castle of Frankenstein after its 10th issue, Carlos Clarens's An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (1967) and the blossoming of Photon and Cinefantastique -- and Cinema 57 is still more expansive and all-encompassing with the net it casts than anything in English until the 1970s. All in all, a historic and impressive tome!

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A number of the Center for Cartoon Studies students are eager to see George Romero's new feature, Diary of the Dead, and the Spanish film [REC] is eagerly anticipated, too. I just posted this reply to a CCS discussion board thread, since these youngsters (well, OK, they're in their twenties) are seeing it all in the context of now, as youngsters will, and this geezer felt the need to add a bit of context. I'll post my blather here intact (I don't use the format I use on Myrant typically, so bear with the capitalized film titles, please):

Since Romero is one of our great living filmmakers, and he himself calls DIARY OF THE DEAD his "running away from LAND OF THE DEAD" and his experience with Universal Studios (which he admits went much better than he feared, but still, the studio system just doesn't work for Romero), I'm eager to see it. Even Romero's least (BRUISER) are interesting films, and worth seeing.

I see where you're all coming from, but don't assume Romero's in lockstep with current fashions or fads. This whole genre -- as I note in my yammering about CLOVERFIELD at Nine Panel Nerd's podcast (link's on my blog yesterday) -- goes back to Peter Watkins and his work for BBC in the mid-60s. There's a clear lineage here, and horror movies have been part of it from Orson Welles's fake WAR OF THE WORLDS radio broadcast in October 1938 that sent listeners screaming out of their houses believing the martians WERE coming.

There were also key underground filmmakers (Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, Ed Pincus, etc.), feature films like DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY (1967) and passages in Brian DePalma's early films (GREETINGS, HI MOM) that anticipate this whole current movement. DePalma's use of faked video footage was often quite funny; there's sequences in HI, MOM and GREETINGS that are still hilarious and scathing, forty years later, that absolutely anticipate this whole "new" 21st Century movement.

Though the new vein is definitely fueled by the democratization of technology via digital video media (including cell phones), the conceptual turf is at least half-a-century old; if you count home movies and amateur movies, it goes back to the 1920s and the first available 16mm cameras, boosted immeasurably by 8mm film in the 1940s-60s. But Brakhage was the first cinema diary keeper, beginning in the 1950s, and Ed Pincus formalized the genre by the 1970s -- by which point satirists like DePalma were already goofing on it.

"Shoot 'em in the head": A martial law execution of civilians in The War Game. Like Gillo Pontecorvo's La Battaglia di Algeri/The Battle of Algiers, also made in 1966, Peter Watkins's The War Game emulated newsreel techniques to make its harrowing portrait of nuclear war-ravaged Britain utterly believable.

Horror entered the fray early on: to my mind, some of Brakhage's films are genre-relevant (SIRIUS REMEMBERED, his meditation on the corpse of his dog, found in the woods near his home; THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES, a grueling but beautiful and staggering feature-length work filmed in a city morgue). Watkins was using faux-documentary techniques to recreate historical medieval warfare for CULLODEN (1965) and to make THE WAR GAME in 1966, "documenting" the nuclear bombing of the UK and the aftermath with such vivid power that BBC (which produced the film) refused to broadcast it.

"Bring Out Your Irradiated Dead!": Another stark newsreel-like image from Peter Watkins's classic The War Game (1966), a definite precursor to Night of the Living Dead and the current vein of 'you are there' digital-era horror films.

Point being, Romero is tapping a much, much richer and deeper vein than the most immediately apparent (CLOVERFIELD, [REC], MY LITTLE EYE, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, THE LAST BROADCAST, etc.) contemporary context.

Don't forget much of the first flesh-eating zombie movie of 'em all, Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, depended on faux-TV news broadcasts, which meshed with Romero's use of handheld cinematography and 'you are there' staging in its narrative passages to create something completely fresh in 1968. He was, at that point, building on John Frankenheimer's films (THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, SEVEN DAYS IN MAY) incorporating news film techniques with mainstream studio filmmaking traditions -- Frankenheimer emerged from live TV drama, and in the early '60s his approach was startling and new to most viewers. Romero was taking that further, and by doing so reinventing horror cinema -- a step Frankenheimer himself had taken two years earlier with the underrated SECONDS (1966) -- so he was tapping this tree looooooooong before the current wave of filmmakers were even born.

All horror fans have heard of, and many have seen, Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1981), but how about the BBC broadcast that scared a nation, Ghostwatch (shown only once -- October 31, 1992)? It's the real successor to Orson Welles's historic Halloween 1938 radio play of The War of the Worlds, and another precursor to the current wave of digital horrors.

That, for me, is the context for DIARY OF THE DEAD. I can't help it, I grew up watching these films AS THEY CAME OUT -- so I've experienced this genre as it took shape, usually seeing the films when, or close to when, they were first shown publicly. Even Watkins's horrific THE WAR GAME, which was shown by anti-nuke activist groups in the 1960s on 16mm, including a showing at my high school up in Duxbury, VT in 1970!

Off the top of my head, for anyone interested in tracing this lineage with their own home-movie festival of precursors, I'd cite Watkins's THE WAR GAME, BBC's crafty, fun GHOSTWATCH (which so terrified a gullible UK viewing audience that BBC never showed it again, so vehement was the public outcry against their 'true ghost' mockumentary broadcast), Ruggero Deodato's CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1981, and still a shocker, template for many that followed including BLAIR WITCH and CLOVERFIELD), and a few others.

Shameless Plug Dept.: Speaking of this whole school of 'you are there' digital horror, I did this cover art two years ago for the definitive DVD re-release of Lance Weiler and Stefan Avalos's digital feature classic The Last Broadcast (1998), the film that predated (and provided the obvious template for) The Blair Witch Project (1999). My cover art was ultimately used as an inside-cover sleeve 'pinup'; a few CCS pioneer class students and I also worked up a sweet little two-color minicomic on the Jersey Devil for this DVD package, too, which is mighty cool and only available in this DVD.

You can buy your copy online from a variety of venues; check it out!

For those of you interested, here's the online trailer for Diary of the Dead,

and a Spanish trailer for [REC] -- enjoy.

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OK, tomorrow is the last post of the next full week or so, more than likely, so I made this a fat one and hope to do the same tomorrow. Workload and travel require my attention be occupied elsewhere next week, so I'll likely weigh in here rarely if at all -- as promised, I'll be back to daily posts come March.

Have a great Thursday; we've got my amigo Howard Cruse coming in to speak at CCS later today, and Marge and I are looking forward with dinner with Howard tonight, so we'll be having a fine day ourselves.

You do the same...

The Cloverfield Rap,

More Swamp Thing Cover Roughs

& More on the World's First (?) Monster Zine...

First, a moment of silence for the late, great Steve Gerber.

I'm sorry to hear of his passing; his comics had a great impact on this reader, and I wish the industry had treated him kinder (but I can say that about almost every comics creator, pre-1985).
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I've yet to make the time to complete my detailed overview of Cloverfield, which I'll eventually be posting here -- but in the meantime,

if you've the time and interest, you can listen to me blather about Cloverfield and its many precursors today -- here's the link to the Nine Panel Nerd podcast, compliments of Dave Kraus.

This the second episode of Nine Panel Nerd's overview of the film, which is fading from area theaters hereabout this week to make room for the Thursday influx of Valentine's Day fluff. Episode 11 is all me and Dave chatting about Cloverfield; as Dave ballyhoos, "In part 2 of our monster show, we sought out some help to get some perspective on the films that influenced Cloverfield. So we turned to monster expert Steve Bissette. Is the monster of Cloverfield the new Gojira (a.k.a. Godzilla) of the 21 century? Steve has a lot to say about what Cloverfield and it's creature mean and represent."

Check it out, your perfect audio coffee mate -- and enjoy.

More Swamp Thing Salad Days Cover Roughs

Also heralding from south of the border (Massachusetts, that is), Mark Masztal brought this auction to my attention, providing yet another peek at my past Swamp Thing cover process... actually, the auction misidentifies the covers these were roughs for (yep, two covers came out of these two pages of roughs, folks).

These roughs actually yielded the covers for the Alan Moore/Rick Veitch issues of Swamp Thing #55 (December 1986) and #56 (January 1987), though judging by a glance at the auction art, it looks like #56 emerged from a cover concept I might have initially proposed to editor Karen Berger for #55.

But before I get to that, the auction --

Here's the auction, if you're interested.

Good luck, if you choose to bid; there's nothing in it for me, folks.

Now, about the covers: these are two of my all-time favorites among the many covers I drew for Swamp Thing. I was feeling confident with my sense of concept, composition and moving freely from 'realistic' cover images to more abstract, design-oriented concepts that conveyed that issue's concept to the reader in symbolic terms -- and these cover roughs succinctly offer an ideal snapshot to both approaches. They also are among the few cover roughs that almost perfectly match the final covers (which I'm posting images of below), with minor tweaking of the elements for the sake of more balanced final compositions.

* The cover for ST #55 was a simple image of grieving, and one for an issue in which Alan was playing the narrative card 'is Swamp Thing really gone?' -- for the second time in his run on the series (the first was "The Nukeface Papers," Saga of the Swamp Thing #35-36, April and May, 1985, with Swamp Thing's rebirth in #37, alongside John Constantine's first full appearance, noting John Totleben and I first sneaking Sting -- soon to become John Constantine -- into the background in the final pages of #25, "Sleep of Reason"). As for #55, "Earth to Earth" was the story this issue, setting the stage for Alan and Rick's science-fiction Swamp Thing run of issues, tailor-suited to Rick's preference for sf over horror as his genre of choice. I really like the drawing for this cover -- one of the few, in my personal estimation, that works as a drawing, period -- and that's my first wife Marlene (then Nancy) O'Connor who posed for Abby, with her (Marlene's) then-long hair flowing in the breeze. She chopped it all off a few year later. Still, a good cover, I think, on all levels.

* As noted, I think the final accepted design for #56 came out of the cover roughs submitted for #55, which would have made this the easiest of all Swamp Thing cover pitches. Again, we were all playing the shell game of 'is Swamp Thing really dead?,' a game readers always recognize as a cheat -- I mean, the series would have ended, were it true, and even then, such demises are only "real" until the publisher sees a possibility of squeezing more revenue out of a defunct concept, character or title in need of revival (if only for trademark purposes).

This issue, "My Blue Heaven," was a gem, the first full-blown Moore/Veitch sf issue, a run I still think merits assessment for its unique attributes. It was also a sort-of Crisis on Infinite Earths cross-over issue, sort of, and the letters pages included Alan's own response to letters about our notorious #40, "The Curse," the female lycanthropy issue that emerged from a story suggestion by yours truly linking lycanthropy with a woman's menstrual cycles (a concept I had floated to Heavy Metal's art director John Workman years earlier -- in 1979-80 -- as part of a pitch of a fictional article on an imaginary sf writer, Curtis Slarch, that my old Kubert School classmate Rick Grimes had contributed ideas to as well; more on this later this year, here on this blog!). I really like this #56 cover, too, and it presented the most elegant use of color and basic design skills in my entire cover run.

OK, that's that, folks -- hope these Swamp Thing cover reveries are of interest to somebody out there. I never know, and if you don't say so, I'll never know....

More on the World's First Monster Magazine -- Or Is It?

Front cover of Cinema 57 #20, 'Numero Special' for July/August 1957 -- is this the world's first monster magazine? Some say 'no'!

Hooooooooooooooooooowwwwl! Part 2:

This past Saturday, February 9 (scroll down two posts), I wrote briefly about my recent purchase of a copy of Cinema 57, purported by many to be the world's first monster magazine. As a diehard collector and conniesseur of the genre and its critical writings, this long-sought after gem was a keystone in my collection, and an essential link in understanding the gradual awakening of critical writing about horror, fantasy and science fiction cinema.

Online dealer Patrick Giraud (of Versailles, France, at eBay as 'Pgmovies') is offering a copy of this mega-rare genre classic on eBay, and it's still available as of this morning -- here's the link.

My post has kicked up this discussion on the Classic Horror Film Board (thanks to Tim Lucas for bringing this to my attention), which is well worth a read, including folks like Bill Warren weighing in.

Back cover of Cinema 57 #20; its all-genre contents, from cover to cover, makes this a unique item in the evolution of genre studies in any format.

Why the interested parties don't post comments here, I'll never know. But let me use this blog to post my end of the discussion, since I started it -- and I'll ask that nobody cut and paste my comments here to the Classic Horror Film Board; please link to this blog, to bring me some new pairs of eyes, please, just as I've hopefully brought some new eyes to the board with the link provided above.

OK, first off, this is definitely a magazine -- note Tim Lucas's assertion on the discussion board that, due to its page length, this might be considered a book rather than a magazine. Nope, no such thing -- it's indeed 144 pages, plus covers, but it's digest-size, identical in format (though on much slicker paper) to most of the American sf pulp zines of that time.

The zine itself measures 7 1/8" x 5 1/4", and at 144 pages it's most definitely a magazine, not a book. I'm not sure what conceptual yardstick Tim was using when he posted that comment to the Classic Horror Film Board (and I'm not being 'snippy' here; Tim is a dear friend, I'm just clarifying the specs to reply to his point) -- I mean, the sf pulps in my collection dating from the 1920s to the 1980s are on the average 98-140 pages in length, and I have on hand here a stack of Look magazines from the 1950s-60s, and those are all 124 pages in length every single week! 144 pages for a digest-size zine was a standard format in 1957, nothing unusual in that.

Secondly, it just so happens I do have the so-called "first book" (which I believe it is) on horror films in my collection, too -- Le Fantastique au Cinema by Michel Laclos (Jean-Jacques Pauvert, editor; Societe des editions, 1958) -- which I purchased from Forrest J. Ackerman himself, at one of three conventions I attended with Tim and Donna Lucas (Tim, do you remember which show that was? It wasn't the Chillercon we were all at, it was one of the other two). Ackerman had a table (with another dealer -- Dennis Billows? I can't recall) and was selling off, according to Forry, 'doubles' and 'extras' from his collection, and having read about the Laclos book, it was one of two goodies I purchased from Forry that day. He personally told me about Cinema 57 during that conversation, a zine he had referred to elsewhere in print before that conversation; that, in any case, is what put Cinema 57 on my mental 'want list.'

I don't think I'm stating anything revelatory here, nor do I think I've mispresented anything. However, the zine is not widely known, and is still quite a rarity. A cursory glance at The Collectors Guide to Monster Magazines (by Bob Michelucci; 1977) turns up no mention, nor does a furtive pouring through the pages of its second edition The Collector's Guide to Mnster, Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Magazines (1988, Imagine Inc.) turn up a listing; Mark Sielski was seeking copies of Cinema 57 in his ad in the same book (pg. 148), but that's all I see in that tome.

It is listed in Michael W. Pierce's Monsters Among Us: Monster Magazine & Fanzine Collector's Guide 1995 (self-published, 1995; I purchased my copy from Michael personally, which he inscribed) -- on page 136 -- where Cinema 57 was priced at $300 in good condition, $400-600 in very good/fine, and $800-$1,200 in mint, making Patrick's eBay pricing incredibly fair and arguably a bargain 13 years after the price guide's publication. That listing simply notes, "This was the inspiration for Famous Monsters of Filmland."

But here's the real meat and potatoes. In the second edition of Michael's book -- Monster Magazine & Fanzine Collector's Guide #2, co-authored by John Ballentine (P&B Publishing, 2000) -- Cinema 57 has the same listing, and had only slightly increased in value (good condition copies list at $350; very fine/near mint at $1,000-1,500). Ronald V. Borst offers a more definitive statement in his introduction, "Which Monster Magazine Was Truly the World's First?" (pp. vi-vii), which remains the most comprehensive discussion of the subject to date. Borst notes, "[Famous Monsters of Filmland] Editor Forrest J. Ackerman has always maintained that the only publication that he ever saw prior to his own which was totally devoted to fantastic film coverage was Cinema 57, a French digest-sized magazine which was actually that magazine's whole issue Number 20 for July-August, 1957. Normally, this publication covered all film genres eventually doing a special number on western films as well." Borst also notes the UK one-shot Screen Chills and Macabre Stories, which based on the evidence of its contents hit British newsstands sometime in 1957 -- perhaps simultaneous to Cinema 57, though nobody knows and no definitive record has ever turned up to confirm 'which was first.' As noted on the Classic Horror Film Board, Famous Monsters of Filmland remains the first ongoing periodical monster magazine, which is true -- as Borst notes, "FM was the first professionally published magazine totally devoted to horror/sf films if only because Screen Chills also contained non-film articles (i.e., fiction by Robert Bloch) and Cinema 57 was a specialty number, hardly a 'monster magazine'..." Borst goes on to nominate the 25-50 copies printed fanzine Science Fiction Movie Review (five issues, 1938) as the first "all-movie horror/fantasy/science fiction periodical... [not] featuring fiction alongside the film articles," as the first. 'Nuff said.

Now, I've got lots of movie fan magazines, science-fiction pulps, popular science magazines and various oddball newsstand and subscription magazines from the 1920s and up that feature articles, photo-stories and even covers and cover-stories on horror, sf and fantasy films. That's another topic all together, I think, and only obfuscates the point. Points of interest, for sure, and cool items and collectibles in and of themselves, but those don't count as 'monster magazines' or genre magazines by any stretch of the definition. I also have the Curtis Harrington articles Tim mentions in my collection, along with almost all the British film magazine issues (Sight and Sound, Films & Filming foremost among them) featuring genre essays, articles and interviews (always superior to anything in US publications of the '50s and '60s, until Castle of Frankenstein's heyday) -- all crucial and of interest, but nonetheless, Cinema 57 represents the first single-issue, single-volume offering of serious genre analysis, period.

Nevertheless, content, not status, interests me above all. Without a doubt, the content of Cinema 57 #20 and Le Fantastique au Cinema offer the first adult critical assessment of the genre; the first in magazine format -- a one-shot special, yes -- the second in hardcover book form. Both are handsomely illustrated, and are a major cut above anything available until the maturation of Castle of Frankenstein on newsstands and the arrival of Carlos Clarens' marvelous An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1967), which changed my life forever and marks the first English-language genre book worth reading.

More tomorrow, including a table of contents listing for Cinema 57 -- have a great Tuesday!

The First Monster Magazine?
Plus: Cloverfield Podcast with Yours Truly, Pentagon Blues

Is this the first monster zine? Forrest J. Ackerman has long said so, and I've yet to find anything to pre-date it as a solo-genre zine. A gem!

Hooooooooooooooooooowwwlll!

Thanks to the marvelous online dealer Patrick Giraud (of Versailles, France, at ebay as 'Pgmovies'), I at last have acquired for my collection the long-cited 'first monster magazine' of all time, the French filmzine Cinema 57, and a real beauty it is, too. I'll write about it in some depth in March, but wanted to acknowledge Patrick's service -- great communication, fast ship, and as pleasant an ebay and online dealer experience as I've ever enjoyed! -- now rather than later.

Patrick has also given me access, initially through his always fascinating auction items, to a little gold mine of European treasures; I'm a very happy customer! Over the past two months, I've secured an eye-popping Druillet Quest for Fire movie poster and a clutch of delightful European movie photo-fumettis I'll be writing up in March (with page samples!).

Incredible as it may seem, Patrick now has another copy of Cinema 57 up for auction on eBay, and here's the link -- if you're at all interested, now's the time to jump on this rarity.

Patrick also has these goodies up for auction just now,

or visit his eBay store anytime to see what he's offering.

Recommended, and good luck!

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Dave Kraus and I had a long chat about Cloverfield last weekend, a film I wrote about briefly here and will write about more as time permits. I've caught Cloverfield twice on the big screen, and loved it both times; it's the monster movie of the year thus far, though of course we're only just into February, so you could say I'm hedging my bet. Nevertheless, Dave caught me when the first viewing was fresh and my desire to talk about it high, so his podcast conversation with yours truly may be of interest to those of you with a similar bent.

Check out Episode 20 and (later this weekend) 21 of Nine-Panel Nerds -- the first installment offers a panel discussion, the second episode (21) some one-on-one discussion, including my input. Enjoy!

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On top of the Pentagon malfeasances I discussed yesterday, there's plenty to keep an eye on, even given the ongoing shroud of secrecy President Bush, Vice President Cheney and the current Pentagon staff have obsessively nurtured and maintained since 2001 -- as obsessively as they've labored to stripmine our privacy as citizens in the selfsame name of 'national security.'

No surprise, then, that that very secrecy continues to erode the Pentagon's ability to prosecute "detainees" as the perverse miscarriages of justice continue unabated with precious little to show (save persecution) for the President's Kafkaesque sense of 'justice.'

The secrecy shrouding government files on terror suspects continues to stymie the Pentagon's effort to hold trials at Guantanamo Bay, with defense attorneys continuing to accuse the government of withholding potential evidence, making any notion of fair trial (even under military tribunal standards) impossible.

Meanwhile, the erosion of our military might under the watch of this bunch of bozos -- how did even a sliver-thin 'majority' of Americans fall for the line of shit the Republicans put out that they're the party of national security? They've done more to threaten our national security then Osama bin Laden has! -- continues to manifest.

This past week's classified Pentagon assessment concludes that "long battlefield tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with persistent terrorist activity and other threats, have prevented the U.S. military from improving its ability to respond to any new crisis."

Got that? The President's policies, and steadfast refusal to address reality, have placed us in danger while straining the military to a breakpoint -- this is gross, irresponsible mismanagement from their (and our) Commander in Chief.

It's Admiral Mike Mullen, current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who completed the new risk assessment, which will be delivered to Capitol Hill later this month; given the classified status of this new document, we may or may not know more once it is delivered.

"Because he has concluded the risk is significant, his report will include a letter from Defense Secretary Robert Gates outlining steps the Pentagon is taking to reduce it." Note, too, this isn't news: "The risk level was raised to significant last year by Mullen's predecessor, Marine Gen. Peter Pace;" when will Bush be held culpable for blatant dereliction of duty?

The Teflon President must spray himself daily with political Pam; he's the no-stick President.