Famous Monsters was the most renowned of Warrens photo magazines, but in the early 1960s he produced three other titles covering different b-movie genres, all of them classic examples of the format.
Wildest Westerns
Only six issues between May 1960 and August 1961, but a superb homage to the B-Movies from the 1930s t0 the 1950s. Features one classic Basil Gogos cover, the brooding Brando of ‘One Eyed Jacks’ and three by the irrepressible Jack
Davis of EC fame. Among the rarest of the Warren publications, it was published in America and few seem to have found their way into the UK.
Spacemen ran for 8 issues plus Yearbook, between July 1961 and June 1964. It features sci-fi movies from the serials to the 1950s cornucopia of the genre. One great Basil Gogos cover graces #3
Screen Thrills Illustrated comprised ten issues between June 1962 and February 1965. It relied upon serials and TV, and the photographic content was still of a very high standard, but the covers were much more conventional and a bit messy.
By the mid-60s Warren began a new line of magazines inspired by the EC led horror comics of the early 1950s. Where the original trail blazers had been neutered and finally destroyed by the comic code in 1955, Warren spotted the potential for reviving them in a magazine format which evaded the legal straightjacket that comics were still subject to. He employed some fine artists, including some of the fifties alumni, and produced three quality comic form magazines. In 1964 ‘Creepy’ was introduced, followed in 1966 by ‘Eerie’, and in 1969 by his greatest success in this format ‘Vampirella’. They all had long runs, and are worth looking out for, but I never collected them and so can’t display them here.
One I have collected though is a very short lived war comic published between ‘Creepy’ and ‘Eerie’ in 1965 called ‘Blazing Combat’. It ran from October 1965 to July 1966 in four quarterly issues, and then abruptly finished. It was a fine magazine with some excellent artwork, but the stories were all very much anti-war, cynical and elegiac, and in an era when America was busily waging war on defenceless civilians in pursuit of a mad ideology, it probably couldn’t find an audience, but the four issues shown here are a testament to independent publishing. All have great Frank Frazetta covers, and are not easy to find.
Blazing Combat
