A Wonderful Life: Basement Style
Some things that happened in my life leading up to me becoming a comic artist
I was around five. Creature Features and Chiller Theatre were on late night TV. Some of my earliest memories were of my Gramp telling my sister & me stories of magic and fantasy. Mystical Indian heroes, big bad wolves & bears. There was magic in the forest. Often my sister and I were heroes of Gramp’s tales. Gramp was great; he also took me to the corner stores, Five & Dimes, and gave me a dollar to spend. I’d bring home 10 comics! Batman & Robin, Superman & books where soldiers battled dinosaurs were my favorites.
Then one day I happened upon a magazine all ripped up. The pages were scattered along a fence surrounding South Jr. High School, all stuck together from a recent rain. I carefully peeled them apart and my soul grew wings! There were monsters! Glorious monsters! Black and white photographs, like you’d see in a newspaper of real monsters! It was, as we said in those days “wicked”. But, the cover and early pages were lost. What was this magazine?!!
I’m guessing I was around six when our family went camping one summer when we stopped at this little store on the side of a lake. There was a comic rack in this mom & pop store so visiting it was the highlight of the vacation! I would be able to join Batman & Robin in the Batmobile, soar over Metropolis with my pal Superman! But, what’s this? A grumpy wise crackin’ rocky orange monster was wrecking the lab of his partner who stretched like a rubber band, and then, THEN, there was this hulking green Frankenstein lookin’ monster fighting the U.S. Army! He crushed tanks cuz they just…wouldn’t…leave him ALONE! What a concept! Monsters as heroes! Batman & Robin were on primetime television now with the Twilight Zone. A new band called The Beatles was causing unbelievable levels of excitement in the young generation, and now I could carry creature features, rolled up in my pocket, anywhere I went. It was such a magical wonderful time.
Then I found the Holy Grail…
I remember the store. I could take you to it and show you where the magazine rack was on that wonderful day the day I found the magazine of which its previous issue I’d found torn & tattered on the school fence. Simply looking at the title made my heart race. “Famous Monsters of Filmland.” Issue forty two. Frankenstein meets the Wolfman. Greedily drinking in each photo I stared trance-like at each page, my imagination soared as I wondered what treasures each back issue contained, the covers of which were absolutely horrifying beautiful! And then…THEN… <sniff> I still get choked up over it... then I discovered in those heavenly back issues pages, magazines called “Creepy” and “Eerie”! Two covers affected me the most. A King Kong-like gorilla thundering towards a voluptuous blonde (Haunting issue eleven of Creepy), a scene, by the way, I hope Peter Jackson puts in the new Kong! And then there was Eeries’s cover depicting two startled kids in a swamp looking at a monstrous T-Rex which was in turn looking at THEM (Fearful issue five! I left my body! I soared at light speed from Massuchests to