Besides comic books, Marvel made occasional forays into the b/w magazine market...
..with this seven-issue 1965-66 title being their longest-lasting Silver Age series!
(Note: with the second issue, Stan Lee's name was added to the cover as a selling point!)
Other mags had used the gimmick of captioning old movie and tv photos for a feature in a magazine...but never an entire magazine!
At this point, the book changed it's title...
...nobody's really sure why, but it seemed to work!
One of the koolest aspects was that Stan Lee wrote the captions...
...bringing the same kitchy vaudville-level humor that he used for decades in
Marvel's humor comics!
I'm not sure if declining sales or Stan Lee's increasing workload caused the cancellation!
(Besides his writing/editing duties, he was now the public face of
Marvel, giving interviews, making appearances on tv, even touring
college campuses where Marvel Comics were the "in" thing!)
In 1973, when
Marvel unleashed an entire line of b/w magazines, ranging from horror to kung fu...
...they revived the concept, still written by Stan Lee!
...but this time, the title was the least-successful of the b/w line!
It was re-tooled into a Famous Monsters of Filmland/Castle of Frankenstein format, adding features about both old and current films and tv shows...
...but the alteration didn't help and the book was cancelled.
Marvel tried again, later that year with a Famous Monsters of Filmland/Castle of Frankenstein clone called Monsters of the Movies, which lasted for eight regular issues and an Annual.
Starting next Friday, through November, you'll be seeing the best (IMHO) of each issue!
Don't Miss It!
