Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Movie Monsters #4, Part 1!

Time to start a look at another monster mag, and this time around, I've selected Movie Monsters #4! As with all prior entries in this series, you can click on any page to get a larger view.

Movie Monsters was Atlas/Seaboard's entry into the monster mag field. This issue was the last one of this magazine's short run. As we get into this, you'll see some ads that will be very familiar to you if you've ever read any of the 1970s Atlas comics!


And, as always, we start with the cover, painted by George Torjussen. I'm not sure what monster is supposed to be portrayed here, to be honest!


Page 2 features one of those "get rich quick" ads that littered comics for the longest time, and of course, page 3 has the table of contents and credits: Publisher Charles Goodman, Editor-In-Chief Jeff Rovin, Art Director John Chilly, Assistant Edtior Richard Meyers, Production Manager Steve Mitchell, Editorial Staff Gary Gerani, Carl Macek, and Keith Morris, and the cover credit.

Jeff Rovin would go on from his stint at Atlas/Seaboard to author or co-author many books, including the Encyclopedia of Super-Heroes, the Encyclopedia of Super-Villains, and the Encyclopedia of Monsters! Steve Mitchell's name rings a bell, but I can't place him. And is that Carl Macek the same guy who eventually brought Robotech to the USA?


And with page 4, we start out with the first article of the issue, and as you can see, it covers Ray Harryhausen's 20 Million Miles to Earth! Lavishly illustrated, the article details how Ray came to make the movie, and briefly summarizes the movie.





It's a pretty decent -- and lengthy -- article, and I find myself wondering why the heck it didn't end up being cover-featured!

Next time around, some ads, and Lon Chaney, Jr.!


  1. well.. that monster isn't one i have ever seen..

    if that is Carl Macek, its kinda a bad word for many people like myself.. Am a Macross Fan (And i do mean Fan. Macross, Macross 2, Macross Plus, Macross DYRL, Macross 7, Macross Frontier and a few more). Some say he is a devil for what evil he did to Macross to make it into Robotech.. Others say he didn't want it to be so bad and was in fact a saint for trying... oh well.. too long a story for here huh?

  2. Maybe it's just me, but I strongly suspect that Macek's adapting of the three series into RoboTech probably did its fair share to help popularize (or perhaps re-popularize) anime in the USA (it had been a while since Battle of the Planets, hadn't it?)... and I wonder if there hadn't been so much info about how RoboTech was done, if Macross (the original) would've had the fanbase it has today?

  3. there is always that part of the debat but mostly his work is credited as to the reason we get soo many bad edited watered down Dubs on kids TV where they guys not only seam to write a whole new script based on whatever action is going on, but they edit the art and animation aswell to get there new stories across... and i hate the fact when Macross Fans call the character Lynn Minmei! Her Japanese name was Lynn Minmay! It was an english spelling.. it was the Americans that made it chinese...-_-

  4. That's an imaginative rendering of "The Thing" getting zapped by the electrical trap at the end of the movie. The movie is featured inside the issue. I have this issue and featured the cover a few days ago on the Daily Monster magazine Memory over at

    The hi-rez cover scan is visible at:

    Thanks for your great blog!

  5. Thanks, Fred... even with your clarification, it's hard to see that as being the Thing! Doesn't look at thing like Arness' alien carrot to me!

