Some people of a certain and more decrepit age bracket may remember a day not that long ago when there was no Internet. No blogs. No forums. It was actually a time that seems Medieval but was really not far into the past that our world existed in this primitive fashion.. I remember when video games at the little pizza place run by George from Greece (later busted for selling LSD along with his excellent pepperoni pizzas) jumped from Atari ping pong and the slow moving cowboy shootout thing to Space Invaders and then to Gallaga. But even then when the whole technological world seemed to transforming at a ludicrous pace there was still no Internet or blogging and people had only one option for reading and learning: holding a book or magazine in their hands and looking at it. Many people now may not realize what a luxury being able to sign up to a place like Wordpress or Blogger really is. You can sign up for an account and then have a film blog up and going in a matter of a few minutes. And you can reach some sort of reading audience. Here at the Uranium Café I am proud to get about 1500 to 2000 hits a day on average. At my other blog, Necrotic Cinema, I only get maybe 15 to 20. I cannot figure that out. The Café is hosted and Wordpress based and I spent some considerable time figuring out sitemaps and SEO plug-ins for it. It gets promoted on Google, but my Google based Blogger blog does not really do much even though the same brilliant mind is behind both sites. Well what do these numbers  matter to me when at one time my dream to self-publish a ‘zine’. Sometimes called fanzines, or zines for short, these were usually short little booklets that were basically the size of typing paper (maybe folded in half), Xeroxed off (sometimes on a Xerox machine at some one’s job) and hurriedly stapled together. They were almost always only black and white and full of hard to correct typos. You had to type it right the first time or use loads of white out. The themes were usually about off the wall films or bands no one had ever heard of and that did not get much coverage in the more mainstream music magazines of the day. Hit Parader or Circus just did not cover The Cramps or The Dead Kennedys.

Zines typically had an extremely limited readership. They may have even been given away free at local record stores or comic book shops rather than sold. While the appearance of the zines were often crude the material on the inside was as well researched as you could get at the time. Remember there was no Internet to do the research on. No IMDB. People had to try to find printed material on people Lucio Fulci or Barbara Steele any way they could. And getting a hold of images was tough too. I have no problems now either finding images on the net or capturing them from an AVI file. We can all create images from a film now that no one else has published if we want. In the days of the zine people relied on images already long published in magazines. Some images have now become rather iconographic in nature because of the sheer number of times they have been reproduced first in magazines and then in fanzines and fan styled poster art. The more successful of the zines were able to advertise in the back of some sort of near underground type magazine or comic book. You had to  mail order them and I used to have a small collection of cool little fanzines I had ordered from the back of magazines. Magazines like Psychotronic Video Magazine had loads of cool ads. I think that is where I saw the ad for The Betty Pages (later the Bettie Pages) and managed to get every single copy at one time simply by ordering them and then waiting by the mail box for a couple weeks. Maybe some readers remember these days.

MORE OF THE FANZINE VIDEO VOICE HERE >>

Found out about this magazine called Hembras Peligrosas (Dangerous Women) online somewhere and cannot find out much information on it other than it is in Spanish and well drawn. I even found a PDF of an entire issues and the interior drawings are nice b/w pen and ink drawings. There seems to to be four female characters and the stories are built up around them from issue to issue. One is a vampire and another is a werewolf and i am not sure what is up with the other two. The couple fan sites I found were in Spanish and the few English posts on the magazines were not very informative. In fact sometimes I sort of like to not know too much about a new thing like this. I like the element of mystery about it, the unknown. One thing that seems apparent is the the cover illustrator certainly has a fanny fetish. And there is nothing wrong with that. The magazine was printed in Spain and these books were printed in the early 80’s as far as I can gather from the information on the PDF issue I have. I will probably put up some samples of the inside artwork another day. There is a sister magazine called Sukia and I will probably finds some covers scans of that magazine one day and get them up as well. I think Sukia was an Italian magazine but had a Spanish translated version.

Here is a link to a site that contains little information about the magazine’s history but what it does contain are the covers to every issue of Hembras Peligrosas and a rapidshare link in most posts to a PDF of the inside artwork. When I do my post on Sukia I will provide a similar link. Thank you to whoever runs that site.

MORE EROTIC COVERS FROM HEMBRAS PELIGROSAS >>

A while back I uploaded and posted the entire album for the obscure but great rock opera album Flash Fearless vs the Zorg Women Parts 5 & 6 which featured people like Alice Cooper, John Entwistle, Elkie Brooks and Jim Dandy. The album was a spoof of sorts of the old Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon comic strips with an overt sexual theme running through it. A Uranium Café reader, Keith Firman, was generous enough to take the time and energy to share the comic book that came with some releases of the album. The Chrysalis releases I had owned in a couple different version never had a comic book on in the inside. The scans were pretty good but some of the text is a little blurry as I had to resize the files a bit. Sorry. It was the best I could do. The panels where the text is super tiny actually are showing the song lyrics. Should not effect any story continuity.This thing is really hard to come across and I have not yet seen scans of it online. If you are not familiar with the album check it out free here at the Café and maybe the Rapidshare on the post link is still good if you want to download all of it. Again, thanks to Uraniumphile Keith for these. I do not get many comments here at the Café but what I lack in quantity I make up for in quality from my dedicated readers.

SEE THE ENTIRE FLASH FEARLESS COMIC BOOK HERE >>

Myron Fass was to magazine publishing what Ron Ormond and Al Adamson were to film making, only consistently lacking their sometimes dubious scruples and ethics. His best remembered for his wild assortment of magazines published from the 60’s to 70’s by the company called Countrywide Publications that he partnered with Stanley R. Harris. Harris would leave the partner ship after he was beaten to a pulp for some reason by Fass and would go on to form Harris Publishing who would purchase dwindling Warren assets and then later revive some of the Warren titles such as Vampirella. If you are of the middle ages as I am and thumbed through magazines during the 70’s you probably picked up more than a couple at any one time while at the stand. He covered everything from unauthorized celebrity mags to UFO and occult books that were hot at the time and even gun magazine and some porn titles. There is no doubt that a man of Fass’s questionable character deserves some place here at the Café but details of his life are few and most likely apocryphal.

Most of what he published is lost in eternal obscurity but some titles that I definitely remember from way back in my book buying days are the ones published under his Eerie Publishing company name. The name of the company is an obvious rip-off from Warren and the magazines were pale imitations of the finely done Warren books. Many of the stories were pre-code reprints and artist/writer credit is usually lacking. The covers were really the item here. They were graphic and lurid and unlike anything else on the magazine stand at the time. Truth be told I never bought one of these as a young lad. I was into Neil Adams, Barry Windsor Smith, Frank Frazetta and the other gods of comic book art and design. I found the Eerie titles cheap looking and I could tell the inside art was mostly reprints. I now have almost all of the Eerie titles in digital format and actually do not find them so terrible. I am posting a couple complete stories here. One from Tales of Voodoo, Vol. 2 # 2 and  one from Weird Vol. 3 # 2. I actually like the drawings in the stories I selected and as time has gone on I have to admit I think these covers are just great in a classic exploitation fashion. Expect more covers and maybe some more stories from publishing shlockmeister Myron Fass and Eerie Publications here at the Café. More covers for sure.

SAMPLES FROM TALES OF VOODOO AND WEIRD HERE >>

I saw a post over at Gilligan’s My Retrospace and it ignited a little flame in me. I have often found myself searching the net for damsels in distress pictures. I had long had the idea for a them like this and seeing what he did with Monsters Love to Carry to Girls made me realize how much I liked this line of thinking. Maybe even more than my Girls with Guns fetish. Not sure. The image of a hapless female being carted away by a monster or brute is simply an integral part of the horror mythos. It cannot be taken away. It is one of the main pillars that hold up the temple of horror. I did not want to focus my theme only on woman being carried away but decided to find assorted images of women generally being menaced, threatened and harassed by apes, mutants, madmen, aliens and God knows what else. This will probably become a recurring theme and will eventually earn a category listing after another post or two. I guess one day I can go into some deeper analysis of the whole girl over the shoulder of a brute fetish but I would have to admit I am not sure what the appeal is. No doubt there is a lurid and fetishistic nature to some of these images, and what is wrong with that? A couple are publicity stills and seem designed to simply show off the ample curves and cleavage of the frightened females. I have been looking to broaden out what I do here with simpler posts. I simply get worn out doing my long treatises on the films of Al Adamson or Ted Z. Mikels that no one probably reads and want a break sometimes. Maybe will get back to posting more comic book and poster art as well and give myself a rest while I am working on some posts in my drafts folder. Have no fear, there will be more monster and girls themed posts in the future. There is certainly no end to such images to be found online. Also, expect another Girls with Guns post soon as well to keep the balance. Sometimes girls get tired of being carried off and they pick up a big long barreled gun and blow the heads off their tormentors. Both theme have their place here at the Café.

MORE GIRLS BEING MENACED BY BIG, NASTY MONSTERS HERE >>

I was never a big fan of National Lampoon and its brand of humor but as a young lad imagine my surprise when I walked by the magazine rack and saw the above fantastic Frank Frazetta cover gracing the August 1973 issue. I picked it up and on the inside was yet another Frazetta drawing for a comic book spoof about a gay Dracula quaintly named Dragula. The story was drawn by another great master Neil Adams who also penned another story for the same issue called Son o’ God about a super hero messiah. Frazetta did another cover for Lampoon that I am aware of but I prefer this one and when I stumbled across this online the other day I thought I would put them up here and share them with the Cafe denizens since these drawings are fairly unknown. I know I just did a Frazetta post recently but I just do not think a person can ever get enough Frazetta. Imagine a time when you could scoop up art like this for a mere .75 cents.

From the late 40’s to early 60’s Frank Frazetta worked in the comic book field mostly doing well detailed and rendered covers. He had gained a sort of apprenticeship from working alongside Al Williamson and Roy Krenkle and later Al Capp. The style we see now as Frazetta developed after the mid-60’s when he began doing movie posters and working for Warren Magazines and finally the immortal Lancer and Ace paperback book covers that changed the way fantasy art was interpreted forever. I am presenting here a few of his early comic book covers, all but one from Famous Funnies,  as well as an anti-smoking ad that used to run in the back of the Warren magazines. I have never smoked in my life and I am sure it is simply because of the influence of this one advertisement. Okay, I am exaggerating. The covers and his occasional interior work shows a unique style that is proof Frazetta, even during his comic book period, was marching to the beat of a different drummer. There is simply the element of genius in these works that is seldom seen even in modern comic book design and artwork.

MORE FRAZETTA COMIC BOOK ART HERE >>

When once I wore a younger man’s coat I had quite the collection of Warren Magazines. I cannot remember the total number of the issues of Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella and Famous Monsters of Filmland I owned at the time but it was a lot. I also had original copies of all four Blazing Combat books and all the magazines were well tended. Well, they are all long gone except the memory though I now own about almost everything Warren ever printed in digital form. I know that a jpeg file is not the same as a piece of paper but there is the simple reality of how much or many of a thing you own and how much it weighs and how much space it consumes. So I settle for second best now.  Computer files. One set of Warren books I could never get my hands on but always coveted  were a set of experimental titles  they put out in 1965. Along with the double feature issue for the Hammer films Curse of Frankentstein and Horror of Dracula were the “photo-comics” made for The Horror of Party Beach and The Mole People. I knew they existed because I saw them advertised in the back of the Warren mags I collected. The back pages were loaded with cool ads for books, novelties and records and 8mm film clips. While the books did well in some foreign markets in Europe and Mexico the books basically flopped sales wise in the States and were discontinued. Here are the covers and some sample pages. There are about seventy pages per book and that is simply way to much to post here in their entirety. I think the books were sort of neat ideas and I hope I can find the Frankenstein/Dracula double feature soon. I actually did see a real copy of that magazine once and got to thumb through it. There was also release  the same year a “how to” photo magazine that featured make up techniques by Dick Smith (make up effects for films like The Exorcist, Taxi Driver, Scanners, The Godfather among many others) that I would like to have a look at someday.

MORE WARREN PHOTO-COMICS HERE >>

THE HOUSE OF HAMMER

The House of Hammer was a British movie magazine put out in the mid 70’s when Hammer as a film company was grinding down to a near stand still. But at the time the magazine was the best selling movie magazine in Britain. The publication tried to combine what Warren magazines was doing with Famous Monsters of Film Land and its black and white comic magazines. The artists that contributed to the magazine were also frequent Warren contributors and they may have jumped at the chance to illustrate some of the classic Hammer films in narrative form. The magazine however did not only focus on Hammer films or exclusively on British cinema but contained articles on classic American horror as well.  I included an illustrated version of one of the better latter day Hammer films Vampire Circus drawn by the fantastic Brian Bolland. I have all the issues on my hard drive and look forward to posting some more samples from this curious magazine including some comic strip hosted by an illustrated Peter Cushing as Abraham Van Helsing. For now enjoy Vampire Circus and a couple page samples.

MORE HOUSE OF HAMMER #17 HERE >>