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.

Photos are  by Jeff Goodman and are used with his permission.

Originally from Bad Mags

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 >>

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 >>

Shortly after Creepy magazine hit the newsstands in 1964 publisher James Warren put out the anti-war themed quarterly Blazing Combat. The magazine was heavily influenced by the war stories found in the EC titles edited by Harvy Kurtzman, such as Two Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. EC artists such as Wally Wood, Russ Heath, Alex Toth  and John Severin would contribute to the short lived Blazing Combat. The title only lasted four issues from October 1965 to July 1966. There seems to be little speculation as to why this finely written (all but one story was written by Archie Goodwin) and drawn comic magazine went under. It was released during a period of escalation in the Vietnam War and its anti-war themes did not go over well with distributors and wholesalers. The American Legion initiated a boycott against the book chiefly because of one story called Landscape which takes place in Vietnam and ends with the senseless death of a simple rice farmer by American troops on a vengeance raid of the village. Earlier in the story the village is also razed by the Viet Cong. The hostility from distributors caused to magazine to lose more money than Warren was willing to settle for. As well other Warren magazine titles became threatened and after a mere four issues what is considered some of the greatest war comics ever ended with a whimper and not a bang. (more…)

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