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THE MOST FAMOUS MONSTER OF THEM ALL:

JAMES WARREN - the monster pioneer of monster mags!
For all the monster magazines on the stands today, FM was the first one: all the monster books you see, all the monster or horror magazines you read, all came after FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND.

Born on July 29, 1930 in Mt. Sinai Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Jim did not come from a monied family, but his parents and uncles and aunts showered him with love and encouraged him to become an artist.

He excelled in art during his grammar school and high school years, and came in second in the Pennsylvania State Scholastic Art Competition.

Motivated to be an architect by the design of Frank Lloyd Wright, he attended the University of Pennsylvania, School of Architecture where another architect whose work he admired - Louis Kahn - served on the faculty.
Jim was a dedicated student, maintaining high grades. He also maintained an excellent ROTC record while at Penn, which no doubt served to further his military ambitions when the Korean war broke out. Jim - in his Junior year at the time - ankled college to enlist in the army. He volunteered for Armored Infantry Officers Training. He was accepted immediately.

Six months later he was deafened in a night training operation when he got too close to the .50 caliber end of a heavy machine gun. He was medically discharged a few months later.

Interests surfaced from his childhood, including music, airplanes and adventure.

His favorite comic strips of the day were Buzz Sawyer and Captain Easy.

But the army experience had changed him; he was no longer interested in becoming Frank Lloyd Wright. Instead of returning to Penn, young Jim busied himself reading other famous comic strips including Terry & The Pirates, Joe Palooka, Buck Rogers, Dick Tracy, and his heaviest influence of all: The Spirit, by Will Eisner.

He attended classic films ... Walt Disney's Fantasia was a defining film in his youth ("the color, the music, the fabulous artwork!"), Gunga Din starring Cary Grant ignited his sense of adventure, and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane showed Jim "what talent can do when it's burning bright and focused in the right direction").

The 1950's found him working in advertising as an artist and writer. He was fascinated by the publishing efforts of one Hugh Marston Hefner, and before long launched his own After Hours magazine, which lasted only four issues and landed him in jail - he'd been handcuffed and arrested on charges of obsenity and pornography for featuring bare bosoms on the inside and Bettie Page on the cover.

The Philadelphia Enquirer headlined "PORNOGRAPHER ARRESTED" for all the world to see, with a nice photo of Jim in handcuffs during his arrest; subsequently he was booked.

Thus terminated Jim Warren's girlie magazine publishing career, but this period of his life was not without benefits, as during the course of publishing the short-lived magazine, he met up with a writer contributor to After Hours, one Forrest J Ackerman.

Noting that the 27-year-old Hugh Hefner could create a revolution on the newsstands with a totally new concept, and inspired by a French movie magazine (Cinema 57) which had devoted one of it's issues almost entirely to monsters, Jim channelled his own enthusiasm for the idea into the very logical theorem that monsters in a magazine plus kids at the newsstand equalled BIG BUCKS!

With deepest admiration for the classic Universal horror films of the 1930's, and considerable art and advertising background, he delivered his FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND concept to the Los Angeles doorstep of his After Hours writer contributor, Forrest J Ackerman, who at the time was putting food on his own table as a literary agent with a client list that included Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov (Forrest J often opened his couch to a somewhat wanderlust L. Ron Hubbard during those early Ackerman Agency days, and is said to have contracted some of Hubbard's first writing assignments, pre-Scientology.)

Stocked with a house full of books, movie stills, horror props, and a near complete Al Jolson record inventory that would turn the most dedicated Jolson collectors green with envy, Ackerman acknowledged he could easily provide enough stills for one issue of Jim Warren's movie monster magazine idea.

With Ackerman's assurance and Jim's last remaining dollars, Warren beat down distributor's doors in New York

"The rest is history" as they say: in 1958 FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND hit the newsstands running, and under Jim's astute editorial, graphic, publishing, and promotional savvy, quickly sold out and begat issue #2, which in turn begat issue #3, etc., etc., etc.

Under the Warren Publishing Company banner, FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND enjoyed its Golden Age, 1958-1983.

Health issues limited his creative output for a period of years, but today Jim Warren is back with a passion and a baker's dozen of new projects that include further development of his original FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND magazine creation, conceptual design and development of comic book and graphic novel characters, expansion of his new Warren Music Group releases, DVD creation and production, and coffee table books of the original Warren Publishing catalog.



- Verne Langdon
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