Famous Monsters Of Filmland - 1965 Yearbook - Special Issue

Now we go to the 1965 Yearbook of Famous Monsters. These Yearbooks (also called Fearbooks) were a collection of some of the best articles from early issues accrued for fans enjoyment containing some cool pics and pieces that some buyers may have missed over the years. The cool cover ghoul is, of course, the Frankenstein Monster. I have two of these, and the other one is in better shape than the one pictured here. The old Universal horrors were always partial to me, but they lost some of their sheen to these eyes once I was exposed to Hammer Films.


FM's peak years were from its first issues through the late 1960s, when the disappearance of the older films from television and the decline of talent in the imaginative film industry left it with a dearth of subject matter acceptable to both editor and fan. Warren and Ackerman created a jump in issue numbering from issue 69, which was printed in September of 1970, to issue 80 in October of 1970. They did this (according to the editorial in issue 80) because it brought them closer to issue 100, justifying the numerical jump because of the publishing of ten issues of the short-lived companion magazine 'Monster World' as issues that 'would have been' Famous Monsters issues. During the '70s, the magazine came to rely heavily on reprints of articles from the '60s. In the early 1980s, the magazine folded after Warren became ill and unable to carry on as publisher, and Ackerman resigned as editor in the face of the increasing disorganization within the captainless Warren Publishing Company. The magazine stopped publication in 1983 after a run of 191 issues.