Let’s see…Chrome made the Grateful Dead joke I was going to make…AuntiePam answered Milo’s question about CREEPY and EERIE magazines (don’t forget VAMPIRELLA, the third of the group)…and several other people said THE NATIONAL LAMPOON (the 1970-1980 years) and SPY (the 1985-1992 years).
So I’ll have to go for NEMO magazine, which was published during the late 1980s by Fantagraphics Press, the folks who do COMICS JOURNAL.
NEMO was devoted to great comic strips of the past, and did interviews with aging cartoonists and great reprints of things like “The Outbursts of Everett True,” “Oaky Doakes,” “Barnaby,” and “King Aroo.” Probably had a circulation of about 350.
Well, there was “Undertakers Monthly,” “Better Tombs and Gargoyles,”, “Coffin Times”…
No, seriously now–
New Worlds–a famous British SF magazine published during the SF “New Wave” era. Short-lived but extremely influential.
Trouser Press–THE music mag of the punk rock period.
Psychotronic Video–maybe it’s still be published, but I can’t find it. If you love wonderfully bad movies, this is the one for you.
BYTE–I’m not a tech-head, but even I appreciated the depth and quality of the computer articles in this mag. Plus, I enjoyed reading Jerry Pournelle’s “Computing at Chaos Manor.”
Destinies–another SF magazine. This was a “bookazine”; it was actually published in paperback format, 4/year. Maybe not the greatest SF magazine, but it fit nicely on my shelf.
Science News–back in my early days of pre-teen nerd-dom, I subscribed to this. It was really a very well written weekly newsletter. The articles were written so that a layperson could understand them, but contained enough “meat” for a scientist (well, maybe a grad student).
Omni–sort of. As a long-time SF fan, I resent the condescending attitude that the genre has to be fancied up to make it palatable for the mainstream. However, it did provide a well-paying venue for many writers, and some good articles. But why was it laid out exactly like “Penthouse” (minus the nude women)?
Can’t believe I forgot about this one. Used to grab it religiously at the newstands. A friend of mine and I once taught an “Evening at Emory” (Emory U.'s adult-education night classes) course entitled “Incredibly Strange Movies” (the title of course being an allusion to Ray Dennis Steckler’s classic The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies). Psychotronic was, of course, one of our major sources of background material.
Ike, Eve, Nemo:
I thought of including the early Spy in my own list, but it definitely wore out its welcome with me, so that I don’t miss it in the way I do the others.
rackensack–did you ever see “The Incredibly Strange Film Show”, a documentary series on the Discovery Channel? Each episode was about a different terrible film director–Ray Dennis Steckler, Herschel Gordon Lewis, Doris Roberts and, of course, Ed Wood Jr. There was also an episode on Mexican wrestling films, focusing on the one and only Santos (and Son of Santos). A great series that needs to be re-run.
I miss Omni, too. The real one, not the resurrected, new-age spewing rag it became after its first death. The reason it’s laid out like Penthouse is that it’s was owned by the same publisher and it was probably cheaper to share the layouts, so to speak.
Sounds like they borrowed heavily from the reSEARCH volume Incredibly Strange Films, especially if they did a whole show on Santos. I didn’t see it (haven’t had cable in the nearly 20 years since I left home for college).
You may want to check out the thread on Really good really bad flicks that some has providentially and apparently coincidentally started.
I miss the magazines from the “Golden Age” of home computing such as Compute! and for us old Commodore users Compute! Gazette. BASIC program after BASIC program and those wonderful little machine language programs that looked so cool, but I was never willing to sit down and type in 3000 lines of code like:
They’d have the comic strip (or sometimes a multi-page story) on one side, and the translation on the other (facing page, for the long stories), broken down like this:
Kana/Kanji
Transliterated Japanese
Direct Translation
(More) Natural English
(Occasionally a yet more natural translation)
Explaination
The premise was that the hosts Cain, Able and Eve would tell stories about horrible things happening to people, and when the story was over, they’d all be rolling on the floor laughing until tears shot out of their eyes. To this day, whenever something goes wrong in my life, I say to myself, “plop” and suddenly my misfortunes are hillarious.
MrKnowItAll,
I hadn’t thought about it in years, but even before I clicked the link you provided, a mental image of John Travolta flashed through my mind… and there he was! I know I read each and every issue of that magazine
Wow! Thanks for that blast from the past!
(No longer trying to get my Hair to look like Farrah’s…)
Voted “Most Popular Small Appliance” on the SDMB 1999
(ok, so I made it up!)
Chrome Toaster
