With two boys in the elevator, everything smelling of hamburgers, I thought, “Mundane, mundane, won’t you fellows cease? I’m on my way to meet, in one form or another, the Maker. Checking the directory, I found out that, yes, Captain Company, Warren’s mail-order Disneyland of Monsterdom, was also on floor seven.

I walked into the lower east side building along with two delivery boys who were both eating sandwiches. Nearly three million people read them every year: they are translated into German, French, and Spanish and are the living embodiment of the most ghoulish publishing empire in the world: Warren Magazines.ĭespite all this big news, I have been waiting to talk to founder and publisher James Warren for 15 years. It and three other horror comics - Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella - stir deep, deep in the dark, still heart of every complete newsstand and sell for a buck apiece. Today, Famous Monsters of Filmland is the oldest, best monster magazine in the world. As we read the synopsis of The Crawling Eye, a film we’d seen together a few weeks before, and looked over the many stills from Them and It Came From Beneath the Sea, we knew as inexorably as Carl Denham’s hunch about King Kong that here was something significant, something larger than life.

Our monster club had its weekly meeting on Friday nights, and at one meeting vice-president Brent Griffiths held aloft a pulpy, picture-strewn magazine pinched firmly between the thumb and forefinger of his warted chartreuse monster gloves, and said, ”Gentlemen, note this.” We gathered around. Friday nights, when Roderick came on and hosted Shock Theater with his assistant, Igor, the personification of what would happen to us if we didn’t sit up straight in class. Remember: the dark night of our prepubescent souls really arrived at 11 p.m. It probably was TV camera stop-action trickery but Jones could draw and fire faster than any opponent could even put his hand on his revolver.I first looked at Famous Monsters of Filmland back in the sixth grade. Ben Murphy, as Kid Curry/Thaddeus Jones from Alias Smith and Jones (1971-73), gets my vote hands-down in this department.

If, however, the magazine merely refers to Breck in character as Nick Barkley then I would argue the point. If Breck, himself, is that fast a draw that's one thing. There is no qualification as to whether this actually is Breck, himself, drawing a revolver from a holster or whether this is Nick Barkley being a fast draw. 'According to 'Wildest Westerns Magazine', Peter Breck was able to draw his gun in 16/100 of a second, making the character of Nick Barkley the fastest draw in television history.' Who WAS the fastest draw in American westerns?Īccording to a trivia tidbit in the Big Valley thread:

Wildest westerns magazine