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For, lo, the moment has come for the return of a feature that's spread panic in the corridors of power.
The first person to comment below will set the starting point for today's discussion.
It may involve sport, art, films, music, myth, magic, mystery, sofas, sausages, sci-fi, horror or seasides.
Or something else completely.
Only you can know.
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24 comments:
What other “periodicals” did you read during your youth besides comic books?!
Name the other magazines, newspapers, whatever printed matter entered your house that you enjoyed reading and what you liked about them!
Charlie - in my teenage years, as well as comics, I also read my dad's Analog science fact/ science fiction periodicals. To be honest, I didn't read the science stuff. I mostly read Callaghan's Bar stories & Havilland Tuff - oh, and the book review section. I read some of the editorials - if they caught my interest. I remember one about not being an "inverse conformist".
Phillip
Actually, I'd stopped reading comics as a teenager!
Phillip
Steve - Could you remove my comment, so Charlie's idea gets everyone's undivided attention?
Phillip
Phillip, I've deleted your comment from public view but I've saved it behind the scenes and I'll use it as the basis for next Tuesday's Speak Your Brain post.
Thanks for the topic, Charlie. I can't remember reading much in the way of magazines way back then but we did used to get a mid-1970s one called Science Fiction Monthly that had the same page size as the Marvel Treasury Editions (though with far fewer pages). It was distinguished by its great use of artwork.
I had a handful of editions of Starburst magazine in the very late 1970s and early 1980s. The first issue I had included a lengthy interview with Terry Nation who created the Daleks and Blake's 7. So, that was exciting for me.
We had one issue of The Unexplained which was an early 1980s magazine devoted to the strange and mysterious. The issue we had featured aliens and UFOs and was suitably disturbing.
In the early 1970s, we occasionally used to get a couple of magazines called Look and Learn and World of Wonder which were educational publications for children. They always had great illustrations in them, of castles and Romans and Normans and Mongols and suchlike.
I had three of the four issues of Atlas/Seaboard's Movie Monsters magazine which I remember being good but I've not read it for forty years, so my memory could be playing tricks on me.
I read various mags and papers back in the day but liking back I realised that most of not all contained some sort of comic content. As a music fan I bought rock and pop papers in the 1970s my favourites being Sounds and New Musical Express ( although both carried some cool comic strips like Alan Moores "The Stars my degradation" etc) also Record Mirror but that was pretty much just for the excellent J Edward Oliver strip cartoon rather than the music content. I also read a magazine called AdAstra around late 1977, a mix of Science fact and fiction . For films I read Starburst .
I also got the last three issues of Science Fiction Monthly a massive tabloid size mag and for football ( or soccer) I used to get Shoot magazine every week. I would read my brother's copy of the weekly Rangers News ( even although I wasn't a fan of Rangers). I also picked up House of Hammer but that had a pretty cool comic content and any US or AT mags like Atlas \ Seaboards Movie Monsters mag which I agree was pretty good.
Oops I forgot to add that I occasionally would read the odd issue of Rover a text story paper for boys but only if my dad picked it up for me. Like many UK boys in the early 1970s I also used to sneak a peek at Jackie the girls magazine at school just for the Cathy and Claire's girls problems page.
We got 'Radio Times' and 'TV Times' for the TV schedules - until 1991 you had to buy both magazines, one for the BBC and one for ITV.
And all through the '70s my father had a subscription to 'Reader's Digest'.
Steve, I had the entire run of 'The Unexplained' - 156 issues from October 1980 to October 1983.
We got the daily "Gary Post Tribune" and the Sunday "Chicago Tribune." So, pretty much the entire offering of US comic strips were for me to enjoy! Everything from Alley Oop to Dondi to Orphan Annie to Spider Man...
My mother subscribed us to Boys Life which was a monthly. Usual adventure, scouting stuff which was a good read.
Parents got Readers Digest, Sports Illustrated, Time, Fortune which were read as well.
And of course there was the Roman Catholic weekly "Our Sunday Visitor" news paper.
Lot of paper coming through our house daily, weekly, monthly LOL. Truly a great opportunity to open our minds.
I bought the odd football magazine (Shoot etc) but mainly if it cover featured West Ham or came with free panini stickers. As an early teen I got into 8bit computers and did pick up various computer magazines, although I lost interest when they became increasingly game oriented. I also moved onto NME, although again, manly if the cover feature interested me. I also did get into Viz reasonably early (mid 80s), when it was sold in specialist shops rather than newsagents. With hindsight most of these overlapped, to some extent, hence I never subscribed to any of these on a regular basis.
DW
Charlie- I was a voracious reader early on! My parents got Reader's Digest, which I ...digested. Later on, in my teens, I started reading Billboard Magazine weekly at the library to follow the music industry. Also started reading Newsweek and Life Magazine, as I was also (and still am) a news/history junkie. Oh, and I also got these monthly Science Club books that featured a different subject each time. They came with loads of stickers you would insert into the booklets, and you could collect them all in hard sleeves they provided. Especially looked forward to any that discussed paleontology...
I devoured TV GUIDE every week as a kid. I’d check the TV listings for monster movies and other items, read the capsule descriptions of my favorite shows, etc. I’d also read Cleveland Armory’s weekly opinion piece and Judith Crist’s Movie Reviews, and the other articles. The FALL PREVIEW issues were always a treat, they helped soften the blow of having to go back to school in September.
We got the DAILY NEWS and for a short time, the HERALD EXAMINER. For some reason, my parents disliked the L.A. TIMES. I mostly just read the Entertainment section, which also had a Comics page.
We had a subscription to the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC for a year or two. The photos and illustrations were always spectacular but I didn’t find the subjects all that interesting to read about. There was one lengthy article about the sinking of the Titanic that I recall vividly — it actually gave me nightmares.
Mom was a voracious reader — mostly mysteries and romances. The Travis McGee and 87th Precinct books were her favorites, and she’d occasionally pick up other series books like Mike Shayne, Carter Brown and Shell Scott. I never read any when I was younger but have become a fan of some of them over the years. I’ve read most of the 87th Precinct books (Mom was right, they’re GREAT) and scattered MacDonalds (I prefer his singletons over the McGees — actually, I much prefer Ross MacDonald over John D.) She had subscriptions to both the HITCHCOCK and ELLERY QUEEN digest mags (they didn’t interest me much at all) and she’d also occasionally get those super trashy ‘True Detective’ type magazines, which were grim and depressing as hell but also morbidly fascinating.
I read FAMOUS MONSTERS for a few years, but ‘aged out’ of it around ‘76. Fortunately, STARLOG was there to take its place, and a few years later, CINEFANTASIQUE. Fiction-wise, I occasionally bought the MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION and ANALOG. I bought GALAXY pretty regularly for awhile — the ‘Jim Baen Era’, with Fred Saberhagen, Roger Zelazny, several early John Varley stories, Spider Robinson’s snarky book reviews, lots of gorgeous Stephen Fabian art.
b.t.
We also had a set of the WORLD BOOK ENCYCLOPEDIA, which was fun to dip into on occasion.
In the Summer of ‘68, there was a series of 12 slim hardbacks, heavily illustrated (in color, yet) called THE AMERICAN HERITAGE BOOK OF PRESIDENTS AND FAMOUS AMERICANS. They was sold on a special display at our neighborhood grocery store, a new volume every week. We ended up with a complete set (which I still have). I probably learned more about American History from that series than all my actual History courses in school, combined.
Charlie, I’m jealous of all the great newspaper comic strips you had access to. Our local paper carried mostly humor strips (Peanuts, Blondie, B.C. Etc) with a few ‘Soap Opera’ type strips (Mary Worth and Rex Morgan M.D.) and only two ‘adventure’ strips (Dick Tracy, Steve Roper and Mike Nomad). While visiting relatives in Oklahoma, I was astonished to see Tarzan, Flash Gordon, Secret Agent X-9 and the Phantom (an actual costumed superhero!) in the daily paper. Never even knew such cool things existed before that.
b.t.
I finished with comics when my best mate Dez came in and screwed up everything. I must have been about 13 at the time. After that I think went on to Shoot which was a football news magazine. Although I did read my brother's Roy Of The Rovers too. And at one point when I was reading comics, I was also reading Look In, which was a TV program and pop music themed comic/magazine with magazine articles and the sort of two-page-long serial comic strips that Dez would have loved.
b.t. you raise a questions I've always pondered...
How exactly / what exactly were the cartoon "Syndicates" e.g., the Tribune Syndicate?
Did the Syndicates charge the newspaper by the cartoon or...?
Why did some newspapers seemingly carry some cartoons from multiple Syndicates?
WHat's funny is that between the Chicago Tribune and Gary Post Tribune, we had all the strips you mentioned BUT not the last batch of Tarzan, FLash, X-9, and Phantom. I think they were to be found in the Chicago Sun Times though.
We did not read the Sun Times. It was written at the 4th grade level and the Chicago Tribune at the 6th grade level. Charlie's family was definitely high brow!
The comic stories in la la la-la laa Look In (sorry, as soon as you mentioned the mag even after all this time the old tv jingle popped into my head dangermash) were pretty standard licensed stuff and not to my taste either, but they had some really great artists working in full colour.
John M. Burns drew a fantastic Bionic Woman.
I remember the days of the old music papers well. Melody Maker was too straight, the NME seemed a bit bourgeois (sorry DW) and I don't think I ever saw a copy of Record Mirror, so that left Sounds, which was the first publication I read regularly that wasn't a comic.
The really good thing about those papers was that having to fill so many pages every week meant that they covered a lot of stuff that was well out of the mainstream (I recently read that The Residents believed they got more coverage in the UK than anywhere else back then for that very reason).
They were also a route into the world of post-punk fanzines - Adventures In Reality, Kill Your Pet Puppy, Vague, etc - that went even further off the beaten track...
-sean
I always assumed that the syndicates were basically companies that er... syndicated comic strips Charlie. Like, King Features was set up by Hearst to distribute content - strips, cartoons, columns etc - more widely to other papers.
Presumably a paper would go to multiple syndicates if they wanted different stuff.
-sean
Colin - My family got TV & Radio Times only over X-mas, as a treat!
b.t. - It often seems the Travis McGee books are written using about 3 formulas/recipes. If you prefer John D's singletons, did you ever read 'The Last One Left' ? To some people, it's his best work, but I wasn't impressed. To me, it seemed almost like a script for a tv movie.
As a teenager, to say my worldview was 2 dimensional would be an understatement. Spider Robinson & Heinlein acted like they had all the answers. Then, after 19, 20 - I felt they'd sold my young self a bill of goods. Really, in retrospect, neither was true. They were just trying to write entertaining stories, for money, I suppose!
Charlie - to a UK ear, Sun Times sounds like an oxymoron. Over here, 'The Sun' is a low brow tabloid, whilst 'The Times' used to be a high brow broadsheet.
Phillip
They're both owned by Rupert Murdoch though Phillip, so not completely different.
-sean
Phillip, nowadays I only buy the 'Radio Times' Christmas double issue. For the rest of the year I just use BBC Sounds or the internet to see the TV/radio schedules. But buying the Xmas double issue is a festive tradition, like mince pies or Bailey's Irish Cream.
Colin - Bailey's & Viennetta for Dangermash!
Phillip
Sean - As regards 'The Times', I deliberately wrote the words 'used to be' !
Phillip
Charlie, Phillip, Colin, McScotty, Dangermash, bt, Redartz, DW and Sean, thanks for your comments.
Colin, does this mean The Unexplained came out every week? Its staff must have felt frazzled, putting that together on a weekly basis.
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