Jim Warren was a very colorful publisher of not-very-colorful magazines. He's the guy who brought us Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, Famous Monsters of Filmland and many others. Depending on your age and who was in charge of those magazines when you read them, they could have been very important to you. Even at their lowest points, they stood way above most of the imitations…and boy, did they have imitations.
A lot of very talented people passed through those pages and one could make the case that, of all the publishers trying to appeal to the tastes of a certain youthful audience back then, no one had a better "read" on what the customers wanted than did James Warren. At the very least, you could argue that no one did as much with such low budgets as James Warren.
His story has been captured well in a new book by our friend Bill Schelly. Bill is a superb researcher and chronicler, and I was startled by how much he discovered about his subject that I didn't know. Warren, like so many other publishers back in the late fifties, was trying to replicate the lifestyle and financial success of Hugh Hefner without the funding. He wound up making his mark with monsters, not bunnies.
That's the tale Bill tells, along with Warren's revolving door of editors and the challenge of being a little guy on a big newsstand. If any of that sounds of interest to you, order a copy of James Warren: Empire of Monsters. It sure was of interest to me.