Cover Story - Top 15 Basil Gogos Covers

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This weekend the world lost a titan of illustration and horror- Basil Gogos.  Gogos was one of the fundamental names in horror artwork; his style was unique and widely influential in a way that few others have ever managed.  He’s also one of a lot of artists that don't get brought up nearly enough due to how much his work was instrumental in defining a previous era.  Gogos’ greatest volume of published work with the farthest reaching impact was unquestionably his huge collection of cover art produced for Famous Monsters of Filmland.  

Famous Monsters was a horror/monster/schlock magazine that first saw print in 1958 and basically invented the horror movie subculture.  In the days before the Internet stuff like Famous Monsters was the only way horror fans could interact with other fans or even get a hint of the horror landscape beyond their own personal borders and it helped inspire a lot of fans turned creators over the years.  So, today we honor a great man and his great legacy with the top 15 Basil Gogos covers of Famous Monsters of Film Land.

Universal Announces Classic Monster Shared Universe

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As a long time fan of shared universes and continuity, there’s a big part of me that wonder show this moment of popularity for those things will look once it’s passed into history.  Obviously, that’s assuming any trend can truly pass away anymore instead of simply going into extended hibernation, but by the same token, the young adult film boom of the mid-2010s seems to have thoroughly wound down, so I guess we’ll see.  

One thing seems fairly sure, most of the shared universes of the day will probably be looked back on with awkward disinterest or surprise, and none among them will garner such a response the same way I suspect the Universal Movie Monster-Verse will. 

In case you hadn’t heard, Universal has decided to revive the brands on their classic monster movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s to act as a new shared universe, which makes sense given the original films also acted as a shared universe.  These new films will be kicked off by this summer’s The Mummy and are being managed by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman- two of the biggest hacks working in Hollywood right now behind such atrocities as Transformers, Amazing Spider-Man 2, and the worst parts of the Star Trek reboot.  

Previously Universal had done a good job keeping this whole idea out of focus but as The Mummy nears and they start worrying about getting the hype machine going they’ve produce a big publicity spread to get people like me talking about it so, yeah; let’s talk about Universal’s Dark Universe.  

Filmland - 8 Kaiju That Should Join the MonsterVerse

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We’re now a couple weeks out from Kong: Skull Island, the 2^nd installment of Legendary’s proposed “Monster-Universe” of films.  For those not in the know, this is a planned shared universe of giant monsters movies that’s been in the works for a while now.  The concept originated with Legendary’s desire to reboot Godzilla for the modern blockbuster age when they came across the script for Pacific Rim.  They like some of the concepts but ultimately ended up deciding to make a Marvel-style shared universe instead.  The first installment in this was 2014’s Godzilla, directed by Garreth Edwards, which wasn’t great. 

However, Kong: Skull Island looks fresh and Godzilla: King of Monsters is showing a lot of promise, bringing in Michael Dougherty, director of Krampus and Trick r Treat, as a new director along with three classic monsters in Rodan, Mothra, and Ghidorah.  All of this is leading up to an eventual King Kong vs. Godzilla remake, though there’s plenty of room for franchise expansion beyond that.  That subject of franchise development is what I’m here to talk about today with 8 classic Toho Kaiju who should appear next in the giant monster-verse. 

The Mummy Trailer Breakdown

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Let’s talk for a second about “cinematic universes.”  The idea of cinematic universes is a pretty new concept for most general audiences, but it actually finds its origins with the so-called Universal Monster Cycle.  

This was a collection of films produced in the ‘30s and ‘40s by Universal Studios and are considered the first major horror hits of the talking picture era.  Basically, our universally held conceptions of Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolfman all come from these movies, and they all ended up sharing continuity with each other. 

The big reason for this was that aside from being owned by the same studio, each of the monster movies had a unique style while still fitting together as a cohesive whole.  That’s always been the secret of the cinematic universe, and now, 85 years later, Universal seems to have forgotten it as they return to this particular well with 2017’s The Mummy.

10 Characters We Might See in Dark Universe (Justice League Dark)

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Edited by Robert Beach 

Well, I don’t think anyone saw this one coming. If you asked me or anyone else last week what was happening with the Justice League Dark movie, they would’ve told you it was probably dead, especially when WB premiered that animated adaptation at SDCC.  The fact that the project is alive at all is pretty shocking, but that it’s poached Gambit director Doug Liman and is getting ready to enter casting comes completely out of nowhere. 

Also, the film is now being titled Dark Universe. No doubt this name change will set it apart from the light, cheerful, wholesome universe of the previous DC films. I don’t mind the name shift given the JLD has always included pretty much every magic user in the DCU, but it’s not like DC was bereft of names to apply to that group. As you’re about to see, DC has a long history of magic teams like this one. 

Cover Story - Top 17 Bizarro Covers

This week marks the live action debut of Bizarro on CBS’ Supergirl.  Granted this is Bizarro Supergirl as opposed to the standard Bizarro Number One of the comics but it’s still a pretty big deal all things considered.  I’m a massive Bizarro fan so this is a pretty big deal for me and I’ve chosen to celebrate by taking you through the best Bizarro covers I could dig up from across the characters very long history.  

This is going to be one of those Cover Stories where the cover collection doubles as an excuse to talk about Bizarro’s exceedingly weird history so in case you ever wanted to know what the deal was with the chalk white rocky Frankenstein Superman that is Bizarro, here we go.

Panel Vision - Top 10 Tales of the Zombie Covers

It’s October, Halloween is happening, I’m talking about zombie movies for literally the whole month, and the Walking Dead is on every Sunday.  Given that, of course I had to dedicate a listicle to the best zombie book covers.  The only thing is that there are as many zombie comics as there are stars in the sky and it’d be nearly impossible for me to cull through all of them so I’m narrowing my list to just one zombie comic.  It was originally meant to be Walking Dead before I remembered Walking Dead’s covers are incredibly bland so instead I fell back on my standard answer to most comic book questions: the ‘70s.  I’ve mentioned before that in the ‘70s an agining audience forced DC and Marvel comics to experiment more with what content they were putting out.  DC started releasing its classic horror anthology comics again and Marvel released a whole ton of horror comics including Tomb of Dracula, Frankenstein, and today’s topic Tales of the Zombie, and the covers by the brilliant artist Boris Vallejo.