If you had the mixed fortune to be American, male, of a certain age, and interested in horror movies and science fiction, chances are better than good that you grew up with a soft spot for Forrest J. Ackerman. Ackerman, who died last week at the age of 92, was a legendary figure in several categories of fandom as a writer, editor, convention goer and collector of memorabilia. But he was best known in kids' bedrooms across the country as the man behind Famous Monsters of Filmland, a nostalgia-drenched photo magazine that combined stills from classic scare pictures (taken from Ackerman's vast personal collection) with punning captions and assorted trivia. Famous Monsters began in 1958 as what was first intended, by independent publisher James Warren, to be a one-shot publication based on a French magazine consisting of classic horror movie stills accompanied by captions. Warren was stymied, though, by two problems: what he saw as the dry, academic tone of the writing, and his discovery that he couldn't simply reproduce the contents of the French magazine without dealing with a mountain of copyright problems. After Ackerman assured him that he could provide stills as good as those in the original magazine, Warren agreed to go ahead with the project, provided that Ackerman also juice up the copy with strings of "Fangs for the memories!"-style puns. (Ackerman once told a reporter that Warren's great contribution to this proess amounted to sitting across from him "holding up an invisible sign reading, 'I am eleven years old, make me laugh.'") The one-shot was so successful that it became the launching pad for what became Warren Publishing, which would go on to the horror-comics magazines Eerie and Creepy, which were spun off from the Ackerman-edited Monster World, as well as Harvey Kurtzman's Help! and the '70s reprints of Will Eisner's The Spirit.

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