CINEMA 57 MARKET UPDATE

Since I first posted information about the French monster book, CINEMA 57 about a dozen years ago, there are currently two listings on eBay selling copies: one is a very good copy with a $349.00 "or best offer" price tag and the other is an "acceptable" copy from a seller in Canada for $326.66 USD.

To read what CINEMA 57 has to do with monster magazine history, click HERE for the details.

THIS MAGAZINE IS BIZARRE

I recently discovered this stashed away in my "Monster Magazine Files" folder and thought it would be a good time for them to see the light of day (or the dark of the moon, depending on when you're reading this). I've had it for at least a decade or longer and the best I can recall is it came from an eBay listing, maybe two. I took a quick new look and one seller had a copy up for bid or "best offer", starting at $119.00, but it was taken down and has since been re-posted for $89.00, plus shipping. Other than that, I have found no other copies for sale and virtually no information about it, much like I did 10 or 12 years ago when I originally downloaded the images.

Comparing this to CINEMA 57, another French 'zine featuring monsters (read the story behind that HERE), there are several copies of this currently up for sale ranging in price from $250.00 to $400.00. So, does this make BIZARRE #24/25 (March 1962) any more rare than CINEMA 57? Since I haven't been tracking these two international magazines for a long time, I can't be certain -- but I'd venture a guess that it's at least scarce.

So, what's the story behind BIZARRE? It was originally founded by Eric Losfeld, who printed two issues until 1953, then disappeared. If the name sounds familiar, Losfeld is the man who published Jean-Claude Forest's BARBARELLA in 1968, which had originally appeared as a strip (no pun intended) in another French magazine in 1962. BIZARRE was then taken up by Jean-Jacques Pauvert and Michel Laclos, who published it continuously from 1955 until 1968. The content has been described as a "torrent of iconoclastic wit, cultural criticism, and artistic daredevilry". Pauvert is also notorious for publishing books by the Marquis de Sade out of his bookshop on the Rue Bonaparte which had fallen under police surveillance. Eventually, he found himself in a controversy in which the government banned the sale of such scandalous trash. A number of the magazine's contributors also faced public outcry and run-ins with the law, including the political cartoonist, Siné, who held strong anarchist, anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic views. Sounds like it could have left CHARLIE HEBDO in the dust! In any event, BIZARRE was certainly in the middle of the maelstrom of the French counterculture.

Pauvert also published issues of his magazine on the topics of cinema and popular culture, hence the issue that we see here. As described at the Yale University Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library page, the strange -- and, yes -- bizzare history of BIZZARE is summed up thus:

"The editors of Bizarre had a penchant for revealing the dark side of American popular culture, as in [its] stinging critique of MAD magazine, chastized for its lily-white heros and its complete silence on the topic of racism and the civil rights movement in the United States [unknown to them, the editors of MAD had their reasons]. The rising wave of détourned political comics, which spread quickly throughout Europe in the early sixties and became a staple visual component of protest literature in the wake of 1968, certainly ripples through the 48 issues of Bizarre from first to last."

Expanded images from the pages of BIZARRE:

THE FIRST MONSTER MAGAZINE? A NEW DISCOVERY

The controversy over the first monster magazine is, in my opinion, much ado about nothing, barely rising to the level of little more than a tempest in a Tana leaf teacup. It is most widely accepted that it was Forrest J Ackerman, inspired after seeing a copy of the annual French film magazine, CINEMA 57 (the issue for 1957, titled Le Fantastique), who came up with the idea for the first film monster periodical (and thus, by default, the first monster magazine) along with publisher James Warren, in 1958. The magazine was to become FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND, and it even had a test drive as a special "monster" section in Warren's AFTER HOURS #4.

For the last of the holdouts that stubbornly maintain that CINEMA 57 deserves the honor of being the first monster magazine, their assertion lies in the fact that the entire issue is a cover-to-cover, monster movie-themed magazine. It's hard to argue about that, but it was still only one issue in the periodical's history of covering the oeuvre of world cinema, not just monster movies. If it had been a one-shot, independent publication, the veracity of the argument would be greatly increased. But alas, it was only one of many in the life span of the popular French film magazine.

So, by following the same criteria, it may come as a surprise to know that even the lauded CINEMA 57 drops from the running. Why? Because another French magazine (ah, those French!) qualifies under the very same rationale -- only this one wasn't published in 1957 -- it was published 35 years earlier, in 1922!

Actually, it was two numbers of the French magazine LE FILM COMPLET (The Complete Film) that contained full issues dedicated to F.W. Murnau's NOSFERATU. Interestingly, the first of the issues, with a publication date of 3 March 1922, was just the day before the German opening of the film (it had premiered earlier, on 17 February at The Hague, Netherlands). This is not too surprising as advance promotion for the film was heavy and is no doubt how the publishers of LE FILM COMPLET received their materials. It was these same costs for promoting the film that far surpassed the eventual boxoffice returns, and was part of the reason for occultist/film auteur Albin Grau's Prana Films, the production company that financed NOSFERATU, to go out of business after just one production.

The March issue of LE FILM COMPLET contained 9 photos from NOSFERATU, as well as a 13-page synopsis of the first part of the film. The second issue, dated 6 December, 1922 again included 9 photos and a 15-page synopsis of the second part of the film. It is estimated that between the two issues is the most complete "filmbook" of the legendary vampire movie ever published.

LE FILM COMPLET published over 500 issues from the 1920's through the 1950's. It maintained the basic format of a  7" x 10" page size and a length of 16 pages. Not as lengthy as most magazines, it still qualifies as the first "almost" monster magazine (and first "filmbook"), again using the criteria mentioned earlier.

The images of the issues shown here are from auction Lot #83908 sold by Heritage Auctions, Dallas, TX in November, 2012 for $1,015.75. They are considered extremely rare and, unless the owner of these magazines discloses more, or until other copies are discovered, what you see here will likely be the extent of the available images.

As you can see, there is a compelling new argument for provenance of the "almost" first monster magazine. I have laid out the reasons and rest my case!

EYE ON EBAY: FAMOUS (FRENCH) MONSTERS

A digest-sized magazine from France, CINEMA 57, has frequently been cited as being the first-ever monster magazine. I disagree. True, it is a magazine that has monsters in it, but it was not ever meant to be an on-going periodical, which I believe is the qualifier. Warren's test run of the soon-to-follow FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND in AFTER DARK #4, while content-heavy with monsters, can be similarly categorized.

Nope -- unless a hitherto unknown moldering tome is miraculously resurrected from the trash heaps of time, for me, FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND is the first, regularly published monster 'zine.

However, that doesn't stop dealers from fetching premium collector's dollars for CINEMA 57. Two sellers are offering the 145 page, July 1957 French publication on eBay. One copy is described in "very good" condition and is selling for $458. The other is being sold as a "good" copy for $249.