Magazines and Monsters

Magazines and Monsters is a long-running show about classic comics and the old horror, fantasy, and science fiction films that share their shelf space. Billy D. runs it. He almost never runs it alone. Nearly every episode brings in a friend from the comics blogging or podcasting world, and the show treats that pairing as the point rather than a garnish. The result sounds like two people with the same stack of back issues on the table, talking without a script. The feed carries several named strands. The Bronze Age of Horror Comics handles Warren magazines and DC anthology titles, with Kirby on hand for Creepy and Martin Gray calling in from Scotland to cover House of Secrets 135 from 1975. The Brave and the Bob narrows to Bob Haney and The Brave and the Bold, though it wanders into adjacent oddities like a 1974 World's Finest in which Deadman possesses Batman to scrawl a clue about a mountain sanitarium. The flagship show covers everything else. That has recently meant The Lost Boys, an Amicus anthology run through March that closed with From Beyond the Grave, and a multi-part read of V for Vendetta with Dr Anj that slows down for V's backstory and the authorities who cannot see what he is building. The structure is reliable. Set up the book or the film, admire the cover, then work through the story beat by beat with stops for reaction and recollection. Digressions are frequent and usually earn their place, whether that is a note about how advanced a 1987 opening scene looked at the time, a guess that Santa Carla was modeled on Santa Cruz, or a debate over whether House of Mystery and House of Secrets really outclassed Witching Hour and Unexpected. There is a particular pleasure in noticing accidents: a buffalo missing one eye where a black cat in the previous story was missing the other, an artist's choice that seems to make no sense at all. Older material gets discussed as it was, with occasional acknowledgment that a character's rough vocabulary reads differently now. Listener feedback and letters printed in the original magazines get airtime too, sometimes carried over to the next episode when a conversation runs long. Warmth is the default register. The show is chatty rather than polished, generous toward its guests, and quick to send listeners off to whatever blog or network the guest calls home. For anyone who collects omnibus editions, remembers browsing spinner racks, or watches Hammer and Amicus features on purpose, this is company for the reading.