To everyone else in American the magazine artist they looked forward to was Norman Rockwell in the Saturday Evening Post. But like a few thousand sick and twisted horror fan kids around the country my “Rockwell” was Basil Gogos. He did the covers for most of Jim Warren and Forrest J. Ackerman’s magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland. In fact, looking back, I have to say that the best thing about the mag was the covers; the insides were on cheap newsprint and featured stories that were mostly excuses for horrific puns. 

Gogos was a mainstream magazine “super realist,” like Rockwell. But he also had a vivid sense of color, and a flair for the dramatic pose. I love his cover image of Gorgo, with its rich deep midnight blue background, for example.

Now, thanks to the new book Famous Monster Movie Art Of Basil Gogos (Vanguard, 160 pages,$24.95, ISBN: 1 88759 171 0), I am suddenly aware that Gogos, who is still alive, permeated the whole of pop culture, including work for men’s adventure magazines, book covers, and movie posters, and I know a lot more about how Gogos did his art. This oversized paperback is a career survey of Gogos, with many fine reproductions and a fine if somewhat cursory biography. Vanguard specializes in books on artists, including 

 

I say cursory because there is no mention (that I could find, anyway) of the terrible tensions between Warren and Ackerman. But then, they may have been irrelevant to Gogos’s work for the publication. On the other hand, there is a lot of detail about Gogos’s covers and interior illustrations for many men’s magazines, an unknown terrain to most readers. The book is written by Kerry Gammill and J. David Spurlock, with an intro by Rob Zombie. It tracks Gogos from the 1950s when he was an up and coming commercial artist, through the Warren and mens’ mag years, to now, when he does special private commissions, works on charcoal and the occasional cover. There are extensive quotes from Gogos, who says at one point that his career making alliance with Warren was formed because no one else at the agency where he worked and which Warren contacted “was cut out for it, or cared to do it.”

There are also numerous testimonials from fellow artists. James Bama, for one, who did the Doc Savage paperback covers, said of Gogos that his work is “second to none,” which is high praise indeed. And there is also lots of detail about Gogos’s technique, from his imaginary quartet of colored lights which sometimes gave his subjects the hues of a Francis Bacon, to his transition from dyes to watercolors to casein to acrylics. He even experimented with silkscreens, long after the medium had been dropped by everyone else, but which for him led to some great covers, such as for the the cast of Tales of Terror.

The book is loaded with tidbits. For example, I learned that both Gogos and Bama used the same model, a guy named Steve Holland. The stolidly handsome Holland was both a thousand adventurers in men’s mags for Gogos, and Doc Savage for Bama. It’s too bad that when they came to make a movie of Doc Savage they didn’t use Holland, who as it happens already was an actor, appearing as Flash Gordon on TV.

 

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