About Me
So as not to pretend the magazine in speaking to you by itself, this is Steve Smith, founder, co-publisher & editor of MONSTERSCENE magazine for its short 6 year life from 1992 to 1998. Because of a screwup with our ISP, we've temporarily lost possession of www.monsterscene.com BUT are working to get it back online asap. We have also acquired www.monsterscene.net so check there soon if you want. Here's a not-so-brief history of MONSTERSCENE. I started MONSTERSCENE as a newsletter back in 1991 with a friend of mine named Chris Ecker. In October of 1992, we released a one-shot square-bound magazine featuring a composite hand-tinted photo of Elsa Lanchester from BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN as the cover. I drove with my wife Chris, and my friends Tom Schild and Frank Kurtz to New Jersey for the fall '92 Chiller theater Convention where we unveiled the magazine to an enthusiastic crowd. A friend from here in the Chicago area, Bill Harrison, happened to be at Chiller. We all learned you can't make a freaking left turn anywhere in that state! So anyway, the magazine was well-received but because I still had a real job, I couldn't concentrate the energy to make it a regular periodical. But in the spring of 1994, I thought I'd give it a go. The editorial work was done when I got news that my wife had breast cancer. This hit my family hard, both emotionally (our son Andrew was five at the time) and financially (I had just left my stable job to go out on my own). So Bill Harrison agreed to come on as a financial partner in Gogo Entertainment Group so that we could get the magazine out. Bill later became more involved with the work on the magazine too. I named him co-publisher, and for the remaining four years, he did most of the photo scanning, wrote some video reviews and an occassional feature. But it was our last issue when Bill presented his incredible Addams Family/Munsters episodic comparison that so impressed author Stephen Cox, that he asked us for permission to use the material in his revised edition of the MUNSTERS SCRAPBOOK. See the book, see our names in the acknowledgements, and the cover of MONSTERSCENE no.11 inside. Back to the story. I was getting more and more involved with entertainment licensing and a partnership with Star Wars legend Dave Dorman. MONSTERSCENE, which upon its debut in '92, was the only professional horror film magazine other than Fango, was by this time competing with Scarlet Street, Monsters from the Vault (a fine, fine magazine), Scary Monsters and even the new incarnation of Famous Monsters. It wasn't financially a good business move to continue publishing, so we stopped in the spring of 1998. But we refunded ALL our subscriptions (and actually had people trying to insist we keep the money), and kept the website up "just in case." Well, 2007 marked the 15th anniversary of MONSTERSCENE and Bill and I keep talking about bringing the magazine back. Stay tuned for more information.
