"Welcome to Monster Mag! Blood rich colour and full gloss gore is what we have to offer
every month."
British customs workers in the 1970s took their job very seriously. Accordingly, when a shipment of Jan and Roger Cook's second issue of MONSTER MAG poster magazine arrived from Italy on the shores of England it was summarily confiscated and destroyed. A few copies landed in Germany and France which made it highly-collectible to English-speaking fans.
Miraculously, the next issue was cleared, even though it still contained much of the bloody and gruesome content that got the previous issue stopped in its tracks, this time the cover had a banner that read "For Sale to Adults Only". Maybe that helped.
MONSTER MAG was a thin 8-pages, but the attraction was the monster-sized, 24" x 36" poster revealed when you unfolded the magazine's pages.
The first run of the 'zine lasted for 14 issues, published from 1973 to 1976 before it . . . well . . . folded. Dez Skinn picked it up later in 1976 and published three more issues. Almost four decades later in 2014, Skinn teamed up with former editor Cook to reprint the rare second issue in English from a French copy--one the custom agents had luckily missed!
NOTE: This is the fourth issue and is an admittedly low-quality scan, but it's all I've got.
View more of MONSTER MAG HERE.
MONSTER MAG
Vol. 1 No. 4
1974
Top Sellers, Ltd.
Editor: Roger Cook
Art Director: Gordon Winchcomb
Cover: Photo cover
Pages: 8 (Plus open-up poster)
Cover price: 20p (about 25-cents or so in U.S. currency)
