THE MONSTERS OF HUBBARD HOUSE

If you look close enough, you will find buried within the moldering pages of cheap monster magazines and comics (and sometimes even mainstream mags), the monsters of Hubbard House. The ads promised inflatable "Monsters From Outer Space" and "Gigantic Dinosaurs", all for only a buck or three.

As far as I can tell, Hubbard House was an obscure novelty mail order store out of Boston, Mass, that catered to kids fantasies of space monsters and ancient giants that, when inflated, ranged from 1 1/2 feet to over 4 feet tall. I suspect that, based on the price and all the hype, the "7 Big Monsters From Outer Space" were simply blow-up balloons that had the creatures painted on them. The artist/designer of the ads is lost in the fading ink of lost ephemera.

The Space Monsters had names. They were all made up from a word salad that when unscrambled, some made sense and some didn't. For instance, "Baluchor" comes out to several words, all with a count that was less than the full name: broach, choral, labour, ocular. "Etteloc" spells Colette, "Rebreg" is Gerber, "Llewodcam" is allowed, and so on. One thing you have to admit is that all of them sound pretty space-alieny.

"Commended by Monster Lovers, U.S.A."!

Each monster also had a title that suggested these things populated the entire solar system:

Llewodcam - Creepy beetle of Mars

Reberg - Flying horror of space

Scincus - Beast of the Moon

Baluchor - Terror of Venus

Nosauros - Spider Man of Uranus

Dimetron - Bird Man of Saturn

Etteloc - Brain of Neptune

Ads for the Space Monsters can be found in the one-shot 1966 monster cheapie, CHILLING MONSTER TALES (see tomorrow's post). A full-page ad is in 3-D MONSTERS, another one-shot 'zine from 1964. Other ads were scattered around the Tower Comics line, such as T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS.

But, wait -- that's not all! Some twenty years later, Hubbard House either reappeared or was still hanging on, as this ad was spotted in the December 1988 issue of POPULAR MECHANIX. The venerable Hubbard House had moved (maybe sold?) from Boston to Dania, Florida. This time they were selling inflatable dinosaurs! No doubt produced the same as as the Space Monsters, these bad boys stood a "giant" 24-inches tall.

I guess it just shows you that you can't keep a cheap monster down. For all I know, Hubbard House is still selling product (maybe inflatable political personalities?), but it's doubtful. Anyway, I'm not spending hours going through my collection to find more -- this is quite enough!