THIS MAGAZINE IS BIZARRE

I recently discovered this stashed away in my "Monster Magazine Files" folder and thought it would be a good time for them to see the light of day (or the dark of the moon, depending on when you're reading this). I've had it for at least a decade or longer and the best I can recall is it came from an eBay listing, maybe two. I took a quick new look and one seller had a copy up for bid or "best offer", starting at $119.00, but it was taken down and has since been re-posted for $89.00, plus shipping. Other than that, I have found no other copies for sale and virtually no information about it, much like I did 10 or 12 years ago when I originally downloaded the images.

Comparing this to CINEMA 57, another French 'zine featuring monsters (read the story behind that HERE), there are several copies of this currently up for sale ranging in price from $250.00 to $400.00. So, does this make BIZARRE #24/25 (March 1962) any more rare than CINEMA 57? Since I haven't been tracking these two international magazines for a long time, I can't be certain -- but I'd venture a guess that it's at least scarce.

So, what's the story behind BIZARRE? It was originally founded by Eric Losfeld, who printed two issues until 1953, then disappeared. If the name sounds familiar, Losfeld is the man who published Jean-Claude Forest's BARBARELLA in 1968, which had originally appeared as a strip (no pun intended) in another French magazine in 1962. BIZARRE was then taken up by Jean-Jacques Pauvert and Michel Laclos, who published it continuously from 1955 until 1968. The content has been described as a "torrent of iconoclastic wit, cultural criticism, and artistic daredevilry". Pauvert is also notorious for publishing books by the Marquis de Sade out of his bookshop on the Rue Bonaparte which had fallen under police surveillance. Eventually, he found himself in a controversy in which the government banned the sale of such scandalous trash. A number of the magazine's contributors also faced public outcry and run-ins with the law, including the political cartoonist, Siné, who held strong anarchist, anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic views. Sounds like it could have left CHARLIE HEBDO in the dust! In any event, BIZARRE was certainly in the middle of the maelstrom of the French counterculture.

Pauvert also published issues of his magazine on the topics of cinema and popular culture, hence the issue that we see here. As described at the Yale University Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library page, the strange -- and, yes -- bizzare history of BIZZARE is summed up thus:

"The editors of Bizarre had a penchant for revealing the dark side of American popular culture, as in [its] stinging critique of MAD magazine, chastized for its lily-white heros and its complete silence on the topic of racism and the civil rights movement in the United States [unknown to them, the editors of MAD had their reasons]. The rising wave of détourned political comics, which spread quickly throughout Europe in the early sixties and became a staple visual component of protest literature in the wake of 1968, certainly ripples through the 48 issues of Bizarre from first to last."

Expanded images from the pages of BIZARRE: