Famous Monsters pretty much ceased publication in 1983, apart from a brief attempt at a revival in 1993. But now it's coming back, full steam. This is fantastic news for anybody who loves classic monsters. Here are the details, according to a press release from IDW:

Famous Monsters of Filmland, the classic sci-fi/horror/fantasy-specific film magazine that captured the imaginations of so many for more than three decades, today announced its return to print. FM has partnered with IDW Publishing, responsible for hit comic book titles such as 30 Days of Night, Angel, Transformers, and Locke & Key, to bring this new incarnation of the magazine to life. The new Famous Monsters magazine will begin its run on a quarterly basis starting in summer 2010, and will be available in major book retailers, comic stores, and online at famousmonsters.com.

Originally launched in 1958, Famous Monsters of Filmland was one of the first magazines to take readers behind-the-scenes of some of the most popular movies of present and past. Pulling the curtain back on the filmmaking process, the magazine became a lightning rod for legions of young fans, sparking the minds and hearts of future storytellers such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Guillermo del Toro, Stephen King, and John Landis. Under the guidance of beloved editor-in-chief Forrest J Ackerman, credited with nurturing and even inspiring the careers of early contemporaries such as Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen, and L. Ron Hubbard, the magazine brought monsters to life and made household names out of writers, directors, creature designers, FX artists, and monster makeup technicians.

Editorial duties for the magazine will be handled by Michael Heisler, a veteran of the comic book industry for over 20 years, with experience logged at Marvel Comics, WildStorm Productions and IDW itself. "FM was far and away my favorite magazine when I was a kid, and there has been nothing quite like it since," said Heisler. "Our goal is to update that magic for a modern audience, with coverage of current horror in all its forms, while continuing to pay tribute to the classic films that started it all. Personally, I'm thrilled to be taking this step down the road that Forry Ackerman and ‘Chilly Billy' Cardille put me on so many years ago."

Famous Monsters cover via Godzilla Cover Gallery. [Comic Hero News]

Whether you're buying for loved ones, loathed ones, ones you barely know but feel an obligation to get something something for or yourself, it's hard to go wrong with a well-chosen toy as a gift. But it's hard to know just what toys you should be looking at, which is where we come in; we've split our choices into three categories: Play, Display and Making Your Life Better, which is to say things that are useful (or, in one case, useless but kind of essential nonetheless). Click through to see our selections.

For Play
LEGO, action figures and things for you to hit other people with safely. After all, isn't that what "play" really means?

For Display
For some people, toys are things to keep on shelves, on their walls or in boxes. Here're a few ideas for the serious collector.

For Making Your (Or Someone Else's) Life Better
In which we suggest gifts offering education, amusement and/or something to hold onto at night. Yes, even that last one.

Additional research by Alex Eichler.

Star Wars Mustafar Volcano Kit
And talking about learning, who knew that the climactic battle between Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi would lead to an educational toy teaching kids how real volcanoes work and why, when you're in a life-and-death lightsaber battle with your former teacher, it's really, really stupid to let them cut your limbs off. Remember: Volcanoes + Ewan McGregor can turn you into a cyborg crybaby.

(Actually, all of the Star Wars Science toys would make perfect gifts. Especially the Force Trainer. Not that we really, really would like a Force Trainer, Hasbro. Of course not. Unless you happen to have one handy, of course.)

Alien USB With Illuminated Tongue
Yes, I know; you're all sick of the novelty USB gadgets by now, but read what this one is called again. Look at the part that says "Illuminated Tongue" and ask yourself very seriously, how have you managed to get this far in your life without one?

Terminator Salvation Fuel Cell Lighter
Some would argue that there's nothing toylike about a lighter, and normally they'd be entirely right. But this is a lighter that looks just like the nuclear fuel cell embedded in the chest of every Terminator, which practically makes it a Transformer, right? Just think of everyone you'd be able to impress by whipping this out and explaining the unnecessary story in public!

Plush Mecha Godzilla
You can't have a toy guide without at least one plush toy for you to lose your heart to and dream of snuggling up next to every night, so why not the one that is unsuited for plush toy treatment? Yes, many would've considered a robotic replica of a giant lizard that rampages throughout Tokyo toppling buildings and killing people to be an unlikely candidate for cuddly toy translation, but look at his little shiny tiny arms, those "love me" eyes and tell me that your heart doesn't melt for reasons other than his firey breath.

White's Deviant Art gallery includes tons of these amazing paintings, some of which are still for sale. They're all acrylic on stretched black velvet, generally around 14 by 18 inches, although some are as big as 18 by 24. And they're like your most vivid dreams about robots, spaceships and aliens, only brought to life in pure velvet.

Says White:

I am a huge scifi geek. I saw this velvet painting on the Star Wars Collector's Archive, and I thought it was so cool in an awesome, yet cheesy way. I figured I could reproduce it pretty quickly. I was wrong. Painting on velvet is a lot harder than I thought. I did a few more, which were a little better, but they were still more like the "oh god that's so bad that it's funny" velvet paintings that seem so prevalent. I stopped trying for a while, and then had the idea, instead of trying to make them "cheesy", that I would try to paint them as realistically as I possibly could. Slowly, the paintings got better, and I started to get the hang of working on velvet. So, the more realistic paintings in my "deviantart" gallery are the more recent ones.

Check out more of his artwork here: [Bruce White on Deviant Art]

James Turner, an editor for O'Reilly Media, claims that zombies share a kinship with Godzilla. His theory is that, just as Godzilla was inspired by the dropping of the atomic bomb, Western filmmakers (Romero aside) latched onto zombies in the wake of Three Mile Island, the recognition of AIDS, the Ebola outbreak, and similar medical and technological disasters. He goes on to posit that the increasing popularity of zombie movies involving a biological outbreak suggests a Western ambivalence toward biotechnology.

It's an interesting thought, though perhaps a bit reductive. Certainly zombies have been used to comment on biotechnology, but they've also been used to comment on a number of social issues, including consumerism, corporate greed, and the objectification of women. And what causes the zombie outbreak is often less important than what comes afterward. Still, Turner makes an interesting case that biotechnology-based zombies could evolve to more acutely reflect our biological and technological fears:

Blackberry-spawned abominations, anyone? Dawn of the Single-Payer Healthcare Undead? What about, They Came From H1N1?

He's far more convincing when he talks about the important differences between giant monsters and zombies, namely that it's the military and scientists who fight Godzilla, where zombies fall to resourceful and self-reliant survivors.

Americans must like the idea that, as out of control as our hubristic science might become, a good machete and a 12 gauge in the hands of a competent man or woman can always save the day. The 2003 bestselling title, The Zombie Survival Guide, offers the same message of self-reliance. (I'm not sure what lesson we can take from the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.)

A Brief History Of Zombies [Forbes]

Bloody Disgusting had news that another Godzilla movie is on the horizon — and the good news is Legendary Pictures is the production company thinking about investing in rebooting the classic monster. Legendary has a pretty great track record of at least attempting to make entertaining and engaging films.

My only request is if you're going to do a modern day Godzilla, please make it fight something (or someone) gigantic and monstrous.

This copy of Godzilla versus the Cosmic Monster, taped off television probably 25 years ago, turned up on one of those popular video-sharing site thingies. The Godzilla film is pretty terrific in itself, especially with some truly hideous dubbing. But the intro and outro from Dr. Paul Bearer are sources of endless fascination. He's like an old Vaudeville comic doing a monster schtick, cackling as much from nervousness as to keep up the "ghoul" act. I wonder what Dr. Paul Bearer is doing now? Here's his outro:

This used to be the point of the afternoon where I'd talk about the previous night's episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, or occasionally Batman: The Brave And The Bold. But both of those shows are off the air for awhile now - Clone Wars returns in the fall, and Brave and Bold in May - which led me to wonder what I should be doing with the time I normally spent watching and writing about them. And then I realized that you should tell me.

In Netflix's "Watch Instantly" area's sci-fi category, the following movies are listed as "new arrivals":
Frequency
Dragon Wars
Godzilla Vs. Destroyer/Space Godzilla
Battlefield Earth
Antibody
I've seen none of these movies before - No, not even Battlefield Earth - but you get to change that. Below, you can vote for the movie you want me to watch this week, and write about this time next week. Majority rules, unless someone makes a particularly compelling case for one of the movies in the comments (Or no-one votes, in which case you're getting Antibody. Dude, it's got Lance Henriksen being shrunk down and injected into a terrorist to save the world). All I ask is that you please be gentle. It's my first time, after all.

The project made its first appearance on Wonton Soup creator Stokoe's friend Brandon (King City) Graham's blog, where it's described as "messing around with an idea for a Godzilla comic" while watching 24. All we can say is, if this is "messing around," we can't wait to what Stokoe can do when he's trying.

Life Inside This Dome [Royalboiler]

Berg is a prolific designer, who has won many awards. His Godzilla game is in the early stages of development: They're still running play-test sessions (and posting the results in the forums at boardgamegeek.com) and adjusting the rules for balance. There aren't any art assets or photos of the game yet, but we do know it'll be non-collectable (that is, you get the entire game and all available pieces in one box). Confirmed monsters include Godzilla, Rodan, King Ghidorah (aka Annalee's avatar), and Gigan. There will likely be miniatures representing the monsters, but no word on the scale or design of the pieces. A 2009 release is anticipated.

The mechanics are intended to be relatively simple and fast moving. Players split a set number of action points per turn between their monsters and military units. Monsters collect victory points by trashing buildings, stomping tanks and beating each other up with fists, nuclear breath, claws and other attacks. Monster-on-monster combat involves playing a series of attack cards that define how many dice you roll. Everyone rolls a pile of dice and figures out how many hits they've scored.

Just give me King Caesar and Mechagodzilla and I'm yours, Mr. Berg.

Initial Playtest Report. [boardgamegeek]

According to Pink Tentacle, Gojira can belt out blobs of fire because (s)he has "a “uranium sack” and “nuclear reaction sack” that produce radioactive fire-breath and energize the body." Note that his brain is actually kind of small, which explains that whole Highland Fling dance he does when he beats down his adversaries.

Gamera has organs that store "lava, oil, coal and uranium." Too awesome. If these images were being made today, he might have an ethanol storage organ too.

This is one of my favorite monsters, Guiron, who battled Gamera in Destroy All Planets. Sadly, nothing about these organs can explain why two hot alien ladies kidnapped those little boys and fed them drugged donuts while Gamera and Guiron fought outside their spaceship.

And here's Anguirus, who has two sub-brains to control the extra-armored lower legs.

Kaiju Anatomical Drawings [via Pink Tentacle]

An article published in Science today has the details. According to the New York Times:

Scientists attribute dead zones to a process that begins when nitrogen from agricultural runoff and sewage stimulates the growth of photosynthetic plankton on the surface of coastal waters. As the organisms decay and sink to the bottom, they are decomposed by microbes that consume large amounts of oxygen. As oxygen levels drop, most animals that live at the bottom cannot survive. “The overwhelming response of the organisms in our coastal areas is to migrate or to die,” [lead author Robert J.] Diaz said. “To adapt to low oxygen water, it has to be a part of your evolutionary history. It’s not something you can develop in a 40- or 50-year time period.”

About 400 coastal "dead zones" have been identified, and their combined area is comparable to the U.S. state of Oregon. Many are doubling in size every year.

This is bad news for sea life, but even worse for human life. Most of the areas affected are in regions where people raise fish and lobsters in fisheries. Areas hit include the Gulf of Mexico and the Baltic Sea, where the times reports only "microbes" can live now. More recently, China and Norway's Kattegat Sea have grown dead zones, and some are appearing in the United States off the coast of South Carolina and the Pacific Northwest. At least we're safe from Godzilla, who wouldn't be able to swim to shore through the oxygen-destroyed waters.

Oxygen-Starved Ocean 'Dead Zones' [NY Times via KSJ Tracker]

Darth Vader

Godzilla

The Daleks

Skeletor

Megatron

The Borg

Thanks to Lauren Davis for life-saving research help.

Gibson refers to Godzilla a lot in his work, sometimes casually (a sound in Spook Country is "like Godzilla's footsteps") and sometimes wryly (an earthquake that levels Japan is called Godzilla in his Bridge novels). So I had to know what he really thinks about Godzilla movies.

He replied:

I watched them growing up, and saw the original Godzilla movie. I think of Godzilla as that original character. Even though I saw the [Americanized Raymond Burr version], I thought I picked up on the dark meaning of the original. I thought I knew what they were trying to say with that movie. But I saw all those old monster movies. I was really disturbed by Mothra. Something about the tiny little twins who sang woefully.

Though he grew up mostly in rural southwest Virginia, Gibson has spent his entire adult life living in Vancouver, Canada. And yet in his world-spanning novels, Canada rarely makes an appearance. Until the ending of Spook Country, which takes place in Vancouver. I was curious about where Gibson sees Canada fitting into his geopolitical dreamscape, and where he sees Canada heading in the future.

Gibson said:

Douglas Coupland's descriptions of Vancouver circa City of Glass are closest to my sense of the place. It's hemmed in and separated from the rest of the world by an ocean, a border, mountains. And then there's the unknown and incomprehensible north. Vancouver sits there, insulated to some extent, but picking up influences from across the ocean and across the border. The signals seem to be amplified by those symbolic barriers. Psychogeographically, I identify with greater Vancouver more than I do with the rest of Canada, which I have a fondness for and good feelings for. Vancouver's peculiar culture feels like home.

I like it because I grew up in a really extreme monoculture in southwestern Virgina. I was surrounded by Southern white folks – this was in badass Appalachia, up in the hollers where my mother's family had been forever. Having that experience in a small town made me happiest in big cities. Especially in radically multicultural big cities – as far as you can get from monoculture. I'm happiest where people are generally not even of recognizable ethic derivations. I'm into hybrid vigor.

Canada is set up to run on steady immigration. It feels like a twenty first century country to me because it's not interested in power. It negotiates and does business. It gets along with other countries. The power part is very nineteenth century. 99 percent of ideology we have today is very nineteenth century. The twentieth century was about technology, and the nineteenth was ideology.

I asked him about Spook Country, an explicitly political novel where it seems like ideologies are shaping the way people use technology. For example, the characters repurpose technologies like iPods for the purposes of espionage.

He explained:

In Spook Country, old ideologies hang around and shape the initial phases of a longterm change that it will never be able to keep up with. The digital realm is inherently porous. These days we're all coming to the attention of the authorities as a matter of course. But the really new thing is that the authorities are coming to our attention. It's more difficult for authorities to keep their secrets. it's working both ways. We live in the era of the leak, the document that doesn't get wiped off the hard drive. That drive you thought was wiped shows up in a pawn shop in Vegas. It's equally porous in both directions. But individuals have a better chance of applying transparency to their lives and transactions on the internet than states and corporations do. If we continue in this direction, I believe people in the future will wield unimaginable tools of forensic transparency — and they'll aim them back at history. They'll find out about what every major player did all the way back with tools we can't imagine today. There will be no more lost cities.

Since we were talking politics, I asked Gibson about whether he sees his work as political. After all, he has said that he fled to Canada to dodge the draft. And I wonder if those politics have seeped into his work. He laughed when I brought up the draft-dodging.

He said:

Well, [that was] political and it's also true that I wanted to get laid [with hippie chicks]. I've had to engage in this kind of grudging self-examination because of my ever-changing Wikipedia entry [which mentions early interviews where he talked about being a draft dodger]. When I started out as a writer I took credit for draft evasion where I shouldn't have. I washed up in Canada with some vague idea of evading the draft but then I was never drafted so I never had to make the call. I don't know what I would have done if I'd really been drafted. I wasn't a tightly wrapped package at that time. if somebody had drafted me I might have wept and gone. I wouldn't have liked it of course.

In my novels, I've done my best to avoid political didacticism. Consciously I never work from any sort of expressed political philosophy. To the extent that I have one it strives to be open — open to change. I try very hard to attain what E.M. Forster described: “Let the characters get completely out of my control.” Some of the characters are completely out of my control and get frankly political. Often when they'd just been awakened from a nap, like when Milgram is awakened from a nap [in Spook Country] and finds himself telling Brown that Brown and his ilk are bringing down the country. That was the Rize talking. Milgram would have a lot more going on consciously if he weren't cramming all that benzodiazanine.

I asked Gibson why he thinks so many people characterize his work as dystopian, especially since he tends to favor happy endings.

He said:

None of us ever live in dystopia. That's an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don't seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl.

I don't think a writer can hit the dystopic key without being misanthropic. I'm actually not misanthropic. I think people are capable of wonderful things. I'm quite fond of them and enjoy their company. I can't do Jonathan Swift. I don't have it in me to do that. I also don't have it in me to say to reader, “This is all real.” I'm enough of a postmodernist that I go in and out of believing in my own narrative. The happy endings, such as they, are are actually a function of that. They're the "that's all folks” at the end, waving the big three-fingered glove. I want to remind people that they're reading a novel about an imaginary future. If I had my way, I'd even be reminding people about the whole culture of reminding people.

I asked him please not to get meta like that, since it would take him into Thomas "Gravity's Rainbow" Pyncheon territory.

He said:

In Pyncheon you're never allowed to believe in the characters. He's making moves all the way through to remind you that these are cartoons. I have a little bit of that. I don't want people to be completely sucked into the mechanism. They should remember that they're riding on a rollercoaster. But I roll with the human characters.

So what's next for Gibson? What's he working on now? He was a little mysterious but did say:

I have a historic tendency to write three book sets, but I'm unlikely to do it next time out. I always start from nothing – no idea. I daydream about writing a Civil War novel. I happen to know a fair bit about the Civil War. But I don't get to make those choices – the saving grace of my method is that they're made for me. And I can't say anything about it beforehand, or I feel locked in.

Here's hoping for a near-future Gibson novel where new forensic technologies allow people to reconstruct the Civil War in perfect detail. Of course just by writing that, I have guaranteed that it won't happen. Sorry, Civil War buffs!

You can get Spook Country in paperpack! [via Amazon]

While the rules for Monsterpocalypse haven't been completed yet, a few things are known. Monsters come in factions, such as alien invaders, cybernetically enhanced giant humans, dinosaurs or robotic military units (plus a monster that looks suspiciously like Cthulhu). Players will control smaller monsters or tanks along with their main monsters. Trashing a building will generate a power-up for your monster, and monsters will have "Alpha," "HyperMega," and "UltraMega" forms.

Anyone who collects all three issues of the comic book series will be able to get a limited edition monster. You can learn more at the official site, or read game designer Erik Yaple's blog about the Monsterpocalypse design process. I'm already saving my pennies to buy a case of this when it comes out, but if Privateer could get the license from Toho to make minis of the classic Godzilla monsters, this would officially be the Greatest Game In the Universe. Images by: Privateer Press.

Thanks to Seth L for the tip.

Let's go through some of the insights this chart offers.

ATOMICS/DEADLY ATTACKS: As you can see, there is a very clear historical connection between atomic bombs and atomic testing and giant monster movies, so that truism turns out to be correct. After a long period of no giant monsters in pop culture at all, we get a sudden burst of giant monsters in the 50s, many of which are explicitly created by "atomic tests" (see: the ants in Them, the dinosaur in Behemoth, Godzilla, and more). What's interesting is that there appears to be about a 10-year lag between the disaster and the first movies dealing with it. A similar lag happens between disasters of the 1990s and early 2000s and the giant monster explosion of the 00s. Interestingly, the biggest explosion in giant monster movies since the 1950s is going on in the 00s, perhaps as a response to global terrorism and human-caused disasters (see below).

PLAGUES: "Call of Cthulhu," which is about a giant monster who haunts people's dreams and drives them mad, could probably be linked to the "sleepy sickness" plague that was sweeping the United States at the time Lovecraft first thought up his tentacly menace. The disease made people appear to sleep all the time, and did drive them insane. But generally, as we can see later in the timeline, plague doesn't appear to spawn giant monsters. In fact, the HIV/AIDS plague has probably resulted in more human-sized monster tales: witness the explosion in vampire and zombie stories during the 1990s and 00s. So, generally, plague disasters don't cause giant monster movies.

NATURAL DISASTERS: One of the biggest natural disasters of the 20th century, the Yellow River floods in China in the 1930s, gave us no giant monsters. King Kong, the most popular giant monster of the 1930s, was probably inspired by Westerners "discovering" gorillas in Africa in the early 20th century. But the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami seems to have had an effect: two of the biggest giant monster movies of the last year have both involved beasts from the ocean.

HUMAN-CAUSED DISASTERS: Yes, human toxic spills and pollution seem to trigger giant monster movies. Most of the giant monsters in the 1970s and 80s are related somehow to pollution, and come soon after several widely-publicized oil spill disasters. Note that the 70s and 80s were also a time of human-sized toxic creatures, like the Toxic Avenger, the bears in Prophesy, the whatevers in CHUD, and so on. So these disasters inspire both giant and regular-sized monsters. I think the explosion in 00s monster movies may also be a result of the same lag we saw between atomics in the 1940s, and giant monsters in the 1950s. A lot of toxic disasters happened in the 80s and 90s, and suddenly a bunch of giant monsters pop up in the 00s.

Chart by Stephanie Fox.

SOURCES:

Chemical Disaster in Bhopal [Greenpeace]

Oil tanker leaks [BBC]

AIDS number one cause of death for men in US in 1992 [Kaiser Foundation].

AIDS in Africa numbers [WorldStats]

Atomic Tests causing deaths [CNN]