I love to hear stories about peoples' first encounter with Famous Monsters.

I'm lucky enough that mine goes all the way back to the beginning. I was 8 in 1958 -- is that good timing, or what?

One fine day my brother came home from the corner drugstore and said he saw a magazine down there called "Monsters."

I said, "And you didn't get it???"

And he said, "It's 35 cents!"

I couldn't believe my ears that anything could be that expensive. It only cost me 25 cents to see a whole monster movie, 8 cartoons and a Three Stooges at a Saturday matinee.

But after somehow arranging the financing, he went back to the drugstore and got the thing which we found out was actually called "Famous Monsters of Filmland" and our lives were never the same again (in a good way).

And in one of the sillier ideas of my brother's life, a few days later he decided to create his OWN monster magazine -- and he derived the pictures for it by cutting them out of Famous Monsters! So instead of our first issue today being worth hundreds of dollars, it's worth approximately four cents.