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I discovered CoF the same day I discovered FAMOUS MONSTERS... I was maybe six years old and living with a foster family of sorts, a mother and her son who took care of me during the week while my widowed mother worked nights at the telephone company. There was a storage room in their house that was usually locked; one day when it was opened, what should I find inside but copies of CoF #2 and 3 and FM #19, 21 and 27, as well as copies of SPACEMEN, SCREEN THRILLS ILLUSTRATED and some 1950s BATMAN comics. I made sure the monster mags didn't get trapped behind that locked door again and read them all so many times, the layouts were permanently burned into my brain.

When my mother quit her night job and was able to look after me regularly once again, I went back to live with her and I took my obsession with me. I bought FM as often as I could find it -- I didn't begin to find it regularly until issue #49, but I once found a bunch of older issues packaged together in packs of three, all with the logos cut off, at a cheap price. CoF I began to find regularly with #9; I can remember spending a weekend with a family member who had a copy of #8, with the great Christopher Lee Dracula cover, and becoming as inseparable from it as I could, hoping it would be given to me as a gift. It wasn't. I can still remember my feeling of jubilation when I finally scored a copy of my own, and when I completed the whole run of back issues.

As I grew into my teens, CoF became a magazine of unparalleled importance and frustration. One never knew when the next issue would appear; in fact, it was so bad I started assuming each issue was the last until I would spot one on the newsstand and it took me completely by surprise. Sometimes I'd get caught short of spending money, have to run back home and plead with Mom for an allowance extension, then run back hoping they weren't all sold. The whole approach of CoF to the horror genre was eye-opening because the reviewers would actually criticize the films and expand the whole concept of screen fantasy to include things like Orson Welles, the Marx Brothers, The Beatles, Max Ophuls, etc. It was the first place where I saw any fuss made over Mario Bava. Until CINEFANTASTIQUE came along and started reviewing genre films in even greater detail (and with greater regularity) in 1973, CoF meant the whole world to me.

During a period of hard times in the 1970s, I had to sell my CoF collection -- I let the whole set go to a comics dealer for only $50. But later, in 1988, when I had published my first comics scripts in TABOO, the same dealer was so impressed by my accomplishment that he let me have my collection back, for the same $50! It was wonderful to get them back, and I still have them.