Monday, March 15, 2010

Wildest Westerns

Warren Publishing Co.
Publisher: James Warren
Editors: Harvy Kurtzman, Sam Sherman
May 1960 - Aug. 1961

Favorite Westerns of Filmland / Wildest Westerns was Warren's 2nd magazine. It was to be for the western genre what FM was for horror, covering cowboy movies and the many TV western series. Kurtzman likely only edited the first couple of issues, in a mostly gag oriented style, before moving on to Help! Once Sherman took over the reins, the mag started taking on a more serious tone, but folded after only six issues. WW #5 was the first issue of a Warren mag to use the name "Captain Company" in the ads pages.

No. 1










No. 2
Cover Art by Jack Davis









No. 3
Cover Art by Jack Davis









No. 4
Cover Art by Jack Davis









No. 5
Cover Art by Basil Gogos









No. 6
Cover Art by Basil Gogos

9 comments:

  1. I love these covers, especially the Gogos ones.

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  2. Gogos only had 3 FM covers out by the time WW5 hit the stands. The Davis covers are fun, too.

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  3. Yeah- those Jack Davis covers are excellent! Thank you for this post!

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  4. Nick Adams by Basil Gogos! brings a tear to my eye...

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  5. On cover 3, they kind of look like midgets. Weird! But still great.

    Gogos never put a paintbrush wrong, did he?!

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  6. Phantom of Pulp said..."Gogos never put a paintbrush wrong, did he?!"

    IMHO . . . No!

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  7. I guess you'd need to be a certain age to fully grasp this, but at the time WW was first published, Westerns were the biggest genre in the world by far - even bigger than horror/monster/sf films! So Warren's business acumen was sound in launching the mag (albeit it probably would've been far more successful had it begun alongside FM back in '58, the heyday of both the "adult Western" and its TV counterpart.)

    I guess the x factor that finished off the American Western was the Violent Cop Movie, which really came into its own just as the Western (and the spaghetti Western) was drifting off the radar.

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  8. Just great another Warren run I need to complete.😆

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