If you had the mixed fortune to be American, male, of a certain age, and interested in horror movies and science fiction, chances are better than good that you grew up with a soft spot for Forrest J. Ackerman. Ackerman, who died last week at the age of 92, was a legendary figure in several categories of fandom as a writer, editor, convention goer and collector of memorabilia. But he was best known in kids' bedrooms across the country as the man behind Famous Monsters of Filmland, a nostalgia-drenched photo magazine that combined stills from classic scare pictures (taken from Ackerman's vast personal collection) with punning captions and assorted trivia. Famous Monsters began in 1958 as what was first intended, by independent publisher James Warren, to be a one-shot publication based on a French magazine consisting of classic horror movie stills accompanied by captions. Warren was stymied, though, by two problems: what he saw as the dry, academic tone of the writing, and his discovery that he couldn't simply reproduce the contents of the French magazine without dealing with a mountain of copyright problems. After Ackerman assured him that he could provide stills as good as those in the original magazine, Warren agreed to go ahead with the project, provided that Ackerman also juice up the copy with strings of "Fangs for the memories!"-style puns. (Ackerman once told a reporter that Warren's great contribution to this proess amounted to sitting across from him "holding up an invisible sign reading, 'I am eleven years old, make me laugh.'") The one-shot was so successful that it became the launching pad for what became Warren Publishing, which would go on to the horror-comics magazines Eerie and Creepy, which were spun off from the Ackerman-edited Monster World, as well as Harvey Kurtzman's Help! and the '70s reprints of Will Eisner's The Spirit. Ackerman also came up with the name of one of Warren's most durable properties, the scantily clad alien bloodsucker Vampirella, and served as associate producer of a 1996 movie based on the character. But it was as the Famous Monsters guy that he got to live out one of the great fantasies of the collector-geek, keeping his dusty old enthusiasms alive by transferring them to members of a new generation. He edited 191 issues of the magazine from its founding until it finally closed up shop in 1983. (A revival that began in 1993, launched by a fellow who decided that the title was in the public domain, led to Ackerman getting involved in an expensive, long-running, and in the end, barely resolved legal tangle.)

Ackerman, who had received a special Hugo Award for "#1 Fan Personality", was a beloved figure on the festival and fan convention circuit, and was, among a great many other titles, a board member of the Seattle Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, which provides a home to many items from his personal collection. More recently, he was given the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement by the Horror Writers of America. Among movie directors with a taste for his favorite genres, he was a favorite get for insider cameo appearances, in such movies as Equinox, the 1976 King Kong, Joe Dante's The Howling, Peter Jackson's Brain Dead (released here as Dead Alive), and several films by John Landis, including Innocent Blood, Schlock, an Kentucky Fried Movie. He also appeared in many documentaries and was the subject of last year's Famous Monster: Forrest J. Ackerman. Ackerman's own fiction was published under countless pseudonyms, among them "Spencer Strong", "J. Forrester Eckman", "Dr. Acula", and "Laurajean Ermayne", under which he wrote "sapphic" fiction. The Daughters of Bilitis once showed their appreciation for his efforts by naming him an honorary lesbian.