April 8, 2008

Like most of us who found the horror genre at an early age, my childhood was shaped by certain iconic influences that left an indelible mark. It started with a fascination with dinosaurs, magic tricks and superheroes. Later, it was all about the local Mom and Pop video store, FANGORIA magazine and a maniacal urge for comic book collecting. I was lucky enough to have a shop in my neighborhood that took care of all three necessities at once, and one comic that I was absolutely bat-shit crazy for was a book called: “Doc Stearn… MR. MONSTER”

This comic had everything any red-blooded American adolescent genre fan could ever ask for… gorgeous art, awesome stories, bizarre monsters and a hero armed only with his superior knowledge of all things supernatural and a blazing pair of Colts! Being an independent book (all the rage in the ‘80’s) MR. MONSTER practically burst at the seams with splatterific scenes of sublime carnage, sexy vixens in distress, and pure gonzo slam-bang pulp action, all without the impediment of that pesky Comics Code. There was just no way Doc Stearn could ever exist under a Marvel or DC banner and for the developing rebellious artist in me, that alone made him ten times cooler than he already was.

Here in a rare interview, creator/writer/artist Michael T. Gilbert gives us all the nuts and bolts of his career, shares his thoughts on the early days of independent comics and walks us through the creation of one of the most thoroughly entertaining comic series I will ever read!

I hope that this interview encourages all you Mr. Monster newbie’s out there to discover this gem for yourselves. Read on and learn something, ya mugs! – By Jsyn – 4/08

IOF: What are your earliest recollections of the genre?

MTG: As a child I was certainly absolutely in love with the old Marvel monster comics from the late 50’s early 60’s, Tales to Astonish, Strange Tales, things like that, that my grandma gave me. They were written by Stan Lee and drawn by Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby and had giant monsters and these wonderful little Ditko backup stories at the back of every issue. They captured my imagination. I also loved the ACG horror comics, which weren’t really all that horrifying at that point, this was late 50’s post-comics code, but they had wonderful little spook stories in Forbidden Worlds and Adventures into the Unknown, stuff and I found them very entertaining. I loved them as a kid and voraciously read them.

As far as movies go, I can remember a few that scared the pants off me when I was a kid… one wasThe House on Haunted Hill.

IOF: The William Castle movie?

MTG: Yeah… I was a little kid and went in there (laughs) I think they were supposed to have a special effect in the theater where a skeleton swoops down the aisle or something but they were too cheap to do that in my theater, so we didn’t have that (laughs) but I was sitting in there just petrified, as Vincent Price pointed to a pool of acid, and I was like “Oh my God! A pool of ACID!” The thought of falling into a big pool of acid was terrifying (laughs).

Another one, a lesser known one, I thought it was just fabulous, was something called The 4-D Man, I don’t know if you remember that one, but the premise of that one was there was this scientist who could walk through walls but when he did, he would get really, really old. But if he touched you, he’d get his youth back by sucking away your youth so you’d get old instead! That was really terrifying to me as a kid –– this story about a guy who could go through any walls to get you. But it was a really neat movie. I saw it again about ten years ago and was really curious if it still held up, and surprisingly it was really good! It was filmed in full color, not black-and-white as I’d remembered, and had this jazz music. It and was actually a very cool movie, and unexpectedly intelligent.

Another big one was Rodan, the original 1958 movie. I remember I was about seven or eight years old and I convinced my father to take me, but there was some other boring movie before it. By the time Rodan came on I was asleep, and missed the whole thing! You can imagine my frustration afterwards!

And of course, the original Twilight Zone TV shows. I also loved The Outer Limits.

IOF: Where did you grow up?

MTG: I grew up in New York, in the quintessential ticky-tacky suburb: Levittown, Long Island.

IOF: Right on! I’m from Franklin Square. Another Long Island guy!

MTG: Yeah, my family moved to Levittown from the Bronx when I was about 2 years old. Then I moved to Commack, Long Island when I was 16.

IOF: Where did you go to college?

MTG: State University College at New Paltz.

IOF: Hey, my cousin graduated from New Paltz! What led you there?

MTG: I got bitten by the art bug pretty early, drawing little comics when I was seven or eight years old and I went to New Paltz because they had an art program. To keep my parents happy I signed up for the Art Education program to “have something to fall back on” but I always wanted to be a comic book artist. I did get an art teaching degree, which I never used.

IOF: Was it your intention to create comics with your own characters or were you hoping to land a job working on existing characters for say Marvel or DC?

MTG: I had played around with my own characters; certainly I would have loved to work on Spider-man or Batman but I also had my own characters. I had a character called Mr. V, who was a vampire superhero and I actually drew a couple of pages of that when I was fourteen or fifteen.

IOF: Did the art and the writing develop together or were they on different paths?

MTG: Kind of together, I was doing the artwork first but my pictures would often have stories behind them; something like Superman kicking away a piece of Kryptonite with a lead boot on when I was seven, stuff like that … (Laughs) I would have these stories in my head as I would draw. As I was growing up I found myself going back and forth, my art would get better and I would have to develop my writing more, and when my writing was better, I would want to get my art back up there, so it was a continual give and take.

IOF: At what point did you know comics were something you wanted to do for a living?

MTG: I started to get into thinking a little more seriously about comics in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, particularly when Harvey comics published two double-sized issues of The Spirit, which absolutely floored me. They also put out an issue of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Fighting American comics. Both featured reprints from the 40’s and 50’s and that stuff really inspired me; the variety of stories and artwork together and how seamlessly the art and stories worked together.

IOF: Where did you get those resources back then? Did you have comic stores or were they just sold at newsstands?

MTG: Back then it was mostly drug stores and stuff like that, you would get your hamburger and malted or whatever and there would be a big rack of comics and magazines and such; the comic stores didn’t really start popping up until the ‘70’s for the most part.

IOF: I guess around that time, you must have had access to the drive-in and B-grade horror movies… did any of that seep into your unconscious as well?

MTG: Not really, no. A little here and there but mostly I didn’t have a lot of money for that stuff and the money I did have I would rather spend on comics!

IOF: Tell us about how you first broke into the comics industry.

MTG: After I graduated college in late 1973, I got a job at NBC news in NY doing graphics for a few months. In 1975 I moved to California because I wanted to break into comics. I had gone to DC and Marvel, showed them my stuff and they weren’t interested; I had gone to Warren Magazines (Creepy and Eerie) and they were more encouraging but I still hadn’t made a sale. I thought I might have an opportunity if I went to the Bay Area and sold to the underground comic scene, which I found to be exciting; all these people doing their own stories and artwork, all this creativity going on.

There were some wonderful artists working on underground comix. More importantly, there were some awful artists working on them too… so I figured I might have a chance!

Unfortunately, I got there around ’75 and the underground comics industry was already dying, but I sold some things to the Berkeley Barb. It didn’t pay much, like $25 a comic strip, but it was my first professional sale. However, I’d already published my own comic book, New PaltzComix, in 1973 when I was still in college. That was the first time I had ever had my comic book stories printed, which was very exciting. I actually wound up publishing four issues over the course of ten years.

So when I was living near Berkeley around 1976, Mike Friedrich was publishing what he called “ground-level comics,” which was sort of halfway between mainstream and underground comics. His output at that point primarily consisted of his sci-fi/ fantasy title, Star*Reach.

So I went over to meet him and was pitching some of my stories, but none quite clicked with him. A few weeks later Mike gave me a call. During my visit, he’d mentioned that he was about to start a new funny animal comic called Quack! Well, one of the artists had dropped out and he suddenly had this big hole in the book that needed filling, and he was desperate enough to call me!

He asked me to come up with a new funny-animal character, so I wracked my brains and finally came up with The Wraith, a funny animal version of Will Eisner’s Spirit. That was my first comic book series, and it was in every issue of Quack’s six-issue run.

From the start, I always seemed to be drawn to “independent” comics. I really liked the idea of keeping my copyrights and creative control and the artwork. In a way I was sort of following Will Eisner business model because he always kept the rights to The Spirit. I thought that was very smart.

Star*Reach publishing went out of business around 1979 and a lot of my work dried up. A few years later I had heard from Mike Friedrich again. He had become an agent for comic writers and artists and he told me that Pacific Comics was going to be doing a new sword and sorcery series, Elric, based on the Michael Moorcock novels. Friedrich asked me if I would be willing to move to Ohio to work with Craig Russell on the art. This was in 1982, and I was living in Austin, Texas.

I was really excited –– and terrified –– at the opportunity.

IOF: What are your recollections on the independent comic scene around that time?

MTG: It was a very exciting time! I mean, you had the Hernandez Brothers doing Love and Rockets for Fantagraphics, and Pacific and Eclipse were starting to put out a bunch of cool comics. It was exciting to finally have an alternative to Marvel and DC’s comics, which had really gotten stale.

IOF: How did you first discover the character called Mr. Monster?

MTG: I was working at Pacific Comics beginning in 1982, drawing a six-issue Elric series with P. Craig Russell, with Roy Thomas doing the dialogue. After we finished adapting the first novel, there was some downtime before I could get started with the second series. Mike Friedrich, my agent, got me a gig doing an eight-page story for another Pacific title, Vanguard Illustrated. The comic was an anthology with numerous features, and they told me to come up with a new character. Time was short, so I went to my trusty comic collection to see if anything there would spark my imagination. That’s when I found Mr. Monster.

Actually, I found him a decade earlier at the 1971 New York Comic Convention, when I’d stumbled upon a coverless 1947 comic starring a weird monster-fighting hero called Mr. Monster, written and drawn by Fred Kelly, a Canadian cartoonist. I later found out that this comic, Super Duper Comics #3, featured the only full story starring the Golden Age Mr. Monster. It was printed by Bell Publishing, a Canadian company, shortly before they went out of business.

The comic had a spectacular splash page with this monster fighting super hero, and I immediately fell in love with it. I remember buying it for fifty cents and thinking, “Boy, this would be such a cool character to bring back!” Now I had the chance to do just that, only reinventing him for the 80s. I pitched it and the editor approved that first story, (after a bit of hemming and hawing!). I then wrote it and laid it out that first three-issue story. My friend Bill Loebs did the inking and Ken Bruzenak did some spectacular lettering for the story. And that’s how Mr. Monster began!

IOF: How did that initial three issue story end up compiled in a single issue for Eclipse Comics?

MTG: I’d originally done the 26-page story in three chapters, intended for Vanguard Illustrated issues seven, eight and nine. Unfortunately Pacific ended up going under after only part one had been printed. This happened to be at the same time my soon-to-be-wife Janet and I were moving to Berkeley, California from Ohio (where I had been working with Craig Russell on Elric). Now I suddenly didn’t have a job! However, by the time I got there, my agent had sold those three chapters to Eclipse Comics as a single issue one-shot Mr. Monster. They printed it and it was popular enough that they said, “Ok, let’s make this a continuing title.” Now I was really thrilled to have my very own comic! Of course I was still working on Elric, which had moved to First Comics, so it was a bit of a juggling act for a while.

IOF: One thing that always floored me about the Mr. Monster comics was how dense they were; almost every bit of the page is crammed with art and lettering that just leaps off the page. I had never seen anything like that…

MTG: Oh, absolutely! For years and years I had been fantasizing about doing my own characters, doing my own stories. I had a little taste of that with The Wraith, followed by Elric, my first color comic. In addition to the art, I was also helping with the adaptation of the Moorcock novel, though Roy Thomas did the actual scripting. But Mr. Monster was my first time creating a comic from scratch, controlling it from beginning to end. Naturally, I made sure it had all my favorite comic book themes: heroes, humor, horror, and science fiction. Mr. Monster was really tailored to all my interests.

I had all these years of pent-up, “I want to do this, that and the other!” and now I had a place to do it. I decided to use the Will Eisner Studios model to help get all that work done. Will would write and lay it out his Spirit stories and other artists would do the finished art. That’s also the way Harvey Kurtzman worked when he wrote and laid out those great old Mad comic books and Two-Fisted Tales for EC Comics.

In both cases, there’d be an overall consistent artistic vision, but you’d still get this wonderful variety of art styles. I also loved the way both Eisner and Kurtzman would integrate story, art and lettering and coloring into one seamless package. That’s exactly what I was trying to do.

I wasn’t shooting for a comic that would be out for that month and tossed away and forgotten. I wanted a timeless comic, something you could look at twenty years later and still find entertaining, much like The Spirit. That’s one of the reasons it was so dense.

IOF: How did guys like Alan Moore and Dave Stevens get involved with Mr. Monster?

MTG: I had started a correspondence with Alan Moore about the time I finished that first Mr. Monster story. I sent DC a fan letter when Moore’s Swamp Thing came out and they passed it on to Alan, who gave me a call all the way from England. Now that was exciting! While we were talking I asked Alan if he’d be interested in writing a Mr. Monster story that I’d illustrate, and he said yes.

Then I showed Dave Stevens some Xeroxes of my first story before it came out, while we were at the San Diego Comicon and he agreed to do a cover for issue two. So even before the first issue came out, we had Alan Moore and Dave Stevens, so Mr. Monster was off to a pretty good start!

IOF: One of my favorite MM stories features a character called Hemo-boy! Can you explain the character and how it came about?

MTG: Well basically he’s a little kid with a plasma bottle head! (Laughs)

IOF: How did you even think up something like that?

MTG: He’s actually a very sympathetic character, really just a sweet little kid. But the modus operandi of Mr. Monster is that he absolutely hates all monsters and his main purpose in life is to kill monsters. So you set up the situation where you’re rooting for the “kid” –– but your hero, (who you’re also rooting for!), is determined to kill him.

I had a second sub-plot with Hemo-boy’s mother, Mamma Globin. She’s this big, fat Southern Baptist Bible-thumper type who’s just pure evil, always pushing the kid around and treating him like crap. Later in the story she winds up slugging it out with Mr. Monster, who’s discovered she’s really a giant, ten-foot tall blob of mutated Communist hemoglobin! Whew!

It was a really fun story and one of my favorites. I got the name from a Borden milk product in the fifties that I saw an advertisement for something called Hemo. It was some kind of product that was supposed to get your hemoglobin going and one of the ads said showed a photo of a wife smiling at her husband who’s dancing a jig or something, and she’s saying, “That’s my Hemo-boy!” (Laughs).

And I thought, “Hemo-boy! That’s such a cool name! I wonder what a Hemo-boy would be?” So that was one of the things that started the whole train of thought to come up with the story. You pick up stuff from everywhere when you’re trying to get ideas.

IOF: Every issue of Mr. Monster features a smorgasbord of different art styles; pen and ink, watercolors, sometimes realistic, sometimes almost cartoonish… Was there a conscious decision to have different art styles, sometimes even from story to story in the same issue, with continuity being pretty much only in the characters?

MTG: Yes, that was very much a conscious thing. Again, many of the comics I loved in the past were the comics of the forties and fifties. They would have three eight page stories or something like that and each was complete in and of itself. By the time we got to the seventies and eighties, Marvel would be doing these interminable storylines that never ended. They just kept going on and on and I wanted to give the readers stories with a beginning, middle and end. I’d often have two or three complete stories in a single issue, which hearkened back to the comics I grew up with.

We’d also have continuing plot threads throughout the series, but a new reader picking up the comic for the first time didn’t have to know anything about Mr. Monster except that he’s the worlds’ greatest monster-fighter. He just hates monsters!

But to get back to your question, when I wanted to work with a specific artist, I’d tailor the stories I’d write for their specific strengths and interests, the way Harvey Kurtzman and Al Feldstein did at EC.

IOF: After the initial Eclipse run, the book continued as a mini-series at Dark Horse, which delved into the secret history of Mr. Monster. Can you tell us about the difference in tone between the two series?

MTG: I was impressed by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen, and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight and was curious to see if I could pull off a long, serious story like that. I came up with what turned out to be a 200-page story. By contrast the longest story I’d done up to that point was something like 40 pages.

I’d just moved to Dark Horse from Eclipse and figured this was a good time to try something serious, rather than the tongue-in-cheek Mr. Monster stories I’d done before that. I wanted to see if I could pull it off, and for the most part it worked.

There were certainly bumps along the way, and I wasn’t crazy about some parts of the comic book series. But I was lucky that Bob Chapman at Graphitti Publishing suggested that we do a deluxe book collection, which allowed me to go back and re-draw and re-write the parts I didn’t like and make it flow more naturally. I was delighted with the finished book, and the Graphitti collection later received two Eisner Award nominations.

IOF: I think it works because in the original Eclipse series, as the reader, we see all these monsters he’s fighting in an almost slapstick way. But in reality, these would be truly horrifying creatures and this man has to deal with things like that day in and day out. At least that’s what I got from the origin series. It’s like a chance to see things from his point of view…

MTG: Yeah, one of the things I was trying to do with such a large canvas, a 200-page story, I wanted to take advantage of that and give it a real sense of scope and emotional depth. I wanted the readers to really get into the characters in a way you just can’t with shorter stories. I also took some time to see things from the monsters’ point of view, which was fun too.

In the course of “Origins” we learn that Mr. Monster is just one of a line of monster-fighters going back centuries, and that the modern Mr. Monster’s dad was the Golden Age Mr. Monster (the Fred Kelly version).

I showed the original Mr. Monster retiring in the late 40s; about the time he vanished from comics (after that one appearance in Super Duper Comics). He falls in love with his nurse, Lily, and proposes marriage, but she refuses to marry him as long as he’s Mr. Monster. She doesn’t want her children to become part of that bloody legacy.

In my story, Jim Stearne agrees to retire, and soon they have a baby, little Strongfort Stearn (the modern Mr. Monster). Doc’s mother makes a conscious effort to hide his father’s past, and the fact that there’s been this Mr. Monster dynasty stretching back centuries –– unbroken until now. Not surprisingly, things don’t quite work out the way she hoped. It turns out little Doc is a natural sponge when it comes to monster-fighting lore, and quickly absorbs some very useful tips from some old Tales From The Crypt comics he’s sneaked in! And it goes on from there.

At first I approached the story with a very serious tone, but soon realized more humor would improve it, so I lightened it up a bit, which made it more human. But despite the humor, I was mostly playing it straight for this story.

IOF: Since the Dark Horse series, there were mini-series from companies like Image and Tundra. Is there a chance we’ll ever see the old school Mr. Monster in a new monthly series?

MTG: There is nothing really planned at the moment for that. I don’t really picture Mr. Monster as a monthly book; to do it justice I’d rather do smaller story arcs, like a mini-series or whatever. I think a monthly book would be pretty difficult.

IOF: I remember even with the Eclipse books, it wasn’t exactly monthly (laughs)…

MTG: No, there was a lot of struggling with deadlines. As you say, each page was just so dense. It was just chock full of everything, which was extremely time-consuming. We did out best but we didn’t always get in on a regular schedule.

IOF: How do you feel about the general landscape of independent comics now?

MTG: I think it’s all over the place really. I mean, you’ll always have people doing very personal books that will probably never sell a lot of comics but they’re very interesting comics. And then there are obviously people just chucking stuff out so they can pitch something to a movie studio. There are also lots of great comics in between.

IOF: Do you have any current favorites?

MTG: I like my friend Batton Lash’s comic, Supernatural Law. I’ve been enjoying Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman, when it comes out, and the new Spirit series is pretty good, though it’ll never equal Eisner’s Spirit.

To be honest, I don’t follow too many current comics closely. I still get most of my inspiration from Gold and Silver Age comics. There are such wild concepts there…

IOF: I feel the same way about films. There aren’t many new films out that have the same effect on me like the stuff from the seventies and eighties does.

MTG: Yeah, I mean part of it is the fact that I’m always more impressed with the stuff that came before me. I admire the stuff that my peers do, but I’m not as connected to their work. I connect more to the cartoonists I read when I was growing up –– whether it be Will Eisner or Kurtzman or Steve Ditko. Their stuff interests me on an emotional level that the new stuff just can’t match.

There’s actually guys out there doing really wonderful stuff… Eric Powell’s The Goon is great and you can certainly admire the craft of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and such. But it’ll never have the impact that Kirby, Wood, or Kubert had on me when I was a kid.

IOF: It’s funny you should mention Hellboy, because that’s the only other comic series since Mr. Monster that I’ve been ravenous about. What are you up to these days?

MTG: I do a lot of work scripting for Disney comics, which I’ve been doing since about 1990, mostly for Egmont located in Denmark. My wife and I both work for them, separately. She sends typed scripts, while I write and lay out my stories.

Egmont’s not a traditional comic book publisher, but more of a packager. They put together thousands of new comic book stories about Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and the Disney crew every year, using writers and artists from around the world. Then they send copies of all the stories to Disney publishers throughout the world, who choose the ones they want for their specific titles.

Our stories are published in over 50 countries, and read by millions of kids and adults. I like it because I’m doing these little self-contained stories, usually from six to thirty pages, which are really similar to the comics produced in the forties and fifties.

Beyond Disney, I recently wrote and drew a story featuring Michael Chabon’s character, TheEscapist, for Dark Horse, which should be in a book collection next year. And I finished a very neat 7-page story for Erik Larsen’s Next Issue Project for Image. That comic takes long-defunct Golden Age comics and pretends to do the very next issue from the late 30s or early 40s. It’s really cool, and I’m having a lot of fun with the character I’m working on –– the old Golden Age super-villain, The Claw, who fought the original Daredevil in the 40s and 50s.

My premise with The Claw in the 21st Century! was to take a 100-foot Fu-Manchu-type monster (with fangs, pigeon-English and every offensive stereotype you can imagine from the 40s!), and see how he’d fit in today. Basically, he’s a middle-aged monster, with a bad back and a huge chip on his shoulder. He tries to blend into modern society by wearing a suit, but it’s a lost cause. No matter what he’s wearing, he’s still a 100-foot monster! But living in the modern world, he’s forced to preside over interminable meetings at his company, ClawCo (a Haliburton subsidiary), filled with dull yes-men. Oh, for the good old days where he’d crush thousands of screaming people beneath his giant yellow foot!

It’s the first new horror character I’ve done since Mr. Monster, and I’ve really got some nice black humor going. Maybe he’ll even tangle with Mr. Monster someday.

IOF: One thing I was surprised to see on your website was official Mr. Monster Tattoo Flash! How did you get involved in the tattoo industry?

MTG: I was at a comic convention in San Diego a few years ago and David Bollt, one of the guys who runs the tattoo company, Tattoo Johnny, introduced himself. It turns out he’s a big Mr. Monster fan, and asked me if I ever thought about doing tattoos. I hadn’t, but I figured it would be something different, so I designed about fifty of them. It was a real challenge! You can see them at: http://www.michaeltgilbert.com/tattoos

IOF: And what is Mr. Monster up to these days?

MTG: Well, for almost ten years I’ve been running a column on weird comic book history in Alter Ego Magazine, hosted by Mr. Monster. “Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt” runs about six pages every issue, and he and I talk about really weird horror comics or science-fiction comics. Or any oddball piece of comic history I stumble onto.

So, Doc’s still out there! As far as a new mini-series, you never know.

From what I see, it’s a pretty tough market out there. There’s just too many titles for the market to sustain. With a few exceptions, comic sales are pretty miserable for the most part. I’ve seen comics sell as little one or two thousand copies, and you can’t make a living off that.

But Doc hasn’t disappeared. Atomeka published a Mr. Monster comic in 2006, with new and old material, and a few weeks back the my Mr. Monster story, “His World!” was reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Horror Comics. My Alter Ego publisher, TwoMorrows, will also be reprinting the Alan Moore Mr. Monster story “The Riddle of the Recalcitrant Refuse!” this December for a new edition of their book, The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore.

IOF: Has there ever been any interest in a Mr. Monster movie or video game?

MTG: Yeah, I actually had a couple of Mr. Monster options cartoon shows. At one point Nelvana and ABC wanted to do a Mr. Monster cartoon show. It was in the mid-90s, and ABC actually put Mr. Monster on its schedule, believe it or not. But the very next day, Disney bought ABC and they scrapped everything! Considering the fact that I was working for Disney Comics, it was pretty ironic!

As far as other things, Randy Bowen produced a fantastic Mr. Monster mini-bust a few years ago. We worked on the design together and he did an amazing job. I was fortunate to work with him on that. And years ago, Bob Chapman at Graphitti produced some great Mr. Monster t-shirts.

I’ve never been approached to do a Mr. Monster video game, but I’d love to see one made. It would certainly be a natural fit.

IOF: Yeah, I think you can get away with the most monster carnage in a video game. I’m just surprised to hear there hasn’t been a serious interest for a feature film. These comics are basically perfect storyboards that are ready to be adapted for the screen!

MTG: Well that’s certainly how I always felt!

IOF: Michael, thank you so much for your time and thanks a million for Mr. Monster!

MTG: And thank you for the kind words, Jason!

Receive a MR. MONSTER back issue catalog by sending an Eeek-mail to Michael T. Gilbert at: mrmonster00@yahoo.com

Visit: http://www.michaeltgilbert.com