Ink And Horror: Building Magazines In A Digital Age

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Horror deserves ink you can hold. We sit down with art director and publisher Brian Stewart to chart a wild journey from the first death of Fangoria to launching Phantasm Media and steering Delirium with a fresh design voice. Brian shares how a single-subject magazine strategy—think George Romero, Sid Haig, Italian cinema, Linnea Quigley—creates depth you can’t get from quick-hit feeds, and why making paper in a digital world is more rebellion than nostalgia.

The conversation rocks into music, where KISS served as Brian’s early compass and later creative canvas. From official poster books to tour guitar picks, he shows how rock theatrics and horror imagery fuel each other. We trade Detroit Rock City memories, swap favorite shots, and celebrate that charged moment when a bootleg screening turns a kid into a lifer. Then we map the roots of heavy metal—crowning Black Sabbath, tracing Alice Cooper’s reinventions, and tipping a hat to Rob Zombie’s showmanship—revealing the shared DNA that binds riffs, latex, and late-night double features.

Center stage is a love letter to 1985. We connect the dots across Day of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead, Lifeforce, Back to the Future, Rocky IV, and Weird Science; then jump to comics with Crisis on Infinite Earths and toys with the second wave of G.I. Joe; and round it out with music sparks from S.O.D. to Dead Milkmen and Samhain’s shift toward Danzig. It’s a curated atlas of a year that rewired genre culture, the kind of deep dive only print can stitch together without losing the thread. We close with Phantasm trivia, Angus Scrimm’s towering illusion, and where to find Delirium and Phantasm’s latest work.

If you love horror, metal, and the smell of fresh ink, hit play, subscribe, and share this with a friend who still files their favorites on a shelf. Leave a review to help more fans find the show and keep print’s pulse strong.

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