Graphic Story Magazine
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Graphic Story Magazine was an American magazine edited and published by Bill Spicer in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Attempting to find a new direction for narrative art and a point of departure from commercial comic book stories, this journal of criticism and artwork evolved from Spicer's previous magazine, Fantasy Illustrated.
![]() This 1974 cover was Howard Nostrand's first humorous horror art since his stories for Harvey Comics' Flip during the early 1950s. | |
Editor | Bill Spicer |
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Categories | comic books stories and criticism |
Frequency | annually |
First issue | 1967 |
Final issue Number | Summer 1974 16 |
Country | United States |
Based in | California |
Language | English |
Gary Groth, editor-publisher of The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, wrote in 2009,
By the late 1960s, Graphic Story Magazine evolved into the most literate “fanzine.” I remember thinking, at the time, that GSM looked like it was put together by grown-ups, whereas most fanzines, mine included, were cobbled together by my peers — precocious but essentially clueless high school kids. Spicer brought a rare maturity to fanzines that had been conspicuously absent. His editorial direction was less fanboyish and more professional; that is, he and his writers — among whom were John Benson and Richard Kyle — focused less on characters and more on individual cartoonists and in a far more searching way than most other “fan” writers of the time. GSM pioneered long, probing interviews ... which was mostly a matter of asking intelligently conceived questions — or at least of avoiding the usual cretinous fanboy idolatry that wasted so many opportunities.[1]