Comet Atomic
Author's posts
Oct 30 2025
Famous Monsters of Filmland
In 1958, a strange new magazine appeared on American newsstands. Its pages were filled with vampires, werewolves, giant apes, mad scientists, aliens, mummies, and creatures that seemed to have wandered out of late-night television and directly into the hands of young readers. It was called Famous Monsters of Filmland. Created by publisher James Warren and …
Oct 30 2025
Alfred Sisley: Rivers, Changing Skies & the Quiet Poetry of Impressionism
Born on October 30, 1839, in Paris, Alfred Sisley became one of the central painters of Impressionism while remaining in some ways the quietest member of the movement’s famous inner circle. He painted beside Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, participated in the first Impressionist exhibition, worked constantly outdoors, and spent decades studying the effects of …
Oct 29 2025
Monster Toys of the 1950s and 1960s
By the early 1960s, American children could surround themselves with monsters. Frankenstein’s monster might appear on television after dark, Dracula could stare from the cover of a magazine at the drugstore, and the Wolf Man might be waiting in the toy aisle. There were model kits to build, masks to wear, games to play, figures …
Oct 28 2025
Monster Movie Hosts and Late-Night Horror TV
Long after the neighborhood movie theater had gone dark, another kind of horror show was just beginning. On Friday and Saturday nights during the 1950s and 1960s, television stations across America filled late-night hours with old horror movies, science-fiction pictures and inexpensive thrillers. Dracula might emerge from his castle after the evening news. Frankenstein’s Monster …
Oct 27 2025
Roy Lichtenstein: Comic Books, Ben-Day Dots & the Bold Language of Pop Art
Born on October 27, 1923, in New York City, Roy Lichtenstein became one of the defining artists of Pop Art by transforming images associated with comic books, advertising, inexpensive printing, and mass culture into enormous paintings that entered some of the world’s most prestigious museums. Fighter planes explode across canvases. Tearful women stare from romance-comic …
Oct 25 2025
Why Classic Monsters Became Halloween Icons
Walk into almost any Halloween store and you will find them waiting: a vampire in a black cape, a green-faced monster with bolts in his neck, a bandaged mummy, a furry werewolf, or perhaps a mysterious woman with a towering streak of white hair. These figures feel so naturally connected to Halloween that it is …
Oct 23 2025
Aurora Monster Model Kits
For a generation of young horror fans in the early 1960s, watching Frankenstein’s monster on television was only the beginning. Soon you could build him. Aurora Plastics transformed the growing American monster craze into one of the most memorable hobby phenomena of the era when it began producing plastic model kits based on famous movie …
Oct 23 2025
Lawren Harris: Northern Light, the Group of Seven & the Road to Abstraction
Born on October 23, 1885, Lawren Harris became one of the most influential figures in Canadian modern art by painting landscapes that gradually ceased to look like ordinary landscapes at all. Mountains became enormous geometric monuments, clouds curved through the sky like architecture, stripped tree trunks reached upward like spiritual symbols, and stretches of Lake …
Oct 22 2025
Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, Collage & Modern Art
Born on October 22, 1925, Robert Rauschenberg became one of the most restless and inventive figures in postwar American art by refusing to accept that a painting had to remain a painting, a sculpture had to remain a sculpture, or an artwork had to remain safely separated from the ordinary world. Quilts, newspapers, photographs, neckties, …
Oct 20 2025
Yasushi Sugiyama: Reinventing Nihonga Through Color, Texture & Form
Born on October 20, 1909, in Tokyo’s Asakusa district, Yasushi Sugiyama became one of the major figures in the transformation of modern nihonga, or Japanese-style painting. He was trained in a tradition built upon mineral pigments, careful drawing, paper and silk, yet he spent much of his career testing just how far that tradition could …
