| Like many
writing here at CreatureScape, your editor has a childhood of Aurora
model kits on the shelves, Frankenstein movies on the TV and the
Rolling Stones on the radio. An average Saturday afternoon would
include three or four hours of cleaning around the house, a trip to
the store to spend the pennies earned, an afternoon of football in the
biggest yard in the neighborhood, and an evening making monsters and
waiting for the local Creature Feature.
I gave up model building around
thirteen when I started getting serious about girls and my creative
energy switched over to writing and rock and roll (no regrets, mind
you . . . .) I never fully got over it though. I secretly
played Dungeons and Dragons with some other closet nerds now and then,
and I still watched every old monster movie I could find. In
fact, I remember one cold November afternoon when I was about 17.
My closest friend came over in a panic (I will only say it involved a
girl and a series of complicated regrets), and I made him sit down and
shut up until the last 15 minutes of THEM! was over. (Hey . . .
it's a good movie!)
So, flash forward about nine or ten
years. I was out with my son who was maybe three or four years
old and I took him into a hobby store because at the time, he was
enamored with model trains and we were slowly piecing one together.
Little did I know, but displayed there at the top of the shelves were
about twenty of the coolest figure kits I had ever seen--Geometric's
King Kong, Horizon's Creature From the Black Lagoon, Kaiyodo's
Godzilla 63.
That was it for me. I quickly
discovered magazines like Amazing Figure Modeler and
Modeler's Resource were available in local bookstores. Then
came the internet and the golden years of the late 1990s when anything
imaginable was suddenly available in kit form. I made it to my
first Wonderfest in 1996 and began making friends in the hobby.
What was a simple past time to relieve
a little stress and enjoy with my son became an addiction and I hit on
the idea to publish a small "magazine" on CD ROM to utilize the
tremendous space and color capability of the electronic medium.
That was back in 2003.
Since that time, CreatureScape has gone
through many changes. Currently, we are working on the final
issues of the hard copy and will become a web source for the future. |
