I've learned thru Jim Engel via Steve Thompson that Larry Ivie apparently passed away in January.
Now most of you are doubtlessly going "Who the heck was Larry Ivie?" but to a lot of us "monster kids" he was a key influencer in our lives, albeit one who never fully graduated into the pro ranks.
Larry is best remembered for his remarkable albeit short lived 1960s monster mag, Monsters & Heroes, and before that his occasional articles for Castle Of Frankenstein. Back in the 1960s there were no serious professional regularly published magazines dedicated to sci-fi/fantasy/horror films; Forry Ackerman's Famous Monsters Of Filmland was pretty much it, but while it supplied a wealth of film making details & rarely seen photos, it was written is a tone that can best be described as juvenile and with an editorial out look that said said there was no such thing as a bad movie -- at least so long as they were dependent on studio publicists for photos & interviews.
CoF and later Monsters & Heroes changed all that (and, to be fair, so did a couple of other short lived mags). Larry's Monsters & Heroes had a unique editorial POV insofar as it actively encouraged DIY culture long before DIY culture was even a thing to encourage. Larry was a fan who was always on the verge of breaking into either comics or film, and while he offered a great deal of inspiration & encouragement to others, he never seemed to be able to make the final leap himself.
Larry Ivie as The Mask in Don Glut's amateur Batman And Robin film made a year before the Adam West TV series premiered.
I corresponded with him briefly in the 1960s, and from that correspondence I'd say he was a sincere, earnest, enthusiastic, and decent person who genuinely wanted to nurture new talent. Some of the earliest works by Bernie Wrightson, Jeff Jones, and Mike Kaluta were published in Monsters & Heroes, and he regularly gave aspiring film makers a chance to show their work.
I lost contact with him when I was drafted and never communicated directly with him again. Occasionally his name would come up in conversation ala "whatever happened to...?" but the answer was always that he was struggling along on some new project or trying to complete an old one.
The brass ring of pro-dom, of being a professional with a recognized body of work always seemed to elude Larry, and from what I've read online this may be due to an obsessive perfectionism that kept him from releasing anything until he felt it was absolutely ready.
He lost contact with that generation of monster kids who then grew up to be pros and creators in their own right. The news of his death is not surprising, but it is sad.
He never made the pro ranks, but he started a thousand others on their way, and to that we say thank you.