Flashback #1 - Pentagram

Another magazine that stretches the boundaries of this blog's subject matter, Flashback was another one of those early-70s magazines all about old-timey stuff, in this case old Hollywood films. Normally I wouldn't have included a magazine like this, but the Jack Davis cover won me over.

Marvel's distributor Curtis Circulation put out Nostalgia Illustrated(and ran ads for it in the Marvel comic b/w magazines), but this little curio is from the oddly named Pentagram Publications(!) and ended up being a pretty solid magazine.

After the nifty Davis cover, the magazine is broken down into sections about Hollywood's Golden Age, like:
"The Escapist Film"--stills and text on Lost Horizon, The Sea Hawk, Mark of Zorro, and Gunga Din
"The 'B' Westerns"--Prairie Moon, The Cherokee Flash, Renegade Trail
"The Musical Films"--Gold Diggers of 1933, Gold Diggers of 1935, Alexander's Ragtime Band, The Great Ziegfeld
"The Comedy Film"--The Paleface, My Little Chickadee, Keep 'Em Flying, Way Out West, Sailor Beware
"The Horror Film"--Mask of Fu Manchu, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Frankenstein, Creature From the Black Lagoon
"The 'B' Film"--Mr.Moto's Last Warning, The Saint, Sherlock Holmes in Washington, The Chinese Cat
"The Blockbusters"--Mutiny on the Bounty, Dark Passage, Gilda, Touch of Evil, Sunset Boulevard, King Kong, The Women
"Serials"--Dick Tracy, The Adventures of Captain Marvel, The Phantom, The Crimson Ghost, plus a neat section on Flash Gordon featuring some comic art:
...and in the back there's a neat section highlighting books about movies and a substantially large section on comics, recommending such publications as Steranko's History of Comics, The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy, Batman: From the 30s to the 70s, even some EC reprints!

They also had some of Captain Company-esque thing set up, because there was an order form and a couple of catalog pages where you could order books on movies, even 8mm and 16mm film strips!

Whoever Pentagram was, they must have had some vague connection to someone or someones at Mad, since the inside back cover features this subscription ad drawn by Mort Drucker!

I haven't been able to find any info on Flashback other than issues I've found for sale on ebay--the first three, all with covers by Jack Davis. The first three are easy to find so due to the complete lack of any other issues I have a hunch these were the only ones published.

These photo magazines were cheap to produce so after Warren blazed the trail with Famous Monsters of Filmland there was all of a sudden an avalanche of them, and of course most of the folded quickly. Judging from this first issue, Flashback was one of the better ones.