For an early issue of Monster Children, co-founder Campbell Milligan asked the artist Thomas Campbell to hand-paint a barcode on the cover. It was a sound aesthetic decision. From a strictly utilitarian point of view, it was less than a raging success. The hand-drawn barcode could not be scanned. Several bookstores called to complain. Machine-made barcodes had to be plastered over Campbell's artwork at a cost of about four thousand dollars. The incident said everything about Milligan's relationship with the straight and narrow — and about the magazine he and Chris Searl had founded in Sydney in 2003.
Monster Children started as an alternative to the standard action-sports titles of the era. Milligan and Searl had grown up skateboarding and surfing, reading surf and skate magazines religiously, but as their tastes matured they discovered that the same people who loved the work of Richard Prince were also big fans of Mark Gonzales or Jason Lee. The idea was simple: expand the content of traditional board-culture magazines into art, photography, design, and music, and present it all with the visual ambition and irreverence of a publication that would print a green camouflage cover specifically because someone told them green was a bad-selling colour.
"We started Monster Children with the idea being that if we made it past ten issues, it would be a success," Milligan wrote. They made it past seventy. The contributor list grew into an embarrassment of riches: Ryan McGinley, Ed Templeton, Mark Gonzales, Natas Kaupas, Stephanie Gilmore, Mike Mills, Ari Marcopoulos. A US edition launched in 2010 with offices in Los Angeles and New York. Editor-in-chief Jason Crombie steered the editorial voice toward something that was neither a glossy skate magazine nor a purebred art journal but a publication that covered a lifestyle rather than any single category.
The magazine visually reinvents itself every issue, playing with fonts, format, and cover design with consistent inconsistency. The twentieth anniversary in 2023 was celebrated with a special issue and a series of brand collaborations. Two decades in, Monster Children has expanded into film, podcasts, events, and a shop, but the print magazine remains the heart — a publication that proved board culture and high culture were never as far apart as either side liked to pretend, and that the best way to make a magazine last twenty years is to refuse, from day one, to take anything too seriously.
Explore Monster Children at <a href="https://www.monsterchildren.com/" target="\_blank">monsterchildren.com