After winning a competition at the school sponsored by Pocket Books, Gogos began his professional career with the cover painting for a western paperback novel called Pursuit published in 1959.

[1] The majority of his work during this period was for men's adventure magazines for which he painted many scenes of World War II battles, jungle perils and crime as well as cheesecake portraits of beautiful women.

Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, created by publisher James Warren and editor Forrest J Ackerman, premiered in 1958 and was aimed at young readers who were then discovering the classic horror films of the 1930s and 1940s on television.

Gogos' first work for Warren was the cover of Famous Monsters of Filmland #9 in 1960 featuring a portrait of Vincent Price from House of Usher painted in shades of red, yellow and green.

Gogos' Famous Monsters cover art featured most of the classic horror characters such as The Phantom of the Opera, Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, The Wolf Man, The Mummy, King Kong, Godzilla, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon and popular horror actors like Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price, Lon Chaney, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

In 2005, Vanguard Productions published the coffee table book, Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos by Kerry Gammill and J. David Spurlock.