Monster League Of Evil

Pop on over to Supermanica for Octobers' Monster of the Week from the four color pages of Superman. Last week's Monster was The Shark, and right now it's the delightful Monster League Of Evil! (thanks Bryan!)

Fearsome Foldies

Feel like making some seasonally spooky papercraft? The delightful Paper Forest has your links to the good stuff.

Mad House Mania

Before Gladir and Busino created the short-lived and well- loved Tales Calculated To Drive You BATS (of which I've posted often), they both toiled away on another obscure Archie comic book called Archie's Mad House. Though not nearly as monster-centric as BATS, this other Mad Magazine rip-off still had it's fair share of creepy cartoons. In fact, the comic eventually developed a 'monster section' (alongside a 'teen-age section' and a 'space section', being sure to cover all the hot fads) with a regular dose of wacky monster gags hosted by Hilda the Witch. I promise to post a heap of this campy madness at some later date. In October 1962, two of the sections collided in the creation of Sabrina, the Teen-Aged Witch, written by George Gladir and drawn by Dan DeCarlo. You've probably heard of her, even though it took Sabrina years to click with an audience. In an interview at The Comics Review, Gladir recalls those early days... "Around 1961 I came up with the idea of doing Tales Calculated to Drive you BATS'..or BATS for short. My partner in this endeavor was my old C&I classmate Orlando Busino. And while this book was destined to become a cult favorite it was relatively short lived, because the Comics Code Authority thought that our innocent spoofs on vampires and assorted monsters somehow violated the Comics Code. Shortly thereafter, I created "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" for Archie 's Mad House (#22 - Oct. '62), and was most fortunate to have the comics legend Dan DeCarlo draw it. I think we both envisioned it as a one-shot and were surprised when fans asked for more. We continued to do Sabrina stories off and on in Mad House until 1969 when we were flabbergasted to hear it was to become an animated feature. I might add, that Sabrina first made her appearance two years before Bewitched showed up on TV." Here are a couple of pages from that inauspicious beginning.

Holy October!

Time for Monsterama's yearly reminder about the history of the holiday season originally derived from the Celtic Samhain. But lets not short change the Christians... they brought a lot to the table in the creation of the festival now known as Halloween. In the 800's, as Christianity was spreading into Celtic lands, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 All Saints' Day (a time to honor saints and martyrs) in an attempt to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a church-sanctioned holiday. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the traditional pagan night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve. In A.D. 1000, the church made November 2 All Souls' Day, a day to honor the dead. It was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils. Together, the three celebrations, the Eve of All Saints', All Saints', and All Souls', were called Hallowmas.

What Are You Going As?

Time to start seriously thinking about your costumes, folks. The big holiday is right around the corner. Here are a few ideas.

Skeleton Cave

Aeron Alfrey's legion of monster drawings are irresistibly weird. And if you're brave, his Imaginary Museum is far, far weirder.

Wicked Warren

I don't know what exactly Warren Leonhardt's tantalizingly secret project entails, but I know two things. He's a brilliant genius, and it's got Monsters in it.

Christopher Lee Rocks The Equinox

The Wicker Man.

Sleep of the Green Man

A very happy Maybon to all you beautiful wiccans, druids and witches out there. For the uninitiated, Mabon is the Autumn Equinox, which divides the day and night equally. Time to take a moment to pay our respects to the impending dark and give thanks to the waning sunlight. The Druids called this celebration Mea'n Fo'mhair, and honored the The Green Man by offering libations to trees. So go pour some Budweiser onto the roots of the nearest Oak tree and say 'Cheers!', why don't you. Or better yet, build and burn a Wicker Man!

The Terrors Of Tallarico

Monsters is a nifty 1965 storybook with severely abridged retellings of the tales of Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Despite the appearance of the Mummy and Wolfman on the cover, that's all they had room for. Other than the obvious, what I really dig about this book is the distinctive art by Tony Tallarico. Tallarico is rather infamous for his depictions of Dracula, Frankenstein and the Werewolf, but it isn't this earlier, rather nice-looking book that ties his name to the characters. Oh no. Tony Tallarico is well known in certain circles for one of the weirdest pop culture mash-up's in history... the superhero versions of the three monsters done by Dell in the mid- '60's. The swingin' '60's version of Count Dracula saw the modern 'descendant' (didn't know the dead could conceive, did you?) accidentally drinking some "Bat Derived Healing Serum" he'd been working on, giving him the ability to transform himself into a bat. In issue four he got a female sidekick with the same powers named Fleeta. You know, like 'fliedermaus'? Yuck! The Werewolf was actually the codename/ supersuit owned by former U.S.A.F. pilot-turned-Super-Spy Wiley Wolf. His sidekick was a wolf named Thor. Ahwoooo!!! But my favorite of the three is the all-new Frankenstein, mostly because he's not all-new at all. That's right, this is the original Monster, who is reanimated when a lightning bolt strikes the ruins of Castle Frankenstein. For some reason he is dressed in a bright red leotard, tight blue trunks, and a belt with an 'F' logo on it. All he needs now to be able to go out and fight crime like the others is a secret identity. Oh! I know! How about 'Frank Stone'? Brilliant. This stuff was obviously hacked out at top speed by the creators... Tallarico's linework doesn't come close to his illustration job for Wonder Books. But it's sooo awfully conceived that it succeeds as Camp at it's finest. I'll let these sample pages speak for themselves.

I Wonder How They Taste...

Despite a few shudders over the materials used for such anomalies, I have a soft spot for Fortean taxidermy, as anyone who remembers my post on Jake, the Alligator Boy can attest. Juan Cabana is a talented modern practitioner of this dark art, with some very classic specimens on display. For a modern, rock n' roll approach, check out the grim works of local (Guelph) fiendster The Great Orbax. Lovely things, these.

A Holler For Holley

During the height of the Monster Kid craze, every pop culture character from Fred Flintstone to the Pink Panther was expected to host some spooks now and then. This gorgeous Ponytail cover by Lee Holley captures that period perfectly. Starting out as an assistant to Hank Ketcham, Lee eventually created a syndicated panel of his own about a (then) typical Teen-Age girl named Ponytail, which became quite successful. What I find even more inspiring is Holley's business savvy. Realising that his income from the fickle world of comics wouldn't last forever, he began investing in Real Estate at the height of his career, and is now a very wealthy man... not from the comics, but from his investments. Pretty smart for a cartoonist. Anyway... back to the monsters, no? The title 'Monster Mash' is more than a little misleading, as the Lurch-ing character appears only on the cover and title panel. What we do get, however, is a charming Haunted House tale, complete with a wager to stay the night, attempt at trickery, and real ghosts at the end. Here are a couple of pages...

Mad Monsters

Mad Monsters is brimming with nicely scanned monster mags, cards, toys, posters, and more. Wonderful stuff.

4 little, 5 little, 6 little Weird- Ohs

Lookie what I got! Vintage (licensed?) Weird- Oh masks! Mr. Nostalgia has more if you're interested.

Cartoon Creepies

I highly recommend a trip over to previously mentioned (and delightfully warped) Gruesomestein's Monsters, as Mark and Riccardo have posted all the fantastic Gruesomstein animated shorts for you to enjoy! Free and fiendish!

Your Haunted Mansion

Praise the Spirits! My favorite Dark Ride of all time has some stunning Halloween merchandise for sale! Yup, I can now get a glowing Ezra, Phineas, Gus, and the Bride from Disney's Haunted Mansion (the cool ride, not the poopy movie) from this Disney Shopping site! I can't wait to... $169.00??!? What are they, nuts? Sigh... I'll probably end up buying some anyway. I think I'm an addict.

Make-Up Monster

The previous post about my dear, old Make- Up Monsters book really seems to have struck a chord with you weirdos! Many of you wrote to wax nostalgic about these spooky old face concoctions. Here's a photo of me in the Werewolf make-up. Apparently everything in the '70's was brown, as this snapshot has the same diarreah tone of the book cover. The black cape at left was my kid brother as Dracula, but the '70's also had crappy cameras, and a lot of these photos came out with half the picture blackened. Dracula didn't make the final cut of this one.

The Abominable Pat

One of the contributers to the Wide Awake 666 anthology mentioned below is the lovely and talented Pat Lewis, responsible for loads of funnybook goodness including the Monsterama-relevant PROWL, and ABOMINABLE (about an apathetic ex-scientist named Lisa who saves the day when an unfrozen yeti stalks the halls of a shady research laboratory. Creepy and funny. My favorites!). This is cool, too...

Wide Awake

This anthology of creepy cuteness looks very promising... here's the sales pitch from the site: "This October you’re in for a real treat! Prepare to savor every gooey drop of this deranged collection of drawings, comics and stories from some of your favorite indie artists. Wide Awake is a horror-inspired comic anthology sure to chill you to the bone (well, maybe the funny bone)." Mmmmm... very interesting indeed. And I do so like the inspired minds behind The Students Of The Unusual.

Three...

A trio of old comic book Monster ads...

Two...

Question: What do you get when you cross beatniks with supervillians and add in a touch of 'Weird-Oh' freakrodding? Answer: Two of my favorite comic criminals of all time... The Terror Twins! The Twins' one and only appearance is in the pages of The Owl #2 (1968), created by none other than writer Jerry Siegel of Superman fame. Obviously influenced by the popularity of the campy Batman TV series, These baddies are pure nuttiness! Gangster 'Scarmug' Maroni is deeply disappointed in his deadbeat, Rock N, Roll delinquent sons Rudy and Gilbert until their mom talks them into becoming criminals to humor the old man. They rob a bank wearing the skull-face masks of the Terror Twins, blasing away with their laser guitars and escaping on skelecycles. But wait! There's more! They kidnap one Professor Dalrymple and force him to make a weapon that backfires in the lab and turns the Professor evil. Now he's so bad he takes over and forces the Terror Twins to wreak bigger and better havok... eventually inciting them to steal Abraham Lincon's head from Mount Rushmore! Oh my god it's so stupid. Can you imaging how much I love it?

One...

Halloween Intrigue is one creeptacular new blog. Hope you don't think it's too soon for discussing All Hallow's... if so, you've come to the wrong place!

Boo!

Eeeegaaaah! Ok, so the cryptids project I'm developing for the Cartoon Network is taking up a lot of my time. Everything is going really well, and really fast, which is great... but I'm not going to be able to blog quite as much for the next little while. This batch of putrid posts ought to keep you fiends at bay for the moment.

Impossible, you say?

This British comics Annual from 1968 has some of the worst off-model drawings of Frankenstein Jr. in it. What could have been a very cool line up of stories featuring the likes of (personal favorites) Space Ghost and The Impossibles, it is instead a collection of garishly recolored reprints accompanied by some rather tragic 'artwork' from the Atlas Publishing staff. I can hardly believe this is an official Hanna-Barbera product! Guess it speaks volumes about how important Joe and William felt the British market was. Here's a look at a page from the original 'Frankie Jnr' text story fromm the back of the book, entitled "A Spook In His Wheel" (click to enlarge). I try to look away, but I can't!

Back from the Abyss

Where are all the cool monsters? Where the hell have I been, anyway? Well, fiends, I've been in L.A. on top secret cartoon business. The Cryptids project is now in full-blown development with the lovely and talented Cartoon Network, and I'll let you know how that's going soon. Now back to our scheduled programme...

The last post had me reminiscing about this 1976 book Make-Up Monsters that I begged my mother to order for me through Scholastic when I was a kid. This is my original copy, and it's pretty dog-eared! I tried out nearly all of Marcia Lynn Cox's cool techniques for All Hallows and otherwise... including SKULL FACE, SCAR FACE, COUNT DRACULA, DRIPPING FACE, and my favorite, the WEREWOLF. The last one was so itchy it drove me crazy, but I still wore it twice!