Like, Boo, Man

Be safe and have fun, whatever you do. Tonight we open the gates of the TMI offices, turn on the fog machine, and listen to Screaming Jay Hawkins.

And because we like you a whole lot, we're puttin' two treats in your bag. Check it:

It's Halloween o'clock! Artist unknown, or at least uncredited, where we found it. If we figure out who did this orange and black dream, we'll edit accordingly.

Next up is Frank Frazetta's cover art for Creepy magazine, issue no. 7 (published by Warren):

Great googly-moogly! It's a werewolf fighting a Dracula! Our publisher-at-large, S.L. Kreighton brought us this one, and over-shared the following: "I'm pretty sure when I first saw this, I got an erection. Ah, to be nine again."

Now we're really scared.

Everybody Wants a Moon Monster Of Their Own

The Typing Monkey digs the short films of Jason Willis. And the rascal's back again with another seasonal effort:


Moon Monster - Animated Horror Fan Club Spot (Comic Book Ad, 1970) from Jason Willis on Vimeo.

It's good fun and took a lot of work, as you might imagine. Read about the making of Moon Monster here. And check out Mr. Willis' website for more neat stuff.

Alas, Poor Yorick

From the most wonderful Mike Mignola:

Daily Planner ... of Horror!

Mark Anderson of Andertoons discovered something wonderful. The "Mighty Marvel Calendar for 1975" can be repurposed for 2014. That is, all the days and dates line up exactly with the current year. It's not a black swan event, it happens three times during any given 28-year cycle.

Anderson just happened to have the 1975 calendar. So he scanned it and made it available to us plebes. We didn't mention it back in January because we figured you already knew that was a thing and were all over this.

October's artwork provides a nice peek into what mainstream comics were doing at the time, and 1975 was a boom year for Marvel's horror titles:

Go get the whole thing at Anderson's site (linked above) and live out the last quarter of 2014 like the stylish gadabout you are.


[Hat tip to Bleeding Cool a way back in January.]

TL;DR -- Cage Loves Comics

Actor/force of nature/internet meme Nicolas Cage owns some pricey comic books. And nearly 15 years ago, some were stolen from his home. Read Sandro Contenta's story about the crime and how an LAPD detective with a name that sounds like a character from a Superman comic solved the mystery.

It's exactly as strange as it sounds.

Ooh, the Colors

Given how sporadically we've been publishing anything -- artwork that some genuinely talented person created, a music video from decades past, critical commentary passed off as "writing" -- we still won't apologize.

That would be arrogant. For beneath any plea, no matter how sincere, is the expectation that readers were out there, waiting for The Typing Monkey to do something.

Instead, let's play catch up over the next few weeks and aim for a productive summer. [Somewhere, a retired junior high school band teacher mumbles "don't apologize, fix it." -- ed.]

To begin, take some time to read Oliver Sava's April 11 piece on comic-book colorists from the AV Club's "Big Issues" series. Sava writes intelligently about comic books, especially the superhero titles. And when he uses Big Issues to talk about the work behind the titles, it can be thoughtful and educational -- all the things good critical writing should be.

Colorists have been ignored, historically. Despite a good colorist being able to lift already good artwork to a higher level, the colorist's name rarely appears on the front cover. But that's been changing and Sava uses that change to talk about what a good colorist does, and why you, comic book reader, should care.

It also lead us to the blog of colorist Jordie Bellaire, who posts breakdowns of her work and is quite good at selecting images that illuminate the value of skills like hers. She's good, and she knows working with good artists makes them both look better.

But I Do

Here's a Valentine for you, sweethearts:


Olive Oyl sings He Needs Me from Blue Heron on Vimeo.

TL;DR -- More Typing, Less Monkey

In scouring the unpaved service roads, blind alleys and drainage ditches of the information superhighway to put together this year's Halloween Frenzy, we accumulated a few items that, while strange or even a little scary, didn't fit within the tasteful orange and black boundaries we try to maintain.

That doesn't mean we don't want to share them. So welcome to our clearance sale.

First up is an ultimately sad tale all the way back from January of this year, so if it's a rerun to you, we apologize. But this tale of vorarephilia is fascinating. Canada's National Post reports of a man who sought help at a Toronto psychiatric hospital in 2012.

The man expressed a desire to be consumed by a "large, dominant woman." He wanted to be eaten. Most cases of vorarephilia involve the diagnosed party as wanting to eat others. So this man's case proved unusual and worth further study. There's so much more to this story, including a puzzling end.

***
From strange consumption to mass consumption: On October 10, Truth Dig reported on a horrible prediction from this year's Chocolate Industry Network Conference in London. The forecast for chocolate does not look good friends. Evidence mounts.

One day, future generations will only know of the confection through a few perverted tales and perhaps a candy wrapper on display in a temple somewhere. We try to make light of this situation because as the adage goes, sometimes laughing is the only alternative to tears.

***

All mythologies have end-of-days stories. Norse mythology tells of Ragnarok, the ultimate battle of the gods against the giants that will result in the death of Odin, the all-father, and the plunging of Midgard [that's Earth, y'all -- ed.] into endless dark, cold winter.

As it turns out, some Norse scholars in England think Ragnarok is about to commence, and they blew a symbolic horn to mark the beginning of the end, which should arrive 100 days from Nov 15. Thanks, guys!

Read all about it on the Daily Mail site, which features a ton of video ads, so adjust your volume accordingly. [And a tip of the antlered helmet to the supremely wonderful Walt Simonson for the late-breaking news lead.]

***
We end this three-course feast of strange with a chewy dessert called The Bus. It's been making the rounds at comics, writing and art blogs for the past couple months, and with good reason. It's a series of short comic strips by Paul Kirchner. We know nothing more about it or him. We could look him up and find out, but frankly, the mystery just adds to the charm of The Bus.

Look Behind You!

If you followed our headline and actually saw something scary, that's pretty cool. But you probably saw curtains, or the back of the couch ... maybe a coworker. Either way, we've made it to the end of the 2013 Halloween Frenzy. Whew!

We hope it was good for you. Have fun today and be safe tonight. Remember to check under the bed.

Here's a Silly Symphony from 1929 called Hells Bells. Based on slightly foggy memories of a couple biographies we read more than a decade ago, the whole 'toon was likely designed and plotted by Ub Iwerks, the nearly invisible hand that guided Disney's formative years as an animation studio.


[courtesy of Pat Hawkins]

And at no extra charge, have a laugh at Hark! A Vagrant's newest, a Halloween themed set of one-strip gags based on antique postcards. "Bewitching Halloween" is a riot.

So Much to See

Sometimes we see blogs, Tumblrs and other stops on the web and wonder why we even bother. Then we remember, we bother because if we weren't here to pass the links on to you, who would?

At least that's what we tell ourselves at night before drinking enough cough syrup to fall asleep while listening to old radio dramas.

Imagine some sort of brass fanfare here. Now look!

Can you even stand it?! Yeah, exclamation points. Journalism-degree-be-damned. If ever there was a still from a Disney cartoon that merited a freak-out, this certainly makes the grade.

This is just a smoked pepper corn amongst the bounty of spicy offerings at the Graves and Ghouls Tumblr.

It's run by a woman named Cat who has another Tumblr worth your time, Vintage Gal.

There are GIFs on both, which tend to bug our wonky eyes, but that's one broken match in the factory full of joy. And please know there are ladies in various states of undress on both blogs, so don't get fired on our watch, okay?

Monsters All the Time

Need near-daily doses of hideous horrors, creeping corpses and fantastic phantasms? [Who wrote this, Stan Lee? -- ed]

Get thee to Monster Crazy and Monster Brains.

Yeah, we talk about both blogs a lot, and link to them in the Monkey Love section. But that's because they are excellent portals to art both high and low, and all of it geared toward monsters. What are you even still doing here reading this?

Oh fine, here's a sample of one of many great things you'll see at Monster Crazy:

Now get going.

Ain't Got No Head

Two very different takes on the Headless Horseman of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

First, Frank Frazetta:

That man could draw horses like few others. For real. You know why Maurice Sendak decided to use monsters in Where the Wild Things Are instead of his original plan for horses? Because he realized how hard it is to draw horses.

Second is Kate Beaton's knee-slapping script-flip of Ichabod on the run:

Read the short strip here.



[A doff of the Jack O'Lantern to Weird Tales for the Frazetta art.]

Solid Advice

We can't stop watching the Fake Adam West videos.



There are just four videos, but it looks like FAW is just getting started. Per Bleeding Cool, where we found this, he had only 38 followers on Twitter when they posted on Jun 2. We're guessing he's got a lot more by now.

Friday on a Tuesday

Please enjoy what was to be a "holiday weekend post" to send the reader off into a holiday weekend with a good feeling.

Now it's something to help you coast through a short work week.

First is a cut from the long-gestating third full-length recording by Quasimoto:



Our thinking is that greedy heads will eat this up and share it, as we have, because if not stupendous, at least it's something. But our untainted devotion to The Unseen and The Further Adventures of Lord Quas give us hope that there's much more to Yessir Whatever. Quas's latest comes out June 18 and yet, nobody has given us a copy. Curses.

And while you listen to that, you can look at this variant cover artwork by Kevin Wada. It's for the new X-Men comic book simply titled X-Men, which is a funny title on account of the team comprises women only. Go ladies! (For non-geeks the players are, from left to right: Rachel Summers, Shadowcat, Psylocke, Storm, Rogue and Jubilee.)

Despite the Fitzgerald-ish look of the mutants, the book does not take place during the 1920s in upstate New York. Oh well.

Wackys Found

For a certain kind of kid, probably most kinds of kid, the phrase "Wacky Packs" triggers immediate memories of playground conclaves in which the titular cards and stickers were shown off and traded as aggressively as pork bellies at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

For those sadly left out of that Venn diagram, this is a Wacky card:

It's a simple concept. A silly, unexpected or gross-out pun on a popular consumer product is played for laughs. Children, slobbering teens and adults with severe cases of arrested development in the pop culture realm, fell under the sway of Wacky Packs.

Most of the artists responsible for Wacky Packs were of the '60s and '70s comic underground movement. We hope Topps, the baseball-card and petrified gum company that produced Wackys, paid the artists well because kids spent plenty of allowance and paper route earnings on the cards.

Seeing Wackys now gives us a better understanding of how a bunch of Mad magazine types helped shape a generation or two of consumers happy to bite the tail of the commerce beast. We may eat Doritos, but we can laugh along with Don't Eat Those.

There are two astounding archives of Wacky Packages, and probably more, on the web. Lost Wackys catalogs some of the rare specimens, while WackyPackages.org is a buyer's guide run by a fellow named Greg, who will also sell you sets.

Before we release you into the galleries of Lost Wackys, we want to share with you two examples from the '70s era sets that simply wouldn't fly today. "Hostage Cupcakes" is far too grim for modern parenting and "Commie Cleanser" requires both a knowledge of the existence of Comet cleanser and Communism. Discuss?

Whoa, Dude

When former Typing Monkey publisher/editor-in-chief/ombudsman S.L. Kreighton asked the staff to join him in a video conference this afternoon, we thought it might have something to do with May Day.

After all, our Fearless Leader, Emeritus, has taken to aimlessly travelling the highways and byways of the West Coast, so it's entirely possible that he'd take up with activists and bohemians, laughing on the inside the entire time, knowing that his deep pockets and secure retirement plan means he only sleeps on freight trains because he wants to.

What was it he wanted us to tell us? He had links for two websites that he "got from a friend from Mildred Street University." [What? -- ed.]

Before we could complete the orbit of our collective eye-roll, our mouths were shut for us by this:

and this:

The first is a John Buscema splash page, colored for maximum black-light ka-pow. It's part of Nick Derington's Flickr gallery "Marvel Third Eye Posters."

And the Dr. Strange splash, from the good doctor's brief run in his masked mystic costume, was drawn by Gene Conlan. That comes from Richard Guion's blog Giant Size Marvel.

Friend, both of these destinations are worth blowing off whatever chore you had planned. Sincerely.

Sweet Solstice Time

It's dark out. Lighten up.

(Circa 1960s Christmas card by Wallace Wood)

In the Gallery After Closing

Just this week we learned of two art blogs that recently ceased publication: Covered and Repaneled.

The former was the creation of artist/writer/illustrator Robert Goodin. Covered had various artists re-imagining and re-interpreting covers from comic books. If you like that sort of thing and, like us, somehow missed this blog, you are in for a treat.

Anthony Vukojevich, cartoonist and illustrator, was directly inspired by Goodin's blog when he created Repaneled. If you haven't guessed, Repaneled does what Covered does, but with individual panels from comic books.

Both blogs closed down recently, but are still live for jerks like us to wander around in and spend time enjoying the weird, fun work therein. Even if the source material is unfamiliar, both sites are worth a look.

Hooray for the Web, where nothing ever really goes away! (Except when it does.)

Look Over Here

We love good visual art as much as anybody who has at least one eyeball and a heart. The comic and fantastic is were the fun stuff tends to live. As such, we gravitate toward those places.

There are many good art blogs out there cataloging these things, so please spend some time at Monster Crazy and Monster Brains, where you are likely to lose hours at a time just taking it all in.

Now that that's out of the way, we must point you to the work of Christopher Mitten, an artist and illustrator working in comic books. He's been at it long enough to have a crackerjack resume but we just learned of him and are looking forward to reading some of the books he's worked on.

Stylistically, his work recalls Bill Sienkiewicz and Mike Mignola. And like the former, it's especially fun to see what happens when Mitten interprets iconic characters from sci-fi, horror and pop culture past.

His Skeletor will erase any memory you might have of the silly Filmation toy commercial cartoon from the '80s. That's a villain to be feared kids.

And don't you just love Mitten's fin-enhanced Creature from the Black Lagoon?

Mitten is launching a new site soon, so keep looking at his Tumblr, where we guess he'll post more in the meantime.

["Creature from the Black Lagoon" illustration by Christopher Mittens 2011. Copyright applies, so don't copy it without attribution, ya dig? Commissioned by Ashcan Allstars for a Universal Monsters theme.]

Exit Mr. Bradbury

He had to go sometime. His short stories are always worth reading. Dig into the novels.

[Image courtesy of Poe Foreward]