Blood and Rage for Halloween

Halloween has come and gone again like a murderous curse stuck on repeat or our ham-and-egg existence riding that eternal recurrence merry-go-round one more time for the sake of eternity. I love Halloween. This one (2015) was a pretty good one- candy, costumes, and a few Great Pumpkins. My wife and I attended a pumpkin carving party and she immediately took control of our pumpkin, deciding by executive order that we would make a Red Lantern pumpkin. This continues a tradition we started last year with our Green Lantern pumpkin. It worked out well since we didn’t have all of our pumpkin art tools at the party and the Red Lantern logo is probably the easiest Lantern logo to recreate.

Our friends made some pretty good pumpkins too, but I didn’t take any pictures of them so you’ll have to use your imagination. One featured a cat and the others were spooky in their own way. One of our friends tried to carve about thirty letters into his pumpkin. He gave up after about nine. Some people aren’t cut out for the pumpkin life.

Last year we scored some really good quality green lights for the Green Lantern pumpkin so we tried to do the same with red lights this year. After we were finished with with the pumpkin, I installed the lights in a small display of my Green Lantern toys.

We did acquire some red lights, but they unfortunately they are as good quality as the green ones we got last year. They’re really candy cane lights, not red lights. Now that Halloween is over, I plan to use them in a display of my Harley Quinn toys.

Pumpkins in Georgia are a bittersweet bit of Halloween. On the one hand, people from Georgia love stabbing things with knives. On the other hand, it’s still pretty warm around Halloween here and the pumpkins get pretty gross pretty fast. Once a pumpkin starts to devolve into a mushy, moldy insect orgy, you can feel more confident in your witchcraft.

My wife is adamant that we keep making Lantern pumpkins every year until we’ve done the logos of every Corps, so I’m not too worried about the strength of our marriage. I love Halloween.

One of Those Adams Classics

For Halloween this year, I salvaged what I could from the Green Lantern Jack-o-lantern and the lights were the only thing to be salvaged because that pumpkin went south shortly after presentation. I’ve been out of the jack-o-lantern game for a while and did not realize the nuances of preserving a carved pumpkin. Out of the ashes and into the night like Jean Grey in a character-defining saga, those lights came to become part of my Halloween costume, a costume that I’ll admit belongs somewhere on yourcosplaysucks but it’s Halloween and Halloween is not the convention scene. I don’t think there should be too much pressure to have perfect cosplay on Halloween. I’m just happy people dress up at all. On Halloween, a shitty costume is better than being too cool for school. At a convention, I go for the too cool for school look because I’m not a cosplayer and I am too cool for school. My costume this year was an ode to the iconic cover of Superman 233 illustrated by comics legend Neal Adams.

As you can see, the costume’s beauty lies in its simplicity. Using only materials I already had, this creative couture costs  me nothing except the juice in the battery. The t-shirt I already had and wear with some frequency. I’ll admit that I’m the type of nerd who who have also been prepared had a Flash, Batman, or Green Lantern idea come instead a Superman one. I used some scraps from the last round of printing for the issue numbering and pricing.

In Hallowest Ween, In Blackest Night

To celebrate Halloween this year, the missus came up with the idea of a Green Lantern jack-o-lantern. She did most of the important work- coming up with the idea and carving it. I did the other stuff- empty the guts out of the pumpkin and trace the logo onto the pumpkin.

Carving the pumpkin…

 

After the show, it’s the after-carving, After the carving, it’s the hotel lobby…

The view from our apartment’s parking lot….

More shots…

We ordered the green lights a couple of days ago and they arrived in the mail today. In somewhat related news, THE LEG by Van Jesnen (Green Lantern Corps writer) and Jose Pimienta also arrived in the mail today!! For those of you who didn’t kick in to the kickstarter, you can score a copy here from the fine people at Top Shelf. I’m super-excited to start reading it. I’ve flipped through it and the art, particularly the colors and all the Mexican architecture, looks splendidly dreamy.

 

 

Several pumpkins, a banana, a bat, and Frankenstein’s monster

These are some Halloween decorations that Jasmine and I made today at Wonder Root. They’ll be on display presumably until Halloween, but there’s two Halloween parties planned there this week and the party hosts may choose to discard these decorations we toiled over today. Above is a tribute to Lou Reed. After making all the pumpkins, I really was in the mood for a banana.

Jasmine made this bat, but I made all the other decorations. The whole project rests however upon her having some candy in her car, which ignited the fire and keeps it burning deep, deep into the future.

Here’s a Frankenstein made from construction paper and a little bit of duct tape.

Classic Jack-o-lantern, loosely based on Pontius Pilate.

The Boo and Happy Halloweeen are also made from construction paper, as is the blood. Fair warning to you vampires- you cannot survive on construction paper blood.

This is where our little Halloween project began- some candy, a bowl, and a dream featuring four deadly handsome pumpkins inspired by the Pringles guy, Kool-Aid Man, and a panda.

亲爱的 Dracula: Looking So Paisley Right Now

Both of these images are based on photographs I took at the Gay Pride Parade two weeks ago in Atlanta. The parade was mostly corporate sponsors and churches, but luckily there were a few truly fabulous souls to keep parade attendees from falling asleep like those sexy firemen from Swinging Richard’s. During the parade, I saw a lot of individuals who identified themselves as “bears.” I may need to infiltrate this community for the purposes of finding models for my pictures. Seriously, who makes a better panda than a bear?

Also I can’t take credit for the paisley pattern in the first picture. I just grabbed that the ol’ internet. I probably won’t stick with it as I’m trying to work solely from my own imagination and photographs, but I think it looks good so I thought I’d share it here. I wish somebody would invent a good paisley generator where you contribute a few squiggles and a robot transforms your input into beautifully detailed, yet unassumingly elegant patterns.

Last weekend, I attended the Little 5 Points Halloween Parade. There was an army of David Bowies from various points in his career and a very tall Godzilla that breathed smoke. Perhaps the strangest sight was a van covered in a full graphic wrap featuring premium strands of marijuana and they were distributing medical marijuana lollipops to raise awareness of attempts to decriminalize and legalize marijuana. Other advocates for marijuana’s legalization made their voices heard at the parade, but this van was truly something out of the ordinary. I expected the driver to pull off her mask to reveal McGruff the crime dog, but that didn’t happen. Maybe she took the mask off later.