What coulda/shoulda been: Back in the late 1990s, my pal James Chambers and I briefly had our own comics company called Shadow House Press. We published five issues of our horror anthology title Shadow House ('natch!) before we ran out of money and had to call it quits.
This gorgeous wrap-around cover by Kirk Van Wormer and Kevin Nowlan was intended to grace our (ultimately unpublished) Shadow House Halloween Special and features our horror hostess character, Autumn, offering some tricky treats to Jim's creation, the Lil' Ghoul Gang....
The Halloween "Horror-Mood" continues with another glorious Nightmare cover from Skywald Publications. This one is from issue #10, and the artist is the great Ken Kelly.
As previously mentioned on this blog, General Mills has celebrated the Halloween season this year by making available all five of their classic "monster" cereals... for the first time! While Count Chocula, Franken Berry and Boo Berry were pretty consistently popular, later additions to the line - specifically, Fruit Brute and Yummy Mummy - weren't around for very long, and were never available at the same time (until now).
Anyway, as the photo above testifies, I stopped by my local Target store on Friday night to buy some new shoes and a pair of warm slippers for the winter, and while there, I picked up one box of each variety (well, actually, I got two boxes of Count Chocula). While the cereals are available through numerous retailers, only Target has them in reproductions of their original "retro" packaging.
For the record, I did eat the Count Chocula this weekend (while watching 70s cartoons on DVD, 'natch). As for the others, well, they probably will not be fully consumed... but then, I really just wanted the boxes, anyway.
1987's The Lost Boys isn't really one of my favorites - I hadn't seen it since it originally aired on HBO and didn't care for it then - but revisiting it on Blu-ray was fun.
Tonight's Movie: Roman Polanski's 1967 horror spoof, The Fearless Vampire Killers, a visually arresting yet only intermittently amusing satire of Hammer-styled gothics. I'd only seen random parts of the movie on cable before tonight, but thanks to the Warner Archive streaming channel, I was able to finally check it off my list. Fun poster by the great Frank Frazetta. (Well, the bottom part is Frazetta, anyway.)
Booyah! This is the best Pacific Rim trailer yet! Apparently, it's not testing well with mainstream audiences, who see it as a "Transformers rip-off." I feel very sad for anyone whose pulse doesn't race in anticipation of witnessing giant robots battling giant monsters on the big screen. Poor devils.
Ray Harryhausen, the undisputed master of stop-motion animation, has passed away at age 92. As others have noted, he didn't create the special effects technique of animating small models one frame at a time, but he perfected it in a series of imaginative motion pictures that, regardless of their other merits (or lack thereof), will endure forever because Ray somehow managed to breath convincing life into his menagerie of mythological and fantastical creations, working in solitude for months at a time. There have been other talented stop-motion animators (including Harryhausen's own mentor, Willis O'Brien), but few managed to imbue their characters with quite as much personality and "soul."
The movies he made will always be remembered, but it is all of the artists and animators, filmmakers and authors that he inspired that will be his true and greatest legacy... and I count myself among them.
R.I.P. Ray. There's considerably less magic in the world today.
I finally ordered the IDW hardcover collection of the Gorgo comic books illustrated by the legendary Steve Ditko for Charlton Comics back in the early Sixties. This cover, from issue #2, is no doubt included in that volume, which should arrive here by Saturday. I'm really looking forward to digging into it. The only Gorgo comic I've read was the first issue, which Charlton reprinted in a terrific 1966 one-shot called Fantastic Giants (which paired it with the first issue of Konga, also by Ditko).
The new Blu-ray edition of the Gorgo film supposedly came out yesterday. With luck, I'll get my hands on that disc soon....
There are several genre films I'm looking forward to in 2013, including Iron Man 3, the next Star Trek movie, and the new Wolverine film. But the one I'm most eager to see is the giant robots vs giant monsters flick from Pan's Labyrinth/Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro, Pacific Rim.
I think del Toro is one of the great visual stylists working in movies today, and when it comes to cinematic fantasy, I don't think there's a better director out there. Plus, you know: giant robots & monsters.
ADDENDUM 12/12/12: The full teaser trailer went online today. Check this out:
