I ordered Marjorie some fancy-schmancy shoes from England a few weeks ago, and they're a bit late getting here, so when we received a note in our mailbox telling us we had a package to pick up at La Poste, she was delighted!

Man is she ever going to be a lot less delighted when she gets home from work and finds out it's just a bunch of Halloween stuff from Calamity Jon (calamityjon) and Kate (superdaintykate)! Haha! No, hey, she's going to flip over this stuff too.


Since I was expecting to receive the shoes, imagine my confusion at the post office when the guy handed me a box adorned with Calamity Jon artwork! Those footnotes read "Belated" and "Sucker." The nerve of those shoe people!

( What's in the baaaahx... )

Did you know I drew a whole lot of short Halloween comics back in the day? calamityjon wrote about 'em here (be sure to admire his pumpkins, if you know what I mean), and there are links to even more of them on my Comics page on my site.

Happy Halloween some more!

Today on Cool Stuff in Paris I've started a gallery of weird public art! Several of the pics are things you've seen here on LiveJournal, but there are a bunch of new ones, and I'll be adding more as I run across them in town.

(Fyi, I plan to keep these new website updates to a minimum on my LJ; maybe I'll post a list of new articles here every week or so.)

In other news, man, I've been in serious Halloween deprivation mode, and this clip is just what the doctor ordered.

Ben (schtune) just sent me this picture from his phone, with the text, "August sixth."



HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYBODY!

We don't really have Halloween in France, and I'd told Marjorie there was a small chance we'd see some Halloween candy/costumes/decorations in stores during our visit to the States this month. She was intrigued from an anthropological (and goth) point of view, having never experienced Halloween herself. I thought we might start to see some Halloween stuff popping up near the end of our trip, around August 24th, if we were lucky, but American consumerism went and jumped the gun before we even got there! Amazing! Man, now I'm even more excited for our trip tomorrow. Did I mention we leave tomorrow? We'll be visiting for a couple weeks, mostly for my mom's 70th birthday party in New Jersey, but we're also spending some time in New Orleans, the Jersey Shore, Philadelphia, New York, etc. See you soon, America! We'll be trick-or-treating door to door across your great nation until we've eaten all your candy, and then hopefully we'll be allowed back into France, where it's illegal to be fat.

I was rewarded for getting up early to vote yesterday morning by finding this awesome jack o'lantern right down the street from the polls.


Pennsylvania kicked more ass for Obama than I'd had the audacity to hope. Which means... my trip was a waste of time! I could've just not voted! Ha. Okay, I'm going back to Paris this evening. See you folks next time.

Happy Halloween! What are your favorite Halloween songs? Here are my top 20, in no particular order.

• The Halloween Dance — Reverend Horton Heat
  
• This is Halloween — Marilyn Manson (cover of the Nightmare Before Christmas song)
  
• Dragula — Rob Zombie
  
• Transylvanian Concubine — Rasputina (the original, or even better, the Marilyn Manson remix)
  
• Halloween — Siouxsie and the Banshees
  
• Bela Lugosi's Dead — Bauhaus
  
• Halloween — The Misfits
  
• Release the Bats — The Birthday Party
  
• Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) — David Bowie
  
• Halloween Parade — Lou Reed
  
• Dinner with Dracula — The Cramps
  
• Ghost of Stephen Foster — Squirrel Nut Zippers
  
• Frankenstein — New York Dolls
  
• Haunting — The Pogues
  
• Ghost Town — The Specials
  
• Lullaby — The Cure
  
• If I Was Your Vampire — Marilyn Manson
  
• The Devil's Chasing Me — Reverend Horton Heat
  
• Now I'm Feeling Zombified — Alien Sex Fiend
  
• Dead Man's Party — Oingo Boingo

I have a few important criteria for songs that make it into the Halloween playlist: The songs have to be at least somewhat spooky or monster-themed (even if they're not literally about monsters; they have to at least remind me of monsters or have a lot of spooky imagery) AND they have to be good party music (I might make exceptions for this if the song is super-Halloweeny but not terribly rocking; see Halloween Parade) AND (and this is the hard part) I have to actually love the songs. I think a lot of people will throw in any ol' song with the word "ghost" in it even if it totally sucks or doesn't have a Halloween-y feel at all. Like, I love me some werewolves, but you're not going to find Werewolves of London in my playlist, because I hate that song and it's like the opposite of spooky.

Something else I love to listen to around Halloween, but doesn't fit in this list because it's not a song and it's not really good party music, is Philip Glass' Dracula soundtrack. That's the best driving-around-looking-at-Halloween-decorations or sitting-at-home-scaring-yourself music ever.

So, what are you folks listening to this Halloween?

Happy Halloween! Here's my costume for Steve and Trish's party Saturday night. When people asked me what I was exactly, if I suspected they were a geek, I'd tell them I was Manning Belmont, least talented of the Belmonts (that's the Paris Belmonts, formerly Beaumont). I do have a whip on my belt but it's obscured in this picture. And if they weren't a geek, I'd just say I was a vampire hunter who really sucked at his job.

The stakes were expertly made by Ben, by the way, whom I realized later was basically Kris Kristofferson to my Wesley Snipes. He also suggested I put just a tiny drop of blood on the tip of one of the stakes to make it look like one time I'd just barely nicked a vampire, but I ended up not having time/forgetting. Also, man, Halloween really is the one time of year when redeye can actually enhance a picture. I'd thought about buying weird contact lenses again this year and it turns out I didn't have to!

I'll post more pics from the party when I have a better internet connection! One party down, two or three to go...

Speaking of killing monsters, if you haven't known me on LJ for very long it's possible you've never seen Curses!, the Castlevania-style video game I made with my friend Patrick a while back. We never got past building the one-level demo, unfortunately (although I'd love to pick up where we left off someday) but it's still a lot of fun to play if you're in the monster-hunting mood, which, if you're anything like me, when are you not?

Thanks for all my jpg-formatted birthday presents yesterday, gang! You're too kind. Did... did you all get jpg-formatted gift receipts for those, by any chance?

Man, my birthday was awesome: I woke up to a pumpkin muffin, then caught up with old colleagues in Philly, then killed a couple hours in Philly doing lots of shopping, and then went out for really great sushi with Steve and Trish, and then we went to the Bates Motel haunted house and hayride and drank hot chocolate afterward. That's basically everything I want out of America all in one day.

October has got me thinking about Halloween, and Halloween has got me thinking about monsters, and monsters have got me thinking about werewolves, who've been my favorite monster since I was a little kid. I was just rereading the Wikipedia entry on the Beast of Gévaudan (which I'm sure you already know all about if you care about werewolves and wolf-type monsters like I do, and/or if you've seen Brotherhood of the Wolf), thinking about taking a Halloween trip to the area, nowadays known as Lozère, to chase the legend a little bit. And then something else caught my eye at the end of the article, in the See Also section:

Wolves of Paris
The Wolves of Paris were a man-eating wolf pack that entered Paris during the winter of 1450 through breaches in the city walls, killing forty people. A wolf named Courtaud, or "Bobtail", was the leader of the pack. Eventually the wolves were destroyed when Parisians, furious at the depredations, lured Courtaud and his pack into the heart of the city, where they were stoned and speared to death before the gates of Notre Dame Cathedral.

Man! Incredible. I really picked the wrong century to move to Paris.

Hey Americans! I will be in America next week! I'm coming back to Philly and New Jersey for a couple weeks, to attend a few Halloween parties, see my friends and family, work a little bit, et cetera. I'm super excited to be back in the States for Halloween! I'm also super excited to eat some pumpkin pie, which is my favorite thing in the world and is forbidden in France (note: this is not true). I arrive in Philly next Wednesday the 22nd, and I leave again on November 5th. I booked my return flight for right after the election so I can tell everybody, "I swear to god, if John McCain (or Barack Obama, or anybody) wins this election, I'm going to go live in France! I'm fucking serious!" Don't act like I won't do it.

If you want to get (even more) excited about Halloween, check out this video of some artist guy's Halloween display playing in the front windows of his house last year:

May 1st always means one thing to me: we're halfway to Halloween!

As some of you already know, I snuck back to Philadelphia around the end of October after just a month in Paris, which was much sooner than I'd planned on winding up in the United Snakes again. But I had a totally great reason for rushing back: My best friend Ben married his amazing girlfriend Corri. I was the best man, and I had to read stuff during the ceremony and also hold onto the wedding rings until it was time for the bride and groom to exchange them, just like Slash in the November Rain video. (After I handed over the rings, I went out into the desert and played a screeching, bittersweet guitar solo.) I'm waiting for permission to post a couple more pictures from the wedding itself. [Edit: boom.] For now you just get me and my awesome new suit.

During my stay in Philly/New Jersey, I also managed to draw a short Halloween comic, go to two spooky Halloween parties (my gang and I went as zombie Laverne and Shirley and Lenny and Squiggy), work a lot, buy lots of clothes, receive a few birthday presents, see my family, and most importantly, go out for sushi four times. That's a very good way to fill up a little less than two weeks.

I'm exhausted and very happy to be going home to Paris tonight. Here's a picture I took in a shiny window in my neighborhood a couple weeks ago, and forgot to post 'til now.



See you next time, America.

For like a million years now, calamityjon and I have been producing different permutations of our just-about-annual Boo! Halloween Stories comic anthology project, sometimes in print, sometimes online, sometimes with just the two of us, sometimes with lots of contributors, etc. This year I took a back seat on the whole thing, as I was super busy with moving back to France and other nonsense like that, and Jon spearheaded the Boo! project himself, writing thirteen spooky scripts and distributing them among a bunch of his artist friends. The finished comics that have come in so far are posted over at Jon's OuCoPo blog. I just finished up the story he assigned me, a five-page silent comic (my reaction upon learning that the story had no words: "What, you don't like my lettering?!") called The Drunkard's Dream, based on a super-creepy penny arcade machine in the Musée Mécanique in San Francisco.


The Drunkard's Dream
Written by Calamity Jon
Illustrated by Manning Krull

I had to rush the hell out of the thing to fit it in along with the wedding this week, and work, and all the other stuff I've got going on right now, but I'm really glad I made the time to participate in Boo! this year. Be sure to check out the rest of the stories here. Happy Halloween, everybody!

All of a sudden Philadelphia is all cold breezes and orange leaves and yellow skies. Halloween is in the air. I submit to you as proof:

The other night I stood next to Ben as he fed quarters into a parking meter, and in between quarters, a spider jumped out of the slot onto the ground and stood there looking up at us, furious. If that spider had had a fist, it would have been shaking it at us.

I had to work on Saturday, and Frederick and I were the only two people in this big, empty, echo-y office — cavernous; that's the word for it. I heard something from across the room that sounded exactly like snoring, and I wandered closer to it, thinking it must be some sort of mechanical noise. I couldn't see anything or anybody, but as I got closer to it I became absolutely certain it was indeed someone snoring. There's a row of offices along the far wall, and I just assumed it was some clown who'd stayed out late after work on Friday and got wasted and decided to sleep it off in the office rather than stumble home. Frederick noticed me sneaking around, so he stood up too to see what was up. I whispered to him about the snorer, and we silently searched the offices together, swat team style, with hand signals and everything. There was no one in any one of the offices or under any of the desks, and the noise stopped completely. I'm pretty sure it was just a lazy ghost.

I watched zombie movies until late last night with Jenn and Russell and didn't get much sleep before work this morning, and today I'm totally feeling like a zombie myself. I just reached into the inside pocket of my jacket to grab a business card for someone, and I pulled out a finger-shaped lollipop with black nail polish. With the way I'm falling apart right now, I wouldn't have been terribly surprised if it were one of mine.

My Bratislava pictures are up!



Whew. That's the end of this trip. I still have one more huge trip — Bosnia, etc — to write about. I think I'll take a little break though, first. In the meantime, ( here's me on my first Halloween back in the States... )

The first of two stories I'm illustrating for this year's BOO! Halloween Stories is up! It's called The Sleepwalker, and it's written by my good friend Courtney (kocici). Just go to the site and click on Stories, and the link is in the right column. I wish I had more time to write about it! I've got a crazy deadline to meet.

P.S. Look at this awesome dumb thing calamityjon got me for my birthday: my own Wikipedia entry! What, no photo? Why, this article is practically a stub, man. Ho ho, I'm just goofin', and thanks again, Jon.