Ah, the first day of fall! Cool mornings, cooler nights, pumpkins on the vine, leaves turning (at least for today on the Google website*), impending frost... you know what this means, don't you?
Halloween's a-comin'.
Oh, YEAH, baby! Halloween! The only holiday worth getting excited about! Time to get out the spooky decorations and put up the ol' Halloween Tree** so as to garner favor with The Great Pumpkin and, no; it's not too early-- I-Mockery.com celebrates for two whole months!
Expect a lot of Halloween-related posts in the coming days.
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**I actually have a Halloween Tree, as if there was any doubt. My surprisingly indulgent friend Pam (seen here to your left as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing) made it for me. It's a small tree branch stuck in a gravel-filled pot wrapped in white crepe paper adorned with dozens of little plastic bats. She even made me some ornaments (including a really scary one of Oliver North, who was big in the news at the time; see Iran-Contra Affair). Twenty-some years later I still set it up in the living room every Oct. 1.
Edit: Some of you out there are muttering, "What's this Autumn People by Ray Bradbury crap? Ray never wrote a book called The Autumn People! Sure, there's The October Country, but whoever heard of The Autumn People?"
Oh, ye of little faith. The Autumn People is an anthology of EC Comics versions of some early Ray Bradbury horror stories. According to Wikipedia,
Some of EC's more well-known themes include:
--Adaptations of Ray Bradbury science-fiction stories, which appeared in two dozen EC comics starting in 1952. It began inauspiciously, with an incident in which Feldstein and Gaines plagiarized two of Bradbury's stories and combined them into a single tale. Learning of the story, Bradbury sent a note praising them, while remarking that he had "inadvertently" not yet received his payment for their use. EC sent a check and negotiated a productive series of Bradbury adaptations.
Quick reminiscence: My Mom & Dad were not real keen on my childhood fascination with all things dank and leprous, believing with many other parents of the time that it would warp my personality (ahem!); consequently, I was forced to do what any self-respecting pre-adolescent would do--I hid it. My friend Sam was good enough to loan me his copy of The Autumn People during our stint at elementary school (4th grade?) and I smuggled it home in my book bag, reading it clandestinely long after my official bedtime under the covers with my trusty flashlight.
5 comments:
And don't forget the anticipation of the upcoming Zombie Walk!
Margie
Crap - did I miss it already?
Margie
No, not by a long shot. The Zombie Walk is scheduled for Oct. 25:
"This year, as always, we will walk Carytown. And that's it. You will find that it is exhausting to lumber around just after a few blocks. In previous years some of the locations that we walked based popular suggestions have been 'hit or miss'. We loose attendance with each new location, and there is some confusion with our out-of-town undead."
Updates here.
The Autumn People, oooh boys and girls, scary! Well Lee, I would say that although Al Feldstein comissioned and published these GRAPHIC renderings sans Ray's permissio, they both came out ahead of the game (and settled so nicely, too). Thanks for resurrecting this memory. I just went out to the archives (in the pouring rain!) and found my copy. Another acquisition, I think, from DrugFair. I love autumn. Do the word "actinomycetes" mean anything to ya?
I wait until the end of the month before posting about my favorite holiday. The rest of the month I post about clowns and government experiments and secret laboratories. GW, look up "Frankenstein's Den" by THE HOLLYWOOD FLAMES and check my October 07 archives.
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