happy halloween!

okay...

i've been watching horror movies on amc and sci-fi for the past week, have been looking desperately to find some story, some article, someTHING to post to add to your hopefully already creepy halloween...and i got nothin'.

brian mulcahy found me a great article/update from the boston globe on the dover demon, the creepy creature that we talked about a month or so ago that was originally sighted in dover, massachusetts almost 30 years ago and will appear in perhapanauts:second chances #3. if you are so inclined, here's where you can read that.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/10/29/decades_later_the_dover_demon_still_haunts/



i also have a few more pictures of the finished choopie statue that craig sent over...







as for a scary--or hopefully scary--halloween story, i offer the following.

Disappearing Being
by Whitewater

I traveled from Greenville, Texas to the area where I was raised, Neligh, Nebraska, in mid October to camp out in the Neligh park and bow hunt for deer in the Oakdale, NE area. One morning I hunted some land about 1/2 mile north of Oakdale, next to some irrigated farm land my cousins were renting. I had hunted this land previous years and had scouted the area a couple of days before and had put up a tree stand. I arrived before daylight and had just crossed the fence from the cornfield into the old pasture to an old river bank near my stand.

Daylight was just beginning. I became aware that I was not alone. To my right, I could sort of see another being headed in the same direction about 8 - 10 feet from me. I say "sort of see" because initially it seemed like this being was not solid, and I could see partially through him and see the trees in the background. The being then seemed to become aware of me and stopped and turned to stare at me. At this point, he became more solid, and I could no longer see through him.

He appeared to have no covering on his head, except dark curly hair about two inches long. He had dark, piercing eyes, no facial hair and features that were unique from any person I had ever seen. I had been all over the world during my 22 years in the US Navy, and this being did not really resemble any particular type of person I had ever known. The closest resemblance was perhaps to native American Indian, but still quite different.

He appeared to be covered in something tight fitting of solid texture in dark gray or dark green color, not cloth. His feet were covered with what seemed to be a continuance of his clothing. He had nothing in his hands, which appeared to be very similar to mine. He seemed to be quite muscular and several inches taller than me (maybe 6'6" - 7'). We looked at each other for about 30 seconds. He showed no fear, only some curiosity, as he broke eye contact to look me over. Curiosity, with an absence of fear was what I also felt. At the end of the 30 or so seconds, he partially turned away from me and within another 5 or 10 seconds, became transparent and disappeared. I have not had any similar experiences on subsequent visits to the area.

and here's another quick one.

Ghost or Doll
by John Pinckney

While my wife and I were watching television, I noticed through my peripheral vision what appeared to be a girl gliding out on to a loft on the second floor of our house next to my daughter's bedroom. The girl was wearing what looked like a transparent vale-type dress and she had no head or face, but rather a dark void where the head should be. The girl came out of my daughter's bedroom and onto the loft, stopped, looked down on us and then glided down the stairs and disappeared. The whole time I saw this, I saw it from my peripheral vision and never looked up at it and I did not mention it to my wife because I thought I was imagining it.

Within seconds of this vision, my wife looked up at the loft and said to me that she thought she saw the girl coming out of the room, and she described it exactly the same way I saw it. I quickly went to check on my daughter, who was five at the time, and found her sleeping soundly. We looked at each other in disbelief.

The next morning, I woke up around 4:30 a.m. My daughter came downstairs, saying she did not sleep well last night because her doll was walking around in her room last night.

hope one of 'em gave ya a little chill at least.
and that your halloween is wonderful!
smell ya later!
todd

needless to say...

okay...

PERHAPANAUTS:SECOND CHANCES #1 is on sale.
NOW.
it looks like this:



but, y'know, with words on it and stuff...
and a horse's head up in the corner.

also, there's an interview by frederik hautain with me all about SECOND CHANCES at:
www.brokenfrontier.com

also, andrew (wiernicki) has finished craig's choopie sculpt and here's just one of the final photos:



also, i'm down to the last two episodes of 'lost' season 2, but because abc staggered the showing of 'lost' and 'the nine', it messed up my tape of the second and third new episodes. if anybody has them on tivo or tape, i'd love to hear from ya.
ps--don't tell sharon...i was s'posed to be "in charge" of this...

also, so have ya READ IT YET?!

hope ya like it.
smell ya later!
todd

some stuff for a gray monday

okay...

so, anyway, it's kinda gray and cloudy and just slightly chilly here in upstate ny this afternoon and i just came in from a walk with jake, my dog. though we talked a bit, he was really more interested in playing with his ball in the leaves and i was left to ponder over my two minor concerns; how to best word a snippet of dialogue toward the conclusion of perhapanauts:second chances 3 and what to use as a subject for today's blog entry.

the obvious answer to the latter would be--HEY! PERHAPANAUTS:SECOND CHANCES #1 is coming out THIS WEDNESDAY!!! Though I've run the cover and even several of the first few pages here on the blog in the past--this IS the perhapablog, after all--I felt that maybe I've been too much of a hard sell and maybe should back off a bit. I mean, we don't want you to get SICK of the thing before it's even out! right?


so i thought i'd do what i did a week or so ago and mention some of the cool things i've been looking at or listening to or whatever lately.

first thing is, i think EVERYBODY should subscribe to a daily dose of calvin and hobbes over at www.gocomics.com
there is, in my simple opinion, no better way to start your day than having these two show up in your inbox every morning! bill watterson is an absolute god when it comes to telling stories in a strip and though they are ten or so years old, they STILL are so far ahead of their time!


second, sharon and i have been working as hard as we can catching up on 'lost' season 2. (i've taped the first few episodes of season 3 so we'll be able to catch up soon enough. and yes, i said taped. i don't have tivo...yet. yes, i know it's amazing, you don't know how you lived without it. i get it. i'll get it. i just can't afford to get one at the moment.) season 2, of course, is blowing me away and i am constantly amazed at how exciting and clever the writing is! can't wait to get caught up!


and on the heels of the one above, for those of you (fools!) who don't check out my pal, mike wieringo's blog regularly, (www.mikewieringo.com) he just did a week of sketches of some of the members of the cast. here's one of my favorites (both the sketch and the character), but head on over to mike's site to check out the rest. he's awesome!


also, i think that this should be standard practice for fire departments...



playing around on ebay recently, i stumbled across this action figure/toy i had when i was a little kid. i had completely forgotten about it until i saw it again.
it kinda explains a lot...


and that's it!

i won't remind you all to make sure you pick up a copy of perhapanauts:second chances #1 at your local comic shop this wednesday! and i won't tell you to tell your local comic shop owner that he should keep the trade in stock.
and i'm not gonna say--

smell ya later!
todd

tales from the darkside

okay...

really busy, but wanted to post something so as to keep up with the swiftly crumbling schedule of three times a week (i'll get it back, really!) working days with my pal, jeff, we have a lot of fun and talk a lot. the other day he mentioned that he had seen a 2 hour block of old "tales from the darkside" episodes on scifi. man, i used to love that show and remember the opening being one of the creepiest parts about it; the dark, foreboding landscape being twisted into a negative of itself, the chilling music, that guy's freaky voice...
i think they're all on dvd. i'll hafta check.

anyway, reminded me of the two stories that follow, both, again, from paranormal at about.com.
neither one of them really well written, but they are stories well-told as they conjure up vivid images and convey some very unsettling sensations.


Something Under the Bed_by Wil
"I thought I was going crazy. After so many years, I found, or should say read, that someone else had been visited. I think I was about 9 or 10 when I was first visited. To give some background to this story, I was living in Oklahoma and was sharing a bedroom with my younger sister. I had stayed up late, it being a Friday and no school. My father told me to make sure that when I went to bed to turn out all the lights. My sister was already in the room asleep. I, being like any other kid back then, turned on all the lights in the rest of the house and made my way through turning lights out. I got upstairs and turned to make sure I hadn't left any on.
I headed to the room and climbed in bed. It might have been maybe 10 to 15 minutes later that I felt something grab my foot from under my bed! The beds were the old wooden bunk beds that had been taken down and butted up together. Just thinking about it still sends shivers through my body. My sister and I had a habit of sleeping like the other. One foot and one arm off the beds. That is when I felt something from under my bed grab my foot and ankle and start pulling me under. I had grabbed the side of my bed for I was halfway under it before I was able to scream for my father to come. I remember never feeling the floor under the bed.
When my dad came into the room, he grabbed me and started pulling me back toward him.... with very little success for the effort, but with the next effort he placed his arms under mine and wrapped his around my chest and pulled really hard and I seemed to fly out from under the bed. My father, to this day, still doesn't want to talk about it, or if he does he just says it was all a bad dream that I was having. But I know and even then knew better."


Sinister Being_by Paul D.
"It was when I was about nine. I slept in the big double bed with my mum for a couple of years after my dad died. He didn't die in the house; he had a heart attack and passed away in hospital. One night I was sleeping and all I remember is that I was suddenly standing looking out the window of my mum's bedroom, holding the blinds open and looking out over the garden and the street. The house is directly on a corner, and on the road running perpendicular and away from ours I saw someone walking up toward our street.
All I really remember is that this "person" walked two blocks in about two seconds, he flashed forward as if he were in fast forward, and then suddenly appeared directly in front of me in the garden. He didn't jump the wall or anything, he just flickered and disappeared from the corner and appeared in the garden. I don't remember anything about his face, but I remember that he had a really sinister looking smile.
The person I was looking at seemed to be male and average height and weight. As soon as he appeared in the garden, he started appearing in three different spots in the garden, spaced evenly like the points an equilateral triangle. Every time he appeared at the next point of the triangle he would physically look the same, the same evil grin on his face, but the clothes he was wearing would change.
I just remember feeling really scared and I could not take my eyes off of him. My mum called out to me to ask why I was looking out the window and I looked at her, then back out the window and he was gone. I've never really experienced anything as freaky or seemingly concrete to me since then. I don't know if there is a possibility I was maybe sleepwalking and my mum speaking to me just woke me up. Those are the only strange stories I can recall."


of course, either or both of them could easily be waved away as dreams. or half-dreams--those nightmares you start having before you even fall asleep. they are both in bed, asleep at the onset, and one even claims to be a sleepwalker.
i was a sleepwalker--or am. i think it's like alchoholism, you're never, ever cured of it. i used to walk a lot as a kid and well into my twenties. my mom or my roommates would find me in the weirdest places. when i was 8 my mom watched me get dressed and head down the street for school--at 2 in the morning. when i was about 22 my roommate and his girlfriend looked out the window to see me walking across the snow-covered field next to our house in the moonlight. i would often wake up to find pine needles and grass in my bed and my feet dirty and not remember a thing about it.

well, that's not true. the next day i would sometimes remember what i saw or where i woke up (or sorta woke up), staring at a wall or the shed in the backyard. i remember waking up one night laying across our washer and dryer down in the laundry room, my dog, gretchen, having folllowed me and laying at my feet watching me. she musta thought i was doing something weird. and, yes, once my roommate followed me out to my car, in the dead of night, middle of winter, keys in hand, going to...? work, i guess...? who knows.

but i do think that there's a darkside. a place you can get to only when you're falling asleep. certain things you can see only when your mind is in just the right state. you have to be just on the edge to get there. but i bet you've seen some things there. no?
i bet you will.

more tomorrow.
if all goes well.


smell ya later~
todd

choopie, blood, and pumpkins

okay...

so, as i've said before, i really try not to make this blog about me. it is, after all, the PERHAPA-blog and so i try to keep it about the book, weird and creepy things, and comics, movies, that kinda stuff. sure, my perspective comes through with what i write--it's impossible to be THAT objective. plus, i think that would be a pretty boring read. like a robot wrote it.
ANYWAY...
tuesday was my birthday.
someone asked me what i was doing for my birthday and i said, "ignoring it."
unfortunately, there were other people NOT ignoring it.
i got birthday calls and emails (mostly 'cause myspace thinks it's a good idea to let all your 'friends' know it's your birthday...%#$@in' myspace!), nice presents from my brother, sister-in-law, niece, and nephew, my dad, and my partners 'n pals, mike and craig!
highest on that list, though, was my girlfriend, sharon.
(and part of her present is why i'm even mentioning this here...)
she wanted to take me out for sushi 'cause it's my favorite, but our favorite sushi restaurant is closed on tuesdays, so we went for lobster. i bought her a lobster on her birthday. then we came home and she gave me a couple of nice shirts and some chocolate. and then she snuck out to her car and brought in a clear plastic cake box, about 14" x 20", and in it was the coolest cake i have ever seen in my life! it was so awesome i hadda take a picture--



those who know me will find it hard to believe that anything could leave me speechless, but this did it.
i was stunned.
it was beautiful and thoughtful and so well done! (sharon claims that much of it was the help of her best friend, colleen, but she tends to be very humble at times like this...)
oh, and after i took some pictures--it was delicious! and the red icing around the edges started to melt a little in the warmth of the house and looked just like blood oozing out from the sides--choopie woulda loved it!
thank you, sharon--it was wonderful!
a wonderful cake and a wonderful birthday!

so while we're in personal mode--and after i wrote about the dark green/black pumpkin i had last year--sharon and my nephew, tyler, and i went out last saturday and picked up a few pumpkins of our own. orange this time, of course. we dug them out, though tyler had to go home before we all got our faces carved. he and i kept talking about what cool things we could put in them rather than candles. he's 10--this is what we think of. he called me later to say that, while he still thinks that we should blow them up (with the m-80's i have left over from fourth of july), it would be cool to throw a couple smoke bombs in there and see the smoke pouring from the eyes and mouth.
so here's my pumpkin for this year.
the last few shots are for tyler.
(and yes, i will post the m-80 pics at the end of the month...)











that's all for now.
i'll be back here on wednesday with, hopefully, another scary story.
smell ya later!
todd

cabin terror

okay...

once again relying on stories from elsewhere.
mostly because i am insane busy--woodworking, lettering haps 2, tweaking the plot to haps 3, putting the finishing touches on mike's modern masters...

and gettin' ready for halloween!!

and for THAT reason i AM gonna scavenge a bit from some other sites to bring you some spooky stories over the next few weeks. the leaves are changing here and i just finished carving my (first?) pumpkin of the year! so let's get scary!!

this one too is from paranormal at about dot com, posted in the "your true stories" section a couple years ago.

this one really stuck with me, not because it has any real investigatible details, but that it's just so scary. true or not, casey tells a good story!

Your True Tales
March 2004

Cabin Terror
by Casey Allgood

This happened to me when I was 17 (now 24) in Southern Missouri near the small town of Forsyth. My cousin and I were staying the weekend at a cabin that our family owns in the Mark Twain National Forest. It was about 10:30 at night and we were just sitting in the back room playing Playstation and talking. Suddenly, my cousin sat up with a frightened look on his face and turned around and looked out the window behind us. I asked him what was wrong and he said, "Something was looking at us from outside the window."

Normally, I would have laughed it off because of his past history of playing pranks and goofing around, but his face was as pale as a corpse. Alarmed, I asked him what it looked like. He said he only saw it for a second and didn't get a good look, but it wasn't human looking at all. He said that when the TV screen went black to load the next stage of the video game, he could see the reflection of the window on the screen. A few moments later my dog, a large rottweiler began barking and growling in the front room. We ran out there and he was frozen solid staring at the door, growling.

I was scared by this time. We stood and stared at the door for a few minutes and nothing happened. I went to the bedroom and grabbed my .22 rifle I had brought along. I walked over and slowly opened the front door and told my dog to "GET 'EM!" Normally this dog would have rushed outside and raised hell with whatever was out there, but he just stood there whimpering and cowering by me. He would not get within five feet of that door. After about five minutes of trying to get my dog to go out, we heard something on the roof. It sounded like something ran from the back of the house to the front. I was scared to death, but curious. We worked up enough courage to walk out onto the front deck. The front deck has a large overhang and sets about five feet off of the ground.We stood on the deck for a few moments. We saw something from the corner of our eyes drop from the roof to the ground and heard it go under the porch.

I said something along the lines of, "Is someone there? I have a gun! You better leave us alone!" Then I heard the most frightening sound I have ever heard in my life. Whatever was under the porch let out a high-pitched scream that lasted only a few seconds. We quickly ran back inside. We continued to hear whatever the thing was outside scurry around outside the cabin. None of the windows in the cabin had blinds or curtains, which made me feel twice as uneasy.

We stayed in the cabin the rest of the night with the lights on, sitting in a corner away from the windows with the gun fully loaded and ready to fire on this thing if it decided it wanted to come inside. We heard a lot of scratching sounds coming from the back door and sounded like the door knob was trying to turn. We heard more scratching coming from the back room where we were at earlier. Finally, the noises stopped and we heard nothing for about four hours. We continued to wait until the sun came up.

It had been daylight for about two hours. We went outside and looked around the cabin. On the back door, there were deep scratch marks and also on the window of the back room their were deep scratch marks on the window pane. We could not find any foot prints because it was fall and there were leaves all over the ground. We packed up our stuff and left in a hurry. Later, I asked my cousin to describe what he had seen in the window. He said he didn't get a good look, but it was a tanish brown color with beady black eyes no hair and sharp teeth. He said that it was grinning at him when he saw it. He said about as soon as he turned around and looked, it quickly ducked down.

This is something that is burned into my mind for the rest of my life. Just typing this has giving me that same feeling of terror I had seven years ago. I have never shared this story with anyone, not even my family. My cousin and I haven't spoken of it since that day. I figured I would share it here because everyone here has had a similar experience and would not call me insane.


that 'reflected in the newly blank tv screen' made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
three years ago i carved a pumpkin or two or three with my neice and nephew and, when done, threw the seeds and the guts into the bushes next to my house.
last year, a few weeks before the leaves began turning and falling off the trees, i was out with jake and noticed several bright yellow/orange flowers blossoming in the tops of the bushes and really had to look twice to see that they were, in fact, pumpkin blossoms stemming off of a vine that somehow found enough sunlight beneath the deep dark canopy of leaves to grow and climb and find the light. i looked in to see the vines snaking up and all around the tangle of branches...

...and that's not all...

high above, near the very tops of these bushes, depended a dark green--actually BLACK--pumpkin from an exceptionally strong section of vine. this was easily 16 feet up. i was amazed.

so my pumpkin last year was almost black, needing the sunshine to turn orange and never getting it.







17 more days until PERHAPANAUTS:SECOND CHANCES!

smell ya later!
todd

all over the place...

okay...

i use the analogy of spinning plates a lot and realized that some people might not know what that is. traditionally, it's an old vaudeville act where a guy or girl comes out with a stand or stands fitted with thin rods positioned at varying heights. they then proceed to get any number of plates spinning atop the wiggling wobbling rods, usually to the tune of the urgently frenetic "saber dance", eventually having to race from plate to plate, giving each a quick flick to keep them going. when i was a kid you would see this act show up from time to time in between the beatles and topo gigo on "ed sullivan", the last bastion of the dying vaudeville. it is both exciting and exhausting to watch.
and amazing.

i am currently spinning a lot of plates and so am going to rely on andrew's amazing talent to cover for me.

here, of course, are more pictures of andrew wiernicki's fantastic choopie statue (commissioned by craig)!
as you can see, andrew is truly a master at this and, in my humble opinon, has not only brought our bragadocious little bloodsucker to incredible 3-d life, he's also done a phenomenal job of retaining all of the signature craig rousseau traits inherent in choopie; the stance, the mouth, the different types of hair (check out the chest, the chin, and the forearms!!)








thanks, andrew! you're doing an awesome job!

and while we're here, let's start a little countdown to the premieere of PERHAPANAUTS:SECOND CHANCES #1--in stores october 25! got your orders in?

perhapanauts:second chances #1 in 21 days...

smell ya later!
todd

perhapanauts:first blood--brian's review

okay...

the looooong workweek made me completely miss out on friday and even this kinda end of the weekend semi-post is kinda lame 'cause i'm really just cutting and pasting something someone else wrote, but i will try to get a new post up here tomorrow night as everyone else celebrates yom kippur.

what i'm posting is brian mulcahy's glowing--and much appreciated--review for the perhapanauts:first blood trade on amazon dot com. as i told brian inn my gratitude-gushing email, i was thrilled that someone who actually supported the book was the first to post a comment. these days it seems that everyone and anyone who wants to call themselves a reviewer finds it necessary to dissect and tear apart a work simply to justify their stance as a critic. now, i'm not saying that anyone with a valid critique of this or any other work can't be negative, especially if that's how they feel--i'm all for constructive criticism--that's how we learn and we should be as open to it as possible. but in this current market, where a book like the perhapanauts is still struggling so hard to find its audience, a shiny gold star right at the top of the page doesn't hurt.

(of course, maybe we've found as much of our audience as we're gonna. maybe the perhapanauts appeals to too narrow a group to gain any further success. in that case let me tell you all how thankful we are for YOU--for reading, for telling your friends, for BELIEVING...! personally, i liked the first miniseries. and i'm digging the second one even more! and i can't wait for you to see it!)

okay, enough of me.
my perhapa-friends, i give you
the baltimore comicon
perhapanauts booth
employee of the month,
brian "did you get your choopie butt card" mulcahy

from amazon.com

THE PERHAPANAUTS:FIRST BLOOD

If you were pitching The Perhapanauts to Hollywood as a movie - not a bad idea - you'd say it was the X-Files, with Mulder and Scully replaced by a team consisting of a sasquatch, a ghost, a telepath, a chupacabra and a man who is much more than he appears to be. Who better to investigate the unknown. I fell in love with the concept of The Perhapanauts the first time I heard it and believe it has the potential to be the next Hellboy.

It's hard to write a review of this book because Todd Dezago, the writer, does such a great job of throwing unexpected twists at the reader and turning the reader's expectations on their heads that you really cannot discuss too much of the story without spoiling most of the shocks and surprizes for the reader and with them half the fun of the book. Suffice to say, the story itself is an entertaining mix of humor and horror with a dash of action and adventure thrown in for good measure. The other half of the fun of this book comes from the characters. Todd has done a great job of bringing together about as diverse a group as one is ever likely to find under one roof. There is Arisa, the telepath and fledgling team leader, who is feeling her way through a job for which there is no instruction manual in this dimension or any other; Big, the sasquatch, who on first glance looks like the muscle of the team, but turns out to be the brains as well; Choopie, the blood sucking chupacabra, who looks like the comedy relief, but can be counted on in a fight - or can he?; MG, who looks for all the world like your typical Hollywood action hero, but looks can be deceiving; and, my personal favorite, Molly, a young ghost who is having a very hard time coming to grips with her lot in life, or more appropriately in the after-life.

The art is supplied by Craig Rousseau, co-creator of The Perhapanauts with Todd, and colors are provided by Rico Renzi, the third member of The Perhapanauts creative team. Craig has a very clean and open art style which I've been a fan of for years. Craig is a gifted visual story teller who is equally adept at delivering both the big action scene and the quieter character moments. Craig and Todd work well together as a team with Craig's visuals adding a visceral impact to Todd's story twists that really bring those moments home to the reader. Rico's coloring also works well with Craig's art and enhances the story. A good example of this is Rico's coloring of Molly, the ghost. Rico's colors bring home to the reader Molly's etherial nature and provide a constant reminder of the challenges her condition poses for her.

If you are a fan of good story telling and are looking for a fun read, this is the book for you.



thanks so much, brian!
hopefully it'll get more people to give the 'haps a second look.
and a second chance.

smell ya later!
todd