THE HAUNTED MANSION STORY ANIMATED

Story and Song from the Hanted Mansion from David Witt.

H-A-LL-O-W-EE-N SPELLS HALLOWEEN

Jason Willis of the legendary Scar Stuff blog among other things, has bestowed on us another celebratory Halloween video inspired by the haunts of yesteryear. This is his stop motion interpretation of Kay Lande and Wade Denning's classic song "Halloween." It does a fantastic job of capturing what is so endearing about this time of year. Read all about his creative process here. And please, PLEASE don't forget to have a happy Halloween!

CSA FLAT FILE

If you savor the look of vintage ink printed on vintage paper, do yourself a favor and visit CSA Flat File. The site "features current projects from CSA Images, including the daily feature Paper Cuts, a full-bleed source of printed inspiration curated from the millions of images that make up the CSA archives. Paper Cuts span the history of design and preserve the legacy of ink on paper in the digital age"

KEVIN KIDNEY AND JODY DAILY

For years Kevin Kidney and Jody Daily have created a breathtaking assortment of artifacts for the Disney parks drawing inspiration from yesteryear's best Disney designs. Their body of work is truly phenomenal, placing them high among my personal creative heroes.

If you like to treat your eyes well then I recommend visiting this gallery of nearly all of their creations, as well as Kevin's Portfolio and Blog.
If you need further convincing I invite you to take a hard look at the following delights...

Ceramic replicas of vintage concession packaging...

Paper sculpture that cannot be fully appreciated unless enlarged

original illustrations by Kevin Kidney, Boy and Girl with Disneyland souvenirs

Tin Signs

60 YEARS OF TALKING TEETH

Collectors Weekly has a nice article about the history of wind-up chattering teeth, the products they inspired, and the historic H. Fishlove novelty company.

KID-CUSTOMIZED FUN HOUSE CATALOG

When I was a kid I would have gotten along very well with Rick Nagel. When his novelty "Fun Catalog" began to fall apart due to heavy use Ricky, as he was known back then, designed an all-new cover featuring products like the Snake Nut Can, the Hypo-Phony, a Frankenstein mask, and a boomerang.


His filled-in order form still reveals his wish list: a rubber bloody hand, a spud gun and a color-changing handkerchief.


Rick explains why the order remained unsent, "I distinctly remember panicking when I realized I had failed to follow their admonishment to PRINT ORDER CLEARLY. My 12 year old brain convinced me they would not honor my order due to the scribblings and it was never sent."

He did however, obtain a phony hot dog which was met with the standard disappointment.
"When the rubber hot dog finally arrived it was a big, fat, curved, old-fashioned butcher style frankfurter, not the straight skinless ballpark type hot dog Mom always bought. No way Dad was gonna fall for that"

Thanks Rick for sharing this little piece of history. May your days be abundant with rubber bloody hands.

NEW YORK COMIC CON + ME

Hey folks! I'll be at New York Comic Con this weekend celebrating the release of Mail-Order Mysteries. I'll be signing books on Saturday, Oct. 15 from 1-3 PM at the Insight Editions booth #1939. (Plus I imagine I'll be checking in at the booth throughout the Con.) They'll be giving away the cool pinback buttons that you may have seen pictured on the Secret Fun Blog a few seconds ago.

I like saying hi to people so feel free to come by and say hi.

MAIL-ORDER MYSTERIES NOW AVAILABLE!

After five years of development, and dreaming about it long before that, my new book Mail-Order Mysteries is finally available nationwide in bookstores and online! The delays are over and it's officially in stock on Amazon. That fine lookin' video up there is the official book trailer, I'm incredibly thankful to my friend Scott Kinney for producing it.

I've been blessed with loads of great press and even more to come. It was featured in a story on Huffington Post, it inspired an article in the New York Post, and got a mention on io9.com.

While you're waiting for your copy to arrive, feel free to read the interview I did for WIRED GeekDad, or you can hear me talk about it on BoingBoing.net's Gweek podcast.

And here are some sweet blurbs...

"If childhood disappointment could ever be considered an art form, then Mail-Order Mysteries is a masterpiece. Really. The metaphors for life itself are inescapable, the disillusion heartbreakingly laid bare, the tackiness a drug you just can't quit."
- Chip Kidd, graphic designer and author of Bat-Manga!

“If I could put one thing in a time machine to send back to my eight-year-old self, it would be Mail-Order Mysteries. This book would have saved me dozens of allowances and hundreds of glacial hours spent standing on the porch waiting for the mailman to arrive. I always knew there was something fishy about those ‘Gigantic Dinosaurs!’”
—Mark Waid, writer of Kingdom Come and Irredeemable

“Mail-Order Mysteries reveals the secrets behind those too-good-to-be-true gizmos advertised in the comic books of my youth. What a mind-blower!”
—Mark Frauenfelder, cofounder of Boing Boing

Unlike most of the items it showcases, Mail-Order Mysteries delivers the goods.
—John Booth, WIRED GeekDad

"It is...genius." —NeedCoffee.com

"just as magical and weird as the goods it chronicles."
—Comics Worth Reading

"Anyone who loves old comics both for the comics and the ads will have a great time reading this one."
—Comics Bulliten

What was that Amazon link again? oh, yeah, HERE IT IS!

THE ELECTROSTATIC GENERATOR!

The Electrostatic Generator is an item that was sold in comic books for decades, yet in all of my years of scouring eBay I've never seen one pop up. In fact I've never been able to find even a single image of one anywhere on the world wide web. Thus it was one of my wish list items for Mail-Order Mysteries that remained a mystery.

...Until now! Thanks to David of the bookmark-deserving Gorillas Don't Blog blog, we the Internet can gaze upon the Electrostatic Generator!...

It's smaller than I originally imagined, of course, but it did indeed light up. David says, "You'd hold it by the bottom brass ball, rub your feet on the carpet, and the touch the ball on the end with the little light bulb. The bulb would issue a faint orange flicker, for fractions of a second." So it's not exactly good for a spare flashlight, but it sounds like enough to keep a kid intrigued for a while.

Thanks for sharing David!

PHANTASMAGORIA, DEARLY DEPARTED

I've blogged numerous times about the defunct dark ride, the Phantasmagoria, formerly of Bell's Amusement Park in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but this may be my final post. Though a scaled down version of the park recently reopened, the pieces of the beloved dark ride are being sold off.

However, if you happen to be a Phataz enthusiast with money to burn, you have one last chance to own a piece of Tulsa history. Some of the props will be for sale at the Vintage Tulsa Show this weekend at the SpiritBank Event Center. For more information see their web site.

Here are some of the items that will be there...


UPDATE: Here are a couple pics from the show thanks to Kelly Scott...

IMAGINEERING MONSTER MAKE-UP DOCUMENTARY

Imagineering! from David Hansen-Sturm on Vimeo.

It made the rounds a while ago but somehow I neglected to post this amazing mini-documentary on the Imagineering Halloween make-up company. One of my favorite experiences while researching Mail-Order Mysteries, was talking with Larry Liff the founder of the company and inventor of plastic fangs! Watch the video to hear him discuss the genesis of the company and a time when fake vampire blood was assumed to be deadly.

8-BIT HOUSE OF HORROR

(click it for hugeness)

Hiya folks! This Friday the Gallery 1988, Venice Beach location is debuting an artistic tribute to old school video games and I was more than happy to contribute. House of Horror is my attempt to merge two of my favorite things: classic arcade games and amusement park dark rides. (Yet again I was influenced by the Phantasmagoria.) I used a dayglo color pallet based on vintage Halloween decorations to tie it all together.

If you're near Santa Monica this weekend please visit the gallery and tell my painting that I already miss it.

Better yet, you could buy the original and talk to it all the time.

MAIL-ORDER MYSTERIES PREVIEW!

Behold one of the few copies of Mail-Order Mysteries that exists in the United States! [UPDATE: IT'S AVAILABLE NOW!] The rest are somewhere on a slow boat from China, but while the noble captain braves the seven seas I invite you to rest your eyes on this exclusive sneak peek at a dozen of the one hundred and fifty-six pages within. Click 'em to see much larger images...

The book covers a variety of toy solders, also known as Comic Book Flats

My pal Eddie Guevara of HouseOfTheUnusual.com online novelty shop supplied the "book safe" as well as some of the rarest items in the volume.

This spread appears in my favorite section of the book,"House of Horrors."

Raymond Castile, monster kid and curator of the Gallery of Monster Toys, photographed his amazing collection of Topstone brand masks for the cause.

Sea-Monkeys are essential, in this book and in life.

This is my interpretation of a bargain "Surprise Package" which were offered by most novelty distributors and usually consisted of discontinued items.


Oh, and one other thing...

!!!

The book should be available everywhere by UPDATE: October 11th so if you pre-order from Amazon now, you can experience a highly appropriate four-to-six week wait, just like a kid ordering from his first comic book ad. But hopefully this mail-order mystery will not disappoint.

INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF NOVELTIES

Earlier this year Devlin Thompson directed me by way of AltJapan to the site of a Japanese collector that is one of the great treasures of the internet by my assessment. It features the best and most comprehensive assembly of 1960s and 70s era (they call them Showa Era) novelties that I've ever seen. Much of it is the same stuff Americans got through comic book ads, souvenir shops, and dime stores, and some is even more freaky. The author of the site often includes catalog clippings that look like the Japanese versions of the Johnson Smith Company catalog. Best I can tell, the collector actually owns and photographs all of the items.

As a service to mankind I've provided some handy links to my favorite parts of the site. Since it's written in Japanese all of the following links run through the Google translator. Here we go...

I'm obligated to start with the Home Page, the first few links are galleries of badges which are interesting, but it's the next stuff that I'm crazy about. The "What's that Thing?" collection is a directory of galleries that includes the following amazing subsections...

Novelty and Wind-Up toys
Pranks
Money Banks
Keychains
Useful Gadgets
Souvenirs
Toys and Magic Tricks
Nostalgic Gifts for Children
Toy Memories from the webmaster

There's also
Character Toys
Directory of Plastic Trinkets
and his Blog

To demonstrate the level of incredibleness that I'm talking about I did some willy-nilly image grabbing from all over the site. It's like a massage for the eyes.