What I've been up to...

I've been busy.

Haven't blogged much over on this side of the blogspot, my personal Larry side, this 11th Tier site. But that isn't because nothing is going on - pretty much it's exactly the opposite.

Where to start... the good and the bad. I'll start with the bad. Whenever I am asked that question I always choose to hear the worst first - that way I can get it out of the way and absorb it, move on to better news. Kind of my approach to art projects too - if I have a stack of projects in front of me I like to tackle the biggest one first, get it out of the way. That way I'm not dreading it the entire time I'm working on the other, smaller projects.
But I digress...

The bad. I lost two pets over the past month. First, and hardest, was my beloved dalmation, Kelly. This is the finest pet a man could ask for. Best dog I ever had - best dog in the world. She was old, blind, deaf and losing her bowel control. We put her down and it was the hardest thing I've ever done.

Second, was my cat Sara. Sara was a male who we named mistakenly until a vet trip for spaying revealed to us that, no, Sara can't be spayed because HE has to be neutered. Gulp. Too late - the name stuck. They called him Mr. Sara at the vet. Well Mr. Sara passed away this past week. Went missing for several days, we feared the worst. I came home from work last Friday and knew immediately that he was in the house - somewhere. I searched, and finally found him behind my son's dresser where he had crawled to die. I just saw the tip of his orange tail sticking out of the back of the dresser. He was old, and frail and his time had come.

So I buried both pets at my mother's house, which is out in the country a bit. They have a nice little pet cemetery going. Morbid as it is, the Ramones song did pop to mind afterwards. Both pets are missed, but particularly Kelly. She will always be my baby girl and I think about her every day.

I missed Wonderfest this year. I was unable to attend and really hated not being there. I missed the show but most of all I missed all the great friends I have who I only get to see once a year at Wonderfest – friends like Bob Burns, J. Sorrels, Frank Dietz, Dave Conover, Donnie Waddell, Dave Colton, Eileen Colton, Tim Lucas, Donna Lucas, Kathy Burns, Gary Prange, Joe Busam, Harry Hatter, Jim Clatterbaugh, Marian Clatterbaugh, Kerry Gammill, and so many more that there is no way I could possibly list everyone, as well as all my friends from down this way who attend annually. It's like a big family get together and I really missed it.

Now on to the good...

Missing Wonderfest was necessary because at that time I was at my son's high school graduation! Actually, we had multiple graduations to celebrate - my wife graduated from college and my oldest son graduated from High school. I am SO proud of them both. My wife graduated magna cum laude, and we went to both their graduation ceremonies this past month, as well as an elementary graduation ceremony for my youngest son. Three graduations in a month! Huzzah!

Another fun offshoot of the Wonderfest weekend was the winning of a Rondo Award! Myself, Cameron McCasland, and Linda Wylie (Nurse Moan-eek) were all given Rondo awards for the series of PSAs we did last year in our "Go Green with Dr. Gangrene" campaign. It's just such a great honor to be recognized by our peers for the work we do, and I want to say thank you again to everyone who voted for us, and to David Colton and everyone at the Rondo Awards for the nomination. Cameron collected my statue for me and it now resides on the shelf next to my other Rondo (for Best Website).

I've been reading quite a bit. I read four complete collections of EC Comics: The Crypt of Terror (Vol. 1 of Tales from the Crypt), The Vault of Horror Vol. 1 & 2, and Haunt of Fear Vol. 1. These collections of EC books from the 50s are awesome. I LOVE EC comics. GREAT stuff.

I also read a biography on the Ramones called "Hey Ho Let's Go The Story of the Ramones" by Everett True. Great background on the history of the punk pioneers.

I've watched a BUNCH of movies - first I was on a western kick, and watched several Sergio Leone Eastwood movies - Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and the Good the Bad and the Ugly. I seen all these multiple times, but they were just as good this time around and I saw them in letterbox form off dvd, so they were really enjoyable.

Then I somehow got onto a Dario Argento kick, and watched several of his films: Tenebrae, Phenomena, Do You Like Hitchcock and Trauma. I still have one more that I plan to watch soon – The Card Player. I like all these movies, but my favorite of the bunch still has to be Phenomena.

I also re-watched ZOMBIE, the Lucio Fulci classic, just because I was in the mood for it.

And now lately I have become hooked on the TV show LOST. I was recently loaned the first season, and it sat on my vcr for about a month before I finally popped in the first disc. Now we're hooked, and my wife and youngest son and I all sit and watch two or three episodes a night. GREAT series and I can't wait to see where they're going with it!!

I saw Wolverine, Star Trek and A Night at the Museum 2 at the theater. I really enjoyed them all, but surprisingly liked Star Trek best of the three. I wasn't expecting to like it, honestly. But I went in open minded and other than a bit of a hang up about the time travel method I was okay with this reboot. They managed to reset the series without totally invalidating the original adventures, which was important. These are the same characters but set upon a new path with totally new set of circumstances, familiar yet different. Ought to be a fun franchise to watch – Gene Roddenbury would be proud, which is probably the best compliment I could give it.

I started a new video project. It is a series for youtube that I'm calling the Recommended Movie of the Week - not really a review but more of me as Dr. Gangrene highlighting a movie each week that I like and highly recommend. You can find them over at both my Gangrene blog and my youtube channel. I've done 6 so far as well as one other video showing off some of the goodies folks have given me over the years. Got a couple more of these coming up too.

I did a cameo for the new George Demick zombie movie DEAD START - George asked me if I wanted a part in his movie, and I told him I would under one condition... I wanted to be a reporter on the scene talking about the zombie epidemic, as an homage to horror host Chilly Billy Cardille who did the same role in George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. So he agreed, and in fact really liked the idea. I even named my character Russ Bramming, an amalgamation of names of both of Nashville's former horror hosts Ken Bramming (Dr. Lucifur) and Russ McCown (Sir Cecil Creape). Makes me smile to think of that, and I hope someone out there catches that when it comes out on dvd. There was a tremendous turnout that day - 500 people showed up to be zombies. 500 people! and they took names to prove it. Was quite a sight. I got killed by a mob of zombies led by a zombie belly dancer - yeah! There is a clip on youtube of my scene that was shot and posted by fellow horror host Dr. Pureblood who was a zombie extra in this movie. Good stuff! More on this movie as it gets closer to release...

And last but certainly not least, I have started a band. This is a project that I've directed a lot of energy toward the past couple of months, but which I'm REALLY enjoying. The band is called SPOOKHAND. The name comes from a nightmare my oldest boy had one night when he was about two or three. When we got him calmed down and asked him what was the matter he said, "There's a spookhand waving at me from the closet." Creepy! When we were searching for names for the band I remembered that story, and threw that name out there. It stuck, and here's the logo for the band.

It is a horror punk band, kind of Ramones-ish in flavor. All the songs are, of course, about monsters and horror movies and assorted fun. What else? There are five members: Steve Die on Guitar, Grim Jim Vegas on drums, Roamin D. Graveyard on guitar, J. Ghouls on bass, and me, Scary Larry on vocals. We practice once a week at a GREAT practice space in Nashville called Rockin Rande's Garage (if anyone in the Nashville area needs a great practice area drop me an email and I'll get you his info) and we recently played our first show at my friend Troy Guinn's (of the Exotic Ones) Birthday Bash. Went over well and everyone really seemed to like it. We added a new song just this week, which brings our total of originals to ten, I think. We have a show coming up at The End next month on the 17th.

This is something I've always flirted with but never pursued. After the Ramones/Misfits cover set I did last year (with Jeano of the Creeping Cruds as the Coffin Burys at last year's Horror Hootenanny show) I got the bug and really wanted to pursue it more. I figured hey, if I don't do this now, I probably never will. So I posted a Craigslist ad, got a few guys who responded, and ran with it from there. So far it's been a ton of fun and we do have a myspace page with songs up now – you can find it by typing simply www.spookhand.com

And besides all that I have a couple of other projects in the works that I'll talk more about in the near future... so yeah, I've been busy. But you know what? It's been a fun couple of months, and I look forward to an equally fun summer.

The 13 Days of Christmas - Christmas Eve

One the day before Christmas we have the infamous Crime Suspenstories #22, published May 1954 by EC comics. This is the one that was particularly focused on in the congressional witch hunt, er, hearings on comic books that effectively put EC and many other publishers out of business. When asked whether this lovely Johnny Craig cover was in bad taste, EC publisher William Gaines responded no. Bad taste would be showing the head a little higher with blood dripping. That's tellin' em, Bill!

13 Days of Christmas - Day 8

For day eight we have a delightfully violent entry - I had to give you something good, couldn't leave you hanging you know! You can always count on good ole EC comics, and they came through with Crime Suspenstories #20 from 1954! Love that Johnny Craig cover!

Comics and horror and steroids Oh My!

With the latest congressional investigation into baseball and steroids I can't help but think back to the horror comics hearings of the 1950s. Several baseball players and other witnesses have been called into court, and now Congress is considering pressing charges on Roger Clemens for perjury. Sounds all too familiar...

In 1954 Congress, led by Dr. Fredrick Wortham in particular (author of the book Seduction of the Innocent), decided that horror comics were warping the minds of the nation's youth, and called special hearings to look into the matter. Publishers, artists, writers, politicians, doctors and more were called before the Senate in 1954 for the Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency, with the special focus on Comic Books.

You can read the entire transcript at this website:

http://www.thecomicbooks.com/1954senatetranscripts.html

This is a 300+ page document that was posted on the internet by Jamie Coville. It's fascinating reading - There are links to the individual sections of the hearings, so you can, for instance, jump right to EC comics publisher William Gaines testimony. There are also color reproductions of the comic covers that were presented to the Senate.

http://www.thecomicbooks.com/gaines.html

As a result of all of this the comics industry was forced to adopt a comics code. Without it, no comics could be published. It's all pretty unbelievable nowadays, but they were serious with these restrictions, and for years the comics industry had its hands tied by this code.

Here's the part I found most interesting in the comics code, as it deals directly with horror in comics. There was of course much more to the code, dealing with religion, profanity, attire of characters, and marriage and sex. Note the part about no vampires, ghouls, cannibals, or werewolves. Guess they felt that encompassed the totality of monsterdom.


General Standards - Part B

No comic magazine shall use the word "horror" or "terror" in its title.

All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted.

All lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated.

Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or or shall be published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral issue and in no case shall evil be presented alluringly nor so as to injure the sensibilities of the reader.

Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.

The most amazing part of all of this to me is the fact that we're in the middle of a war overseas and a Presidential campaign in the US, and yet Congress apparently has nothing more important on it's docket than to investigate who did and didn't take steroids years ago. Incredible. The result of the comics investigation was a comics code authority. Wonder what they have in mind for baseball?

EC for me!!

After writing yesterday's blog about William Gaines I got to thinking about EC comics and their influence on me. It seems through the years their influence keeps popping up time and again.

As I mentioned yesterday, I didn't read a lot of EC books as a young mad scientist in training, but I did get my hands on plenty of their imitators. I had a nice sized stack of horror and sci-fi comics that I read and reread regularly. Their campy sense of humor and dark, gory stories were right up my alley. I later bought the EC reprints and of course loved those too.

When I got out of college I started my own company and went the self-publishing route. Together with my good friend Chuck Angell we formed Out of the Cellar comics. The first comic we ever produced was, appropriately enough, a horror anthology comic called Monkey Stew, which featured a creepy old man hosting a series of stories to a young couple whose car broke down in a rainstorm.

This past summer I got my first tattoo. I had thought about getting one for a while, but couldn't decide what I wanted engraved on my skin for permanently. I tossed a lot of ideas around in my noodle, until I finally found the perfect tattoo:

It's a picture from the opening splash panel of the Ghastly Graham Ingels story HALLOWEEN, from SHOCK SuspenStories No. 2. It was perfect because reflected several of my interests all in one image – 1st, the image is from a comic, reflecting my comic book past, 2^nd , it is a horror image so it represents my horror host career and love of horror, and 3^rd , representative of my lifelong love of the Halloween and everything associated with the holiday.

I added the three bats at the top, one for each of my three boys. It was done by Ben Dixon at Lone Wolf Tattoo here in Nashville, and he did a terror-ific job on it. I even managed to work it into a segment of a recent episode! So here’s to EC comics, the Crypt Keeper, the Old Witch, and the Vault Keeper, horror hosts extraordinaire!!

Bill Gaines for the Hall of Fame!

I’ve made this nomination for the Monster Kid Hall of fame each of the past two years, but I'll probably keep making it until he gets elected... I nominate William Gaines for the Hall of fame.

After inheriting his father's floundering comic book company Bill Gaines changed the direction of the company and steered it headlong into horror, turning Educational Comics into the EC comics we all know and love. If William Gaines was the general of the EC army, then Al Feldstein would be his field marshal. Al was right there with Bill, writing and drawing comics in addition to helping Bill plot EC’s financial decisions. In fact, a case could be made that the two should be inducted simultaneously, as they worked hand in hand to turn Entertaining comics into a successful business.

Crypt of Terror, Haunt of Fear, Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Shock Suspenstories, etc. probably had more to do with my becoming a horror host than any other single source. I didn't read Famous Monsters that much as a kid (but I sure would have liked to!), but by golly I sure loved my horror comics! Whether EC comics themselves, reprints, or cheap imitations - I loved them all!

They weren’t officially the first horror comic (see http://www.watt-evans.com/theotherguys.html for a great article on other horror comics of the 40s – 50s), but they were the best. They were a visual representation of the old radio horror tales. Caught in the censorship crossfire of the congressional hearings, thanks to Dr. Frederic Wertham (who should win some kind of Anti-Rondo award), EC eventually was forced to fold. But even that was short lived, as EC crawled from the grave and is more popular today than ever. The Crypt Keeper is a star baby! I actually encouraged Curtis Prather, the webmaster of the website www.horrorhosts.com and one of the founding members of the Horror host Underground, to add the Cryptkeeper to the website of current horror hosts, which he did.

They may be cheap, tawdry, and crass - but they are also entertaining, funny (in a dark sense), and almost always pack a morality tale. They also had some of the most amazing art in comic book history, with contributions from the likes of Jack Davis, Ghastly Graham Ingels, Al Feldstein, Harvey Kurtzman, Johnny Craig - the list goes on and on! These comics probably had as big an influence on the horror community, (writers, artists and fans alike) as any other single source. Long live EC comics, and here’s to Bill Gaines, Al Feldstein, and all the artists and writers of EC comics!!

Tales from the Crypt/Vault of Horror

With Christmas just around the corner (13 days and counting) I thought I'd mention one of the dvds I'm most looking forward to in my stocking. Fox/MGM's Midnite Movie double Feature, TALES FROM THE CRYPT and VAULT OF HORROR


TALES FROM THE CRYPT was made in 1972 and is on my list of favorite horror movies. I've always said it's one of the movies I'd most like to host. It is the first big screen adaptation of the EC comic Tales from the Crypt, of which I'm a huge fan, and is a real treat to watch. It's an anthology film, from Amicus studios, and features five stories plus a wrap-around segment. All of the stories are excellent, in particular the Peter Cushing story, "Poetic Justice", and the final story, "Blind alleys", staring Nigel Patrick, in which a mistreated group of elderly blind patients exact revenge on their cruel headmaster in true EC fashion.

VAULT OF HORROR is the follow-up to TALES FROM THE CRYPT, made a year later. It is still fun, once again following in the anthology format, but not nearly as strong of a film as it's predecessor. The best story is "Midnight Mess", which is adapted from the "Tales from the Crypt" comic story in issue #35 (written by Al Feldstein and art by Joe Orlando). It concerns a brother tracking down his sister to a small town. He kills her for her inheritance money, and afterwards stops in a quiet restaurant for a late night snack. The main course, however, isn't exactly what he expected…

This story in particular is one of the more disappointing things about this dvd, from reviews I've read. Fox included the edited version of this film, where they use a freeze frame of the gore moment in the climax of this story. I understand this is the "PG" edited version, not the uncut original. Disappointing. The print of "Tales from the Crypt, however, is supposed to be pristine. This alone makes it a good buy for me, as I only have "Tales" on VHS currently - hopefully a complete version of "Vault' will be released on dvd at some point in the near future.

Regardless of the edited print used for VAULT OF HORROR, I still look forward to adding this one to my collection. One neat bit of trivia to look for when you watch these - there was a novelized version of TALES FROM THE CRYPT written, and as an in-joke it appears in VAULT OF HORROR. You can see a character (Micheal Craig) read it in the 4th story, "Bargain in Death."