A package arrived in the mail on Halloween day from my good friend Lewis D'Aubin. Lewis is better known as Professor Milo T. Pinkerton, the lead singer of the band THE C.O.G. (Consortium of Genius). Lewis had run across a CD at a local Halloween store and knew I’d want a copy – it is a CD of children’s scary stories called SHIVERS – Weird and Creepy Tales.

Now ordinarily I wouldn’t be all that interested in this CD, but there was one thing that made this one a bit different – or I should say, some one. The narrator of this CD is none other than legendary horror host John Zacherley! Zach introduces each story with little skits and narration, and returns at the end of each story to wrap it up. The stories are definitely geared for younger kids, very much in the Goosebumps mode, and kind of corny. But Zach’s bits make this pretty fun. I wound up scanning through the CD to Zach’s bits and skipping the stories.

I have never seen this CD before. It was made back in 1999 and apparently they made at least 3 different ones, although I’m not sure if he narrated them all. I’m going to track the others down on the internet – if you’d like a copy of this CD, you can find it here:
http://www.oldies.com/product-view/14781G.html
at good ole Oldies.com. Be sure to tell em’ Doc Gangrene sent you.

And to find out more about The C.O.G. go to:
http://www.consortiumofgenius.com/
They are a trio of musicians and mad scientists who have been cranking out music for the better part of a decade now. They’re based in New Orleans, and are very much fans of sci-fi and horror. You can find them on Myspace and Facebook, and at the website above, too.

Treat yourself this Halloween!

Every Halloween I take some time to enjoy reading a good book to enjoy the season. Last year I read the Marvel Comics Essentials Dracula series - these collect the DRACULA comics from the 1970s by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan, which is one of my favorite comic book series of all time. I have vol. 1-3 of the essentials, which complete the entire run of the initial series.


The year before last I re-read Death Makes a Holiday by David J. Skal, who is one of my favorite writers. This book is a fantastic history of Halloween, and traces it's roots back centuries. This is a really interesting and fun read, and I may have to pull it out again soon to reread again.


THIS year I am continuing the vampire motif from last year, and reading DRACULA by Bram Stoker. Not many books are better Halloween reading material to get you in the spirit of the holiday than Dracula. Makes you realize why so many different version of this story have been filmed, as the original is so powerful and entertaining, even 110 years after it was written!


So treat YOURSELF this Halloween season by picking up some spooky reading material. Doctor's orders!!

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!!