As you know, these days Toxic magazine reprints my old Team Toxic strips that originally appeared in its pages years ago. All randomly chosen by whoever's in charge now, and without reprint payment as is unfortunately the norm with some UK publishers. I really should have more sense than to buy it but as the latest issue is bagged I was curious to see which one they'd reprinted this time.
The story is The Haunted House of Horrible Horrors that originally saw print in Toxic No.262 exactly ten years ago in 2015. That was the Halloween issue so I'd decided to do a suitably spooky story. The punchline being that the villain (Frankendrac) is caught because some spooks scare him, but they turn out to be kids doing Trick or Treat.
However... in the reprint in the latest issue (Toxic No.409) the dialogue has been changed into "This house looks so haunted they THINK it's Halloween!". Huh? That doesn't make sense, and why bother changing it when the reprint is on sale during this year's Halloween?
Also, again for some unknown reason, they've changed the title box. I'd designed a hand drawn Team Toxic logo that I thought looked effective but they've replaced it with a font for the reprint. I can appreciate that the sight of bat-winged bum-creatures flying around the logo might offend 2025 fragile sensibilities but they could have easily been deleted without redesigning the logo and story title.
If you feel like spending a staggering £7.99 on the latest issue, it comes bagged with a few gifts; an actual small size Rubik cube (pretty good), 15 Glow Sticks (good gift), and a plastic gun. These days they call them "Blasters" because they don't want to use the word "toy gun" on a comic, but it has a trigger and it shoots plastic discs. It's a toy gun. So if you want a toy gun, there you go. Just don't call it a toy gun. (But that's what it is.)
The Glow Sticks are quite impressive but perhaps I'm easily pleased.
Here's the whole package so you know what bag to look out for amongst the shelves full of plastic bagged kids' mags. Looks like some sort of Lego Boris Johnson on the front but it probably isn't. That'd just be too scary for Halloween.
Happy Halloween, Readers!
6 comments:
Nice but far too small to read the pages. Old eyes.
nice to see the story...does look like Boris the cover...liked some of the gags...old floors bumpy.. so the free gifts are good! :)
You do know you can tap the image to enlarge it and zoom in?
Thanks Peter.
nice strip but you are right that the last panel makes no sense.. what was the original line by the way?
I can't find the issue now but it was something like "You've forgotten it's Halloween!"
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