Halloween or Not Halloween? That is the question!

 

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.  

Anyway, I've reproduced the full strip at the top of this post so you can have a read if you've never seen my Team Toxic stories before. 

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!

 

Bat and Eyeball! (2008)

One of these days I'm going to do a blog post about all the artwork I did over the years for various free gifts in comics. It'll take a while because I've forgotten half of them! For now though, here's one of my favourites. 

Above is the "Bat and Eyeball" as Egmont called it which was given away in an issue of Toxic in 2008. I preferred my name for it, the Skull-Bat, but as it was based on the old Bat and Ball toy it made more sense for them to call it the Bat and Eyeball! 

It was the editor's idea to do a gory variation on the old Bat and Ball. I had to work to an existing template to design the art for this. It was an odd shape, not very much like a skull, which is why I put a few spiderwebs in places to fill it out. 

I was pleased with the result. Even more so when I saw the great colouring job that Chris Watson had done for it. I remember buying this issue on holiday in Wales and a friend's little girl really enjoyed playing with the gruesome toy. Kids love monsters!