Countdown to Halloween Day 24: And all through the House...

So today I'm going to take you on a tour of the decorations we have up around the Goodwill Geek's residence. We decorated late this year for various reasons, one being that I got sick early in October and had a small island of healthiness before getting sick again just last week. Long story short (TOO LATE!)  it became a sort of slapdash affair that we've been kind of fine-tuning ever since. So even after these pictures are posted, there will be tweaks and changes made probably right up until the day when I take everything down again and squirrel it away back up in the attic.

Let us begin the tour outside the house, and we'll work our way in. These two foam-rubber creatures with hydrocephalus hang from the tree by the road and greet passers-by. My daughter has referred to the skeleton as "my baby" since we bought it over 7 years ago. The vampire joined the family shortly after that.

My wife has a set of window clings for most seasons. Halloween and Fall get some special attention. This is technically our "front door" but it's really just the door that no one really uses.

Here's the door to the kitchen, our real house entrance. A series of lanterns and various hanging signs that my wife likes all out in full force.

This orange and black owl flag takes the place of the "Skully" cardboard decoration I have from the 80's. Skully doesn't mind being replaced. He lives full time in the Geek Cave now, and this window gets pretty wet from condensation this time of year, so he doesn't have to worry now about melting into a pulpy pile of mush on the kitchen floor. 

I forgot to turn these lights on for the big porch-picture above, but these eyeball lights hang in the window to the right of the front door (if you're outside looking in) and look really nice. 

No room is truly safe when it comes to Halloween decorations. This is our bathroom mirror. My wife thinks it is HILARIOUS to dangle skeleton lights over this mirror every single year. I don't argue with her, I just love that she gets into the season. 

There is a shelf in the living room that pretty much spends the entire year dressed in orange and black colors, and has owls sitting on top and witch-balls hanging from below (the glass kind with the stringy glass inside, you pervert), so it already feels kind of Halloweeny. To this we added a small assortment of gargoyles and creepy plaster monster busts. 

This lantern also hangs in one of the entryways to the living room. 

It's not until you go into the dining room that the real Halloween onslaught begins. This entryway goes from the living room into the dining room, and you can see we have some lovely, rustic-looking lanterns hanging above.

The window looking out onto the porch has skeletons and home-made decorations by my talented children.

We have some big, beautiful hanging paper lanterns in this entry to the kitchen, and  a smaller shelf up on the wall off to the right there...

With a disorderly little pile of Halloween decorations looking down on us from above. 

Our giant picture window looking out on the leafy backyard is full og other lovely items, like our aluminum haunted house, my son's "Thriller" pumpkin and some other characters here and there. There's my new top-hatted blowmold jack o' lantern, and a dia los muertos couple I picked up at Walgreens this year.

We always decorate the chandelier over the dinner table to suit the season as well, and this year we stuck with the decorative leaves,

... and the Halloween bell characters that we have collected over the years.

This witch hangs by herself on one side of the door that leads to the Geek Cave off the dining room.

The main feature, or the "focal point" of the dining room if you will (if you watch HGTV) is the bookcase next to my Geek Cave Door. Here's a quick side-angled shot to show off some of the items hanging on the end... 

And here's the full-on shot to show the different shelves. We used to have a theme for every shelf, but this year the theme was mostly just "get the decorations up before Halloween actually gets here" this year. I did preserve the shelf dedicated to the Halloween village pieces, and the bottom shelves are all just trick or treat buckets this time around. The very top shelf is for dishes that can easily be seen from the narrow, high-up shelf, and my leg-dangling shelf sitter characters I got a couple years back. The two shelves below that, above the Halloween village... is all just jumbled chaos. But it looks pretty good either way. 

I think my favorite flair of decorating this year was in remembering to include my Monsters Vs. Aliens toys in the pumpkin patch portion of the Halloween village. This Halloween special is one of my all-time favorites at this point, and being able to reenact parts of it with action figures and Halloween decorations is just too cool.

Well that's it kids! I'll be back with some Gaunt Goodwill Goodies soon enough! Until then Happy Haunting!

Remember, I'm doing this countdown as a part of the official Countdown to Halloween, so be sure to pop over there and look and see who else is participating this year.

Of Comics and Books and Comic... Books.... wait.

So I thought I'd finally use some of the thousands of pictures I have mouldering away on my hard-drive to actually show off some of the stuff I've been finding at Goodwill while I've been off having my mid-life crisis. I thought I'd get some of the books out of the way this time around, as they seem to be the majority of what I've been finding lately. 

First up, a couple of Darkwing Duck Books! The first one I was kind of disappointed to find featured Tuskernini as the villain, who I never really got behind as a D.D. villain in the first place. They always played him as a weird mix between The Penguin and Mysterio... but a walrus movie director supervillain just feels kind of sad. 

Next up we have this copy of Darkwing Duck: Just Us Justice Ducks which is an adaptation of the tv show. This is the story where the heroes that Darkwing has met throughout the series all come to help him defeat a team-up of his most dangerous foes. The adaptation is a little sloppy, and is definitely aimed at kids, not "all audiences". It feels rushed, and the panels are crowded together to fly through the story as quickly as possible. It's a shame too, because they could have done a great deal more with what they had for material. For instance, there are no splash pages that show the villains all together. The best we get is pretty much just this:

Always loved those episodes of D.D. because it gave the show the same shared universe feel of the comics it was parodying, and you got the goofy, anthropomorphic version of the Avengers or JLA, but Darkwing style. Gizmoduck from Duck Tales makes another guest appearance here, and we get returning heroes like Stegmutt the dinosaur, Neptuna the fish woman, and Morgana the sorceress. But of course, this kind of story is all about the villains. I really loved the villains in the roster of the Fearsome Five: the plant controlling Dr. Bushroot, the electrifying Megavolt, Darkwing's evil twin from the negative universe, Negaduck, the watery salesman Liquidator, and the Mad Jester of crime, Quackerjack! This was a neat find, but honestly if you're a Darkwing Duck fan, I recommend just sitting down with the DVDs and watching the two-parter instead of trying to track this graphic novel down. 

Next up we have this Choose Your Own Adventure book: Mystery of the Maya. I haven't had a chance to play through this one at all yet, but it looks like some good old-fashioned Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones style adventuring, except with kids. Long-time readers will remember that I am a CYOA NUTJOB and I collect just about any of them I find. 

I'm also a pretty big fan of Monsters Vs. Aliens (The movie and the Halloween Special, not the abysmal TV show on Nickelodeon). I am also a huge fan of the wonky old Weekly World News-style craziness that used to be available in the grocery store checkout lanes. So when I flipped through this book and found that they were telling the story in that format:

I had to pick it up. I honestly don't even know if this book would interest ANYONE other than me... the subject matter is a bit young for most kids who are capable of this sort of reading level... and it's too densely packed for an kind of bedtime-story read aloud... so I'm thinking they were marketing this book (and in most cases the movie) to me and me alone. 

It's funny how often Disney and Golden Books put out these "picture stories" of their properties, which were really just comic book adaptations. I'm a sucker for the Fox and the Hound, so when I saw this I had to pick it up. Here's a little sample of the interior:

Straight up graphic novel. 

A couple of MAD magazine comic cartoon compilations from the 70s and 80s. I was really excited to find these, as browsing through MAD magazine was another grocery store pastime from my youth.  

The Mr. Bill Show book! I always found the Mr. Bill segments on the old SNL episodes to be hilarious when I was a kid. They seemed like a really demented version of Gumbi, which was another love of mine back then. Flipping through this book is much the same as watching the shorts on SNL as Sluggo and Mr. Hands torture, maim, disfigure, dismember, and emotionally scar Mr. Bill in some new way on almost every page. 

This one even still has the free soundtrack record included! It's been removed from the perforation and was actually tucked into the middle of the book when I bought it.

Frequent visitors to this blog will also be able attest to the fact that I am a Sesame Street person as well. I collect just about anything pre-90's (and some stuff beyond that... but it has to be really special). I'm certain I either owned this book as a child or I obsessed over it in my school library because the illustrations are sooo familiar. This book really stands out for having a picture of the 2-Headed monster from the wait down: 

Freaky right?

Here is a pile of random comics I picked up, the most notable of the two being the Marvel Comics Presents issues. This comic often told seriously long-haul serialized stories, such as the Colossus story you see featured here, which was a 13-parter (!). There was also a Black Panther story that ran on for 25 instalments!!! I sort of made it a personal goal to collect the rest of the Colossus story at some point, so finding these two issues was pretty cool. The Adventures of the X-Men .99 cent issue is pretty awful, but it features the Man-Thing... so I wanted it. I found another issue of Excalibur I didn't yet have, a part of the excellent "Cross Time Caper" back when comic books were still able to tell their own stories and go crazy places and not have to kowtow to the upcoming Summer crossover event. And I never don't buy What-If? if I find it cheap. And neither should you... not... not buy it? I don't know how write. 

I am a HUGE fan of advertising mascots and campaigns, and the "Got Milk?" campaign with its milk mustaches is one of the most famous and ubiquitous ad ideas of the past few years. So when I found this book detailing the history of the Go Milk ads with a bunch of the ads collected together in one book? I was pretty excited. The book is broken up into categories, such as athletes, cartoon characters, and musicians who have all participated in the campaign. Really enjoy flipping through the book Below are shots of some of my favorites:

Spongebob, Mario, and Kermit have all worn milk mustaches.

Crimefighters in the night, Batman and Angel count themselves among the thankfully lactose-tolerant.

And guys who like greasepaint on their faces like their milk as well, as demonstrated by Ronald McDonald and the members of KISS.

Finally, the last book of this post is the one I was the most personally excited about. Because I used to read this book obsessively as a kid. Everything You Need to Know About Monsters and Still Be Able to Get to Sleep by Daniel Cohen. I used to check this book out from the library (in the town of Bar Harbor when I lived there for a couple of years as a kid) on an almost weekly basis. I loved monsters as a kid and I especially loved werewolves. I would check this and a couple of other books out and pore over the pages lovingly over and over again. What is ESPECIALLY exciting about this particular book is the fact that it is the copy that came from that library. So I found a book at Goodwill that was the exact same copy I used to check out and obsess over as a kid. I now own that book. And it is a book about monsters. I mean... look at that guy on the cover! That mean green guy! He actually looks kind of worried.

Anyway, that's all I've got for tonight folks! I hope you found at least one of these books as interesting as I did. I'll be back with more Geeky Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Hunting!

Young Guns!

It's League of Extraordinary Bloggers time again! And since I've missed the last two topics due to moving, I have been itching to get in on some of the golden League-y goodness!

What's the topic this week? Young Guns!

In the spirit of Young Indiana Jones, Young Frankenstein, or Young Einstein, come up with a “Young ___” prequel or series.

What hasn't been done before I ask you? We've gotten stories detailing the youths of the gang from Star Wars, young Superman (two TV series!), and even the Muppets baby-hood has been done before. A Pup named Scooby Doo takes out another of my staples... And they've done a junior Inspector Gadget cartoon too! Even boardgames like CLUE have junior versions of their characters, stealing each others's pets and lunch money! There's a series of YA novels telling the story of Junior James Bond... so what's left? Hannibal Lector... done to death. The Flintstones Kids? So stone age. Alien got a prequel in Prometheus... we got to see what happened in the future/past of Terminator... Batman's had about twenty versions of Year One... Starfleet Academy... we've seen Mario and Luigi as babies... even the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles did an episode with them as kids. What is there left to do?

I suppose I could go with...

See my Young Guns after the Jump!