You just finish some sort of creative pursuit – a drawing, writing, whatever. The point is that you have completed something new, and likely something that took a lot of time. Your pour a lot of energy into creation. You also pour emotional energy into posting it. You’ve worked hard on it, after all. You want to share what you’ve created and want to see what the reaction is.

So, you post your work. You don’t expect anything immediate to come from it, as that would come off as feeling entitled. But you’re still feeling a little… disappointed? Maybe it isn’t really disappointment, but you are feeling down. The feeling persists. It gets worse when there seems to be no activity related to the thing you poured your time into.

You start to wonder why you do this to yourself if you feel this way every time you post.

This is the Creative Crash.

Understanding the Creative Crash

The Creative Crash is something I’ve experienced near constantly in my life since I started posting my creative output on the internet. It is where the rush and elation of creativity smacks into a wall of seeming indifference and into a wasteland of obscurity. You find yourself lost, asking “is this it?”

The lack of reward causes you to question if your effort – your creativity – is even worth it.

Of course, I use the word “reward” in a very generalized sense. The reality is that you are not owed anything; millions of people post their work into the continual churn of what algorithms have indelicately framed as “content” and the competition makes it hard to stand out.

But, still? Nothing for your efforts?

Where does the Creative Crash come from?

The Creative Crash is not strictly internet-based phenomena, but the internet has certainly exacerbated the issue. Because of the near instantaneous flood of information blasted into your face from a computer or smartphone at any given second, our expectations of how processes work have increased exponentially. If a hashtag can sweep the internet within hours, if memes can cycle into our lives within a day, if we can get continuous updates to news stories we are tracking, down to the minute, why can’t acknowledgement for our effort come at the speed of data?

So, while the Creative Crash is not sole cause, it is like gas poured on the fire.

Now, with that said, I took psychology and sociology in community college. I am not an expert by any means. All I can do is speak from my perspective, what I recognize, and what I have directly observed regarding this Creative Crash. As I see it, the Creative Crash is the relationship between three things:

1. Self-esteem
2. Comparison
3. Isolation

None of these three things are specifically related to the internet, but I don’t think it is hard to see how modern “content” culture can warp these things terribly in how we view ourselves and out work. These things already exist in meatspace, but digital spaces just make them feel so much more real than reality itself.

Self-esteem

For me, self-esteem and creation are heavily linked. I feel that is a thing that many creatives experience, no matter their craft. You put enough time and effort into something it inevitably because part of how you view yourself. That’s why when you make public something you’ve been pouring so much energy into the weight of people not flocking to it can feel unbearable.

Now, imagine that you are a raindrop splashing town into a river. You may be a particularly unique and cool raindrop, but so are all the other raindrops that are now finding their way into the churn. That churn is unending and torrential – this is the internet. You and your creations are a drop in a river of continuous content, competing against other raindrops and corporate pipelines flushing their water into the river.

It doesn’t mean you aren’t a great raindrop, but you’re still just a raindrop in a rushing river.

It can be hard to deal with, but can explain why luck is so influential. And no, you cannot control luck. It doesn’t do anything about the self-esteem issue, but at least you know a lot of this is out of your hands. Or bubble? I admit this metaphor isn’t the best, but you probably get it, right?

Comparison

The human mind recognizes patterns easily. it’s why I could show you a picture of an electrical outlet and you can see a face… unless you’re in some European country where your sockets don’t look like faces. Anyway, the point is we cannot help but observe and compare.

Just like we were a raindrop amongst other raindrops, sometimes we observes deep similarities between ourselves, our creations, and people in similar circumstances. At times, it may seem like they’re doing better than you are at the same game. And yeah, that can be largely true. It could also just been “grass-is-greener-sour-grapes” and that’s perfectly okay to feel.

But if you let it eat at you, and dwell upon it, it only makes things worse. Celebrate the success of others and do not begrudge them. It’s much worse to get caught up in the comparison to the point it paralyzes you. I’m no stranger to seeing peers surpass me. It’s the way of the world. I will allow some time to feel envy, but then I have to shut that shit down or else I’ll go nowhere.

Isolation

Creativity, as often as we try to make it social, is often a lonely pursuit. Even when working with others, I can’t imagine someone not being in their own head about their part in it and overthinking things.

I have been inside my own head plenty of times. it’s a repellant place.

No matter what, you’re going to invest significant time all on your lonesome of the things you love and the things you create. It’ll be a lot of time spent obsessing over details and how you think those details will go over. When it comes time to socialize and it feels like you’re getting nothing, it just ends up making you feel lonelier, I imagine. At least that is how it has been for me.

You put way too much emphasis on how you are viewed (or the lack of viewing) and it just drives you to further isolation. This results in a feedback loop where you create, obsess, dwell, reach out, and then panic when you find yourself back at the top of the cycle. Only to do it all over again.

It’s brutal, isn’t it?

Navigating the Creative Crash

So, with these elements in mind, how do we actually get to the premise of this whole damn blog post about navigating the Creative Crash?

I’ll begin this section with a bait and switch. I honestly don’t know how to navigate the anxiety that comes with the Creative Crash. I have been trying things that help sometimes. I’ve also tried things that don’t really help. I am very much on a journey of discovery in trying to understand what I am dealing with when I am confronted from the come down of exhilarating “making” and dispiriting “sharing.”

With that said, this is all very much about what I do. I don’t know if any of this will work for anyone else. Probably a lot of what I am writing about could be better handled through therapy or something, but in the meantime, I can find other ways to regulate. And regulate I do – the Creative Crash intensifies with increasing post activity, so I need to navigate these issues a lot.

Strategies I have employed to varying degrees of success include:

Disabling Comments

An empty comment field is a hole of sadness to someone like me. Realistically, for some media, disabling the comments is just hurting yourself. The hope is eventually someone will respond, share, or encourage what you do. However, sometimes posting projects with no comment fields can make me feel a little safer; I no longer tie the material to empty spaces. This tends to be a temporary thing for me – it depends on my mood.

Avoiding Stats

I am not very good at this, but I am trying. On a good day I can avoid looking at stats for the entire day. Most days I find myself checking almost hourly. It’s a sickness I can’t help beyond just putting limitations on myself.

So much of a person’s perceived worth in society is inevitably mathematized and the healthiest thing is knowing when to ignore the figures.

Taking in Comforting Media

Taking time to not work – to watch a show, read a book, listen to a song – really does have a significant effect on mental health.

Ideally my advise would go beyond “consume” things, but I am being honest. I do take walks, but more often than not, it’s enjoying something I like. Maybe not even a specific thing, but similar enough to other things I like because I can learn from them. Speaking of learning…

Learning a Skill

I just like taking time to try new things or learn something new. I have found that sometimes to put my mind right during a Creative Crash is to just pickup something to learn about or practice. But, I am just not sure if this is burying frustrations under a pile of new information. But I do feel a bit better when I have something else to really think about. That’s what half of my favorite YouTube channels tend to be about.

Napping

I find that I sleep a lot of more lately when I can get away with it. Part of it is regulation after a long day, either when I go to bed at night, or when I take a quick nap when I am home for work. Other times, for sure, especially when I am feeling bad, it becomes a safe space to disconnect and do nothing. A dark room, a pillow, and a blanket can put me at ease as I crash out.

Working Again

By far my least healthy coping strategy is to just get back to work, displacing the anxiety of the Creative Crash into anxious drawing or writing that masks the feelings of inadequacy in the guise of being a hard worker. Usually the work won’t be nearly as good as I calm down and work to polish it, but it’s something and it is distracting.

Getting back into work, much like the other strategies, are not really great suggestions. They’re really more about how I react to the discomfort of a Creative Crash and they work in various degrees at various times. And the truth is, sometimes none of them work. I am always looking for something else to try though, which brings me to my last point.

One thing I have been working on that I will share is something I hope will help me deal with the Creative Crash is still very much a work-in-progress.

Crash-Recovery

Lately I have been trying to turn this stuff around by putting attention on the works of friends. Part of the nature of a Creative Crash, to me, is that it is universal. I don’t think I am the only one dealing with this weird and unpleasant aspect of creative work on the internet. I think a lot of discourse surrounding it gets washed away by feelings of wanting not to be “cringe” online. Expressing a modicum of discomfort at stuff like this can be construed as whining, or even in bad taste because there is so much worse stuff going on out there. Positive vibes only.

Yet, we also hear continual discourse about prioritizing mental health and cultivating honesty and a healthier lifestyle. So we want people to speak up on mental health, but not if it is a small, uncomfortable thing, because there are more important things going on. The contradiction is quite obvious.

But again, I don’t want to sound like a broken record, complaining, either. It’s a difficulty thing to balance. That’s why I try to forgo the discussion and just apply what I feel to helping other people not feel the same frustrations I do. I try to lessen possible Creative Crashes when I can.

I’ll haunt my social media accounts for things people have posted and I’ll drop in and leave an encouraging comment or some thoughts and what they’ve done. Same with my peers who work just as hard, if not harder than I do. I’ll drop comments, contact them, whatever form of acknowledgement I can find. Someone is reading, someone is acknowledging their work.

It’s not much, but I am sure it does help.

As for you?

This is where I turn this whole post around and put the question to you. How do you navigate the Creative Crash? If you don’t face this, I envy you, and wish you to share your secrets – unless it is just good mental health, if so, keep it to yourself. We can’t all be so lucky.

For real, though. please drop a comment or check out some of my fiction.

The post Navigating the Creative Crash appeared first on hpkomics.com.

I was delighted by the fact that Absolute Superman was every bit as good as Absolute Batman and Absolute Wonder Woman. I think it is probably the best of the three. The Absolute line has been incredible for the characters as they are stripped down, essentialist versions of the characters; though circumstances change, what makes them Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman shine through, no matter what. At least so far, I’ve only seen the first issue from each title.

With Absolute Superman though, in addition to establishing Kal-El as having grown up under the guidance of his parents to a degree, the main appeal to me is that the socialist element of Superman’s character, worldview, and actions has persisted and grown with this new incarnation. Living with the brutal social hierarchy of Krypton, a stratified society based on the perceived value of one’s labor, galvanized something that has largely been brushed aside in the character for a large swath of his publishing existence.

The New Man From Krypton

The socialist elements of early Superman, dating back to his first appearances following Action Comics #1 in 1938, have been well documented. Many have written on the topic, such as Hank Kennedy, and it is hard not to think of the Klan-smashing immigrant who fights industrialists as the superhuman ideal of the socialist critique of society; it lines up too well. He is the idealized, hopeful new soviet man of the future, delivered from the stars to guide the working man to a better tomorrow.

Grant Morrison can confirm as much, and he knows a thing or two about The Man of Steel. Here is a telling quote from an interview with him by Helen Lewis for The New Statesman…

At the beginning, Superman was very much a socialist superhero. He fought for the unemployed, the oppressed, he beat up wife-beaters. It’s about a man driven by a burning sense of injustice — there are no monsters or robots, he fights against corrupt council officials! He was conceived as a Depression-era superhero, who dealt with the problems of ordinary people.

Therein lies an issue; though. That Superman was of a time. Characters evolve, grow, and regress – the publishing history of a character is rife with rivers, streams, and tributaries of interpretation. Superman would begin to change as early as the 1940s, becoming more associated with broader themes of Americana amid the Second World War.

It doesn’t seem a coincidence that the character’s human identity emerged out of what was once John Brown’s Bleeding Kansas. Kansas was a hotbed of leftist ideals in the Depression. Brown sought radical justice for people, at the point of a knife and the barrel of a gun. A true freedom fighter.

As Kate Appel Eckert writes in “Let’s celebrate the hot-blooded, radical, progressive history of Kansas”…

Kansas entered the Union as a free state after a violent conflict over slavery, known as Bleeding Kansas, putting our dear friend John Brown on the map and serving as a “tragic prelude” of sorts to the imminent Civil War. It would later become host of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which paved the way for the end of segregation.

Kansas spearheaded the suffrage movement at the state level, became a safe haven for socialist thinkers, and was the very first state to outlaw alcohol during the prohibition. And in recent years, Kansas was the first state to protect abortion rights after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Kansas is consistently at the heart of every single revolution in America.

How aware Seigel and Shuster were of the weight of Kansas in American liberal history I cannot say, but we are looking at a character introduced during the height of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Kansas was a location that benefitted greatly from FDR’s policy. The Kansas of the 30s was a place where the hardscrabble working class leaned left.

But Superman’s origins tying him to Kansas as the site of his immigration is only one small part of the socialist elements present in the character’s beginnings, and continued existence. It’s laid out wonderfully in the embedded comic below from the CommunistScenarist Tumblr:

The beating heart of the Man of Steel is social justice, and not always the popular and marketable kind. Superman smashing the destructive robots and lasers of rich mad scientists is all fun and games until the mad scientists and ultra-tich begin to run the show as far as the real world is concerned.

Add to that the emerging American identity of the post-war; Americans perceived they were rich, successful, and saved the world from an ultimate hero. Why stir the pot with the unpleasantness of social ills in our comics when the GDP is up and the babies are booming? Market pressure and the rise of the patriotic angle of WWII would push Superman to something less controversial, at least intentionally controversial, and into the broader and goofier (but still fun) tone of the Code-era books.

That is not the say the Code-era is bad. It gave us incredible comics, but something about Superman seemed off, maybe a bit diluted. Like the Kryptonite cuffs were on. While largely goofy and harmless to the powers that be, the books did take their shots, displacing the social ills of society onto the villains in compelling ways.

Enemies and Ideals

As exciting as it can be to watch Superman punch a robot or fight Doomsday, Metallo, or Toyman, Superman’s greatest enemy has always been the worst impulses of his adopted community. Superman’s villains are fascinating and represent all manner of social ills, but many early Superman comics we less about identifiable rogues and more about the issues of the day in the era the comics were written. However, even as the comics drifted away from these concerns, the DNA is still there, often concentrated on iconic villains.

My favorite Superman villains have always been Lex Luthor and Brainiac. Both characters lend themselves well to social justice themes and make for great antagonists for Superman, not only as the big blue guy but as Clark Kent himself. Lex Luthor is deserving of an exploration of his own; I feel much the same about Brainiac. But what I want to emphasize is the social justice angle of both that the best Superman stories featuring these characters tend to explore.

Lex Luthor

Lex Luthor is a character who is easy to write, but not so easy to write well. It’s too easy to dip into “evil businessman” and be done with it. Luthor is so much more powerful than that. If Superman is the socialist man of steel, then Lex Luthor is the capitalist equivalent. He is the pinnacle of Laissez-faire economics; a man so powerful he runs for President of the United States, wins, and the role is still less powerful than he actually has as Lex Luthor, genius, billionaire philanthropist.

Luthor is a chameleon – time and again he comes back the the bald look, which is incredibly iconic, but his appearance shifts many times, inspired by the perceptions of the rich and powerful of each age. In John Byrne’s era, Luthor appears as the platonic ideal of the corporate fat cat, slicked-back hair and cigar in hand.

Today, in the brilliant animated series My Adventures With Superman, he appears as a tech twink – a young upstart of Silicon Valley, because Luthor represents the worst impulses of capitalism at all times. One of those impulses is innovation for profit.

Of course, this all began with Luthor, the Mad Scientist of the Golden Age of comics. The relationship between science and capitalism is the story of America, and Luthor is just another figure in the long lineage of exploiters of innovation for profit. For-profit discovery – where science is viewed in potential market share and less about discovery for discovery’s sake.

The best stories that revolve around Lex Luthor pit him against Superman and Clark Kent, where Superman must use his powers to take on Luthor’s capitalistic science, but the clues are gathered and laid out by everyman reporter Clark Kent and the ever-iconic Lois Lane. In these stories, the depths of greed and depravity of economic-driven science are smashed by Superman and laid bare by the alter ego – the farm boy from Kansas bringing socialist ideals to the big city.

Brainiac

Much like Lex Luthor, Brainiac is an ideal foe for Superman. Brainiac and Luthor tend to have similar approaches to how they deal with their Kryptonian nemesis, and they are often paired to brilliant effect. Brainiac has a very complicated continuity and is sometimes an android from Colu, and other times a tool of the Kryptonians who betrays them in pursuit of data. I tend to prefer the latter, as it adds some extra heft to his encounters with Superman and the presence of the Bottled City of Kandor. it also seems fitting that Krypton’s imperial pursuits ultimately create the enemy within that destroys them.

Luthor and Brainiac are both avatars of avarice and greed. It is more tangible with Luthor – power and money – than it is with Brainiac. He is a kind of intellectual capitalist, akin to the most horrific museum curator one can imagine. He plunders cultures dispassionately with no interest in them beyond categorization into his worldview and his systems. Once he has what he needs, he leaves worlds as drained husks or outright destroyed and moves on to the next resource – uncollected knowledge.

Braniac’s modus operandi is not unlike the mechanisms of resource extraction, such as minerals and oil. It is just on a cosmic scale, and attached to a fairly sinister cultural imperialist angle where Brainiac is the arbiter of what is important, real, and valuable. The universe exists solely as data to be mined and categorized and perfectly preserved, regardless of who is occupying it, as they can always be included or removed at the whim of Braniac – the end-point of algorithmic thinking.

It’s hard for me to think about Braniac and not draw parallels to today’s information-based economy, corporatization of the internet, and the rise of Silicon Valley “altruists” to the levers of power. There is more to explore here, but I have digressed enough already.

Let’s get back to Superman.

Absolute Superman is Absolutely Awesome

All of the above was a preamble to establish the things that I view as my ideal Superman. Absolute Superman is the distillation of the ideal Superman. From what I have read, the first issue, Absolute Superman evokes these elements quite well, and there is a lot of potential. I am on the hook, and I hope that writer Jason Aaron can reel me in.

The following contains spoilers for the first issue.

The premise is simple: it’s Superman. The core of the character remains, but with some alterations that create a more contemporary, essentialist version of the beloved character and story. Take for example Kal-El, the man who will come to be known as Superman, who lived on Krypton with his parents for a time. This isn’t an entirely new conceit, but the political situation of Krypton here seems essential to the motivation and worldview of Kal-El.

Krypton is very much an empire of conquest through science, and is very hierarchical, with Kal-El being born into the planet’s working class. His parents, Jor-El and Lara Lor-Van are people who had the class system not been so draconian and exploitative, contributed great things to Krypton.

As with modern storytelling, the series employs the mystery box approach of leaving elements of Kal-El’s past a story to be unraveled over flashbacks. We get scenes on Krypton to establish an incoming ecological crisis, but Kal-El’s narrative places him on Earth. Specifically, Brazil, fighting for the rights and against the exploitation of the workers of a mining company.

I can’t begin to tell you how much that moment clicked for me when I reached that section of the issue. The trajectory of a socially-awoken Superman, exposed to the horror of exploitation of labor witnessed on Krypton, bringing liberation to the workers of Brazil. It’s inspiring.

Workers of the world, unite. Superman has your back.

The fact that the crest that adorns his chest, the iconic “S” emblem, is the marker of Krypton’s Labor Guild, is going about as left as you can with the character. At least until he starts beating down on jackbooted fascist corporate guards known as Peacemakers (what a joke) who are mad at the workers for not suffering enough to draw diamonds from the mine.

Add to that a not-so-subtle introduction to this version of Brainiac and his bottled cities, and a Lois Lane who takes after her soldier father, and we have a fun blend of iconic Superman features, but with some twists further enhance the leftist nature that has always been inherent to the character.

Revolutions are not easy – as Superman seeks to help the workers, he inadvertently harms them and must rectify it. That is if the system seeking to crush him under the heels of paramilitary action doesn’t kill him first.

I’m worried, but I think he’ll win in the end. He is the Man of Steel and his labors will be rewarded.

Absolute Superman #1 is available from DC Comics at your favorite comic book retailer. It was written by Jason Aaron, and illustrated by Rafa Sandoval. Ulises Arreola colors the pages, while Becca Carey is the letterer.

Thank you for reading Panel By Panel. I hope you enjoyed this first edition – I may take on some reviews with the next one. I just know that I am grateful for any opportunity I can to explore my love of comics.

I plan on writing something a little more in-depth about Luthor and Brainiac in the future, but that is going to require a little more research on my end. I’ve been reading these characters for years, but I am due to reread them to make sure I am writing the best explorations I possibly can. If you are particularly interested in seeing me explore these two iconic villains, please drop a line in the comics with key issues you think I should cover.

Also, if you have a comic you would like to review, please contact me. I would be happy to consider it for the column. You can always help fund my writing online through a donation.

The post Panel By Panel: My Socialist Superman appeared first on hpkomics.com.

There was a lot of care that I put into the visual identity of the show. In many ways, it was a passion project that kept me busy during some dark times and was unabashedly me. Though I am no longer with Deviant Behavior Radio, The Mutant Hours stands out as some of the best design work I’ve done. So I figure why not share what I have in the archives?

The Mutant Hours: The Show

The nature of the show was initially quite ephemeral, for the first year or so the show was aired twice a week on Mondays and Wednesdays at midnight PST. Once the show was over, it was gone. I appreciated that and to a degree, I wish I’d never ditched that. However, friends and listeners wanted recordings, so I turned my attention to Spotify and their then-running “Anchor” platform to make a brief podcast version of the show. Usually, this entailed cutting a 2 to 3-hour show down to 45 minutes to an hour.

The podcast would include my interstitial segments such as Mutant Musings, Mutant Mailbag, or Mutant Media. There would also be the night’s intro, closer, and about 5 or 6 featured songs pulled from the set that week. It made for a tidy little show limited to Spotify due to streaming rights, but should still be available.

The first podcast episode included a special promotional image that I had a great deal of fun putting together. I really should print it and hang it up somewhere in my home. It would make for a good portfolio piece as well.

Spotify Podcast Archive

The archive of the show still appears to be on Spotify, so I am pleased that I can embed the playlist here.

The show ended on podcast episode 42, but it was the 77th broadcast of the show once I had started counting them. The shows were numbered for several weeks before I committed to keeping records.

The Mutant Hours Mixtape Playlist

I would also add to an ongoing Spotify playlist of songs featured on the show that I still listen to pretty frequently. It was a running record of the kind of music I played.

It is pretty neat that both of these playlists are still available. I am not sure how long they’ll be out there, but I am hoping at least for a few more years.

The Mutant Hours Show Flier Gallery

Now, let’s check out the gallery of fliers. These were done during the final weeks of the show, but are among my most memorable branding experiments.

The fliers were designed around a theme of collaging that evokes show flyers found for different punk shows I attended and researched. These were the main promotional tools for the show in the final days and they made for a fun collection of images; at times half of the fun of setting up the week’s broadcast was working on the fliers the weekend before the show went out.

I had even planned to start printing them and marketing the show locally by putting them up in all sorts of places. However, the show entered an extended hiatus following the 77th broadcast. It would not return.

A great deal of the material reflects the horror, punk, and synth vibes of the show. I have a soft spot for lo-fi collage aesthetics and I still very much enjoy glancing at these every once in a while.

Other Branding for the Show

I took the outsider punk and horror-core aesthetic pretty seriously in designing the branding for the show. Here is a gallery of some promotional elements.

Among the collection, you’ll find some merch and sticker designs, promotional material for the show, and the first promotion I ever did, featuring Cadaver Pudding. I played one of their albums for the premiere.

Another key element of the later era of the show was that I also tried to find artists on Bandcamp frequently and would spotlight them when I could. I made them a central element of what I did during the last few months.

Will I ever bring back The Mutant Hours?

Part of the origin of The Mutant Hours was because I knew a guy who knew a guy who started a web radio station and had a music license. I do not have access to any of these things now, nor do I have the budget to obtain them.

Believe me, I’ve considered a Mixcloud show, but I cannot justify the cost of something like that. I am open to bringing the show back and almost did before exiting my arrangement with Deviant Behavior Radio. Unfortunately, sometimes things fall through, and The Mutant Hours was a casualty of things not lining up in such a way anymore.

I’ve told myself that when I could comfortably work the costs of such a return into my budget, and have the time for it, I would bring the show back. I am not really in a place for either condition at the moment. But maybe one day you might see the show return.

Anyway, that is just a little visual history of the weird little radio show I did weekly for a couple of years. if you enjoyed the overview, please let me know in the comments. If you want to support me financially to maybe lead to a return of the show, you can always subscribe to my Ko-fi account.

Otherwise, stay weird.

The post From the Archive: The Mutant Hours Gallery appeared first on hpkomics.com.

This was a spontaneous project I took on, and I am very pleased to have stuck with it. Though these essays are not individually all that long, they add up to well over 100 pages of analysis and autobiography. They also showcase emergent writing as I change my approach throughout the 31 essays. There is a fair amount of discovery and honing of my approach as you move down the list.

Ultimately, these are incomplete pieces. Many are just drafts and sketches of concepts. Each piece is a seed for a more significant exploration that I may eventually take on in some manner. However, don’t let their draft status chase you away. They can be quite entertaining.

The method I used to write each piece was to watch a movie, and immediately jump over to my desk to write about the movie with no pre-writing or planning. Much of what I would end up writing was the result of discovery and minor editing once I found a thread I wished to explore. Other than that, each of these was written in the span of and hour and published immediately.

Master List of Halloween Essays on Medium

1. WNUF Halloween Special (2013)
2. House of 1000 Corpses (2003)
3. The Devil’s Rejects (2005)
4. The Unbinding (2023)
5. 3 From Hell (2019)
6. Night of the Living Dead (1990)
7. The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
8. Mad God (2021)
9. Candyman (1992)
10. Terrifier (2016)
11. Zombeavers (2014)
12. I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
13. Lord of Illusions (1995)
14. Fright Night (1985)
15. The Call of Cthulhu (2005)
16. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
17. Alien (1979)
18. Terrifier 2 (2022)
19. V/H/S/Beyond (2024)
20. Friday the 13th (1980)
21. It Follows (2014)
22. The House of the Devil (2009)
23. The Blob (1958)
24. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
25. Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
26. Salem’s Lot (2024)
27. The Evil Dead (1981)
28. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)
29. Mystery Science Theater 3000: Werewolf (1996/1998)
30. Trick ‘r Treat (2007)
31. Halloween (1978)

31 Days of Halloween: Working Toward a Book

I have collected enough material to assemble a small book, so I will explore that route in the future. Between what I already wrote, some additional annotations, and planned illustrations, I will have plenty to keep me occupied regarding this project, even though the month is over. This will be at least a few more months of work. I don’t plan on doing much with these in November. I could use the break.

For now, though. I am just glad to have completed this project, and I hope that you enjoy the essays. Please feel free to check them out on Medium and let me know what you think.

The post 31 Days of Halloween 2024 – The Complete Collection appeared first on hpkomics.com.