In the process of accepting the fact that I’m getting more scatterbrained, I’m going to start sharing some comic “pilots” here on this very blog. Some may just be a page, while others will be a few pages long. We’ll see how this pans out! Let’s kick things off with Instruction Manual, a project I pitched to open submissions for mini-comics last year. Nothing came of that—at least not as of this very moment—so now the first five pages will exist right here!
If there’s interest from others and if it fits in with what I’m working on next, we’ll keep it going for the full story. It’s not a long one, at least!
Here’s the logline:
Three years ago Berill and his little sister Juniper started finding lost pages torn from a mystical video game instruction manual, each one granting access to weapons, items and other artifacts. Berill always knew the other shoe would eventually drop, and he’s about to find out what happens when he discovers the other side of the manual; the bestiary, the dungeons, and the suffocating demonic aura behind it all.
“Yuck”’s and “ew”’s abound as your average 9-year-old blasts through the Madballs: Escape from Orb VHS for the hundredth time, the bright red Hi-Tops Video logo barely discernible through busted tracking errors. Slime has long since dried up and caked over the roof access grate on their old Ghostbusters Firehouse, and that bug in the corner is either long dead or part of a discarded Creepy Crawlers kit. The kid in question hasn’t been formally diagnosed yet, but there’s no doubt about it—we’re dealing with a full blown gross-out maniac here.
If you were ever anything like that kid, you’re one of the few and proud with nostalgic glasses that sport a tint closer to puke green than rose. You dealt in toys with distended eyeballs and exposed brains—heroes who were nasty by nature, sometimes even more so than the actual villains. In the years since Garbage Pail Kids stickers were slapped on every surface imaginable, the fever for gross-out media has died down considerably. Despite a few lukewarm comebacks over the years and some modern takes on everyone’s favorite nasties, we’re left to worship the disgusting deities of the past, an elite pantheon of the gross, the grimy, and the great.
Balls Gone Mad
As repulsive as the Garbage Pail Kidsand the media they spawned may be—the 1984 feature film deserves its own place in the Nasties Hall of Fame—nothing quite hits the high note of gross-out nostalgia like Madballs. For those who weren’t around or chose to ignore these little stinkers, Madballs started out as simple rubber balls by AmToy, which cooked up a small assortment of weird quasi-heroes like Screamin’ Meemie, a baseball with a massive tongue, and the much more graphic Slobulus, who has one loose eye and a permanently vacant, drooling stare. They went on to mix the giant head motif with poseable figures in the Head-popping Madballs line, and they even had vehicles like the Mad Rollercycle, which, naturally, had a basketball net attached to it.
The whole Madballstoy line was essentially the childhood retail equivalent of the Gremlins phenomenon. Joe Dante’s original flick really lit a fire under the asses of everyone who wanted to make a horror movie about small monsters running amok, from Critters to Ghoulies and beyond. For every Slobulus Madball toy there’s an equally nasty—but safely caged—Boglin. Toy manufacturers got really creative back then, riding the wave of Madballs to produce such inspired pieces of art as Blurp Balls, Weird Balls, and Spit Balls.
After all, who could forget everyone’s favorite Blurp Ball heroes, such as “Skullsquert,” “Croaky Bugchuck,” and “Retch-A-Rat Tomcat.” At least these blurping bastards had the cred of Madballs artist James Groman behind them, or else we’d never, ever remember the likes of “Boney Tossteeth.”
The adventures of the Madballs came to a head in Escape from Orb, a 22-minute VHS that had the crew jammin’ together in a band called—you guessed it—Madballs. In an extraterrestrial Footloose-esquetwist, it turns out the Madballs hail from a planet where music is illegal, all thanks to the wishes of the evil Wolf Breath, leader of the Badballs. This prompts a hasty escape from Orb as their rickety spaceship takes them straight to Earth, where rockin’ isn’t a hobby, it’s a way of life. Luckily, they happen to hook up with a 12-year-old boy who also manages rock acts or something, defend our planet against invading Badballs, and live to rock another day.
Outside of Orb, the only other piece of video media related to the franchise is Madballs: Gross Jokes, which is 22 minutes of “sketch comedy.” Marvel as Horn Head, Freakella, and the rest of the gang try out their best impression of rejected Monty Python material—or you could just pop Escape from Orb in again and pick up some old back issues of the short-lived Madballs comics, which were released for 10 whole issues under Marvel’s Star Comics label.
Toxic ‘Toons
Whether intentional or not, Madballs left a thick imprint on the spectrum of gross-out cartoons, which would also go on to dip regularly into the old Hollywood well for inspiration. One of the most bizarre examples is 1990’s Toxic Crusaders, which took Troma’s lewd The Toxic Avenger films and dumped them on children’s television like so much hazardous waste.
When Dr. Killemoff decides to use Tromaville, New Jersey as his own personal toxic dumping grounds, his henchman Psycho chimes in with an amazingly prescient reply: “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, doc. What if some complete and hopeless nerd falls into the Grossolium and transforms into a hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength?” Don’t be ridiculous! There’s no way that’s exactly what would happen to the otherwise unassuming Melvin Junko, a nerd who likes to sniff his armpits from nine to ten o’clock each night. That’s an actual throwaway line from the first episode, but think about it. An HOUR of sniffing your armpits every night. The mind reels.
The way Melvin’s serial harassers trick our hero into putting on a pink tutu and, after plenty of mean-spirited laughter, eventually force him to slip and fall into a vat of toxic waste, is familiar territory for Troma fans. Toxie’s origin story is watered down to overflowing and sanitized just enough to make it perfect fodder for 13 episodes, a toy line, and video games. It’s Captain Planet with a malformed gross-out twist, back when your average citizen at least pretended to give a shit about the environment. Somehow, pilot episode writer Chuck Lorre—also the creator of actual toxic sludge like Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory—even managed to squeeze some of Toxie mastermind Lloyd Kaufman’s tongue in cheek take on golly-gee suburban idealism into the script.
But what about the kiddies who discovered that there were actual full-length films featuring their favorite superhero Toxie? Speaking from experience, the act of post-cartoon childhood Troma discovery is nothing short of confusing and, depending on how deep you were willing to dig before your face turned redder than a thousand suns, downright traumatic.
Speaking of movies turned into cartoon properties, there was plenty of gross-out fun to be had with shows like The Real Ghostbusters, a series just as notable for its slime-filled 140-episode run as it is for all the bizarre toys it spawned. Granny Gross and Fearsome Flush are just a couple of these, the latter of which is a living toilet that inspired fears ten times worse than the old Ghoulie-up-the-butt nightmare. The improbable cartoon Beetlejuice adaptation ran for nearly as many episodes starting in 1989, and 1988’s short-lived Robocop: The Animated Series always begged the important gross-out questions, like “will an acid-drenched dude pop like an overstuffed water balloon on this, the most sacred of Saturday mornings?” Sadly, the planned Aliens series—which surely would have prominently featured slime and acidic drool—never made it to our screens.
Carrying the Splortch Torch
The rest of the ’90s weren’t without their own gross-out heroes. Ren & Stimpy made the gross-up close-up—a term for the nasty still-frames that turned the show’s vilest moments into modern art—prevalent enough to be featured on t-shirts that actual children wore in public. Aaaahh!!! Real Monsters was just as foul as its character designs would lead you to believe, and every commercial break was punctuated with the promise of Cree-ee-ee-py CRAWLERS, a “make your own gross rubber bugs” device marketed as an Easy Bake Oven for boys. Nickelodeon even managed to fill toy stores with seemingly endless kinds of slime including Gak, a plastic container of ooze that has got to boast one of the highest profit margins in toy history.
Where does that leave us today? Kids keep Elmer’s glue in business making their own homemade slime, but where is my bony stranger? What of my hairy son? For the most part, contemporary kids’ TV is squeaky clean without an errant eyeball in sight. Madballs had a revival of sorts in 2007—complete with new toys and some amazing art by James Groman—and Screamin’ Meemie and the gang got back together for online animated shorts and more toys in 2017. Is that enough? Are you not entertained and thoroughly grossed out? Probably not.
Thankfully, there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Check almost any toy shelf and you’ll see the occasional grody highlight, with a line of figures called The Grossery Gang seemingly leading the charge. With characters like Putrid Pizza, Dodgy Donut, and Fungus Fries, who could possibly hope to challenge their rotten reign? These are essentially the Barnyard Commandosor Food Fighters of the aughts, and you gotta give it up to them for that alone. The official website even has an animated short based on the line’s latest arc, Time Wars. Yes, The Grossery Gang has different series to follow, so you better keep up or you’ll end up chomped, chewed, and poo’d—their words, not mine—by the likes of the Trash-O-Saur.
Maybe that’s where I belong. Chew me up, spit me out, and bury me in the very toxic sludge that raised me.
This post originally appeared on the now-defunct VRV Blog in December 2018.
This article was originally published in the Fall 2021 issue of Sci Fi magazine.
Director David Gordon Green talks about delays, the connection between horror and comedy, and the mayhem that’s about to ensue in Halloween Kills.
Slasher movies have a few rules inherent to their design, and each of the films within the genre tend to establish their own unique traditions. There are plenty that make Halloween villain Michael Myers who, or what, he is, and one of the staples of the long-running franchise that John Carpenter established way back in 1978 is the fact that each new movie opens on or around Halloween. Some of them have been a month or so off, and Rob Zombie’s pair both hit in the heat of summer—fitting for Zombie’s filmmaking style—but most fall somewhere near All Hallows’ Eve. That’s one of many reasons it was such a disappointment for fans and those involved to see the latest entry—Halloween Kills, which follows up Blumhouse and director David Gordon Green’s first crack at one of the most iconic horror characters of all time—move out of 2020.
This was no big surprise considering what a shitshow of a year 2020 ended up being. While the pandemic may have proven to be one of Myers’ only known weaknesses, it merely postponed the inevitable. Like any good horror icon, you can’t keep Michael Myers down for long, and exactly one year later we’re staring right down the barrel of Kills,and the folks involved couldn’t be more excited for everyone to see what happens when the entire town of Haddonfield gets a crack at taking on this unstoppable force of evil.
Blood Beats
Out of all the people involved, it should come as no surprise that director David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express, Your Highness) is among the most excited to finally get Kills out on the big screen. Green started out on dramas before moving on to direct comedies for the big and small screen, but as we’ve seen with everything from Eastbound & Down to 2018’s Halloween and beyond, the line between genres is blurry by design in the most capable hands.
“I think horror and comedy have a lot in common,” Green said the first time I spoke with him, before the delay was announced. “There’s a balance between absurdity and melancholy, which I really enjoy. You obviously lean one way in horror, but I mean you can’t say it’s not absurd how many times this motherfucker keeps getting back up from the dead. Comedy’s like that, too.”
The big difference that separates both genres from drama, then, really comes down to engineering. “If you don’t know what the geography of the house is and you haven’t planted certain objects, who gives a shit at the end because everything would just be a surprise and it’s just chaos,” Green said. “But when everything is laid out in a way—information from characters to weapons to what’s around the corner—it makes for a great jump scare as equally as it makes for a great laugh. The structural engineering of that is very different than in dramatic works, for me at least, as a dramatic writer. When I’m working on dramatic movies it can flow a little more naturalistically, a little more organically, but in comedy and horror I feel like everything has a consideration. Where you put the camera, what you’ve seen of the room, what that character has in their pockets. Because if the audience knows all this information it adds up to a reaction, to a crowd response of fear, tension, anxiety; here comes the joke. Sometimes when you know the joke’s coming it’s funnier than if it jumps right out randomly and surprises you. It all kind of works within similar engineering.”
Green admits he doesn’t always have the mind for those engineering aspects of putting together a perfectly crafted horror scene. That’s where writer and producer Danny McBride comes into play. According to the director, McBride has that engineer’s mind, whereas Green’s is more atmospheric. McBride came up with a lot of those “big plot moves that are really great,” which comes from exercising that ability after so many years of comedy.
There’s certainly intentional comedy peppered throughout Green’s first Halloween outing, but he didn’t feel the need to lean on that to break up the tension in the followup. “The last movie had actual comedy in it, where this one doesn’t,” he explained. “And I think when you see the kind of operatic nature of some of the violence in it, it’s going to be its own sense of fun. So you didn’t need a kid saying bad words in this movie. You didn’t need some of the things I felt helped the levity, the little moments of comic relief and charms our last movie had… this doesn’t really have that, per se. I thought the violence kind of took care of that piece of popcorn.”
Throughout everything, David Gordon Green and everyone else involved echoed the camaraderie on set and the non-stop spirit of fun in the air while shooting Halloween Kills. Green knows that to make any of this work, you actually have to like what you’re doing and enjoy the job at hand. “You should have to check a box on your job application to direct,” he said. “Are you gonna have fun or are you gonna be an asshole?”
Shelving the Shape
When it comes to whether or not Green found it difficult to decide to delay the premiere of this particular slaughter-ama, he sums it up succinctly. “It felt correct,” Green began. “It was just such a confusing time as to how you could actually get the most people to watch your movie, and this being a seasonal horror film it felt important to be on Halloween. So it wasn’t really much of a question to me. I didn’t want to put it on streaming [editor’s note: it did end up streaming day and date], and I didn’t want to release it in the spring or something. Once it looked like theaters weren’t going to be open in the fall of last year, it was a pretty quick, easy decision.”
Even when you aren’t counting on a very specific seasonal launch, Green and the folks at Blumhouse are proof that delays aren’t necessarily a bad thing. “In a good way it gave me a lot of time to work on the script for the third movie, so that’s cool,” Green reflected. “And the movie hasn’t changed a frame since we shut down, so outside of the fact that a year is a long time to put a movie on the shelf, it wasn’t really a bad experience. I got a lot of writing done, a lot of reflection, a lot of strategizing with the team. And brewed up a lot of other ideas with Blumhouse of other movies to make, so we made the most out of the downtime for sure.”
Beyond prepping ideas with Blumhouse for future projects, Green spent a lot of lockdown directing remotely and in person, from commercials to full-on TV show pilots. “Oh man, since we last talked I’ve probably directed a hundred days of things,” he said. “Early in the summer I was doing remote commercials, and then I started doing real commercials, and then I did a TV pilot in LA in January, which was wild, because that was like in the height of everything. It was over at Warner Bros., and it was like a military medical operation to go to set every day, it was really interesting. Then in March we started filming the second season of [Righteous] Gemstones here, and now I just went up to Poughkeepsie to finish up some exteriors on that pilot I did, and now we’re back here [in Charleston].
“I’ve experienced every version of the COVID protocols, and they’re all different. Everyone has their own anxieties and neuroses, or they don’t give a shit, or they do. It’s been so interesting to bounce from New York to South Carolina to California to… actually, some of that pilot I had to direct remotely, because I had a close contact with a camera assistant that got COVID, so I had to direct from my living room for a few days. That was fun.”
When theaters started to open back up, so did the hype for Halloween Kills, which had a new trailer released early in the summer. To some, the trailer appeared to be loaded with spoilers, but Green and his team aren’t worried about ruining anything for their second film. “When we were watching early cuts of the trailer, I was like ‘There’s a lot of kills in this trailer,’ and the studio was like, ‘Yeah, but there’s a lot more in the movie,’” he laughed. “They kind of had a good argument. It’s always a juggling act when you’re putting these things together, right? Because you want to show enough that you get people excited, but you don’t want to give away the twists and turns that happen in the movie. We’ve avoided any twists of any monumental stake, and you get a sense of the mayhem. I was watching it when we put it together a couple weeks ago and I did get a kick out of it, thinking, ‘Yep, well, if you don’t like this trailer, you probably wouldn’t like the movie.’ If it gets people excited, the movie is a lot more of that.”
While the third movie, Halloween Ends, had already been written, the downtime did give David Gordon-Green an opportunity to tool around with it a little. “It just gave me time to tinker,” he said. “The first two movies take place on one night, and this one takes place in the present. So it’s interesting to have a new version of the present in some way. And to think, okay, that was the only real dramatic thing is, I’m going to add a year, and there were some effects of that. It’s hard to talk about that without getting too into it, but…”
Alright, we’ll leave it at that, then. The nice thing about classic slashers like Halloween is you can know as much or as little about them as you want in advance; it all ultimately comes down to the experience. Whether you’re in a packed room of screaming theater-goers or embedded in your couch alone with all the lights off, Michael Myers is still there at the end of the day. On the screen. In your dreams. Waiting to rise from the ashes just one more time.
Halloween Kills originally slashed its way into theaters on October 15, 2021.
Insights from the Stars of Halloween Kills
Jamie Lee Curtis (Laurie Strode) on the camaraderie on set that reflected the filming of the 1978 classic: “The way [David Gordon Green] makes movies, it’s very different. He’s very inventive. It’s like child’s play. Which is what it should be, because art doesn’t have to be serious. He will shake up the snow globe of your performance often, just so you don’t get boring.
Judy Greer (Karen) on what gives Michael Myers such a presence and power over the audience: “He doesn’t speak, and I think there’s something personally that’s so chilling about that. And you don’t have those zany one-liners that the murderer will often have… I think there’s something so scary about the Shape, the form, the silence, and the ever-presence, that really he is representative of so many things.”
Andi Matichak (Allyson) on her relationship with her co-stars after going through hell with them: They are such unbelievable women, and I’m so fortunate that I get to know them, and work with them. They’re both iconic actors and I learned so much from them on set, in terms of being an actor, in terms of being a professional, in terms of being a woman in this industry.
Anthony Michael Hall (Tommy Doyle) on the connection between comedy and horror: “The setup for a scare is like the setup for a joke, and at the same time there’s a sense of play because everybody gets the bigger picture, which is we’re making a horror movie or we’re making a comedy. I think there are correlations between those genres. Even on [Righteous Gemstones], dude, what a great tonal balance, right? It’s like a really entertaining show, and it’s also funny and it’s dark.”
Nick Castle (The Original Michael Myers) on hating to be scared: “I wasn’t a big horror fan, I didn’t particularly love the idea of being in that intense fear you can get from going to the movies. I’d just. Rather. Laugh. Or be amazed, or something like that. But because I’ve gotten so involved with the horror genre of late, you know, I’ve been going to these conventions and things like that, talking to folks, I felt kind of obligated to learn more about it. The closest I’ve gotten in my own [directing] work to the horror genre was my first movie, T.A.G. The Assassination Game.
James Jude Courtney (Current Michael Myers) on the true horror of The Shape: “It’s this vast unknown that really feeds into the collective subconscious … When David Gordon Green talked to me about the character, he said he wanted a cat-like movement; smooth, prowling. I took a look at how [my cat] moved, and thought, ‘We don’t judge a cat when the cat kills a rat, or a squirrel. This is just what the cat does. This is just what The Shape does.’”
It may not have exactly hit in April as promised, but Part 2 of Monster Flight has officially begun! This is the first big batch of full-color pages, and I’ll also be going back and coloring the previous pages and re-uploading them as they’re ready. This ride is just getting started, so please enjoy as you catch up or continue where we left off.
subhumanzoids 