Z is for Zany (Day 26)

This guy is zany.

I bet that's not what you thought Z was going to stand for. By the end of this book, I was really getting creative with the adjectives -- first "wacky," then "yucky," and now "zany." But hold on a second! What is this creature, this "guy" if you will, supposed to be? It looks like he started out as Frankenstein's Monster, but then somehow mutated into something else midway through. I only drew one neck bolt before deciding, "Screw it! Frankie's already been on the cover and two other pages of this book! Time to try something else!" So I colored his skin gray instead of green, mussed up his hair, and added some bloodstains to his outfit. You know what? I'm gonna call this guy a Living Impaired individual. With a single neck bolt.

And that, dearest readers, takes us to the merciful conclusion of My Halloween Dictionary. I will leave you with the book's back cover -- another charming flourish by the young author, who could've just as easily left it blank. I like how the smudged ink accidentally suggests the motion of the broom-riding witch across the night sky.

The back cover

Y is for Yucky (Day 24)

Monsters are yucky.

Okay, okay... so I misspelled "are." I was obviously in a state of artistic frenzy, judging by the bravura depiction of the horror world's own Rat Pack here. We have Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy, and... uh, The Ghost. Notice the bulbous nose and simpleton expression I've given to both Drac and his ghostly comrade. Frankie appears pretty blissed-out as well. Only the Mummy remains enigmatic, a mystery behind his shapeless blob of bandages. Keep in mind, this was all before The Monster Squad. For all I know, they ripped me off. It can happen! Did you see Big Fat Liar with Frankie Muniz and Paul Giamatti? No? Well, you should. It's actually kind of funny. Better than you'd think.

X is for X-ray (Day 24)

Look at the monster's x-ray.

The letter X affords one very few choices in a project like this. I suppose "x-ray" was about all I could come up with. What else was there? Perhaps "The xylophone is memorably used to evoke the sound of rattling bones in Camille Saint-Saëns' eerie Danse Macabre." But that would have been a little beyond me at that age, so I went with the tried-and-true "x-ray." As this drawing shows, my knowledge of x-ray technology derives almost entirely from cartoons.

W is for Witch (Day 23)

See the wacky witch

An end is in sight, kiddies. And glory of glories, I start this one with "See" instead of "Look at." The witch design here does not seem terribly menacing. I must have been influenced by Broom Hilda or Witch Hazel from the old Warner Brothers cartoons. Serious students of the Halloween Dictionary will note that this depiction of a witch does not match the ones we've seen previously in this project like here or here. Before I leave, I must complement the younger version of myself on having great taste in adjectives.

V is for Vampires (Day 22)

I hate vampires.

Twenty years before Twilight, folks. I was ridiculously ahead of the Twilight backlash. Backlashes, of course, are the lifeblood of the Internet. We're all player haters at heart. I think a lot of the anti-Twilight sentiment is directly attributable to the fact that Stephanie Meyer is pulling in mad cash for her little vampire stories, and we all wish we'd thought of it instead of her. I've never read any of the books or seen any of the movies, so my familiarity with the franchise extends only to the way it has been discussed online. (Well, a little on TV.) I don't really even know if Kristen Stewart really is as hopeless an actress as everyone says. I do know I've seen many publicity photos of her looking hilariously blank -- conveying "nothingness" so perfectly that it almost seems intentional. Who knows? Maybe Kristen Stewart is actually a brilliant con artist having a good laugh at our expense.

U is for Ugly (Day 21)

He is very ugly.

And you are very judgmental and shallow, sir. Aren't we being a bit prejudiced here? Well, he has dental problems clearly. And male-pattern baldness (the Daddy Warbucks/Kojak pattern, that is). Some surgical scars still clearly visible. And only three fingers per hand... with the nails on the wrong side... and in the wrong place. No neck. Little puppet arms. Flourescent skin. Prominent warts. Animal-like ears that stick out too far... and don't line up with each other. But do all these details really add up to ugly? Have you gotten to know this indvidual as a person? Did that even occur to you? Sometimes, the people who are "ugly" on the outside are beautiful on the inside and vice versa. I learned that from a little movie called Shallow Hal. Thank you, Gwyneth Paltrow in a fatsuit, for showing us the way. Again.

T is for Troll (Day 20)

Look at the ugly troll.

I would promise you that we're past the "Look at" sentences, but there's at least one more to go. And we're back to having one small character drawn in the middle of the page with the rest left blank. What can I say? To this day, I am not good at drawing backgrounds or props. But what of our troll friend here? This was before the Troll movies by a couple of years and well before the rise of the Internet troll, so the trolls I was referencing were the ones from fairy tales, specifically that Norwegian golden-oldie, "Three Billy Goats Gruff." Note that the troll here has terrible posture and must scuttle around like a crab. That's because he has to live under a fairly low bridge. Note, too, the troll's homeless-guy beard and tattered one-piece outfit. The latter might well be described as a gunny sack onesie.

S is for Spider (Day 19)

Look at the huge spider!

My teacher might have been impressed with the sentences the Halloween Dictionary, but I have some reservations. Nine of them -- about a third of the entries -- start with the words "Look at..." The legend at the bottom of this page is supposed to be "Look at the huge spider." But I think this is one of the better pictures in the book, if only because I decided to compose for the entire frame this time rather than making the rather over-generous use of negative space we've seen in previous entries. To this day, I still draw cartoony pictures on just about every piece of scrap paper that comes into my possession, and my drawing style is still astonishingly like what you see above. Those big googly eyes? Still a personal trademark.