holidays

Amazing Carved Dodo O’Lantern (Dodo’lantern?)

Reader @Stringerplz shared these great pictures of her carved dodo pumpkin!

finally

finally in the DARK

Modeled after, of course, the dodos with the time!

PREVIOUSLY:
• Piranhamoose-O’Lantern
• A New Piranhamoose-O’Lantern

In her tweet above, Stringerplz mentions “Halloween Keith.” Some of you older readers will no doubt remember Halloween Keith from your childhood.

I have written some more about Halloween Keith.

Some say Halloween Keith was a corn farmer who died in a drought year, through laziness or ill-management of his crop; others say he was born from the cornfields themselves, a new form of smut who took legs in an attempt to become a man. Inside his wrappings are either bony limbs hung with rotted flesh, or bulbous, fungal lumps of corn. Perhaps both, working in concert…

Once a year, on the eve of All Saints’ Day, children from the local parish used to go door-to-door collecting food donations to help the less fortunate. Because charity is most virtuous when done anonymously, the children would wear masks, or dress up in costume — sometimes as adults, but other times as monsters and evil things, as a reminder that even the demons may repent and do good works.

This presented the perfect opportunity for Halloween Keith to also disguise himself and collect food from unsuspecting families, enough to feed him for another year…

— Malkidian Geometry: The Forgotten Mythos of Halloween Keith

OBLIGATORY REMINDER: Only two days and a bit remain on the Go Away, Sea Lions shirt!

It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I realized the Chipmunks (which I had always known as cartoon characters from my childhood) were actually, as pop-cultural entities, much older — dating back to their eponymous novelty Christmas record in 1958 or, arguably, the “Witch Doctor” song all the way back in 1952. There was a short-lived cartoon in 1961, but the Saturday-morning cartoon that I and people of my generation are most familiar with didn’t come around until more than 20 years later (1982-1990).

The audio trick that creator Ross Bagdasarian used to create the sound of the Chipmunks’ voices was so simple, and the resulting songs so popular in the late 50s and early 60s, that I figured they must have spawned some knockoffs. Sure enough — enjoy the squeaky sounds of:

The Nutty Squirrels (singing “Uh Oh”)
The Grasshoppers (singing “Shortnin’ Bread”) (More info)
The Three Happy Crickets (“We Wish You a Merry Christmas”)
Woody Woodchuck’s Christmas Sing Song (info only)
Sing Along with the Busy Beavers (album download)
BONUS LINK: The Happy Hamsters sing “Ghostbustin'”, a few decades later. Full album here.

#991; The Chipmunks, and What Came After

  — December 23rd, 2013

[ Tags: , , , ]     Permalink: https://wondermark.com/c/991/

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The British Library has just released a Flickr set of over a million archival images from their collection into the public domain. This is pretty wonderful! In their honor, I have made today’s comic out of their images exclusively, and I will even cite my sources:

The men: from here and here
The environments: Panel 3 here, the others here

#989; The Odious Gift

  — December 17th, 2013

[ Tags: , , ]     Permalink: https://wondermark.com/c/989/

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