MR. CLOWN

Since I’ve been a little kid I’ve always loved Halloween.  Some of that is due to Halloween being my mom’s favorite holiday. She was one of those moms who went over the top with decorations every Halloween. Our living room looked like a mini-Haunted House attraction every year for a healthy chunk of my childhood. I still feel nostalgic for home whenever I see those blinking skeleton string lights in the store or that fake spider web that takes forever to get down the first day of November.

My personal favorite part was not so much the candy, although I enjoyed that a lot. I remember my love affair with Dots (you know those lovely rainbow hued gumdrops from the Tootsie Roll company) beginning because of those little boxes of them I invariably got every Halloween. I was an adult before I realized you could buy of box of Dots.  No, my favorite thing about Halloween was costumes. I started in September each year right after school started planning who I was going to be. While that’s not a very long time now, when I was a child a single month felt like forever.

The first Halloween I remember dressing up was when I was three or four. My friend Jenny and I went as Raggedy Ann and Andy. Our moms conspired to make our costumes (yes, they made them) and it was all very ridiculously cute. I still  look at that picture today and smile. And, yes that picture is floating around on the internet.

We came from the 70's!

Ah, there it is!

I remember being Chewbacca, Gene Simmons of KISS (I wore that to the Kindergarten Halloween party in full make-up, Mom made that costume too), He-Man, Jason Voorhees, an Ewok, and the Purple Pieman (of Strawberry Shortcake). I remember having a Darth Vader costume (one of those awesome Ruby’s costumes), but don’t ever remember actually wearing it for Halloween. I might have, and just not remember that. It’s been a very long time after all. I do remember being very peeved as a child that I never got to be Princess Leia for Halloween.  As an adult I finally made that come true. And yes, there are pictures of that, but no, those are not going up on the internet. I have some dignity. Somewhere.

As I got older and my desire to dress in costume decreased (you know how teenagers are), my love of scary movies was born and Halloween became even more of a holiday favorite because all of the local UHF channels (ah, the days before cable) would show all sorts of great horror movies. I first watched such slasher classics such “Terror Train” and “New Year’s Evil” (well, classic to me anyway) on TV channels with numbers like 21 and 29, often through snowy screens, running out to adjust the aerial antenna during commercial breaks–knowing that often after ten p.m. if the sky was clear I would get a better signal if I turned the antenna just the right direction. When we finally got cable, I remember USA Up-All-Nite showing awful but fun horror movies year round and feeling like life couldn’t get much better.  And to make it more awesome, USA only edited out the language and the nudity, they still showed the gore. The often overlooked and deeply flawed slasher classic “Girl’s Nite Out” was my favorite Up-All-Nite discovery.

You betta be careful trick or treating!

That love of horror movies (I still have it to this day) is obviously a pretty big inspiration on Mr. Clown. He’s right out of a horror movie.  One of the very first Mr. Clown comics I drew was “Be Careful Trick-Or-Treating.” That image of kids in costumes with Mr. Clown answering the door was very vivid early one. It’s how most Mr. Clown comics are born, I get an image of Mr. Clown lurking under a bed, or a kid opening the door to the basement and Mr. Clown hiding in the darkness below.  Some people have mentioned that Stephen King’s It seems like it was a big inspiration, but it really was not as much as you would think. For me it was always the awful images of a clown doing something awful. The first Mr. Clown had Mr. Clown holding a dead puppy, standing beside an oblivious Mom telling her kid, “It’s all right little girl! Mr. Clown just wants to play! And cut off your head!” When I find that in the pile of sketches and drawings (which I’m going through to scan and file as an ongoing de-cluttering project) I will scan it and share it. Early Mr. Clown drawings show the old boy looked a little different in the beginning. Giant grin and pointy hat, anyone?

That bad bad Babysitter Killer strikes every Halloween!

So, hopefully everyone has a Happy Halloween and eats lots of candy and for the adults: have lots of adult beverages, and gets to be whoever they want to be.

peace and love and empathy,

p.