I haven’t had a Cracked article since last year, but it’s not for lack of trying - I’ve had dozens shot down as just not being “quite there” or just too redundant with articles they’ve already done. Oftentimes it comes down to just the personal taste of a single staff member who has the power to approve something.

Case in point, I’m currently working on a pitch about surprisingly disturbing children’s characters, which I thought would have been a pretty easy one, but I still need two more examples for the list - they want a minimum of six - and the last dozen things I’ve proposed have been deemed “not creepy enough.”

Anything you can send me that seems a little too grotesque for a little kid’s show may help, but please click “read more” to see what’s already been pitched first.

Here’s an actual screenshot from an actual Noggin show called OOBI. This is one of only four examples they liked and approved of so far.

ALL OF THE FOLLOWING HAVE BEEN REJECTED:

Read More

TICK SKULL now available in my Store on t-shirts!

I just remembered the dream I had last night.

I actually dreamed about getting new news about the sixth pokemon generation.

It was revealed that the new region would be a red, barren wasteland far in the future.

You would have to travel at night, and find an underground bunker to hide in during the day or “slowly die” in the red sunlight.

Every single underground bunker was empty except for a creature named Gloomduck, who was specified as “not a pokemon.”

This is exactly what he looked like:

That was it.

Gloomduck hung out in every bunker.

Somehow it was always the same Gloomduck.

The sun sucked away your lifeforce.

You seemed to be the only human left.

The same night we had the horrible shitty hotel rooms, as I may have mentioned somewhere or other, was also our friend Kristina’s birthday thing. A nightclub was having a “Halfway to Halloween” party that weekend, with a costume contest and $666 prize.

I don’t normally enjoy parties, bars or clubs, but this was honestly the best “Halloween” party I’ve ever been to. Contrary to my experience with any other Halloween-based party, nobody came dressed as ketchup or giant babies, I actually didn’t witness anyone get drunk enough to vomit or turn into a violent asshole, and people did more than stand around awkwardly in a half-decorated living room.

I guess it’s not surprising that a gothic BDSM club with a year-round dungeon motif would have some standards when it comes to Halloween, even in the middle of summer.

Most of my photos are impossible to make out, but here’s our friend Dylan in his eight foot tall moss monster costume. Mr. Chiggers, which he’s easily won other costume contests with:

Somehow or other, though, he didn’t even come in third for this one; that went to a band of ninjas, or something, from the Nolan Batman movies (BOOOOOO!!!!!!) while first prize was grabbed by this Oogie Boogie:

It’s a damn good Oogie Boogie and I enjoy Oogie Boogie, but I still can’t believe a towering monster glued together from fresh-picked moss and bark - as a matter of fact crawling with real insects, as an accidental bonus - didn’t get some recognition.

There were an awful lot of Jack Skellingtons but only one was accompanied by a Sally

Jesus was there too though! Jesus totally approves of Halfway to Halloween at the bondage goth club.

My girlfriend Margret with the guy they had stationed at the entrance. The bouncer? I hope he was technically the bouncer.

A photographer uploaded a whole lot of clearer, nicer photos from the same night to his website, http://www.seraphimsphoto.com, that you can see specifically here.

HIGHLIGHTS:

The owner of the club made a kick-ass Frankenstein’s Monster. There’s kind of a Digimon vibe here. I hope that’s not an offensively lame comparison for me to draw.

His wife was a less gruesome but still cool looking Bride-Of.

There was a short “Hieronymus Bosch” fashion show, though this was the most Boschian outfit there.

Another member of the staff, I think.

Skeletor was pretty impressive.

The two armored guys were referred to as “Zombie Hunters.” You can’t tell in the photo that their eyes and seams lit up.

I might actually want to go here again if they have an actual Halloween party on Halloween, which they probably will.

http://www.bogleech.com/dnd/forgotten.html

A quick rundown of some old, miscellaneous monsters I love and couldn’t otherwise fill an entire article with.

These aren’t all just cool designs; a few of them have downright brilliant powers and abilities, or thoughtful and endearing personalities.

thebigbadfox:

>

So sure, you can believe that prohibition was effective and had a positive effect on the United States, just as you can believe that abstinence-only sex ed is effective, or that the holocaust never happened, or that intelligent design theory is a valid scientific movement, or that aliens built the pyramids. There are plenty of newsletters that specifically cater to those who prefer conspiracy theories to the public statistics published by the FBI and the DOJ.

Bwuh?

Abstinence-only sex ed makes teen pregnancy, STD’s and rape skyrocket.

The holocaust is thoroughly documented and people still exist who survived it and can tell you all about it.

Evolution is observable, empirical fact, as undeniable as the existence of gravity.

We know how the pyramids were built and the odds against intelligent life visiting the earth are almost infinity to one.

We also know that vaccines save lives, that autism is genetic, that “chemtrails” wouldn’t work even if they existed and they never have, that there’s no such thing as “moregellon’s disease,” that Obama was born on U.S. soil, that 9/11 was not an inside job or seen coming by anyone in the government, that life on Earth is over half a billion years old, and that homeopathic remedies do nothing but kill people who should have understood the difference between medicine and a big, fat placebo.

I don’t subscribe to crackpot conspiracies. I adamantly adhere to the consensus of experts, and people who stubbornly mistrust that consensus in favor of their zany fantasies bother me to such a degree that it’s practically become my shtick throughout the interscape.

That is, in fact, exactly why I said that Prohibition wasn’t quite as big a “failure” as they teach in history class, because that is not an actual, unanimously accepted consensus among the experts at all.

Prohibition was an extremely mixed bag which coincided with spikes in crime, but is not believed to have been singularly responsible for them as many people have presumed.

The war on drugs is a colossal failure and the criminalization of sex work should have never happened, but I believe that, at the very least, the penalties for drunk driving should be vastly more severe than they are now. It can turn any random person, regardless of personality, into a murderer and the victim can be any other random person, for no rhyme or reason. Rape is just about the only crime that makes me sicker and angrier than a drunk driving fatality.

thebigbadfox

Ah, I see; so let’s get this straight. According to you:

No, not according to me. According to professional historians like the one I’ve already linked for you in my last post about you. Should still be on the front page of my tumblr! :)

-Prohibition of the sale and production of alcohol did not in fact create a massive black market to meet the demand for alcohol, and criminal organizations didn’t eagerly step in to fill this void and make enormous profits from it, unlike every single other time in history that a federal ban on a popular sunstance has created a black market

No, I never remotely said that at all. This is, however, blown obscenely out of proportion in the public eye. There was an increase in organized crime at the time, but it was not strictly due to prohibition, and overall crime did not increase to the extent people are misremembering. Also, the “banning anything creates more crime” is the same argument used by NRA psychopaths to argue against any kind of gun legislation, and we know from the example of almost every other first-world country that this is not absolutely always what happens. It varies dramatically.

-overall crime did not increase by 24%

-homicide did not increase by 12.7%

-theft and burglary did not increase by 9%

-assault and battery did not increase by 13%

Well it’s a great relief to hear that none of these things ever really happened! Apparently all the studies, news reports, and crime statistics taken by various state and federal law enforcement agencies were just completely made up because…they all just felt like making themselves look like idiots, I suppose?

No, it’s a collective misunderstanding by the general public over the course of many years, which is normal and common.

I also said repeatedly that I wasn’t completely denying all of those things, just pointing out that the stories are severely exaggerated, which they are.

Most of the historical “facts” people believe about America are exaggerated to outright false, any expert in the field will tell you that. The average person even still thinks Columbus was out to prove the earth was round, when the earth had already been widely assumed to be round and popularly accepted as such before he was ever born. 

People already misremember 9/11 and argue over whether it really happened the way it was portrayed on television, and get the number of deaths completely wrong. A ton of people take it as “fact” that Obama was born outside the U.S. despite how thoroughly that’s been disproven and was pulled out of nowhere as a smear tactic to begin with. I probably don’t need to also remind you that holocaust deniers grow in number every decade. Virtually nothing in our history goes undistorted.

And apparently historians, statisticians and criminologists have all conspired to falsely affirm these totally baseless myths for more than 80 years.

So which sinister secret society masterminded that little trick? Because any organization that can rewrite history that thoroughly without getting called on it for this long has got to be pretty damn awesome.

“Historians, statisticians, and criminologists” are precisely the people trying to tell everyone that what you’re repeating is only half-true. Who did you think I’d have gotten my information from, fox news? Impartial, objective researching always filters out fact from myth.

I know it’s hard to stop believing something you’ve taken to be true all your life and probably used as arguing ammunition, but the horrific failure of prohibition is almost entirely myth. Nobody had to “re-write” history. History is misconstrued CONSTANTLY. Records are kept poorly. Myths get mixed with facts. Almost nothing suffers this worse in our culture than *American* history, where virtually every mainstream interpretation is loaded with errors.

thebigbadfox:

It is astonishing to me that anyone who can both read and write and access the internet is actually willing to defend the idea that prohibition was a “success.”

For anyone that might still be in doubt about this issue, here are the effects of prohibition in the US:

-It gave a major boost to organized crime in general and directly led to the rise of the Mafia

-it caused crime rates in general to skyrocket:

(more)

Oh wow, the old “you so stupid, you shouldn’t even be able to use the internet” bit? Is that really necessary? People sure take my opinions on alcohol personally…it’s like booze is a religion to some people.

I respectfully suggest you read up a little more on the subject, mister faux. You’re parroting a series of popular misconceptions and myths notorious among professional historians as utterly baseless and preposterously exaggerated. Most, if not all popular perception of history, *especially* what we teach in public schools and portray in the media, is twisted to the point that it’s often almost the exact opposite of the truth.

Most of what you say is partially accurate, but not enough that anything I said was inaccurate. Just as many people regarded prohibition as a success as they did a failure, and it was most certainly NOT a reason behind its repeal, either.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470475/

“PROBABLY FEW GAPS between scholarly knowledge and popular conventional wisdom are as wide as the one regarding National Prohibition”

Although organized crime flourished under its sway, Prohibition was not responsible for its appearance, as organized crime’s post-Repeal persistence has demonstrated. Drinking habits underwent a drastic change during the Prohibition Era, and Prohibition’s flattening effect on per capita consumption continued long after Repeal, as did a substantial hard core of popular support for Prohibition’s return. Repeal itself became possible in 1933 primarily because of a radically altered economic context—the Great Depression. Nevertheless, the failure of National Prohibition continues to be cited without contradiction in debates over matters ranging from the proper scope of government action to specific issues such as control of other consciousness-altering drugs, smoking, and guns.

We historians collectively are partly to blame for this gap. We simply have not synthesized from disparate studies a compelling alternative to popular perception.2 Nevertheless, historians are not entirely culpable for prevalent misunderstanding; also responsible are changed cultural attitudes toward drinking, which, ironically, Prohibition itself helped to shape. Thinking of Prohibition as a public health innovation offers a potentially fruitful path toward comprehending both the story of the dry era and the reasons why it continues to be misunderstood.

http://www.bogleech.com/dnd/winglesswonder.html

Why aren’t people more aware that this was a thing?

Guys this was a thing

A comic adapted from a dream I had last night

The gaunt guy running down wooden hallways had the same voice in the dream as a Tickle Me Elmo doll. He acted like a monkey and moved as though on sped-up camera footage.

That should have been terrifying except I was something or other chasing him and trying to eat him, like Pac-man.

I could feel every sensation of biting his face off, like biting into a meaty apple.

He was alright and continued on his merry way

http://www.bogleech.com/comics/comic130-heehee.htm

Oh my god you guys this commercial has anatomically correct fleas and ticks flying airplanes

I’ve had this “giant squid made of a monster with worms” idea in my head for like six or seven years. Now it’s a for real mortasheens.

Based on tapeworm anatomy!

To clear up a tiny bit of confusion I may have caused, Mortasheen drawings are already at least partly digital.

Here’s the raw scan of that last one before any digital alteration, this is all just a bic mechanical pencil:

I do a lot of darkening, add a little more shading, and do an assortment of other details all on the computer, especially eyeballs, so they have a shiny liquid look.

Another one based on several different things I love at once.

I tried coloring it and making it transparent, which I sometimes feel compelled to start doing for Mortasheen in general, but I can’t find any easy or time-friendly way to get rid of the pixelated light edge visible on darker backgrounds, which are my preferred backgrounds.

Using multiply to keep the pencils visible also limits the range of tones I can color with. I could start drawing monsters all digitally, but I still like the look of them in mechanical pencil, which is also just something I’ve steadily worked with and improved upon for so long I’d hate to abandon it.