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Yee-haw!!!!!!!!!!!!! And we’re back to the races my lil’ dinosaurs out there, hitting you harder then a fist full of pizza when your boss is out of the office, with this week’s edition of From Friendly Ghosts To Gamma-Rays! It’s Halloween-time finally, my favorite season of the year, so I’m feeling a bit crazy these days. Ghost, goblins, endless  amounts of candy; nothing could be a more perfect world to live in for me!
Now as was mentioned in last week’s column, Hostess has begun to stick DC heroes on their boxes again, and this week was spotted no one else other then Batman being pimped out on the Hostess Chocolate Cupcake Box:

Batman looks like he needs a Hostess Cup Cake to save the day. I also heard there are Flash cupcakes and Green Lantern snowballs out there as well. To my knowledge though, there is nothing with Aquaman on it. To my misfortune, while at the premiere run of his stage play Cheapjack Shakespeare: The Non-Musical, I mentioned this to former Aquaman writer Shaun McLaughlin, who then attempted to kill me in his lack-of-hostess rage:

Collection of Awesomeness: Harvey Comics Treasury Volume 1: Casper The Friendly Ghost & Friends
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Writers and Artists: Due To Industry Standard at the Time, The Writers and Artists were not credited

For a column that I write, that’s named partly after one of the most famous comic book characters of all time, it dawned on me the other night in the middle of playing some D.J-Hero, that although I have this undying love for Harvey Comics, I have never written about Casper in my column! Well, I couldn’t deal with that and it needed to be fixed immediately. Luckily Dark Horse Comics this past week issued the first collection in a series called Harvey Comics Treasury that features Casper, The Friendly Ghost, as well as stories starring Wendy, The Good Little Witch, Spooky and my favorite Harvey character Baby Huey. Dark Horse knows how to do reprints of comics, as proven here! We get, for only $14.99, 200 pages of glossy full color reprints of these classically wonderful comics! Now, some may not like the fact the color hasn’t been re-done on these comics, but Dark Horse has dug up the best copies of these stories, so although slightly aged looking, you don’t need to worry about ink bleed issues or anything else, they’ve done an awesome job.

The stories are our classic Harvey tales of what we’ve come to love, expect, and remember about these characters. Casper is trying to make friends, but everyone has issues with him being a Ghost. Baby Huey is rock dumb with a heart of gold, and saves the day accidentally. Spooky is a little troublemaker,  but gets the eggs on him, showing us practical jokes don’t always pay off. The artwork on these tales is great. Personally I love the Harvey style. I love living in a world populated by talking animals and ghosts. This is the kind of stuff missing from comic books these days, and Dark Horse reminds us that these comics are just as good today as they were yesterday.

Out On Stands: G.I. Combat Featuring The Haunted Tank One-Shot
Publisher: DC Comics
Written By: Matthew Sturges
Art By: Phil Winslade
Cover By: Geof Darrow

Also just in time for the Halloween season is a one-shot of G.I. Combat featuring The Haunted Tank. Bravo to DC for pulling this one out again. My personal favorite characters from the DC line of war-comics, the Haunted Tank one-shot places us back in World War II, and is not a continuation of the mini-series they produced last year that placed the Haunted Tank in Iraq.

Matthew Sturges did his homework and gives us a Haunted Tank tale that is just as good and fits right at home with the original comics (which admittedly I’ve read multiple times in their DC Showcase reprint volumes). Sturges paints one of the better tales for our tank-crew with a truly Rod Serling-esque morality story-vibe, filled with both eeriness and excitement. Sturges paints our characters with both shades of doubt in wars, the classic Haunted Tank demise if Jeb is really crazy or if the General really does appear to him, and of course the do or die of combat. Winslade’s artwork feels right at home as well, with the style of the classic Haunted Tank comics, and helps create the full picture of a war torn combat life. Quick shout out to the cover by Darrow, which is ridiculously awesome in itself. DC, if you blow this up and toss it on a poster, I’ll buy five copies and cover a wall of my office with them. Out on stands now.

Lastly here that I have to give a shout out to, is the brand spanking new Wacky Packages! If you frequent this column you know I love all the cartoon humor behind the Topps Cards like The Garbage Pail Kids and Wacky Packages. Well the brand new series 7 came out a few weeks back, and I ran into a few packs of them at my local Target. Obviously being me, I picked a few packs up and dug into all the laughter of these crazy good parody cards that have been entertaining Americans for years now. My favorite one I got in a pack was for “Simian Toes Crunch,” mmmm, monkey toes! There is something fun about these cards, and they are very fitting for the whole Halloween season that’s upon us right now. There are 55 brand new cards, plus a bunch of bonus cards you can get, too. Best part is you may even randomly get a foil card signed by underground comic legend Jay Lynch himself! Go out and buy-buy-buy today!
On a side note, I’ve been thinking about Mexican luchador heroes lately. These heroes deserve their own spotlight and I will write more about them in detail in weeks to come. To sum up luchadores for those unfamiliar, Mexico has this amazing culture of masked wrestlers known as luchadores. Luchadores not only wrestle, they have a ton of movies and comics, and in these adventures they are these James Bond/Batman like figures. They never take off their masks, and they wrestle by day and fight everything: vampires, werewolves, aliens, gangsters, etc, by night! If you have time this weekend, check out some luchador action starring Santo or Blue Demon, probably two of the most famous luchadores and most accessible here stateside. Viva la lucha libre!!!!!!!!!!
Well, that’s it for this time around the track! See you guys soon! In the meantime, go out and buy some Bo0berry or Frankenberry! Seems most parts of the country only get this cereal seasonal now-a-days, and so it’s finally the season to take advantage of what was possibly the most delicious cereal ever created by man!!!!!!!!!!
Drew McCabe
drew@comicattack.net