Living in the northern hemisphere, living in Americaland has made me love Halloween. Up here it is the arts and crafts festival. It’s a festival where everyone can make things, everyone can carve a pumpkin. At halloween the gates are flung open and along with the spooktacular, everyone can be a maker.  

Request One: Send me costume requests for the Things!

It’s fun to play dress ups, as previous comics have shown. Send me your request. Or send me your own clever Halloween interpretations of the Things! Send them to things@lizargall.com  

Request Two: PUMPKINS

Send me your carved pumpkin photos. Carved pumpkins fill my heart with joy and I think Pumpkin Cat gets lonely sometimes. If you carve a Pumpkin Cat and a Bunson Cat hanging out together I don’t know if there is a limit to my joy and I will send you Things temporary tattoos (and that tattoo paper is not cheap!). Send pumpkin pics (or picts) to things@lizargall.com

Although it turns out that I find shrinking Things characters emotionally exhausting. I get really scared they’re going to get hurt and interfere in ill thought out ways that burn my fingers. I made myself not interfere while Bunson was shrinking, but it made me sick to my stomach to see him curl up and shrivel!

After the Things and Bunson shrank I did the love hearts and thank you. I do not enjoy sliding things around on the foil, but not worrying that someone would get hurt made it so much easier. I don’t think I’ll shrink Things without someone to keep me company and they will be extremely limited edition! I’m pleased with the end results 🙂

For Uncanny Magazine I promised two wonderful supporters a pack of mini-comics, temporary tattoos and Shrinky Dinks. Here’s what I’ve laid out for the temporary tattoos, just waiting for the special paper to arrive (actual image will be inverted before printing). And here’s my test sheet for Shrinky Dinks. I’ve decided hand drawing them would make them the most special, so I want to do a test run to make sure the sharpie comes out nicely.

Andy (Andrew Penn) Romine has just finished working on Disney’s Big Hero 6 and next week you get to see his take on the Things. Andy’s generally a 3D animator guy, so we’re excited about seeing his take on some folks that are pretty two dimensional! Andy did Clarion West in Seattle 2010 (Liz is Clarion at UCSD in 2009) and they both went to Launchpad Astronomy Workshop in 2013. He’s a super nice guy with nifty brains too and he makes excellent beverages. Andy’s fiction appears online at Lightspeed Magazine, Paizo and Crossed Genres as well as in the anthologies Fungi, What Fates Impose, By Faerie Light and the forthcoming Coins of Chaos. You can find his full list of publications at the Bibliography link. He’s also contributed articles to Lightspeed Magazine and Fantasy Magazine and blogs at Inkpunks and at Functional Nerds (as the Booze Nerd). You can also follow his day-to-day adventures on Twitter: @inkgorilla. A lot of this info was stolen from his About page, go check out his website.