Helloween!

Fall is in the air, bringing a crisp step and the crunch of leaves under foot, and the inevitable—perhaps inescapable—presence of Pumpkin Spice everything all around us! Yes, it's time for 31 Days of Halloween, The Beat's annual tribute to our MOST FAVORITEST TIME OF YEAR. And let's get things going with probably the most obvious link possible...but I have ever written about painter/cartoonist/musician Menton3 on The Beat before so here goes! Based in Chicago, Menton3—aka Menton J Matthews III—is a painter of atmospheric and disturbing images. While you can find a lot of his work at his website, he's probably best known these days as a partner in 44Flood, a publishing company that has teamed with IDW to put out art books and comics. Along with fellow artists Kasra Ghanbari, Ben Templesmith and Nick Idell, 44Flood has put out Tome, an artbook which was mostly Kickstarted, Templesmith's The Squidder, the comic Monocyte, which you see on this page, and Libretto, an anthology of eerieness centering on vampirism. A new volume of Tome is on its way or already here (I couldn't find a lot of solid news about the bunch.)

Of everything I looked ah while compiling my annual Halloween clow=out, nothing disturbed me as much as this. Did you own these cards and...

It doesn't get any more disturbing than this.

Via Cover Browser

There are a gajillion free horror comics on the web, including tons of old public domain stuff of the kind now being collected...

  Sometimes you gotta go with the real thing. Vampira, aka Maila Nurmi, was one of the first TV Horror hosts, and a star of Plan...

We teased Study Group's Halloween offerings a few days ago, but here's the goods.

It's Norman Reedus's world, we just live in it. Seriously, the guy is the biggest draw on the con circuit right now, and he's still honing his crossbow skills on The Walking Dead for the next few weeks. He's also got a somewhat surreal sense of humor, if you follow his twitter feed. And finally, he has a book of photos out.