Holidays

Over on her site, Colleen Doran is posting her out of printGothic short story "Three Black Hearts"a page a day until Halloween.

Another haunted webcomic, this time Red Light Properties Dan Goldman's creepy series about a real estate agency that specializes in cleaning up then selling haunted houses. Cory Doctorow gave it a big plug the other day:

Okay we kinda fell off the track there with our Halloween feature but we'll play super catch up until the big day. here's Stephen Price's take on Hellboy as Eustace Tilley, the New Yorker's cartoon mascot, in a submission for their annual Eustace Tilley art contest.

HABE writes with some links to webcomics suitable for the spooky season, starting with his own anthology The Midnight Tea Party, a Goth Lolita collection of tales, and "Fairy Soup" illustrated by Ashley Cope, creator of Unsounded (below).

Now that the second season of THE WALKING DEAD is a smash hit , just in case you missed 'em here are six AMC=produced webisodes showing how various zombies got to be cut in half and so on. WARNING: high squeam factor.

Via The Horror of it All Blog, comes this Atlas story drawn by Everett Raymond Kinstler from the September 1953 issue of MYSTERY TALES #15. Crime does not pay!

Today's image is pretty strong stuff so to see the whole thing, you'll have have to click on the thumbnail. It comes to us from Sam Costello, who writes:

This image is from our latest story, A Mother's Love, for Split Lip Comics. I wrote it and David Hitchcock (Whitechapel Freak, Springheeled Jack, etc.) drew it. The story is about a monster plaguing a small town in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

You can read the whole story here.

While others celebrate Columbus, we will celebrate Torsten Adair, who's become our regular weekend poster, keeper of the Coming Attractions, and master of the roundup. Torsten has been commenting at the Beat as long as there's been a Beat, and somewhere back in the mists of the Mesozoic Era we said "Hey, if you're going to write all that you might as well post it."

Although on the East Coast, public displays were limited to looking like a crazy stormchaser in a raincoat. it was indeed Read Comics in Public Day yesterday. A parade of participants is on view in the link. There was also a women's division, at Women Read Comics in Public, too! which produced several photos, as well.

Hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday. Regular Beat service will resume tomorrow.

By all accounts, it was one of the biggest Free Comic Book Days yet, with most stores reporting "sell-outs" early on and crowds and -- importantly -- SALES that rivaled their biggest days ever. It was also a media event as over 200 news stories show.

Free Comic Book Day is Saturday, May 7th, 2011! And there are very likely some comics-related festivities happening in your area, or at the very least some free comic books. There are way too many happenings to cover here. Diamond has a master list of events, including interviews by Darwyn Cooke and Humberto Ramos and the FCBD site has a monster list of signings organized alphabetically by state!