If you’re a loyal reader of our Friday Features, I hope you’ll excuse the lateness and brevity of this week’s – sometimes you over-commit your Friday and life’s great passions get pushed, briefly, to the back burner.
Since this is our last Halloween-special Friday feature before the day itself, I wanted to focus on the kid-friendly side of Halloween. It’s a well known American tradition to carve open innocent squashes before we go around a dress up in costumes and beg for candy from strangers (ordinarily not a good life-retention strategy). What may not be as well known is that these practices are extraordinarily silly.
So it’s in honor of Halloween’s outright silliness that I feature two really fun Halloween-y things that are appropriate for all ages.
First and foremost, this movie:
ParaNorman is a movie I really can’t recommend enough. It’s a stylized animated feature about a kid who can see dead people. It’s definitely fun, kid-friendly, and has a good heart, but it doesn’t pull any punches with the intensity of the story. Everybody can find something to love about this film!
I have to confess something about my next recommendation in this last (Late Night Double) Feature – I haven’t actually read it.
Whoops!
But oh well, I’ve hear some really solid recommendations for it, flipped through it in my local comic book store, and I did learn that the artist is from nearby! Buy local, am I right?
In any case The Halloween Legion: The Great Goblin Invasion is a kid-friendly comic (which are rare enough these days, more on that in another post) about a team of heroic Halloween-costume-stereotypes (a ghost, a witch, a skeleton, and a devil) that pop up to save the day.
Since I haven’t read it, I can’t really divulge any more details about the story, but I’m given to understand there are goblins involved.
All kidding aside, I hope you pop over to your local comic book store and check it out! I hope I’m able to soon.
The Promethean Playground 