It’s my favorite time of the year again, the month of October! The weather starts to change, a cool breeze blows, orange, yellow, and brown leaves fall, people decorate their houses with spiderwebs, skeletons, and pumpkins, conservative stores start selling all kinds of cool stuff like skulls and severed heads, and for the grand finale all the kids in the neighborhood dress up in a million different ways and take to the streets in droves… begging for sweets and celebrating our love for all things spooky. I probably sound hokey, but I love Halloween and everything about October. To celebrate my obsession, we’ll be presenting five Halloween-themed Skadi comics for the entire month of October (lucky me, there’s five Wednesdays in October this year!)

Tillie, a dearly devoted Dummite, was the first to notice the hidden bonus facial hair during our Secret Beard week: Big Pants Mouse’s tiny mustache and goatee!

For this, dear Tillie, you are hereby awarded a free Dumm Comics T-Shirt! Simply write us with your desired gender style, size, and mailing info, and we’ll send it out to you in a jiffy!

and Hey! Everyone else: If you would like a Dumm Comics t-shirt of your very own, why not take this opportunity to head on over to the Dumm Comics Store? Click on the pretty girl above to purchase a shirt and support Dumm Comics!

Our guest dummy this week is James Russo, an amazingly talented and funny cartoonist hailing from Providence, Rhode Island. James’ website, www.milkmoneycartoons.com, is a shinning oasis in this endlessly desolate cyber-landscape we call the interweb. Milkmoney Cartoons carries with it the rarely combined ingredients of creativity, humor, awesome drawings, and a keen wit. To top it all off, Russo is an extremely prolific soul. His website has tons of content on it. Its unique layout makes it a literal click-fest/grab bag of entertainment. You can easily spend an hour there and not get bored. I’m serious, check it out!

Thanks for Joining us for SECRET BEARD WEEK, during which we featured funky, funny and freaky FACIAL HAIR in EVERY strip! Look closely… there is still a super-special prize up for grabs!

First off, thanks to everyone who showed up to the Comic Chatcast! It was really fun hearing from the fans and we hope to do something similar again soon.

In other news, we’ve finally written the second part of the Ballad of Skadi. Diseasoid has once again dawned his magical minstrel’s hood and gained the power of song so that he can tell us more about Skadi’s quest. If you missed the first part of the Ballad of Skadi, you can see it by clicking the image below:

Hey everyone! This Tuesday at 10pm eastern (7pm pacific) Comic ChatCast is hosting a live chat session with all of the Dumm artists. This will be a real time event, where anyone and everyone can ask us about anything and everything. Just head over to www.comicchatcast.com and register so you can chat it up with us all night. We hope to see you there!

No, not the band, but awesome animator/designer Devin Roth!  Devin’s a fellow member of the CalArts mafia.  He’s works both as a character designer and animator, and is currently the Creative Director at GoAnimate!, and new website where anyone can learn how to make cartoons.  To see more of his comics and personal work check out http://scatterbraininc.com/

Also, check out some of his commercial work, and awesome films!

Go Animate! Commercial

Ritz Commercial

Fools Gold

Some more of his design work:

For the last two years I had the honor to work on the Nickelodeon Television Series El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera. In fact, all of the Head Dummies worked on this show! Katie did animation and specialty poses, Luke and Sean did storyboards, Gabe directed several episodes and Fred was an assistant director. Dumm webmaster Matt edited some kickass animatics!

Today I had the privelege to view the spectacular series finale, with a final short storyboarded by yours truly! The image above is an amazing digital painting by the El Tigre Character Design and Background teams, taken from one of my very own storyboard panels! Character Designer Extraordinaire Steve Lambe posted a description of the process involved to create this image, on his blog.

Special thanks to Jorge R. Gutierrez and Sandra Equihua, the creators of El Tigre (the world’s most beautiful animated television series). Also endless thanks to Dave Thomas, Roman Laney, Doug Langdale, Scott Kreamer, Tim Yoon, and the entire El Tigre and Nickelodeon team for the opportunity to be a part of this tremendous masterpiece!

Watch for episodes of El Tigre on the Nicktoons network.

I’ve always found barbarian theology (ie: paganism) to be both hilarious and endlessly fascinating. Just the idea that these brooding, hulking, strong people would have even greater brooding, hulking, strong gods who they look up to is such a great thing. When barbarians get together to discuss their theological differences, things get even more interesting. The discussion most often revolves around whose god could kick the other god’s ass. Here’s a fine example of barbarian theology that’s partly responsible for inspiring this Skadi comic:

Yes, Big Pants Mouse does have a girlfriend named Suzy Sunshine. At least that’s what he thinks. Suzy is a girl who likes Big Pants to work for her heart. She is a kind gal with needs and wants just like anyother, but can our pantsed mouse fulfill these needs? Does he even know what they are? Does anyone really know what a girl’s needs are?!