Making of "Specter Halloween"

It was love at first sight for our youngest and our Beetlejuice Sandworm inflatable Halloween decoration.  He was only 2 and ever since he's been obsessed with all things spooky.  

I wanted to do a comic about his favorite shop, Spirit Halloween.  For those unfamiliar, they are Halloween costume and decor shops that only open for a couple of months a year -which makes it quite the event!  Some of the animatronics can be genuinely scary and I'm always surprised how well our guys deal with it.  There was one year where our oldest refused to go, but otherwise they've both enjoyed our family Halloween ritual.

Our 5yo's teacher was telling me about her 3yo's first trip to Spirit and how he merrily walked up to a terrifying clown animatronic to shake his hand.  Our sons are very similar and I could totally see my guy doing that, which gave me the idea for this comic.  It was a cute set up, but it needed something more.  I added a twist by making the "scary" animatronic a human.

Getting the 1st panel to read right was a pest!  It's always hard when you need to show 2 directions at once.  I needed to show he shop, with the spoof Spirit Halloween logo, but I also wanted to show the family's expressions.  My first thought was to have the camera from the side as they open a door with the logo on it, but one of the iconic things about Spirit are the big orange banners they throw up over whatever abandoned shop they've invaded.  I googled "Spirit Halloween outside" and found this picture for reference for the shop exterior. 

I managed to fudge the angles a little and have the family walking together in the parking lot.  I say fudge, because they're sideways a little, but I think I got away with it!  The background colors were surprisingly hard to get right.  I had the building dark like the photo above, but then the banner popped too much.  I lightened it all up, but then the sky looked too dark!  It took some messing around to balance everything.

The second panel was also hard work!  I draw animals because I don't like drawing people and this was no exception!  I roughed it out with the human from my Curse of the Manwolf comic, but I knew I had to draw something new for the real thing.  I drew a lumberjack type dude, maybe because of a werewolf animatronic I'd recently seen?  J suggested I lose the beard to make him look more human -after all, the skin would probably be the creepiest part to a cat person!

Again, the colors in panel 2 were hard, plus drawing the rest of the family huddled together in a natural way with no weird tangents.  All in all, what I thought would be a "simple, 2 panel comic" turned into a few days of work and after looking at it for so long, I kind of hate it now!  Oh well! (: