Halloween Disaster Party Flyer Art, 1987 (w/Bonus Look Back in Anger)

I'm finding some oddball old drawings and documents as I attempt to clean up the studio and all the files and the piles whenever I can take a break from my mansion and my yacht.

The flyer features my old character "Weenie" (clever, huh? He's a hot dog!) and was for a big deal party organized mainly by folks working at the comic shop for several adjacent/overlapping social circles, comic book people, RPG gamers, local college station WSIA deejays, assorted club-hoppers and band members and significant others, etc. 

The planning was hijacked by the biggest social bully in our group, who basically wanted to be the big man and play the big host. There were plenty of angry arguments while he pushed for making everything "bigger" and more complicated, eventually he  just pushed people away from wanting to even bother to help organize things. Everything got altered from the original plan of a pretty simple party for X amount of people for X amount of money and X amount of headaches. He insisted on the $5 door fee instead of $10 because he wanted as many people to get in as possible. We just wanted to cover expenses and control the crowd a little because it wasn't a huge hall and have a fun night jumping around in stupid costumes. But this guy wanted to throw a big party and play deejay/club owner for the night. He took over almost everything and everyone got sick of fighting and gave in or gave up. We almost canceled more than once.

Everyone but DJ Stupid expected headaches and problems. Too many other people brought too many people, including teenage siblings, friends and hangers-on. Staten Island is a hermetic little borough with not much to do. Word got around. Most of these unexpected attendees ate and drank far more than $5 worth, of course. By the time I got there after work (delayed by a dead battery/jump from a friend in a Beast costume from the Beauty and the Beast TV series, and finding out some joker plastered comic book promo posters all over the passenger side of my car) the food was cleaned out, the beer was almost gone, there were drunk seventeen year olds stumbling around, only a few people were taking care of things like the bar and not letting trash pile up, nobody wanted to work the door, and the King of the Party stayed in the big room , only paying attention to his records, his socializing and making announcements. Everyone was on their own, which meant off somewhere drunk, hitting on other drunks, or dancing drunk. 

I ended up behind the bar by myself at the beer station because nobody was doing it. I was super-pissed, especially because I invited friends from Eternity Comics and when they showed there was nothing to eat and a lot of people were in a shit mood about how things were going. We expected problems, but not the mess we had on our hands practically before 11 pm. I felt embarrassed I dragged them out to Staten Island to watch people fuck up a party. We were so low on beer I started giving people I didn't like leftover/forgotten beer poured from used plastic cups into new plastic cups. There was an actual (chintzy) bar in the front room of the VA hall, so no one could see me working my Mr. Bartender Magic behind the scenes with the dregs left behind or brought over by people trying to clean up. They were too drunk to care, the band was on for a while and most everyone was on the dance floor in the larger room and that helped cut demand. People I liked got beer from the tap while it lasted. 

I was wearing a gorilla mask and a Vietnam-era marines uniform my step-father had given me. I told people I was dressed as "geurilla warfare". Some people laughed and most of us were drunk and in our twenties, so yeah, hilarious. 

The flyer indicates there was wine and punch and soda, I don't remember any of that. The tricky icky spite beer ran out pretty quickly. I remember being pretty proud of how long I managed to spread it out and water stuff down and whatever. I  feel like eventually people went out and got cases of beer, because there was n-o-t-h-i-n-g for a while, which always makes the crowd happy. At least by that time all the teenagers had gone home -- including the puke brigade subgroup -- so with all the underage army ants out of the picture at least that situation calmed down. 

My two non-Island friends left early, the band that substituted for Beat Brigade was the same old local band that always showed up for things, and they were awful. There was an ugly incident in the women's bathroom when a drunk guy barged in after a girl  -- luckily she wasn't hurt. It was super surreal to hear all this loud banging and commotion, and then a guy's running out of the place, being chased by a roided-up cop in a big floofy Ron Perlman Beast costume, a guy in law school dressed like Kevin Matchstick from Matt Wagner's Mage series, and a third guy who I don't remember anything about. And, yeah, Alex/Kevin Matchstick had a baseball bat painted white and was willing to use it on the creep. 

That incident put a pall on things (duh), and there were other obnoxious things happening because what else are big, poorly-organized parties for, right? And usually the host of a party has the worst time, too busy taking care of things and worrying to have fun -- but not our event promoter. Oblivious to almost everything happening outside his bubble that night, he couldn't understand why the rest of us who worked on the party were angry. At least we didn't get soaked on the hall rental, disappearing beer and food, etc. The only reason we broke even was because King Clublord forgot to do the costume contest and give out the $50 cash prize. Oy. What a mess that was. 

There are only so many Halloweens in a lifetime. It's a shame idiots and bastards ruin things for so many others because they're so screwed up and self-centered.

Hopefully, next year will be different. 

Happy Halloween!