“Early on I fell in love with the Dragon Lady from Terry and the Pirates. She feared no one. She was impervious to all attacks. I thought, oh, that’s the way to be. Wouldn’t that be nice, if I could be like that, but I had hair like wet spaghetti, crooked teeth, moles all over my face, I was scrawny, my skin was yellow. I was ashamed of myself. I thought I was a useless slob. How dare I, how dare I relate to this magnificent creature who controlled all that she viewed. Well, yeah, I could play make believe, right? How kids do. And that was sort of the beginning of Vampira.”

Not five minutes into Vampira: The Movie, a documentary on the queen of horror hosts, and I’m confounded that I never made the connection.

Little Orphan Annie is one of my favourite comics, and is easily within my top 5 comic strips of all time. I love Annie so much that I somehow picked up two copies of Little Orphan Annie In The Great Depression, released in 1979 by public domain specialists Dover Publications. Some people collect variant covers of Lady Death comics. Not this guy.

I have a big box of stuff that I’m hoping to get rid of before I move, and the Little Orphan Annie book is resting on top. I’ve never been one of those people who was put off by Annie’s lack of pupils, but that cover has been freaking me out for a couple of days now. Sandy’s a fucking monster. After a few nights of lost sleep, I decided to crack open the collection and see if the image they used was somewhere in the book, and if so, whether they had tampered with it.

Who decided that it was a good idea to change an innocent yawn into a soulless maw from Hell?