J. and I attended a screening of the infamous zombie film Burial Ground the other night. It was a washed out print projected from a DVD with sound quality so poor that more often than not the mockery from the yokels in attendance drowned out the dialogue. Despite all that J. and I left impressed, due almost entirely to the zombie make-up.

I love Italian zombies most of all. Most other zombie movies seem to want to hold a mirror up to the viewer more or less as he or she currently exists, showing the walking dead as freshly dug from the grave. Italian zombies, on the other hand, are broken down, maggot infested, muck-encrusted fiends; what we will become as we patiently wait our turn in the damp earth.

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?