ARCHIVE
The Gothtober Countdown Calendar™ is a curated time-release flash-based online museum of 31 works of art by 31 different artists. The official run of the show is from October 1st to the 31st, a new piece by a different contributor is revealed with each day of the month. Every calendar is designed and illustrated by Head Candycorn Julianna (JP) Parr (that’s me) but what’s inside the doors is up to the participant behind it! Here than, without further adieu is our “Gothtober Hall of Fame” containing no less than 270 original works from the last nine calendars since Gothtober’s inception in 2003. Click on a “museum piece” to visit the archived works from each year.
2011′s calendar adopted a “chain restaurant” theme. Gothtober Contributors are invited to participate in the annual theme, or just make something that goes with the general “Halloween” spirit of things. Since fast food and chain restaurants are one of the scariest things in existence, it was a perfect topic to explore. Music once again by Joshua Fielstra, which he was worried about being credited for because I asked him for “the worst canned chain restaurant music you can manage.” You’ll find pieces by celebrated animators Christine Panushka, Trixy Sweetvittles and Billy Kheel. You’ll also find some tasty treats from Cosmo Segurson, Kate Morrison, Barry Morse and Coral Lobera, The Gump Family and Monica Howe.
Welcome to the Haunted Boom Box! You can listen to three different fresh soundtracks while you peruse the knobs and levers of this totally tubular supernatural hi-distress sound machine. The songs were all composed by Joshua Fiestra, who went into his secret 80s laboratory full of dry ice and synthesizer crumbs only to emerge and then immerse you completely in a swath of audio ghostly retro bliss.
In 2009 we went to the “Drive-In” and you will indeed see some spooky cinematic moments, from recipes, to visits of actual drive-in theaters, to a plethora of strange macabre mini films. The Electones provided the excellent “Off to the Movies” soundtrack of the calendar.
The Latin version of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” by The Electones (Jason Myers, Mike Bolger and Jason Pipkin) graces the “Sugar Skull” theme we had for 2008. There’s no shortage of crazy and interesting stuff as usual!
Take a trip on the sunken S.S. Gothtober that went down in a storm many years ago. Step into a creaky rusty overgrown collection of weird tales, strange phenomenon, ghastly gruesome discoveries, Halloween recipes and more.
Gothtoberfest, with it’s lederhosen and eyeball-infested steins of beer was quite the rollicking time, complete with craft projects, a bicycle game involving downloadable dice that can be printed and used for an adventures on your two-wheeled steed.
Bubbling frothing insanity from the mad laboratory was in order for 2005, the sounds of the lab were culled and edited together by artist and author, Andrew Choate.
The second Gothtober Calendar EVER is hosted by music from the Electones (Joey K on drums in 2004) the gravestones within contain things like the gruesome fate of a mouse, a gumshoe mystery with dioramas of dolls, and a very moving photo slideshow about Dia de Los Muertos.
This was the very first Gothtober Calendar ever created! I’d tried a Christmas-themed calendar before this, one with collaborations like Gothtober, and one where all of the content was created by me, inside and out. Based off of the fact that Halloween is such an “Anything Goes” kind of holiday, and the countdown consists of six more days than a countdown to Xmas (which also means 6 more artists to work with) I stuck with the calendar that could be infinitely more weird.
The first 5 years of the calendar were programmed by Bill Luttrell
From 2007 onward our programmer has been Cathy Davies
High Priestess of web and compression for all the calendars is Cristin Pescosolido
