The Lakeview Cemetery: Come for the Dead…Stay for the Living!

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I do love a good graveyard, but visiting the Lakeview Cemetery during my short visit to Cleveland was at the bottom of my “to-do” list. This would prove to be a terrible oversight, and, looking back on my trip, it would be one of the activities I think about most. Several notable Cemeteries have been featured on this blog, and living in Chicagoland, there’s still plenty more I could cover. In fact, I live about fifteen minutes from the infamous Bachelor’s Grove, one of the most reportedly “haunted” places in the world. The Lakeview Cemetery, however, isn’t the kind of place one creeps around during the Halloween season with flashlights and Ouija boards. In fact, despite its status as a burial ground, this place is very much alive, and I don’t mean in a Night of the Living Dead sort of way.

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Prelude to the New Jersey Horror Con: Cleveland Rocks! (and by Rocks, I mean Fossils)

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Back in March, I committed to attending the New Jersey Horror Con & Film Festival with my friend, Jason Schoolcraft. I really wanted to see Peter Criss, the original drummer from the rock band KISS, and with Jason in Rhode Island and me in Chicago, it seemed like a great opportunity to meet up. In the interim, I had to decide whether I was willing to make the full 14-hour trip in one day or stop somewhere and spend the night. I decided to turn this into a mini vacation and take my new car on its maiden road trip. I’m definitely a road-tripping, roadside America kind of guy, but my old Toyota just couldn’t cut it anymore. In March, I gave my son my old red RAV4 and bought myself a new Hybrid model. Satisfying my wanderlust was long overdue, and after some research, I settled on Cleveland, Ohio, as my midway destination. Although I’ve been to Cleveland before and have seen its zoo, the Christmas Story House, dined on its famous pierogies, and visited the childhood home of Joe Siegel, the co-creator of Superman, there were still plenty of other things I wanted to see, most notably the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum. I made plans to leave on Wednesday, May 27th, and spend two nights in Cleveland before meeting up with Jason at the Con on Friday. It would prove to be one of the best decisions I’d ever made. 

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V.N. Thompson’s “Deadly Nature” …  Harmful Humans Making Mutant Mongrels!

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I finally got around to re-reading an ‘80s horror paperback I’ve had in my collection for years, V.N. Thompson’s “Deadly Nature.” As with most books from this era, it was the cover that initially drew me in, and I remember purchasing it at local Crown Books when I was in high school, spending $4 of my hard-earned money bagging groceries at a local store. Cut to nearly forty years later, I now own two copies of this book: a nice, crisp collector’s copy, along with my old, worn one that not only qualifies as a “Paperback from Hell” but effectively looks like Hell. In fact, it’s so beaten up, I used one of its fallen pages as a bookmark.

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Joliet “KISS Expo” More Like a Peck on the Cheek

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On Sunday, May 3rd (the day after FREE Comic Book Day), I joined my friend, Jason Lucas, for a KISS Expo in Joliet, Illinois. This event should not be confused with the much larger KISS gathering that took place last month in Indianapolis and featured the band’s frontman. Paul Stanley, as a guest. Although we had both planned on attending that event, we bowed out at the last minute. For my part, I have a road trip coming up in a couple of weeks where I’ll be meeting up with yet another Jason (Jason Schoolcraft) in New Jersey, which also has a bit of a KISS theme. More on that later, as today we’ll be focusing exclusively on our “poor man’s” KISS Expo, instead.

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The Ins and Outs of FREE Comic Book Day

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Last Saturday, the nerd world celebrated FREE Comic Book Day, an event I’ve participated in since my kids were little. Now they’re all grown up and have sufficiently outgrown me, so what was once a family outing has morphed back into solo ventures. No worries, I’ve been collecting comics on and off since before they were born and can now take part without worrying about what’s ‘kid friendly.’ Thanks to YouTube, I can also approach things strategically, armed with a specific list of what I’m looking for. FREE Comic Book Day kicked off in May of 2002 and has been observed every first Saturday in May since then. I haven’t done all of them, but I did this past one, and here’s how it went…

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