So how is everyone digging this years Halloween blogfest across the internets?  I know I sure am.  Seems like I'm bending the space/time continuum to do it, but I'm finding the time to both post and read a good bit of everyone else's posts as well.  Here's to keeping up that pace (and since I'm playing with astrophysics, I'm going to take a crack at that sticky time travel issue that everyone seems to think is improbable…)

For today's countdown post I'm going to do my last Halloween themed Peel Here column for the foreseeable future (as I'm running out of sticker fodder to post in general, and haven't found all that much in the Halloween-y vein to begin with.)  It will be a beaut though as it's a huge set of Donruss baseball/monster-themed sticker cards from 1988 called Awesome! All*Stars…



The copy of the set that I procured is actually from the Canadian subsidiary of Donruss, Leaf (which I hated while collecting Baseball Cards growing up since they seemed like counterfeit cards, no offense to my brethren from the great white north intended.)  The set consists of 98 different sticker cards and 1 checklist card, which one of the biggest sticker card sets I've seen (much more in line with the other Donruss sets, the CHiPs and Zero Heroes sticker cards I talked about awhile ago.)  For one thing, the whole set is made up of stickers instead of just having a smaller subset, but it's still over twice as large as anything that Topps has issued since the early 70s (even Garbage Pail Kids sets typically only contain 40 or so unique stickers.) 

Not only that but I have a theory that these are also all drawn/painted by the same artist, and I think I've even pin pointed his name, B.K. Taylor.  Actually it was sort of a bit of kismet figuring this out as I have another separate item that I'm going to take about this month, a Monster joke book published in the late 80s that contains illustrations eerily similar to the work in this set (as well as having some baseball themed monsters that are pretty damn close to one of the characters in the set.)  When I was researching him online I also stumbled upon a set of cards I'm positive he did called Odd Rods (in another odd coincidental bit of kismet, a reader of Branded asked me to help him identify this sticker card set this past month!)  You can see more of Mr. Taylor's artwork here.  I'm a pretty big fan of this style of goofy monster, a descendant of Big Daddy Ed Roth's Rat Fink...











I was kind of excited while flipping through this set for the first time.  These are set up in that G.P.K.-esque tradition of taking a name and combining it with an attribute to give the characters a little more personality, and for the first time that I can remember there was not only a "Shawn" card, but it was spelled like my name (and not like apparently every other Sean or Shaun out there.) Of course, this rare Shawn, is also Shawn the Sissy, a nail biting girly monster in a tutu (as you can see in the upper left below.)  You can probably imagine my football-pulled-out-from-under-Charlie Brown-like scream of "AAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHH" when I came upon it.  Sheesh.















The card backs were split two ways, with half of the set getting short little punny bios, and the other containing puzzle pieces to make a giant poster…



Seriously, this set has a pretty big card back poster (at 28 cards, four rows of seven cards), though it's not quite as big as the CHiPs card back poster (which contained 66 card backs.)



I was surprised that with a set this big there wasn't a ton of repeated jokes, though there was one instance that was pretty glaring in terms of repeating the funny…



All in all I'm in love with these stickers and I kind of lament that I was "out of" sticker collecting by that point or I'd probably have been introduced to it decades earlier.

So the rough plan for this month is to only post on weekdays, but I'm still toying with the idea of doing some spooky movie commentary on the weekends.  We'll see how that goes, or in what form it might take…