election | BreBroBlog

Last year I did a Halloween/Election cover (and inside Halloween art) for the local alt-weekly paper in Asheville: The Mountain Xpress. This year, they wanted another one, so I had to come up with a new idea and it was a little harder to try to combine the two. Here are some of the things I doodled and brainstormed on before coming up with the one we used.

The final cover ended up looking like this once the heads and subheads were added:

2013 Mountain Xpress Halloween Cover by Brent Brown

I thought it was funny using the names of actual candies like Mr. Goodbar and Milk Duds to represent candidates that may be good or duds and having the costumed children/voters have to just pick one and hope for the best.

Some people didn’t think it was an original idea, but I promise if it was not, it was unintentional, as I can’t claim to have read every single other publication in every little or big market in the previous decades to make sure we were using something no one had ever thought of before regarding the common occurrence of these two events being so close together!

Anyway, I also drew some inside illustrations, the paper said they wanted. They just meant some bats or cobwebs or something, but I thought they wanted more and spent too much time drawing these classic monsters with appropriate Halloween candy to go inside:

Some of them actually got used!

And finally, my weekly cartoon in that issue needed to be Halloween-related as well (I thought, anyway) and so it turned out like so:

Cartoon by Brent Brown

The local alt-weekly paper in Asheville, NC that I draw a weekly cartoon for asked me to draw a humorous Halloween and Election cover for the issue that would fall on the week of both those events.

I gave them some roughs and thumbnails and sketches for some classic monsters (Dracula, Mummy, Invisible Man, Frankenstein’s monster, wolf man, etc.) and, on a different tack, maybe a jack-o-lantern and a ballot box?

We ended up doing some of them voting in different, yet appropriate ways:

The invisible man is voting, of course, absentee ballot and a ghost voting reinforces the often-cited claim that dead people are voting in our elections, incurring the wrath of an angry, 17th century voter fraud mob. Dracula and his vampire fangs prefer punch ballots and Frankenstein’s creature doesn’t know his own strength when even using a tombstone touch screen ballot.

2012 Halloween cover for Mountain Xpress by Brent Brown

They liked the Republican elephant Frankenstein monster and the Democratic donkey Dracula, so I ended up drawing both of those for inside illustrations: