Your weekly dose of vampires, melodrama and pink hair. Buy the Season 1 book!

Using Ann Laurie's photo studio in a box, I caught some crisp pictures of various dolls yesterday at doll club in Burlington. ( Read more... )

Signal boost for Vera Nazarian's monstrous mashup between Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and an original subplot containing mummies, vampires and other beasts. Regency manners meet things that go bump. Laughs result. It's Mansfield Park and Mummies!!

Watch a real video of a mechanical doll with a real face watching a video of fake faces and yearning after the fake reality on the real screen with true desire. It reminds me of the scene in MirrorMask when Helena gets literally all dolled up by the clockwork music box mannequins.

Hello LHF readers and fans! Season 1 is now available in print form! Just think of it...a book for your favorite doll soap opera!

You can buy a print or a download copy right here at Lulu.com: Love Has Fangs

Why should you buy it?

1. Support 1:6 storytelling!
2. It's better than the online version. See below!

Being undead is the least of Anneka Richardson's problems. There's her 140-year-old boyfriend, Will, who borrows her makeup, the weirdo customers she encounters at her bookstore job and, to top it off, her beloved grandmother's slow death by Alzheimer's.

The first season of Elizabeth A. Allen's online comic Love Has Fangs finally appears in book form. It's all here -- the vampires, the melodrama and the pink hair -- in your favorite doll soap opera with bite.

This collection gathers together all episodes of Love Has Fangs: Season 1 as you've never seen them before. This is the new, improved version, better than what you've read online.

Episodes reshot for consistency
Tighter editing for better story flow
High-quality photos, better than those online, for fine-grained detail

Thanks for the comments, mouse clicks and patronage over the years!

In which Qingting comforts Anneka from her sadness.

I saw New Moon this weekend. It was a damn sight better than Twilight, since it had more plot and more active characters. However, I picked out at least 5 times where it could have ended before it actually did. Also, unfortunately, Robert Pattinson was absent for the bulk of the movie, so I couldn't stare at his nose.

In which Viktor tries to get into Will’s pants [again].

So I really like my GOML Minuk, who I've turned into Maggie, but her overexaggerated lip paint makes her look like a child beauty pageant contestant. To improve Maggie, I erased her lip paint, and the deep indent for her lip line works great to great the impression of a mouth. See? She also has a slight, petulant smile, which was not visible in the original paint job. ( Read more... )

When I first made Qingting, a Hun type vampire and associate of Chow Bang, she was an American Girl Girls of Many Lands doll on a cut-down Obitsu body, but I didn't like that because it was too tall and the arm fastenings too frail. I now have a new body for her, closer to her original height of 9". See photo below for how I transferred her original torso, hands and feet onto a 23cm Obitsu framework.

The next photo shows another GOML I've worked on recently. She was original a Yupik Native Alaskan character, Minuk, but she has now been repurposed and rearticulated to be Maggie, Absinthe's sort-of niece.( Read more... )

...about an envious Goth whose popular and perfect twin sister becomes a vampire? Sign me up for Thicker Than Water: Vampire Diaries 1, not coming anywhere to a theater near you. Clearly I need to see this.

When Janet sings that line in Toucha Toucha Touch Me In Rocky Horror, she's talking about an itch to scratch that she herself can't reach. Did you know there's a word for the part of your body where you cannot reach to scratch? It's called "acnestis." Just reading the word makes me itch.

In which Anneka meets Qingting, friend of Chow’s and world’s youngest grandmother.

The CSS on the admin page for my WordPress blog, where I post eps of LHF, is broken, prohibiting me from making new posts. DAMMIT! I don't know how to fix it.

Michaela started off in an earlier incarnation as a CG head on a CG 1.0 body, but, when I redid her, I put her CG head on an articulated Barbie body with Obitsu hands, then painted the arms and neck to match her head's color. [Linked entry shows her before skintone matching.]

Michaela's Barbie body, while being appropriately small and slight for a girl that was killed and vamped at 13, does not pose very well. But Michaela is a key player in the next few seasons [in the Anneka and Will vs. Thomas plotline], so she needs to pose well! That's why she's getting a Volks Dollfie Plus body. Though I have eschewed these bodies in the past because of their fragile floppiness, I choose one now because, unlike an Obitsu, the neck width of a Volks will make Michaela's head look in proportion. Hooray!

In light of my recent completion of the quiz about my invisible illness, this entry on FWD [Feminists With Disabilities] has me thinking. If I can come out publically as having a mental illness, can I go further with a political/social self-definiton of "disabled?" I commented:

Nellie Jean said, I’m also “afraid” of coming out PWD because I never thought I had it “bad enough.”

I can understand that sentiment thoroughly. I have a sister with cerebral palsy, so the manifestations of her disability have strongly affected what I think of as “disabled.” I am very much loath to identify as disabled with my anxiety disorder and occasional depressive episodes because they don’t seem “bad enough.” The medical model is clearly talking here. I have more thinking to do.

Thank you for the post, Abby.

In which Mark's Halloween party is fabulous!

While wandering around, looking for another deck that appeals to me as much as the luxurious, out-of-print Bohemian Gothic Tarot, I found the slightly more cheerful, equally intriguing and phantasmagorical Tarot of the Sweet Twilight. Following the general Rider-Waite format of traditional U.S. decks, the Sweet Twilight differs from other, more staid decks with its loopy, curly, slightly cartoony illustrations. Bright, soft colors, large-eyed figures and vibrant depths all add up to a dreamy, melancholy set of pictures. It reminds me of a nighttime circus, compelling and yet slightly creepy. Being in print, the Sweet Twilight deck is much more affordable than the Bohemian Gothic [sob!].

So I was browsing around Aeclectic Tarot, idly looking through decks by theme, and of course I checked out the Vampire grouping. Among these I found not strictly a vampiric deck, but a dark and moody one in general, the Bohemian Gothic from Magic Realist Press. The deep, cool blues and jewel-like brights, the profusion of skulls and the disturbingly staring eyes, all in the style of Victorian lithographs, are heavily influenced by Gothic and Romantic tropes. Admire many of the cards at the deck's own Web site. Then weep because it's out of print and commanding nearly $400.00 on Amazon.com. Dammit...and I really liked that deck!

I didn't say it. Stephen Marche says it in Esquire. He thinks that the recent spate of popular vampires represents not, oh, say, dangerous sensuality or suave seductiveness or something, but the desire of straight women to get into bed with gay men. He provides no actual evidence for his claim, other than noting that True Blood's anti-vamp crowd ["God hates fangs!"] sounds a lot like the anti-gay crowd. In fact, not till the end of his blithering ramble does Marche reveal what may be his thesis: