Goosebumps Tooseday: The Werewolf of Fever Swamp
Well I’ll be damned. What are you doing here? It’s a Tuesday! Don’t you know you’re supposed to come over for your Tooseday fix? Well come on in, your Goosebumps is getting cold. No good letting good bumps go to waste. I swear, I can’t be bothered to pick a favorite for the life of me. We’re keeping it chronological! Today’s feature: The Werewolf of Fever Swamp
Now I think we've pretty much established that I'm not about picking favorites here. When you hopscotch across a series of work as diverse in tone and subject matter as Goosebumps, you end up front loading all the "good ones" early on. Plus you raise your chances of missing a few in the mix.
As I've also established, I've got favorites. There are some covers that are just objectively better than the rest. When they come up, I'll point em out. And for the next few weeks, I’m going to be doing a lot of pointing, as Goosebumps 13 through 16 have some fantastic covers. Today’s feature is a favorite. Here's why.
There are a handful of images floating in the cultural landscape that instantly call to mind Old School Horror. You’ve got the dilapidated castle set against the midnight lightning storm. The single decayed hand reaching out from a freshly dug grave. The coffin whose top is slowly being lifted open from the inside. These are the images that evoke the monsters of yesterday, the black and white nightmares that haunt us still. And nothing quite screams Old School Horror like the lone wolf, howling at the moon.
It’s a loaded image, one that Jacobus does well. He contrasts the simplicity of the central Wolf/Moon imagery with a rich background bursting with detail. Just look at those trees! The distant banks of the swamp! Even the moonlight is gorgeous! Compared with the simple color gradients of Piano Lessons Can Be Murder and Night of The Living Dummy, this cover’s background delivers.
You got to hand it to Tim Jacobus; when the man comes up with a color scheme he commits to it, realism be damned. We’ve seen a few staple complimentary color schemes already. Red & Blue, Teal & Orange, and Red & Green all show up regularly throughout the series run. But one color scheme that Jacobus truly nails, is Purple & Green
Whenever Jabobus breaks out the Purple and Green his paintings take on that distinctly Goosebumps aesthetic. Water becomes impossibly iridescent while the sky ditches reality all together to go light purple. Nothing in the scene reflects the world as it is, and yet it is rendered in such detail that we believe it.
That's all for this week folks. If you have a suggestion for what cover we look at next week, build a paperclip chain. Each link must be 3 clips wide for the first five links, 4 clips wide for the next five links, and so on. Once you've gotten a paperclip chain strong enough to tie down a grown man to a rolling chair for five hours, it won't matter because we're keeping it chronological baby!