The Dynamite 3-D Poster Book (1979, Neal Adams, Scholastic Book Services)

In grade school, I was a regular patron of the Scholastic Book Club, the children's reading program that let kids order books and records from a catalog once a month and have them delivered right to their classroom.

If receiving a copy of Norman Bridwell's How To Care for Your Monster, or C.B. Colby's Strangely Enough in front of all your envious classmates wasn't incentive enough to place an order, there was sometimes a special offer for a free poster as a bonus. Admittedly these were usually lame "cute animal" posters... kittens clustered in tall grass or a droopy bloodhound wearing reading glasses, the kind of thing you might glimpse on the wall of one of the Bradford children on an episode of Eight is Enough.

But on one occasion there was a truly magnificent piece of art offered with your book order... a huge illustration of Dracula, standing in a graveyard against a full moon and a sky swarming with bats. And better still... it was in 3-D!

Now, the item below IS NOT the same image. I've yet to track down the exact poster that loomed over my bed throughout my formative years only to mysteriously disappear in the wormhole connected to my parent's garage. (UPDATE: FOUND! See bottom of post) But after laying eyes on this beauty, I'm convinced they were both by the same artist.

This specimen comes from the 1979 Dynamite 3-D Poster Book (which would place it around the same time I remember acquiring my poster), and wouldn't you know it, this is a Scholastic Book Services offering too! (Dynamite was a celebrity-focused kids magazine, published by Scholastic, Inc. beginning in 1974. Like People Magazine for the swing-set set.)

The artist is Neal Adams, who has wielded a pen for both Marvel and DC at various points throughout his comic drawing career, which began in the so-called Silver Age and continues today, drawing both superheroes (Batman, X-Men, Superman, Green Lantern, The Flash, et al) and monsters, sometimes for illustrated children's records like A Story of Dracula, The Wolfman and Frankenstein (Power Records, 1975).

The Dynamite 3-D Poster Book contains six posters by Adams (The Werewolf, The Horse aka "Run Free", The Vampire, Skateboard!, Clown aka "Look Out!", and The Sorcerer), which fold out to a size of approximately 16" x 22", a pair of cardboard red and blue anaglyph glasses, and a brief article about the history of 3-D (emphasizing its success as a 1950's movie fad, although the 1960 non-3-D William Castle film 13 Ghosts gets an honorable mention.)

These posters are really gorgeous... break out the 3D glasses and enjoy!

On a related note... does anyone happen to have a copy of this little poster visible on the wall of Nicholas Bradford's bedroom? I recognize it as one of a series of funny-caption posters that were about half-page in size and printed on cardstock, this one a baby orangutan caught in mid-screech, with the cartoon bubble reading "How Come I Always Have to Take Out the Garbage?" (or comparable hilarious sentiment.) The one directly above that is another in the same series, a baby with the caption "Bald is Beautiful". UPDATE: Found! See bottom of post.

Oh dear, I have to sit down before I collapse in a heap of mirth. Anyone have images of these things?

UPDATE: I finally found my stupid monkey sign! Turns out its from the Wallace Berrie Company of Van Nuys, California, maker of hilarious signs (most suitable for children, but a few with slightly risque' drug or sex references clearly targeted at older teens and adults), novelty knick-knacks, and cutesy figurines, including, in the early 1980s, Smurf characters. 

Dated 1976 (the year prior to Eight Is Enough's first season), here's sign #7719:

UPDATE (8/2021) The original elusive "3-D Count Dracula" poster turned up in an Ebay auction. It is indeed a Weekly Reader Book Club poster, #6486. Although the artist is not credited, it SURE looks like "The Vampire", above. Here is a picture from the auction.

Please, Sign In! (1981, Weekly Reader)

Back in the olden days before Internet social media profiles and emoji voting buttons, if kids wanted to document and share their likes and dislikes within their circle of friends, they had to get a little creative.

Enter "Please, Sign In!", a Weekly Reader entry that I ordered through my grade school Scholastic Book Club sometime in the early 80s (the publishing date is 1981). It's "compiled" by Edward J. Zagorski and Robert F. Gaynor, although that's really nothing to brag about since it's little more than a list of bland survey questions printed on a ruled notepad.

Unless TV sitcoms have lied to me, this type of friend-friendly questionnaire is called a "slam book", (the idea being the respondents write in their answers anonymously, allowing them to "slam" their peers with brutally honest opinions). Questions are supposed to be personal, embarrassing and salacious.

I first heard the term "slam book" in a 1982 Facts of Life episode, "Kids Can Be Cruel", where the book is circulating campus and the gals of Eastland Boarding School snicker over some of the cruel nicknames written in for an acne-scarred boy at neighboring Bates Academy.

The emotional consequences of such unhindered opinion-posting were also dramatized in a 1987 young-adult novel "Slam Book" by Baby-Sitters Club author Ann M. Martin.

Mid-90s magazine Ben Is Dead deemed slam books to be a significant paper artifact of Generation-X history, featuring them alongside cootie-detectors and M.A.S.H. fortune-tellers in the first of what would become a three-issue long retro-nostalgia deep dive (Retro Hell! Issue #25, 1995).

But "Please, Sign In!" is just a kiddified and commodified version of this DIY phenomenon, so the term "slam book" is never used within its pages, and the questions are of the non-controversial variety (with some cute illustrations by Richard Maccabe.)

Unfortunately this is not the actual specimen from my youth, but a recently acquired unused copy, so I don't have the pleasure of presenting my grade-school classmates hand-written answers, just the original dull questions.

The Whistle (Strangely Enough)

Here's an unnerving tale culled from the pages of the Scholastic Book Club's collection of "chilling stories" and "offbeat yarns", Strangely Enough (C.B. Colby, 1959).

In The Whistle, a South Carolina woman living on a remote farm with her dog is repeatedly startled by a strange, unnatural whistling sound emitting from somewhere in the neighboring woods. The  whistle seems to be coming closer every time she hears it, and the high-pitch of the sound disturbs her pet terrier.

One evening, the noise returns and is so loud and frightening she bolts the front door, leaving her dog barking hysterically on the front porch, until suddenly... silence. The next morning she inspects the scene only to find her dog is missing, the porch splattered with blood.

What was the source of the whistle? What happened to the dog?

"Nobody ever found out."

Read the complete text of the story above. While "The Whistle" leaves it a mystery, I have my own theory. The dog could very well have been the victim of a shadmock.

What is shadmock? To explain, I'll first need to brief you on the confusing geneology of monsters. Luckily there's a visual aid for that.

You see, the three primary monsters at the top of the family tree are the vampire, the werewolf and the ghoul. When a vampire and werewolf breed, the offspring is called a werevamp. A werewolf and ghoul produce a weregoo, while a vampire and ghoul produce a vamgoo.

A weregoo and werevamp make a shaddie, weregoo and vamgoo a maddie, and werevamp and vamgoo, a raddie. Now any combination of shaddies, maddies and raddies results in a mock (a polite term for mongrel).

And should a mock mate with any of the other hybrids... they produce a shadmock, lowest on the monster geneological hierarchy.

Shadmocks do not bite or tear at their victims... they only WHISTLE. But their whistle is very deadly. There was one particular shadmock who lived at a remote English castle, so remote that his only friends were the pigeons.

One morning he noticed a stray cat stalking his feathered friends...

...and before he could do anything about it, the cat had a mouthful of pigeon.

The shadmock let loose the eerie, inhuman whistle for which his race is known...

...and in short order, the cat turned into, well... this.

You don't even want to know what happened to the woman he was wooing after she tried to run out on him and he had to whistle for her to come back home.

The story of the shadmock comes from the 1980 cult classic The Monster Club (here's a rendering of the unfortunate cat incident as it appeared in the comic book adaptation of the story)