Devil Doll

Hello, it’s my 23rd birthday today and I have a number of things I want to show you, but I don’t want to overload this page, so I’ll save some things for later.
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Many times I have talked of the virtues of the first four series of Monster in My Pocket and Mighty Max toys, how they were an important part in finding myself in childhood and then finding myself again at the end of my teen years.
I saw a programme a while ago about toys that said that most little girls when left alone in a room with boys toys and girls toys,,, they tend to play with the boys toys. The programme also said that the toy companies know this, but have a stubborn old fashioned attitude and want to keep forcing the traditional girl toys centred around fashion, make up, pets, animals, housewife duties and bringing up children.

But the weird thing is that all these girls’ toy franchises outlive the boys toy franchises and I deeply resent that. Polly Pocket outlived Mighty Max by several years, and more recently I seen it happen again, when Monster in my Pocket was revived in 2006 with the mythology/folklore/legend theme of the first four series, it died very quickly. But the various girls versions based around cute animals were launched at the same time and are selling well to this day, selling in all sorts of shops you can find anywhere, when Monster in My Pocket was restricted to ONE store called Woolworths((which has fallen on hard times)).
How do these girls toys sell so well if they are not remembered or enthused about later in life? I have a feeling that little girls are more persuasive and some of them can raise more hell than little boys if they don’t get what they want. Does that sound real? I just think of all the girls I used to see who demanded to have every Barbie accessory and then didn’t give a toss about Barbie in a years time. Boys toys don’t make the same impression on everyone and a lot of them are not imaginative at all, but there are certainly a few that are really celebrated.

Perhaps these boys’ toys don’t last because there are videogames and Games Workshop/Warhammer to fill those monster loving needs. But a lot of girls play these games too and I’ve noticed girls getting more geeky in the last 10 years((in good ways and bad ways)) mostly centred around Japanese things. (((Completely unrelated: Did you know that more than half of the people who create violent gore torture porn Japanese comics are women? I don’t know why I was surprised, because there is a very visible community of girls who like drawing and reading that on the internet. It’s just that these are usually called misogynistic))).

Anyway, I’ve been reading about mythical monsters in the last few weeks more than I ever have, been buying lots of books about it and it’s a lot of fun, I’ll make a list of books for you guys some time later. My favourites are Nuckelavee, Dullahan, Banshees, Bogeyman, Bloody Bones, Jenny Greenteeth, Cerebus, Ghouls and Minotaur. My favourites are often something to do with the countryside I live in and what feels like it could come around the corner,, almost like inherited fears and memories of the countryside. So a lot of the are of Scottish/Irish/Celtic legend.


Here is the complete(?) and extremely rare card art for the first three series of Monster In My Pocket, many of which were supposed to be in the third series but never got released as toys. I like the crudeness of the art...
Card Art

Best Gallery of the first four series of toys

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Along with Andrzej Masianis, my other most favourite artist I’ve discovered on Monster Brains is Albin Brunovsky. I just bought “Albin Brunovsky Complete Graphic Work 1960- 1997”, it cost me just under 100 pounds((including posting and packaging from a Slovakian store, sadly the only place you can buy the book from.)) but it was more than worth it.
The book does not have everything, so when it says “Complete” it refers to a certain type of work he was doing, unfortunately it only has one small black and white photo of his seemingly very few paintings, some cool photos of his stage design, and it does not feature all his children’s book art. But what it does have is Hundreds of his amazing drawings and some photos and interviews with him.
It is a shame that there are so few places to buy this book from, I emailed this shop...
Slovakian shop
...and a guy set up paypal for me over emails and I bought it from him. The only other book option is a 1990 book which is far easier to find and much cheaper, but Brunovksy did his best work in the last 15 years of his life((it can be done, what an inspiration)) , so the 1990 book misses out on a lot of amazing work.

Here are some scans I made...









Here is some childrens book art not included in the book...
Book Art
Here is Monster Brains gallery links...
3 Monster Brains Links
Here is a 4 page gallery not linked to from Monster Brains...
4 Pages
Here is another shop option...
Brunovskys Son's Shop

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The Silent Hill soundtracks you can buy, are never the full music tracks that you hear in the games, they usually want to fit it all into one disc and compress all the best moments into one hectic nightmare without a lot of the eerie calm you will hear when playing the game, and while I think the “compressed” soundtracks are possibly better, a few of the tunes do suffer from being crammed in and mixed with the others. Here is what I think is the best one from Silent Hill 1 in it’s much better full length glory...

...On the cd you can buy in shops, this is very different and not as good,, Konami should eventually release the full soundtracks on cd, but in the time being, the person who uploaded to Youtube this has the complete full length music to every game in the series, including several different versions and lots of unreleased stuff.