Toddler Timothy's Delicious Candy Apples: A Halloween Tale
Toddler Timothy's Delicious Candy Apples: A Halloween Tale is a full-color zine written and illustrated by Alex Gleason. The title features 20 pages of full-color hand-drawn digital artwork, and is distributed through the official website as a physical copy and as a free PDF download. 1,000 copies of the zine were produced in October 2012, distributed by hand in San Antonio, TX, and mailed around the world.
Story
On a Halloween night, a toddler named Timothy is trick or treating in his neighborhood with friends when they stop at a pink house. Timothy's companions warn him not to approach it because a monster named Snaggle-Toothed Stanley is said to live there. Unphased and ignoring their warnings, Timothy rings the doorbell and is greeted with a diabolical, toothy grin. Stanley drops a candy apple into Timothy's basket and wishes him a Happy Halloween. Timothy begins to bite into his apple, smugly bragging to his friends, when he drops to the ground, gasping for air. He had swallowed a razor blade. His friends desert him, and Stanley drag's Timothy's into his house. Timothy is never heard from again.
Purpose
Originally created to be given away to trick or treaters, this zine parodies the unnecessary fear that elders have about the younger generation's Halloween candy being potentially poisoned or otherwise tampered with. While razor blades have been found in apples given away during Halloween, they were meant as pranks and there is no record of injury from them. Similarly, the only record of poisoned candy were in cases where criminals had a single specific victim in mind. In the author's opinion, it is still widely believed that candy is poisoned or rigged despite the wealth of evidence against such behavior, and this book parodies that by illustrating an extreme.
