Super-Villain Team-Up/M.O.D.O.K.'s 11 by Fred Van Lente

When you're a little brother, it's a fact of life that most of your clothing comes in the form of things your older brother has grown out of. Also, that odd looking helmet comes from my dad's short stint riding with Flint's mounted division (Yes, Flint, Michigan employs police on horseback). His tenure on the force meant that we had both a lot of crazy legendary family police stories (the time my aunt maced herself, the time dad's partner accidentally shot a hole through our bathroom wall) and a lot of old police equipment in our garage, including the real gun belt I'm rocking here. When I was a kid, my dad was a police officer in our hometown of Flint, Michigan. Although, both my brother Brian and I got way more mileage out of his Dracula cape and teeth, the latter of which probably gave us more shared colds than we can remember. For me it was as a ghost, and I think the silver-lined costume mom made is still somewhere in our house.

I don't remember much else from when I was four, but I remember this costume…probably because I kept wearing the mask around the neighborhood for years after that and insisting that my friend Kyle Davis was Robin because he was shorter than me and had black hair.Įveryone should dress up as a traditional 'spooky Halloween character' at least once in their life. (If you see me sometime, ask me to tell the story about when I met Adam West. I'm not sure if I was routinely crashing my Super Powers Batmobile into everything in our house at every available possibility at this point, but I am pretty sure I'd already taken to watching the old Adam West show and taking it 110% seriously by then. I've loved Batman so long I have no memory of not loving Batman, which should be pretty evident by the fact that I was dressing as him at the age of four. The Skeleton overthrow I'm wearing here was sewed by my mom along with a matching pillow case-style bag that I used every year after that. Or in the case of my first costume (and a lot of them on this list), they're made by the wearer's mom. They're made in part or in full by the wearer.

I don't know about the rest of you people, but to me, real Halloween costumes are not bought in a store ready to wear. It's time for the best holiday ever invented, and since I've spent the past month before the annual candy binge helping out at my mother's house, I decided to pull some photos from my Halloween archives and share some of the ridiculous lengths I've gone to for a rocking costume.

Super-Villain Team-Up/M.O.D.O.K.'s 11 by Fred Van Lente