Becoming Death Ray

The Death Ray, featured in Eightball #23 by Dan Clowes, is a costume I've wanted to do for a while. It looks so easy to do, yet the pieces are specific which makes it tricky to put together. I did a few weekends of hunting and managed to luck out most of the time. One thing I learned: living in Southern California makes plain long pants and sweatshirts hard to track down.

First off here is all the pieces for the costume:

Panty Hose! American Apparel had the color I needed.












A blue V-neck sweater. I found this at Ross for a couple bucks.












A striped shirt. This piece looks yellow in the comic. This is close, but it's more on the green side. H & M came through on this one.




















Blue pants. Finding long blue pants was really hard so thanks Dickies.com!




















A red belt that I found at Ross.




















Some killer superhero boots I found through Amazon.com












Oh yeah!




















Red gloves. I found these at Ozzie Dots, an awesome costume store.












And a ray gun (thanks again Ozzie Dots), a toilet paper tube(thanks bathroom), and a funnel (knew you would have these Home Depot!)!












So the shirts, pants and boots help me to at least be halfway there. I started working on the mask.

Panty hose on head: Successful!












Not being see through: Fail!












Painful: Success!

So to get the mask to work I had to get two layers of hose on my head. That helped out enough. Then I had to figure out the eyes.












I tried making a light charcoal outline while looking in the mirror. Pretty hard to do. After that I took the mask off and used white acrylic paint and a sharpie.












Eh not quite working. Kind of rushed it too.

Sticky eyes maybe?












Death Raytarded.

Later on when I wore the costume to work my friend Jackie traced the eyes on lightly with pen. Then I was a little more careful with the white acrylic and sharpie approach. It worked out fine.












I was thinking red kitchen gloves had to exist but I found nothing. I was facing having to spray paint some yellow ones red.




















I had a feeling the gloves would chip and shed red paint all day. That would be lame. Luckily I found those red gloves at Ozzie Dots and they did just fine. If anyone needs household gloves I have some in my closet now if you want them.

The gun, as you saw, involved 3 parts. I did a little modification to the gun by taking off the nozzle. This made it easier for the funnel to fit insde.












Then I cut the cardboard tube down a little less than half. The little glue rings made it easy to track and keep the cut even. Then I fused them all together with hot glue.




















I used yellow glossy spray paint and soon had my very own Death Ray! POP!












Finally pulled off the Death Ray costume! Here is a group shot of some Titmouse staff dressed up for Halloween.












I hope to be getting more pictures of my costume from friends and I'll post them up here.

If you haven't read Eightball #23 you should it's an awesome story. I also read that Jack Black's production company, Black and White Productions, has a movie in the works. So there is probably a Hollywood warehouse that, this whole time, had everything I needed.

Hope you all had a Happy Halloween!