Artist Ray Villafane began carving pumpkins on a lark for his art students in a small rural school district in Michigan . The hobby changed his life as he gained a viral following online and unlocked his genuine love of sculpting. Here are images of pumpkin carvings Villafane created over the past five years.

We’ve got our eye on you, mister!

“Who said Ghostrider sucked? Who was it?”

“Hey, Fat Albert! What do you and school in the summertime have in common? No class! HAhaha!”

“I was next in line to marry Anna Nicole Smith. Damn my luck.”

We’ve heard of premature ejaculation, but this guy loses his head after one tug!

“Dude, man! The Green Giant just took a HUGE crap in the pumpkin patch!”

A Dave-O-Lantern!

What a Hummer owner actually looks like.

Hey, Two-Face! Whaddya gonna be for Halloween?

Though he obviously has brains, something tells us this guy ain’t a genius.

Splitting headache? Try Excedrin, the headache medicine.

After meeting Medusa, she seemed to have trouser snake on the brain.

“Son, it’s perfectly okay to be afraid of lady parts. But you have to understand, they think your pee-pee looks weird too!”

Happy Halloween boys and girls, in this instance the trick IS the treat! One of our first cartoon crushes was the voluptuous Vampirella. With that skimpy, blood red costume covering the essentials perfectly and coupled with an unquenchable thirst for blood, Vampi was the ultimate bad girl gone good… and, nice boys wanted her baaad, broham. Fittingly she debuted in 1969 under Warren Publishing, and since there were several iterations, we thought we’d start with her first 15 years in the biz.

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Picasso Work Sells for $52 Million

It appears the fog might have lifted over London’s economy, at least for one night. An anonymous bidder gave the winning bid of 34,761,250 pounds (roughly $52 million US), for Pablo Picasso’s “Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto.”  The seminal work, done in 1903 during the painter’s Blue Period, typifies both his classical training as well as the impending departure towards the African-influenced abstraction works we have more closely come to associate with Picasso.

In contrast, though a celebrated pioneer as both an artist and a female within the art world, were Impressionist artist Mary Cassatt the first to have a Blue Period, she would’ve easily surpassed her Spanish successor in fame and fortune. As an artist who struggled throughout her career to sell work and become established, this might’ve been the formula for success she so desperately needed. Her own posthumous sales are nothing to sneeze at, however. Cassatt’s paintings have sold for as much as $2.9 million.

We knew he was a little looney, but NASA now confirms artist Andy Warhol may be lunar as well… he and five other major artists have works on the moon!  But don’t expect to see a Campbell’s soup can. Warhol’s simple sketch looks like something George Michael would carve in a men’s bathroom (hint: it’s a penis!).

Each artist (including Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenburg) contributed drawings that were then reduced onto a tiny ceramic “mini-canvas,” which NASA may have unwittingly smuggled to the moon aboard the Apollo 12 lunar landing mission in November 1969. We can’t believe how seriously everyone in this program is taking Warhol’s obvious prank. Surprisingly, none of the other artists drew a “full moon.” To get a gander of the space member, check out the PBS episode of History Investigations below…

Watch the full episode. See more History Detectives.

There is intrinsic value in the above truths, however. First of all, the name Warhol is synonymous with both Pop Art and New York, and, he himself would consider the mention high praise, thinking the concept as being “very pop.” Secondly, while the author tends to ramble, loosely relating several familiar topics and famous people to the art and fashion scene of New York, through her chosen verbiage she inadvertently paints a very detailed portrait of the Manhattan collective groupthink—something Warhol himself attempted with his own The Warhol Diaries, and in much the same fashion. These thought processes are of great value in any timeframe, since as she even points out, “all business is done in New York.” Thirdly, such a move to associate her work with Warhol was smart for business, which is really the biggest, if not the only lesson being a resident of New York will teach you. Consider this tome a Beginner’s Guide to the Manhattan Mindset, with a specific nod to the artistic elite.

Available on Amazon.com.

A humble tribute to the stirring movement known as Pop Art. Without it, the cheeky irreverence we’ve all come to seek online and in print would’ve been delayed by at least ten years. Thank you, Richard Hamilton!