A Living Dead Dolloween 2025: Revisiting the Halloween Series (LDD Roundup #14)

Time for (a little bit of) Living Dead Dolls Halloween again!

Last year, my Living Dead Dolloween project was a juggernaut, covering a great deal of LDD's sphere of Halloween releases, with two from each Halloween series of five and two exclusives, a trio of variants selected from one of the two characters I featured in each of the Halloween series I covered, and a trio roundup of three other dolls that suited the season. That massive project starts here. This year, my priorities have broadened and my banner Halloween celebration is LEGO-focused, so the Living Dead Dolloween is drastically smaller in scope and will not nearly complete a sweep of LDD's Halloween output...but I wasn't going to abandon it, either. My primary goal was to dip back into the three Halloween series, and to feature new characters, but I also played fully to personal appeal with orange-and-black Halloween theming which called for two of my choices to be variants! No rules about only originals and then variants after; this time, I just get what calls to me! I could have fully re-ran the base categories of last year's project and gotten one of the other Halloween standalone exclusives, but I held off. Vesper's orange-and-black edition would fit the theme and is the only variant of the doll I wouldn't have to pay a tariff for right now, being the US edition, but she's not the variant of Vesper I like most and she's more money than I wanted to spend anyway. Jack O Lantern's orange and black edition is not local to me and invokes tariffs. Ugh. Mattel surprise-dropping the Skullector Xenomorph further solidified my decision and I moved the planets for her. As such, I ended up with a pack of just three dolls, and that's legally a Living Dead Dolls Roundup, so welcome also to Roundup #14! It's been a while!

There, Wolf!: Mishka (Series 16, Variant)

Of all the Series 16 dolls I hadn't gotten yet, I found myself the most drawn to the variant version of Mishka the werewolf. I'd seriously considered working her into last year's discussion, too, but availability, pricing, and the structure of my project pushed her away. Had I done a post about variants of dolls I didn't feature, she'd be there, but I wanted variant Salem and needed variant Isabel as a redemption round, so I made my variant post about the dolls I'd reviewed as standard editions. It was good for my first run through LDD Halloween to focus on the mains, but no such restrictions bind me this time.

Both S16 and S18 had a variant set with the dolls in classic yellow, orange, and black Halloween colors, but I think Mishka's palette was the best execution in the variants of either set, and I liked her more than any of the main-set S16 designs. I think she conceptually and visually feels very classic-Halloween, and her costume makes her the most autumnal LDD by far. My plan hadn't actually been to get her this time around, either, and I had my eye on Pumpkin for Series 16. His prices had ballooned and gotten too spicy for me at this moment, though, and I liked variant Mishka so much more anyway that I felt she'd be far more worth the price to me. Not being deep in LDD for a while helped me reality-check myself a bit in a way where I may not have last year, so I maximized enjoyment by picking her! I got a copy of variant Mishka sans coffin because it made her cheaper and I already have Series 16 variant packaging in my collection. I'll let my box collection suffer for variant dolls. I need to control things somehow.

Mishka is LDD's only doll with a classic horror werewolf theme, though LDD's Little Red Riding Hood and her grandma explore visuals of lycanthropy as well. Like Eleanor, who I've previously reviewed from Series 16, Mishka has the gag concept of being the very monster type she's trick-or-treating as, being a werewolf girl in a wolfman mask. That idea of a monster under a monster costume never gets old.

Mishka's chipboard shows off her normal coloration because LDD never printed variant chipboards. Standard Mishka has green tones on her mask and skin, and a blue denim dress with a duller blue-and-orange plaid shirt. 

I do like normal Mishka on her own merits, but the variant is just something else.

Mishka's chipboard poem says:

Mishka loved wolves
And howled at the moon
Some called her eccentric
Others just a loon

That's a bit of a nothing sentiment. "She liked wolves and people demeaned her mental health"...okay? How about a rewrite:

Mishka loved wolves

And howled to the moon
But the pack heard her cries
And brought forth her doom.

Mishka died on Halloween (October 31) in 1953.

A Halloween LDD dying on Halloween is extremely normal for the brand. Mishka's look generally fits into that time as far as the wolfman iconography she represents, though I think she might be considered unusual for a little girl in that era, who would probably be expected to wear more feminine clothing outside a Halloween context.

The certificate poem says:

So ironic to be attacked
By wolves on Halloween
For to be one of the pack
Was Mishka's one dream

Unless Mishka truly died for good and didn't become a wolf herself capable of joining the pack, then I don't know if "irony" applies here. Undead or not, it seems very much the case that Mishka is actually a lycan, so I think she absolutely got what she wanted. Hmm...

Attacked by wolves just like she hoped
One horrid Halloween
Even death could not prevent
Her living out her dream

Mishka's name is conspicuously Slavic, and means "little bear" in Russian and Polish. It's not the same as a wolf, but a beastly name definitely suits her. "Volka" would be more on-target. I genuinely can't claim LDD made a deliberate choice to name her "little bear"; given their shaky track record with foreign languages elsewhere, it's a possibility they thought they were actually naming her "little wolf". As a Slavic-born American with a Slavic name, Mishka's name endears her to me nonetheless.

Here she is "unboxed".

Mishka's Halloween mask is very classic retro-wolfman iconography derived from the Lon Chaney Jr. portrayal in 1941's iconic Universal film The Wolf Man.

Chaney Jr. in the Wolf Man makeup.

In the era where fully-canine-headed werewolves are the visual standard in live-action, thanks to the effects technology to portray them and capture the animal horror of the curse to its best, the old wolfman makeup can look embarrassing or cheesy or kitschy. However, it simply was an iconic influential werewolf depiction for a long time and it is a classic look for any retro-Halloween homage. (Cartoon werewolves were ahead of the curve in depicting more animalistic wolf monsters, but live actors were limited for a while, arguably until An American Werewolf in London broke serious ground for transformation effects.)

Mishka's mask is very standard for this old wolfman look, with the template of a mostly-human face covered in fur. It's sculpted with big brows and large lips which are cheaply, flatly painted in a coral tone with white sharp teeth in an endearingly simple way. The color is a muted brown with some bands of orange across the fur. The warm variant coloring flatters the werewolf mask and makes it make a lot more sense.

Mishka and Ember are the two Halloween LDDs whose variant masks benefited the most from the variant colors. Ember looked fine being a green witch, of course, but her variant mask's paint job was so much cleaner and brighter while the main was muddy. 

Mishka's hair is long and black and rooted in a sharp widow's peak on her forehead, which later pictures will show. It's extremely thinly rooted and I think more could have absolutely been rooted in. It came to me very dry.

It's got points over Series 3 Lilith's hair, at least. Her widow's peak isn't as flat and sharply defined as Mishka's the way her hair lies, and her hair has more volume than I think it's supposed to. I'm pleased the rooting is pretty tidy. The point of Miskha's peak isn't centered over her nose, though, which doesn't seem to be uncommon for this doll. Part of the reason I haven't gotten LDD's Arachne yet is the hair rooting, since I haven't seen one yet with a widow's peak rooting that looked just right.

The hair shaping on Mishka is part of another design inspiration, which is clearer on the main edition--she's derived from the look of Eddie Munster of the sixties TV sitcom The Munsters. He was a werewolf who had a prominent widow's peak, and the Munsters actors wore greenish makeup to look paler on black-and-white film, making color imagery of Eddie a green-skinned werewolf.

I really don't think the Munsters were ever meant to be seen in color, at least not with the same makeup the actors shot black-and-white with, but it's charming and a famous look in its own right.

Main-edition Mishka unmasked.

Mishka's green skin was far more saturated and vivid than Eddie's, and neither looks much like a werewolf, really. I always thought Eddie was supposed to be a vampire like his mom and grandpa, but nope. Werewolf.

Eddie's actor Butch Patrick was born in 1953, the year Mishka died, but he wasn't born on Halloween. I think the year for Mishka must be referencing him, though. Paired with her look, it seems clear.

The saturated skin on Mishka was the main reason I was so interested in the variant. Because Mishka was the only S16 character with a saturated nonhuman skintone, the variant set had to address that with its palette concept. Pale flesh and white colors fit the variant set well, but green would only clash, so LDD chose to face the design issue by turning her yellow to suit the Halloween palette, and it is beautiful.

She looks so stylized and she feels like the most complete color transformation, like a full vintage-Halloween filter has been dropped over her while the other S16 dolls only got wigs and costume changes. Yellow doesn't suit a werewolf any better than green, and taken alongside her Series 16 variant comrades, she's meant to be a literal yellow monster, but in isolation, viewed as a stylized total palette rework, she's incredible. The warm yellow of her skin, the red of her eyes, and the oranges of her costume are all so autumnal and spooky together. She feels like the essence of Halloween. I wish all of the human-colored Series 16 and 18 dolls had saturated warm skintones in the variant sets. This is also why I like Series 32 Butcher Boop's variant costume so much; worn on another copy of the white-skinned main doll, she'd be a perfect stylized color filter too.

Variant Boop's clothes on the main doll's white vinyl cast would be really something. This green skin is a terrible clash, though.

Mishka's recolor pattern was repeated with S18's Gabriella, a green ghoul whose variant is yellow-orange, but Gabi's variant isn't quite the kind of magic Mishka's is to me.

Mishka's face paint has a lot of attitude, with straight thin brows harshly angled down, narrowed eyes with tall top lashes and heavy smudge shading around the edges and corners, and lip paint turning her mouth downward while sharp white fangs poke out from the top.

She's got a vicious energy about her, and I like the design.

Mishka's outfit draws from most werewolves by using denim and flannel imagery for a rugged outdoorsy tone. The variant costume has dark grey for the denim overall dress, and a vibrant fall-colored plaid for the shirt, which looks slightly less like a flannel in this pattern (but neither copy of the outfit uses actual flannel fabric).

The shirt has a nicely defined collar and two small buttons as well as a fold implying the shirt can open, while the sleeves end in defined cuffs. The overalls portion has simple sewn-on straps with no implied buttons or buckles, and the chest pocket is open on top and functional.

The waist is trimmed with stitching, and more jeans-style stitching goes down the front, including the outline of what would be the fly on a pair of trousers. I looked it up, and some overall dresses also include this construction detail despite it being visually out of place on a skirt.

The shirt and overalls are sewn together as one piece which velcros in the back.

Mishka's legs are covered in black footie tights, 1and her shoes are the typical LDD boy's sculpt painted up like retro saddle shoes. This is an added detail on the variant; the main's shoes are unpainted flat black. I think the variant shoes look fantastic, and this is another point in her favor.

Here's a look at the body color because I think it's so special. Variant Mishka is the only LDD cast in this tone.

I took Mishka's hair for a comb and a wash, and it turned out better than I thought it would. It's a little fried at the ends, but it combed out overall smoother than I expected and it's not the worst head of hair LDD has given me.

I took her outdoors for some photos. Here she is in a yellow leaf pile to celebrate her color palette.

She looked good walking on the dirt with the leaves too.

Here she is at night.

Moon edited in.

Blood Runs Orange: Ingrid (Series 18, Variant)

My hope had really been to showcase variant Jingles, and it was fairly heartbreaking to find him totally absent from the market when I decided to pursue him. I was so attached to the concept of re-touring the series, and variant Jingles had been the only Series 18 doll left I seriously wanted for myself. I worried my plan had died in the water and didn't know what to do with LDDolloween 2025...and then I decided to go against all expectations for myself and offer my neck to Ingrid. I love a vampire, and sure, she's not exceptional, but she looks fine for a trick-or-treater. There's meaningful novelty to her variant color scheme on a vampire figure, too. And she was cheaper than variant Jingles would likely be, were he available!

Ingrid's classic vampire theming takes notes from the Dracula's Daughter/Lily Munster side of things with a white dress and white hair streak. 

The official LDD photo made her look tinted blue like the Munsters makeup, but I think I was wrong about that and that the color was the same on both of her variants and not actually defined as blue-toned. Ingrid herself actually isn't a vampire, though, and only dresses as one. She's a human who died from a rabid mundane bat which she bit. Little freak.

I repacked the coffin with Ingrid in her mask on, following my review pattern, but she was packaged barefaced with the mask in back as usual. The mask, death certificate, and pumpkin bucket were in three separate packets.

The chipboard shows the prototype of Ingrid's main edition. The mask looks more hand-painted and the blood spot on the chin that the mass-produced copies have is absent.

The chipboard poem says:

With her favorite vampire mask

And blood on her mind

Escape from Ingrid is a task

Her heartbeat hard to find

And a rewrite.

With her plastic mask of fangs

She comes round from door to door

Truly dead behind those eyes

She wants candy less than gore.

Ingrid died on Halloween in 1970.

Her certificate poem says:

Ingrid caught a bat

And bit off its head.

That bad had rabies

Now Ingrid is dead.

I think the poem is good enough to let stand. I couldn't find any specific relevance to the deathdate or doll's name. "Ingrid" is a Scandinavian name which is a whlle global sphere not commonly associated with vampires, but I like the name.

Here she is out of the coffin.

I like Ingrid in her mask less than I expected to. The sculpt is fun and cheesy, and I like the idea of the hair blending into her real hair, but the eyelids are lacking paint and the hair looks awkward. The sculpt can have the effect of sideburns and the black paint being matte while the rest is gloss makes it jarring.

There might have been more black outline on the eyes in the intended design, but it didn't show up on my copy. A vampire lady mask needs to be serving it with the eye makeup, but these mask eyes feel bare and vacant without more paint around them. Main Ingrid's mask eye shading is two distinct colors with a darker inner ring, which helps it. The variant shading is monotonal and looks flatter. The eye shading and lips have turned orange for the variant, but the blood on the chin is still red, upholding the Halloween variants not changing the blood color. Red doesn't disrupt a warm palette.

The mask reminds me a little bit of the retro Traveler Trading Co. Dracula doll I reviewed last year, but I only just recently let him go from my collection. 

Ingrid's rooted hair is center-parted with orange falling down her left, replacing the white accent of the main edition. The hair is slightly choppy and not too thickly rooted, and wants a boil to lay flatter.

While the mask worked less than I hoped, the face works more than I expected! She's really intense, and the variant colors pop!

Ingrid's skintone is a cold pale grey tone but isn't blue or green, and I'm expecting this is the same color as her main edition. Her face paint is fairly classic LDD, but it's effective. Her eyebrows are the thin upturned shape several LDDs use and her eyes are mostly oval, just narrower at the outer corner. Her irises are totally unchanged from the main doll and were the same colors there, but the eye shading has turned yellow here. It's mostly opaque and the big swoop up to the eyebrows creates the kind of drama the mask should have also had. The eye paint is messy, with some errors in her right eye's iris and a disconnected eyelash. I wish it was tighter, but the face still looks good. Variant Ingrid trades red lips for black lips, keeping a sharp painted downturn at the corners. Like Lilith before her, Ingrid has veins on her face in a darker shade of her skintone.

Ingrid's costume is mostly satin, which isn't my favorite, but it works fine for a trick-or-treat costume.

It starts with the large lobed collar, which is an unusual element. It's fully separate from the dress and can spin freely around Ingrid's neck. It's also a closed sewn ring that can't come off without scissors or decapitation. I don't see why it had to be its own detached piece or unremovable.

The rest of the dress is one piece. It's black with orange paneling down the center replacing the main's white and has a V neckline with the implication the black is a separate over-layer. The sleeves are sewn to hang down a little, but the shaping isn't extreme and the fabric doesn't drape much to help the effect. 

Mesh membranes are sewn between the hips and the end of the wrists of the dress, and go down the full sleeve to create a swooshy bat-wing effect. I think the mesh could have afforded more opacity and the variant could have made it orange. The cut is very circular, and might look better if it curved inward toward the body, but it's still a fun feature.

This is two pieces of mesh like a wingsuit, not one piece that crosses over the back like a cape.

Ingrid has a belt of metallic silver scratchy cord, which is a separate fully- removable piece. The cord threads through two gaps left in the arm mesh so it can encircle her waist.

The cord had some fraying, but I trimmed off the worst.

With the cord off, the dress velcros down the back and slides down off the doll like normal. 

The orange hem isn't finished, and there are two layers of orange which are not sewn to each other on the edge.

Ingrid has black socks and black Mary Janes. Oddly, one sock totally stained her foot while the other didn't touch her.

Here she is with her hair boiled. I think this helps, but she's still going to be a "face" doll for me instead of a "mask" doll. That surprised me, but I'll take it!

Variant Ingrid makes a striking contrast with Series 3 Lilith, as her orange opposes Lilith's blue and her vibe is more poised and sleek than Lilith's cartoony rage.

With the mask on, the two vampires are a bit more tonally matched, though the mask is a different art style.

Lilith received her second haircut after these photos to get rid of her dried fried hair snarls, and now she actually combs smoothly. I love the doll so much that I didn't want to suffer her fried hair any longer. My poor Series 1 Sadie's kind of a lost cause and maybe someday I'll get a second copy and keep her well out of hot places, but Lilith was able to carry off a second hair trim. I might have to be more careful with her too. It's not my fault the best place to keep my out-of-storage Living Dead Dolls is also right under the attic and heats up in summer, but it was my choice to put them there.

Don't make me take another inch off, Lil.

For produced photos of Ingrid, I started with her coffin and my reliable Gothic mirror against an orange backdrop.

I then repeated some shots with the mirror that I'd done with Bloody Mary, Lilith, and Lilith's Resurrection.

For this vampire's requisite "no reflection" photo gag, I composited two shots to show only the mask reflecting in the mirror as if it's the only part of her costume which wasn't hers originally and thus is excluded from the curse.

Inspired by a gag from Wednesday Season 2, here's Ingrid trapped in her coffin by garlic on the lid.

Here's some dramatic photos with shadows and the orange backdrop.

I then put her back in her mask for outdoor photos.

Here she is underlit by a garden lamp.

And here she is hanging by her toes from a trellis.

Here she is in blacklight.

Lingering Haint: Ye Ole Wraith (Series 32)

This was the real "doll that got away" last year who couldn't fit into the structure I'd built for LDDolloween '24, but if I'd had leftover Halloween spirit and energy (I'd kinda burned myself out on Halloween, which I thought impossible!), I might have been tempted to squeeze this one in. It makes more sense to do it now, though. A Tumblr mutual I chat with sometimes about LDD market scouting finds had a copy to sell, so I took it up. This doll did come from Canada and cost me extra thanks to our glorious economic policy as a result, but whatever. I was fine being a good sport and eating it this once and proceeded. Thanks to angelgoatduck for this doll! No thanks to hostile economic policy!

Ye Ole Wraith's chipboard has the following poem:

Gather round the jack o' lantern
For Halloween tales of yesteryear
A time when ghosts and goblins
Spent the night spreading fear

Meter? I never even heard of her! I do respect the atmosphere aimed for here. How about:

Gather 'round the jack-o'-lantern
Hear my tale of Hallowe'en
An olde dark night of ghouls and ghosts
And hainted things that walk unseen

Like the other dolls in Series 32, save Ernest Lee Rotten, Ye Ole Wraith's deathdate is given as Halloween 1926, same as Vincent Vaude who isn't Halloween-themed. 

Going by the printed certificates as gospel (which is the way I treat the death date canon), October 31, 1926 is the most common historical deathdate in LDD. (Ernest has no deathdate, possibly since he's implicitly in some kind of Dorian Gray situation where determining if he ever properly died is impossible.)

The poem here says:

Ye Ole Wraith has a classic yarn to tell you
About a time when Halloween was first getting started
When the leaves changed and the wind blew
And the nights were filled with all those that departed

The phrase "Ye Olde" is a faux-archaic construct interpreting the old thorn character in the phrase "the olde" as a letter Y, and is often used for an affected sense of quaintness and old-fashioned appeal. Calling this doll "Ye Ole Wraith" (with the name affected in a folksy American accent here) is functionally just calling the spirit "the old wraith", but "Ye Olde" has its specific connotations that make it a unique modifier. You wouldn't say a dusty book in your attic is a "ye olde" book, but you could say so for a colonial-era book somewhere in New England's most historical library, perhaps.

Here's a rewrite.

The ole Wraith spins a yarn like a spider with silk
About Hallowe'ens past and vicious
When the leaf-change brought out all her monstrous ilk
And summoned the forces pernicious

Ye Ole Wraith's gender isn't necessarily confirmed, but under previous frameworks that only girl LDDs have hair this long and three boys to a series is an anomaly, plus the fact that the character or series theme don't feel like a pretext for a genderless being, I'm proceeding with the assumption that Ye Ole Wraith is female.

Here she is out of the coffin. Her hair comes fully enclosed within her cloak.

When I first discussed Series 32, I noted how a handful of the designs were taken directly from old vintage Halloween artwork, with Salem, Nicholas, and the Wraith being all traceable to preexisting pieces.

Here's a brief edit of Salem and Nicholas beside their origin artwork.

Not sure which devil face came first or where either came from.

The Wraith, in turn, is based on this extremely distinctive piece, showing an orange gaunt-faced ghost creature cloaked in white, with ear-shaped knotted twists on top of its head. The LDD uses white horns instead, has visible long hair, her face is more orange than red, and she has an open robe over a grey dress and exposed feet.

The illustration the Wraith derives from.

Butcher Boop (who I've reviewed) and Ernest Lee Rotten (who I haven't) are not evidently based on any preexisting Halloween artwork. Boop, being an uncanny masked butcher owing most of her inspiration to Leatherface, wouldn't be expected to be based on vintage art since her theming is so removed from her retro aesthetics, and zombies like Ernest weren't icons of this art style either. Vintage skeletons could have inspired bare-skulled Boop (though I didn't see any vintage-art skulls who Boop would have been based on), but the Halloween zombie popped into form during the fifties and sixties and only became ubiquitous in the decades following.

The Wraith starts with her robe, which is a very thin, very stringy piece with mostly unfinished edges and fragile loose threads all around. It's stylistic for the shabby vintage look, but it's definitely one of the more ephemeral LDD clothing pieces. The piece has two strings of the same fabric at the neck, which are just wrapped around the neck, not tied in a bow or anything. The strings don't really draw the robe much closer and might not have been necessary.

The robe is open in the front and ends in tattery strips above the ankle, both different from the more draped fully-covering robe in the illustration, which featured distinctive rounded layers of wrinkles down the front. I'm not sure why LDD made this change. Perhaps they thought the artwork would be too dull to fully translate and wanted more visual contrast?

The Wraith, like Salem, does not have a mask over her face, mirroring previous trick-or-treat ghost Eleanor. Both dolls use their robes as their costume instead, but the Wraith has nothing at all hiding her face while Eleanor's sheet covered hers. Ye Ole Wraith, Salem, Jack O Lantern, and Vesper are the only seasonal Halloween LDDs with no face coverings.

The hood has wire sewn into the front edge to let it be shaped well.

When I tried adjusting the Wraith's stance, her right hip swung too easily. I thought the hip joint had gotten unglued inside its socket until the peg fell off in two pieces, twisted apart like that. After my variant Nohell, this is my second LDD with a non-brittle hip peg which just broke by twisting. Her leg never even felt stuck, though, unlike Nohell's, which I pushed when I shouldn't have. The Wraith's leg was already loose and breaking.

I was fortunate enough to have a spare hip peg to replace this with.

Here's the Wraith without the robe and her hip surgery done. 

The Wraith's hair is white and wavy and center-parted and comes tied in an elastic and enclosed by her hood, but is meant to come loose. It's shorter than I expected it to be and longer hair would be fun, but I like the shape of it unleashed.

While the illustration the doll was based upon appeared to have deerlike "ears" formed from twists in the hood of the robe, the Wraith does not quite match this, instead interpreting the drawing by giving her the typical LDD devil-horns sculpt.

It's not quite the same effect. The horns don't stuck out as far and are at a different angle, and are easily hidden by the hood. It's lucky for the ole thing that she's still very much in-tone with the vintage spooky spirit, because otherwise, I'd be more upset with the weak horns.

Ye Ole Wraith is cast in orange vinyl in the same tone as variant Salem in the same series, and is the only non-variant LDD cast in this color. The vinyl is quite blacklight-reactive and glows very brightly under UV lighting despite not looking remotely neon in the light. The Wraith's horns and the white features in her face paint are painted in a stylistic aged off-white tone to lend her more vintage tone, in a move similar to Salem's white costume parts. I really appreciate this. Clean white would be too pop for the look.

The face is a loose but obvious interpretation of the original artwork. There's less linework here, likely to avoid overcomplicating and overwhelming the design, but the lines feel shakier than I would expect, and more precise thinner lines could work for the design too. The eyes are fully overpainted by the dark sockets so the shape of the sculpt isn't too obvious, and the paint over the mouth area works pretty well too.

The original art seems to be depicting a withered dried corpse face inside that cloak, but it's not hard to compare it to a pumpkin as well with the hollows of the eyes, nose, and mouth and orange tone, and the ears on the drawing/the horns on the doll elevate this entity to something less familiar and more compelling. While Salem is still the most one-to-one with her artwork inspiration among the Series 32 dolls with derivative designs, the Wraith is still a good interpretation and I like her personality. She looks like a cranky little granny!

The Wraith's variant changes her skin to bluish green, which misses the whole appeal to me. The dress seems to be black in the variant.

The main Wraith has a sleeveless dark nearly bluish grey dress which is very simple and probably the wrong color. I think a matte white dress that blended with the robe would have made the costume look more accurate to the illustration and feel more ghostly besides. It misses the point of the original illustration for me, but it does still look nice and suit the aesthetic in its ways. The bottom edge is finished while the sleeves are not.

The Wraith's feet are bare.

Here's the Wraith with her cloak on and her hair out.

I dunno. It's nice, but I was curious about what I could do...and that's why I got two Wraiths. I figured I was able to create the fully-shrouded drapery I wanted if I just took a second copy of her robe, put it on facing backward, and then put the other robe on correctly so both sides of her body and out-of-place grey dress are covered. The hood falling down her front would even mimic the drapery of the original artwork pretty well.

Nothing of note to say about the second copy I got for parts. Here's the first Wraith wearing the second robe on her front.

I like this a lot. The front hood is a bit awkward, and the wire makes it moreso, but the homage has been improved with this added costuming.

Here's a photo taken of the Wraith in blacklight, color-edited so there's no cool tones in the picture but the glow of her vinyl is still captured.

And here's some pictures of her using her front hood as a pouch for candy corn!

I took more pictures outside, using a red backdrop behind a tree and editing the colors in post.

She looks good against autumn leaves, too.

I made attempts with a night shoot with the backdrop and a haunted house lantern, but I'm not sure it worked.

Here she is against a vintage Halloween paper pattern.

My best pictures combined blacklight, the dark outdoors, and some color editing in post.

Because the Series 32 chipboards don't have character-specific artwork, I previously took it upon myself to order some cutout prints of vintage cats which included Salem's source artwork so I could decorate her chipboard with it myself, held on with poster putty.

My chipboard modification for Salem's chipboard, with the cat face tacked on non-invasively.

I did the same for the Wraith, ordering a cutout of her artwork, though hers needs to be tacked behind the chipboard peeking over the top.

The cutout I received had disappointing print quality with dark colors and blurry lines. I used layers of sealant and colored pencil and pen to go over the print myself and brighten and clarify the design until I had this:

I'd possibly be able to do a chipboard add-on for Nicholas too if I could find or make a durable print of the artwork he comes from, but this couldn't apply to the whole series...unless I reverse-engineered some illustrations to mock up the "originals" that Boop and Ernest could have hypothetically been quoting.

I also continued the Series 32 artwork series I started in 2024, adding the Wraith to the three digital art formats I established. In full sequence now:

To create the cover image, I loosely re-staged the "pumpkin patch" from my Series 18 post, but photographed it less like the art on the Series 18 chipboards, instead making it very orange and black for the dolls' aesthetic.

LDDolloween 2024's Series 18 cover photo--moon added digitally.

I had fun with this group and got some great spooky cheer from them. I gave Ingrid a chance and she rose to the task, while Mishka and the Wraith were overdue and welcome. I think of the three, the Wraith put me the most in the Halloween spirit. Fitting, since she is a Halloween spirit! Mishka and Ingrid are the prizes for a collector, and both are very nice designs, but the Wraith, with her second robe, might be the most personally appealing to me for the purposes of the season. 

I'll tack on a more formulaic LDD Roundup cover photo to the end of this post when I take down my Halloween decorations, as the paper backdrop I want to use for these three is well and truly hung up for the rest of the season.

This isn't all of my LDD this Halloween, but conflicting priorities this October definitely made LDD into the expendable project this season when I needed to recalculate. LEGO took the bulk of my focus, and then Mattel Creations was awfully sinister with the two drops this month, so I committed to LDD the slowest--and thank goodness for that. I do have just a tiny bit more LDD to celebrate with this year. I just couldn't pass up one certain doll.