Tim Jacobus

Hey, Dylan and Travis.

I wanna share my recent experience at Dragon Con 2026, meeting Tim Jacobus and attending his panel.

Hell yeah.

After noticing that he had a booth alongside the other comic book artists, I made my way through the line and up to the fourth floor, hoping to catch him.

That's one of the reasons I've been reading through and looking for the books again.

Hell yeah, dude.

Tim Jacobus' ears has heard our podcast's title.

Hell yeah.

We got a cover here.

Tim Jacobus drew it.

You knew that.

Everybody knows that.

[laughs]

I like the earrings.

I've never heard your Tim Jacobus.

That's the first time I've heard Tim Jacobus show up on the show.

Because as he pointed out, the parents weren't entirely wrong about the visual presentation.

The covers, illustrated by the legendary Tim Jacobus, were often way scarier than the actual stories printed inside.

That's true.

The art was intense.

They extended heavily to the visual packaging of the books.

Oh, definitely.

We touched on the iconic cover art by illustrator Tim Jacobus.

Those covers were not just artistic expressions.

Do you remember when things first start? The eggs were like flying on the counter and they were kind of hopping out of the thing.

The first time I ever saw Tim Jacobus's cover of the Goosebumps book that had the killer eggs from outer space or whatever there, it reminded me of that instantly.

I was just like, oh, like in Ghostbusters.

Yeah, that was, yeah, I can see the similarities there.

For many of us, it was our first doorway into horror.

Tim Jacobus is our guest today.

Tim, welcome to the show.

How's it going, guys? Thanks for having me.

That dripping Goosebumps logo and those wonderfully lurid colors.

Jim- Tim Jacobus' bizarre, funny, creepy artwork, and just the titles were great too.

They seemed almost scientifically designed to make kids just stop and pick up that book.

I know that definitely worked on me.

Uh, no, Megan, you're fine.

[laughs] So before we get too far into the stories themselves, again, these covers were just amazing.

So of course, Tim Jacobus created the iconic cover paintings for nearly the entire original 62-book run, or sorry, the entire 62-book run, establishing the visual identity that became inseparable from Goosebumps.

Mm-hmm.

So these are available, $24 for four double-sided bookmarks, which are pretty high quality.

But then you've got a bunch of different T-shirts, some custom artwork that they've done, and then obviously the iconic artwork from Tim Jacobus.

on top of some different pins, enamel pins, different stuff like that that you can grab.

So all of this is available, not limited, just always year-round able to get this.

Curly as a Funko would be awesome.

But I'm still waiting for an R.L. Stein pop because they've done authors.

Why haven't they done him? And a Tim Jacobus one.

Yep.

But I certainly never owned any of them or read any of them.

And I could just be making it up and they feel familiar because oddly enough, at least the first 25 of this series, the first 25 books of this series was illustrated by none other than Tim Jacobus.

Yes, the legendary Tim Jacobus who did the artwork for the original Goosebumps series.

He did the original 62 covers.

Well, actually, okay, so he did the original 60 covers.

There's like Goosebumps 2000s and other stuff.

But the original Goosebumps series is 62 books.

And Tim Jacobus is the illustrator for every single one of those books except for two.