Bringing Felipe Femur & Friends Back from the Dead

More than a decade ago, my twin brother Russell and I started building a strange little monster world around a friendly skeleton named Felipe Femur.

Felipe lived in a town called Toonstone, surrounded by monsters who were usually terrible at being what monsters were supposed to be. There was Gummy, a werewolf with no teeth. Sunny was a vampire who desperately wanted a suntan. Runny was a witch who wasn’t particularly wicked. And Felipe himself was a skeleton who had far more heart than bones.

We loved Halloween, but we were never trying to create something genuinely frightening for kids. The idea was to take all the monsters we grew up loving and turn their traditional characteristics sideways.

What if a werewolf couldn’t bite anyone? What if a vampire loved the sun? What if the skeleton hiding in your closet was actually the one hoping you would come say hello?

That eventually became Felipe Femur & Friends.

Building Toonstone One Weird Idea at a Time

Felipe started as a character, but characters have an annoying habit of bringing friends with them.

Before long, Russell and I had created an entire cast and started finding different ways to tell their stories. There were illustrated books, browser games, cartoons, activities, recipes, scary stories, coloring pages, crafts, and eventually a webcomic.

Our Felipe Femur & Halloween Friends WEBTOON ultimately grew to 79 episodes.

The fun part was that there was never really a strict boundary around what Felipe Femur was supposed to be.

If we wanted to make a game, we made a game. If Russell had an idea for a children’s book, we made a book. If I thought Gummy the Werewolf would look funny trying to eat something despite having no teeth, that could become a comic.

For a while, the internet became this giant playground where Toonstone kept expanding in different directions.

And Then We Stopped

Eventually, real life did what real life does.

Other projects took over. Careers changed. Time disappeared. Felipe never completely vanished, but the world became mostly dormant.

The website stayed online in different forms. The books still existed. The WEBTOON was still there. Old games continued floating around the internet. Every once in a while I would stumble onto an old Felipe image or see someone had found one of the projects years later.

But we weren’t actively building Toonstone anymore.

Years passed.

Then, in 2026, I started looking through everything again.

And there was a lot more there than I remembered.

Digging Up a Decade of Monsters

Coming back to Felipe felt strangely appropriate for a skeleton character.

We were literally digging through the remains of an old project and trying to bring it back to life.

I found characters I hadn’t thought about in years. Old comics. Games. Books. Artwork. Stories. Halloween activities. Recipes. Videos. Half-forgotten ideas. Pieces of the project had spread across Amazon, WEBTOON, itch.io, YouTube, Goodreads, old websites, and corners of the internet I had almost forgotten existed.

Instead of pretending none of that history happened, we decided to embrace it.

We rebuilt FelipeFemur.com as a home for both the old Toonstone and whatever comes next.

That meant restoring comics, reconnecting games, rebuilding activity sections, bringing back Halloween articles and crafts, and putting the characters front and center again.

But I didn’t want the relaunch to become nothing more than an archive.

If Felipe was coming back, he needed to actually be alive again.

The Monsters Started Making Music

One of the strangest new directions has been music.

We revived the Felipe Femur & Friends YouTube channel after years of inactivity and started experimenting with original monster songs, animated music videos, shorts, and new ways of bringing the characters to life.

That eventually led to characters like LOCHNESS, an enormous Loch Ness monster pop star who performs K-pop-inspired Halloween songs with the confidence of someone who has absolutely no doubt that she is the biggest star in Toonstone.

Runny the Witch has songs. Felipe has songs. The Skeletones have music. Suddenly these characters we had originally drawn for books and comics were dancing around in music videos.

It’s been wonderfully ridiculous.

And that feeling is probably the closest we’ve come to what creating Felipe felt like in the beginning.

Why Come Back After All This Time?

I’ve thought about that question quite a bit.

The simple answer is that I missed these characters.

There is something special about creating a world with someone you grew up with, especially when that someone is your twin brother. Russell and I can look at Felipe and see years of strange ideas, experiments, inside jokes, failed projects, successful ones, and countless hours spent making monsters do stupid things.

But I also think Halloween projects have a peculiar ability to survive.

Every year the decorations come back out. The skeleton gets pulled from the box. The plastic pumpkins return to the porch. Songs you haven’t heard since last October suddenly feel familiar again.

Halloween gives us permission to resurrect things.

So maybe Felipe was always going to come back eventually.

Welcome Back to Toonstone

We’re still figuring out what this new version of Felipe Femur & Friends will become.

There are new songs and videos being made. We’re restoring and reorganizing old material. The comics are readable again on the Felipe Femur website. The Halloween guides and activities are growing. Characters that haven’t moved in years are suddenly dancing.

And we’re discovering forgotten pieces of the project constantly.

In some ways it feels less like rebooting something and more like walking back into an old house, switching on the lights, and realizing all the monsters have been waiting for us.

Felipe is still the same friendly skeleton.

Gummy still doesn’t have any teeth.

Sunny still has absolutely no business trying to get a tan.

Runny still isn’t particularly good at being wicked.

And after a very long sleep, Toonstone is awake again.

Happy Halloween.

— David Vincent Dorn
Co-Creator & Visual Artist, Felipe Femur & Friends
FelipeFemur.com