PopCult

The Eighth Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo took place last weekend in Louisville, Kentucky after taking a year off due to the pandemic. Today I’m going to bring you the first batch of pictures from the show. We’ll likely have another photo essay or two in the coming days, and then Sunday I’ll post a video of cool stuff we saw, plus a bonus video covering our trip to the South Louisville Antique Toy Mall.

We had a blast at our first GI Joe show since before the pandemic. We saw lots of friends from the GI Joe collecting community and caught up with the ToyLanta crew, and I have to single out Steve Stoval for putting on such a wonderful show. I barely got to say “hi” to him at the show because he was so busy, but we had a great time and he’s responsible.

There were dozens of dealers spread out over three rooms  with great vintage GI Joes, plus GI Joe from the Real American Hero era and brand-new custom uniform sets and figures for 12″ and 3 3/4″ GI Joes. Plus there were tons of other action figures and toys for sale.

Today we’re just going to show you random sights from the show. Later this week we’ll take a closer look at the custom figures and dioramas, plus the People of Kentuckiana.

Let’s kick it off..

Lots of toys, lots of people…some of them masked. The people, that is, but some of the toys were, too.

A pile of cool GI Joe stuff from the 1990s and early 2000s.

A display with a whole bunch of custom GI Joes.

Continue reading

Tuesday on The AIR  we deliver another partly brand-new episode of Radio Free Charleston. It’s three hours of music that lets you support the local scene and indulge your strange musical desires. You simply have to move your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and listen to the cool embedded player over at the top of the right column.

We have a newish Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.  Your PopCulteer wore himself out over the weekend doing Toy stuff in Louisville. I’ll have photos and video later in the week. Meanwhile, this week on RFC we open with a new track from Emmalea Deal, and bring you one all-new hour of RFC, and one encore of the final episode of RFC International from before we merged it into the three-hour behemoth you see before you.

We bring you some killer new and vintage local and independent music in our first hour, plus some really great stuff in mixtape form in hours two and three.

So that’s one brand-new hour, and two classic hours of RFC International from 2019.

Check out the playlist to see all the goodies we bring you this week…

RFC V5 057

Emmalea Deal “On and On”
Kerosene Stars “Don’t Pass Me By”
John Radcliff “Useless”
Jay Parade “I Know That It’s Real”
The Dollyrots “Happy Together”
The Lickerish Quartet “Fadoodle”
Guitarmy of One “Detectives and Dragonets”
Lene Lovich “Rage”
David Synn “No Sense of Urgency”
Lost Decades “Essex”
Feast of Stephen “Blue Turbin”
Bob Dylan “Jokerman (Reggae Remix)”
DEVO “Jerkin’ Back and Forth (Frank Panucci Remix)”

hours two and three
Andy Partridge & Robyn Hitchcock “Planet England”
Mike McGear “Have You Got Problems”
Rick Wakeman “White Rock”
Eddie Jobson “Resident”
The Clash “Justice Tonight/Kick It Over”
The Pixies “Daniel Boone”
Hawkwind “All Aboard The Skylark”
Sparks “Selections from Annette”
ELO “One More Time”
Animal ДжаZ “Так надо”
Ray Wilson “Bless Me”
Dukes of the Stratosphear “Human Beans”
Steve Hackett’s Genesis Revisted “Musical Box”
Jethro Tull “Budapest”
Dosed “Jam Song”
Jan Akkerman “Good Body Every Evening”
Moana “Promise”
The Brokedown Dukes “Hellbound”
Reverent Jukie “Creole Love Call”
Charlie P “Secret Survivor”
Captain Beefheart “Yellow Brick Road”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with a replay Thursday at 3 PM. This Friday we’re going to begin an RFC Marathon that will run all weekend long. I’ll tell you about that in a day or two.

As is now the norm, I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand.

The Swing Shift will return with a new episode next week.

Okay, so your PopCulteer spent the last few days having lots of fun in and around Louisville, Kentucky, even though Maysthena Gravis is still making his hands as useful as flippers.  I’ll tell you all about that, with photos and video, starting on Wednesday.

Just like with last week, I did not create any real-world art this week. I did try to draw some stuff on my phone with a stylus, but that didn’t work out too well.  What you see above is 100% digital, created by pushing around a mouse and hitting keys. It’s another one of my geometric abstracts, which, to be honest, I can pretty much knock out in my sleep after doing them for close to twenty years. This one was created by overlaying conectric circles and radial bursts, then colorizing them and ramping up the color.

Click to see it bigger.

Meanwhile, Monday at on The AIR, this week our Haversham Recording Institute friends are still busy providing translation services for The Olympics. We will be running encore plays of recent episodes of Prognosis, Psychedelic Shack and Sydney’s Big Electric Cat for the next few weeks. This afternoon you can hear Nigel Pye’s Psychedelic Shack at 2 PM and Herman Linte with Prognosis at 3 PM.

At 7 PM tune in for 12 hours of the best of Curtain Call, hosted by Mel Larch.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player at the top of the right-hand column of this blog.

This week’s video post is a repeat of a post from May, 2010, which I just discovered had all the video embeds broken at some point. So here it is again, with those videos that are still working  re-embedded this time.  More than half of them are lost to the sands of time…dammit!

When I was a kid, I was crazy about animation. I’m not just talking about Saturday morning cartoons or classic Warner Brothers shorts, I loved everything animated–commercials, broadcast network IDs, industrial films–anything with a cartoon hook had me. I was three or four years old when NBC showed a prime-time compilation of independently-animated shorts.  That was an epiphany for me.

The cartoon you see above is “Moonbird,” by John and Faith Hubley. This was part of that NBC special, and it would be over forty years before I would get a chance to see this again.  The soundtrack is an actual recording of their children playing, around which they then created the animation. “Moonbird” won the OSCAR for best animated short in 1959, but there was no place for it to be seen until a few years later.

After the jump, you’ll get to read more about my life-long quest for animation and you’ll get to see the rest of the first edition of the PopCult Animation Festival, a collection of cool animated shorts from around the world.  It’ll be a weekly feature here in PopCult this Summer. Continue reading

This week we jump back to August, 2015, for an episode of Radio Free Charleston that is jam-packed with cool stuff.  This week we had music from Time And Distance, Christopher Vincent from Qiet, American Murder and Chemical Lizards, plus we had our usual animation and other stuff. We open with a quick jingle from our friends at Route 60 Music.

You can read the full production notes HERE but be warned, the graphics are a mess.  I haven’t had time to fix them all yet.

The PopCulteer
July 30, 2021

Your PopCulteer is on his way to the Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo (read about it HERE), so this is going to be a short column this week. However, it’s going to turn you on to two very cool Kickstarter projects, so don’t skip over it. Best of all, both of these Kickstarter campaigns are already fully-funded, so you know you’re going to get the rewards for your pledge.

Fearsome Weirdos Return

First up we have Fearsome Weirdos: Harvest of Horrors by  Robert Jiminez. I told you about the first series of Fearsome Weirdos in The PopCult Gift Guide a couple of years ago.

Robert’s work has appeared on album covers, in publications such as THE THING: ARTBOOK, VISIONS FROM THE UPSIDE DOWN: STRANGER THINGS ARTBOOK, Tiki Magazine and Pinstriping & Kustom Graphics Magazine, and has shown in galleries including Disneyland’s Wonderground, Harold Golen, M Modern, Creature Features, and Bear & Bird among others.

You can also see Robert’s work in trading card sets for Topps, Cryptozoic, and Upper Deck on licenses such as Garbage Pail Kids, Wacky Packages, Mars Attacks, Star Wars, DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Rick And Morty, Ghostbusters, Adventure Time and more. Most notably, Robert worked on 8 paintings for the Upper Deck trading card set FIREFLY THE ‘VERSE and 9 paintings for WACKY PACKAGES GO TO THE MOVIES by Topps.

Robert is also the author and illustrator of the books LAST CALL AT TIKILANDIA, STRANGEWISE NO.9, CHIMPS & TIKIS AND RAVEN-HAIRED BEAUTIES: AN ADULT COLORING BOOK, NOSFERATU’S CHRISTMAS IN NEW YORK and WEIRD-ASS FACES VOL.1, SOPHISTICATES AND WEIRDOS and the trading card set FEARSOME WEIRDOS.

There are 6 days left in the campaign for Fearsome Weirdos: Harvest of Horrors so you need to act fast. Luckily a bunch of people already acted very fast and the campaign was fully-funded in under an hour. Check out this cool trailer…

Harvest of Horrors is a follow up to the Fearsome Weirdos trading card set. This Fall Special mini set consists of 16 All-New cards inspired by some of Robert’s favorite things, monsters and parodies of products and with this set, parodies of some of his favorite authors!

Included are:

10 Petrifying Product Parodies

5 Alarming Authors

1 Wrapper Card/Checklist!

PLUS! 2 Bonus Cards!

Also included is a bonus Metal Card, featuring H.P. Hovercraft and a Taco Hell sticker.

You can get all this for twenty bucks, plus shipping, and if you want you can add on some other cool stuff, too.

To make sure you get your set of Fearsome Weirdos: Harvest of Horrors  just click the title of the set.

Making Fun of Jack Chick!

This next Kickstarter campaign is for a project that pays tribute to what is probably my guiltiest of pleasures.

A few years ago (May, 2009 to be exact) I went to see a really interesting documentary that the WVIFF brought in to the Capitol Theater with the admission being one thin dime. The film was Gods Cartoonist, and it was all about the eccentric and reclusive Christian cartoonist, Jack T. Chick, who has published and distributed hundreds of millions of his unintentionally hilarious religious tracts all over the world. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but I was in for a series of surprises.

First, the documentary was somewhat respectful in the beginning, but started to lean to the entertainingly bizarre as it progressed.  We see interviews with sincere folks who worked with Chick (Jack Chick would not grant an interview, but he gave consent for everyone who worked with him to do so), and then the documentary takes a bit of an irreverent turn. We get interviews with famous people who collect Chick Tracts and then we hear from The Reverent Ivan Stang, of the Church of the SubGenius.

That was like finding a wadded up piece of paper on the sidewalk and unfolding it to discover it was a million-dollar bill.

Anybody who’s watched Radio Free Charleston knows that we endeavor to hold up the principles of Slack and adhere whenever convenient to the teachings of The Church of the SubGenius.

So I’m sitting in the theater with a huge grin on my face, waiting to tell all my friends who decided not to go what a gem they missed out on, and I get the second big surprise of the afternoon.

The credits rolled and the last one was for the film’s writer/director, Kurt Kuersteiner.

I had been trading email messages with Kurt for weeks for an article I was writing for Non Sport Update. Kurt, in addition to making this movie, also runs Haunted Houses in Florida and produces trading cards based on really cool things.

He never mentioned the movie when I was asking him about the cards. My mind was blown.

The next day I called him and we talked for a couple of hours, and I ordered his book and the DVD of the movie and in the ensuing dozen years I’ve written about his projects for both Non Sport Update and PopCult.

And now he has a Kickstarter campaign for a parody of a Chick Tract, called “The Collector.”  Best of all, you can get this parody tract for three bucks. There are several great add-on rewards, including the book and documentary I mentioned above, and the rewards are all very reasonable, price-wise.

Check out this trailer…

In his pitch, Kurt writes, “Perhaps the best way to remember such an artist is with cartoons. I’m asking fellow comic fans to join me in publishing a top-notch Chick tract parody as an actual 24 page tract. Obviously, it will cost more than my funding goal to produce, but this amount will help with the final phase (the printing). And this campaign will help put these tracts in the hands of people who can help distribute them to other collectors– including future fans who don’t know the colorful history of Chick tracts but will want to collect them once they realize how cheap, intriguing, and/or amusing they are. ”

This project is fully-funded already (more than ten times over) and there’s almost three weeks left, so if, like me, you find the hate-filled hardcore fundamental Christian rhetoric in the famous Chick Tracts to be uproariously funny, you might want to get in on this, at this link.

It’s part tribute, part parody to the late Jack Chick, who five years ago passed on and discovered that he was right about God being a giant faceless entity with a book of his life…right before he cast Chick into the lake of fire.

And with that, we are done with this week’s PopCulteer. Now go support those Kickstarter campaigns while I’m in Louisville buying cool toys. All our regular features will be here as we post fresh content every day, even if some of it is prepared in advance and then warmed up.

The PopCult Comix Bookshelf

Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles
by Jack Kirby
Marvel
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1302930714
$29.99

This one is a real treat.

Marvel has reprinted Jack Kirby’s 1976 all-original Treasury Edition, Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles, in its original tabloid, treasury edition, size and I couldn’t be happier.

I still have the original Treasury Edition, for which I gleefully plunked down a buck-fifty some 45 years ago, but this new edition is on pristine white paper that shows off the art in a whole new light, and there’s also the bonus inclusion of a few of the uncolored original art pages and Marvel’s 1976 calendar.

Now that we live in a world where failed actors go on FOX News and gripe about how the new Captain America comics (which they admit they haven’t read) have gotten “too political,” it’s nice to remember that Captain America was political the day Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created him, over 80 years ago, and that has never changed.

In fact, Captain America was not only always politically-oriented, most of that time he’s been a champion for hardcore progressive and liberal causes. The cover of his first comic book shows him punching Hitler…and that was a year before we entered World War 2, back when Republican forces wanted us to either stay out of the conflict or side with Germany.

This particular comic was created to tie-in with America’s Bicentennial, which was a marketing bonanza, and since Jack Kirby had recently returned to Marvel and was writing and drawing the regular Captain America comic (some 36 years after co-creating him), Kirby was assigned the task of telling a story about how Captain America relates to The American Dream.

With elements of A Christmas Carol, This Is Your Life, and A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, we see Captain America transported through time for episodic adventures that demonstrate American ideals. He is reunited with his long-dead sidekick, Bucky, during World War 2. We seen him in pre-Revolutionary War Philadelphia, where his appearance inspires the design of the first American Flag.

We also see Captain America in the middle of the Indian Wars of the old West, flying an airplane during World War I, inspiring John Brown to become an abolitionist, witnessing the first atomic bomb blast and even inspiring a young newsboy in Mahattan’s Lower East Side to become a comic book writer and artist. That would be a young Jacob Kurtzberg (Jack Kirby) by the way.

This is all due to the mysterious Mr. Buda, who has summoned Captain America to his lair to send him on this metaphysical journey.

There are many folks in comics fandom who malign Kirby’s writing. I am not one of them. This story is very cleverly done, with a skeptical Captain being jerked around through history until he’s forced to learn the lesson he didn’t realize he needed to learn. Kirby’s dialogue is sharp and funny, with some outright satire mixed in to keep the pro-American message from getting too syrupy or insincere.

Captain America’s nostalgia for his sidekick is touching, while his reaction to Ben Franklin copying his costume for the flag is hilarious. Above all, Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles is a warts-and-all celebration of America. Kirby does not shy away from slavery or our horrible treatment of the Native Americans. The message is one of hope, but it’s not blind to our faults.

The folks at FOX News would probably hate this book.

I have to mention the art. Kirby, of course, is a master storyteller and pencil artist, but he was often saddled with mediocre or uninspired inkers. That is not the case here, as this book has Kirby’s oversized art inked by artists who wanted to be involved. The first chapter is inked by Barry Windsor Smith, who had made his name as the first artist on The Conan comic book, but who had gone on to the world of creating fine art prints by the time this book came around. Smith’s inks over Kirby are glorious, and manage to look ultra-contemporary and look like the work of Kirby’s old partner, Joe Simon, at the same time.

Most of the book is inked by Herb Trimpe, who shows his respect for Kirby with solid work that really adds depth to the pages. John Romita Sr., Marvel’s art director at the time, inks one chapter and some additional pin-ups, and brings his usual professionalism to the job.

As a bonus, the book includes a few pages scanned from the original art, with no colors, so we can see just how well Smith and Trimpe worked with Kirby. Another bonus is the 1976 Mighty Marvel Bicentennial Calendar,which has some nice illustrations by Romita, Trimpe, Frank Brunner, Jim Starlin, Frank Robbins, John Buscema and more.

As someone who still has his original copy, this new edition of Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles is still worth owning. The bright paper, superior reproduction and bonus material make it a bargain. It’s not a hardcover, but the covers are sturdy and the binding is vastly improved from the original.  If you haven’t read this story before, it’s well worth adding to your library. The story is great fun, and the appeal is timeless. Plus by showing Captain America as an anti-fascist hero who believes that Black Lives Matter and Native Americans got a raw deal, it puts the lie to this right-wing nonsense that the character has only recently been politicized.

You should be able to order this from any bookseller using the ISBN code.

Your PopCulteer will be in Louisville this weekend for Kentuckiana.  You can read about it HERE and at the bottom of this post. Meanwhile, if you aren’t into cool toys, there’s a lot of fun stuff happening in and around Charleston this weekend, and as usual, I am bringing you a selection of the coolest shows that have decent accompanying graphics.

You should know the drill by now. The pandemic is still not over.  In fact, it’s getting a little worse again. If you are fully vaccinated and ready to do your best to stay safe, you should go check this stuff out. Outdoor shows are okay for reasonable and vaccinated people to go maskless. Indoor shows leave you at the mercy of your fellow patrons, and with the Delta variant surging, why risk any exposure? I know there are folks who hate the idea of wearing masks, even if they’re not vaccinated. Those people are why you shold wear a mask.

So use your common sense and stay safe…and support the local scene. Here’s stuff you can do…

Friday

Saturday

Sunday 

…And In Louisville

Tuesday on The AIR  we deliver encore episodes of Radio Free Charleston, Ska Madness and The Swing Shift. It’s a block of programs that let you support the local scene, skank a little, chill out a moment and then re-learn how to Swing.  You simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the cool embedded player over at the top of the right column.

Basically, your humble blogger/deejay is still dealing with Myasthenia Gravis and its very cruel summer, so I’m taking it easy this week so I can feel better this weekend when I go to Kentuckiana in Louisville.  But I’m not just leaving you hanging. Today’s RFC is an episode from February, 2020, which has been offline for just over a year.  This show features our usual mix of fantastic local music and fantastic not-local music. Back when this episode first aired, I didn’t say much about it, opting instead to let the playlist do the talking, so here’s that playlist again…

RFCV5 007

hour one
Bon Air “Slide”
Farnsworth “Green Valley”
Linnfinity “Gingerbread Girl”
Kevin Scarbrough “O is for Operative”
Hellblinki “Rust”
Bad Keys Of The Mountain “Don’t Think Twice”
The Stranglers “Relentless”
Jay Parade “Three Cheers For A Goner”
Crazy Jane “Lemonade Song”
Ona “Lemon Sea”
Dubioza Kolectiv “Space Song”
Lou Reed “Dirty Boulevard”
Pepper Fandango “Scotch Whiskey”

hour two
4OHM MONO “Entertain Me”
Emmalea Deal “Everything I’m Not”
Mark Beckner “Fragile (C’est La Vie)”
Ann Manguson “What Is Pretty?”
Mika “Ice Cream”
Human Pyramids “The MIghty Atom”
The New Division “Modus”
Mother’s Nature “Stand Back”
Spurgy Hankins Band “Seagull”
Creek Don’t Rise “White Coat Man”
Van Morrison “In Search of Grace”
Nektar “The Light Beyond”
Rose Garden “Next Plane To London”

hour three
Red Audio “Moneytree”
Science of the MInd “Toxic Waste”
Mother Nang “Fade”
Mind Garage “Paint It Black”
M-Opus “Holy War”
Jeff Lynne’s ELO “From Out of Nowhere”
Barclay James Harvest “Sperratus”
Hurl Brickbat “World of Fire”
Out of Nowhere “You Know I’ve Tried”
Pale Nova “Never Get Enough”
The Who “Hero Ground Zero”
Church of the Cosmic Skull “Everybody’s Going To Die”
Godmode Broadway “Surfboards and Broadswords”

For those of you keeping track, this show includes 19 West Virginia artists, 4 ex-pat WV artists  3 artists who at least played in Charleston and 13 artists who are NOT local (including one guy who has since lost his freaking mind over the pandemic).

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Thursday at 3 PM, Friday at 9 AM and 7 PM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight,  and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR.

I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand.

After RFC, stick around for encores of MIRRORBALL at 1 PM, and Ska Madness at 2 PM. At three we have three classic episodes of The Swing Shift.

As I mentioned last Friday, I am in the midst of a heat-induced period of Myasthenia Gravis being a dick to me. As such, I did not even attempt to create any real-world art this week. What you see above is 100% digital, created by pushing around a mouse and hitting keys. It’s one of my geometric abstracts, which, to be honest, I can pretty much knock out in my sleep after doing them for close to twenty years. I decided to use a mix of bold primary and secondary colors and now that I’ve done it, I think it might look better animated.

Maybe later.

Click to see it bigger.

Meanwhile, Monday at on The AIR, this week our Haversham Recording Institute friends are still busy providing translation services for The Olympics. We will be running encore plays of recent episodes of Prognosis, Psychedelic Shack and Sydney’s Big Electric Cat for the next few weeks. This afternoon you can hear Nigel Pye’s Psychedelic Shack at 2 PM and Herman Linte with Prognosis at 3 PM.

At 7 PM, partly because today’s art looks a little like a Disco ball, tune in for 12 hours of the best of MIRRORBALL, hosted by Mel Larch.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player at the top of the right-hand column of this blog.