Month: June 2013 (Page 2 of 3)

Last night, Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School paid tribute to Joss Whedon’s much-beloved and recommended cult sci-fi TV show, Firefly. So many people love this show that it has placed very, very high on my list of stuff to eventually get around to watching.  However, since Firefly has not yet topped that list, I have no idea who Cat Schrodinger and Luna L’Enfant were portraying.  Please feel free to use the comments to explain to your clueless PopCulteer what’s going on here.

There are more quick digital paintings after the jump. Remember to check PopCult later tonight for RFC 186, with QIET and Mother Nang, and click the images to enlarge.

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Here’s one for my dad.

The PopCulteer
June 14, 2013

This week your PopCulteer will bring you 10 bits of information that you need to know. Some of them are bite sized bits and some of them are bits big enough to choke a horse. But that’s enough of this bit. Let’s get on with the bits…

1– Kick Cancer For Kids

The big deal this weekend is ECMC’s Kick Cancer for Kids. Starting before Noon at The Eagles Club at 404 Virginia Street on Charleston’s West Side, this all-day, all-ages show will take 14 of Charleston’s hardest-rocking bands and spread them over two stages to raise money to battle Juvenile cancer. This show is brought to you Wood Boys Music, Rockin’ Robins and East Coast Metal Coalition.

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The PopCult Bookshelf 

Marble Season
by Gilbert Hernandez
Drawn & Quarterly
ISBN: 978-1-77046-086-7
$21.95

I’m already on record as being a huge fan of Gilbert Hernandez. I’ve been on board since the first Fantagraphics issue of Love and Rockets over thirty years ago. As one of “Los Bros. Hernandez,” Gilbert always seemed to be more prolific than his brothers, Mario and Jaime, and has produced work of an amazingly high quality on his own for three decades now.

Marble Season is unlike any of his previous work. This is a semi-autobiographical snapshot of what it was like growing up in a largely hispanic Southern California suburb in the 1960s. Being a kid in that era meant a steady diet of things like comic books, GI Joe, monster movies, Sea Hunt, Mars Attacks cards, and games like Marbles. With this work, Hernandez has dared to tell a story that isn’t epic. So much of his work has world-shattering or life-changing plot points. Marble Season does not. It’s a simple, months long slice-of-life showing kids in a neighborhood, facing everyday situations and just beginning to learn about the pitfalls of growing up.

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This week’s PopCult Toybox is a photo essay looking back at just a little bit of the wonderfulness that was MEGO Meet 2013, held last weekend at the Kruger Street Toy and Train Museum in Wheeling. We will have still more photos on Friday and this weekend, video which we have yet to edit.

We ran up on Saturday and had a blast checking out the new toys, the vintage toys and the customs. This year’s convention exclusive was Snyderman, a re-creation of the mascot hero from the Heroes World catalogs from the 1970’s. These catalogs were the best source for MEGO toys back in the day and they were also notable because they were published by Ivan Snyder, who was a master of comic book merchandising in the seventies and the catalogs were produced by Joe Kubert and his students at The Kubert School, which made them pretty darn cool in and of themselves.

Among the cool things at MEGO Meet were demonstrations of resin head casting and an operational 3-D printer, plus the chance to shoot the breeze with folks like Doc MEGO and Brian Heiler, the author of “Rack Toys.”

It was a great time and the PopCult crew will definitely go back next year. Heck, we’re going back to the Kruger Street Toy and Train Museum weekend after next for the Marx Toy Collectors convention.

Enough jibber-jabber, let’s look at the pictures

The Snyderman exclusive

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I am taking an extra day to edit the photo essay on MEGO Meet 2013. It will be worth the wait.  Look for it on Wednesday.  Video will be coming this weekend.

Today’s art is another twenty-plus-year-old marker sketch, recenrly unearthed and colored in the computer. This one is called “The Lab,” because it’s all labby and stuff.

Click it to see it larger.

Above you see a 1973 animated short by John and Faith Hubley, starring the voices of their preschool daughters, Georgia and Emily.  “Cockaboody” was in heavy rotation as between-movie filler on HBO, back in the early 1980s.

This was the second cartoon the Hubley’s made using the surreptitiously- recorded voices of their kids.  Years earlier they created “Moonbird,” using the voices of their sons, Mark and Ray, and took home the OSCAR for best animated short in 1959. You can see it below. 

The PopCulteer
June 7, 2013

Your PopCulteer is heading north to MEGO Meet this weekend but that doesn’t mean that there won’t be plenty of stuff for you to check out back here in Charleston and other surrounding areas.

The Moonstruck Battle of the Bands takes place on Friday and Saturday, and even though it involves a “Battle of the Bands,” something I do not approve of, and also involves camping, something which has no appeal to this PopCulteer, there is an amazing line-up of bands, so check out their PR: “The event will occur in the Civil War Section, the oldest section of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, and the Civil War Courtyard. Camping is on our 300 acre farm. Tickets purchased in advance online are $20 and if purchased at the gate $25.

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Production notes can be found here.