Month: November 2014 (Page 3 of 4)

The PopCult Bookshelf

With a very busy week that saw your PopCulteer delivering episode 203 of Radio Free Charleston, as well as launching a new audio version of the show (which can hear again Thursday night at Midnight HERE), there hasn’t been much time to read. So today we’re just going to look at three new releases from one of our favorite publishers of comics and graphic novels, Fantagraphics.

The home of Love and Rockets, Eightball, and much of Peter Bagge’s work also has an impressive program to reprint classic comics and comic strips, and they’ve just put out three great collections. You can order these from your local bookstore, or directly from Fantagraphics.

Pogo – The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips Vol. 3: “Evidence to the Contrary”
ISBN-13: 978-1-60699-694-2
$45

It’s in this 368-page volume (featuring another two years’ worth of Pogo strips) that we meet one of Walt Kelly’s boldest political caricatures. Folks across America had little trouble equating the insidious wildcat Simple J. Malarkey with the ascendant anti-Communist senator, Joseph McCarthy. The subject was sensitive enough that by the following year a Providence, Rhode Island newspaper threatened to drop the strip if Malarkey’s face were to appear in it again. Kelly’s response? He had Malarkey appear again but put a bag over the character’s head for his next appearance. Ergo, his face did not appear. (Typical of Kelly’s layers of verbal wit, the character Malarkey was hiding from was a “Rhode Island Red” hen, referencing both the source of his need to conceal Malarkey and the underlying political controversy.) The entirety of these sequences can be found in this book.

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Model kit/action figure hybrids have been around for a while in Japan. The idea that you can buy and build a model that is also an articulated action figure is pretty cool, and now Bandai has brought the concept to America.

Sprukits are so called because all the pieces needed to build the figure come on sprues. In case you didn’t grow up building model kits, a sprue is the little plastic frame that holds all the various pieces. It’s the plastic left in the passageways used when multiple pieces are made by injection molding, when plastic is shot into a mold to form things. In model kits, they leave the pieces on the sprue to make them easier to package and identify.

Bandai showed off these kits at Toy Fair last February, and they started turning up in stores and online over the summer. They’re offering buildable action figure kits featuring DC Comics characters, HALO, and an Anime property called “LBX.” The kits are offered in three sizes, at a variety of price points, and let you build figures that range from four inches tall to nine inches tall, with varying amounts of articulation.

I wanted to see if these were any good, so I picked up one of the two “Level 2” Batman sets, this one based on the video game Arkham City.

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Local virutoso guitarist Ryan Kennedy had some equipment stolen the other night. I’m going to quote from his Facebook page so that I don’t get any of the details wrong:

“A Mackie ProFX12 mixer was stolen from my car last night. Please send me a private message if you have any information.

The Mackie ProFX 12 Mixer

Friends. It turns out that whoever stole my mixer also got my pedal board. If you notice that anyone you know is sporting a brand new Hardwire Stereo Reverb Pedal, a Hardwire delay pedal, an Xotic BB plus distortion pedal, or a Dunlop Crybaby Wah Wah pedal, inside a Boss BCB 60 pedal board, please let me know. Thank you…..

If whoever stole my aforementioned equipment intends to keep and/or use said equipment, then he or she is probably a musician and probably known to one or more of my musician friends. If you know anyone who has recently come across a load of new stuff, ask them about it or just message me privately. I’ve never seen anyone around here use an Xotic distortion pedal, and I’ve never seen the Mackie ProFX12 in anyone’s rig before.”

It really sucks when somebody with an amazing gift has the tools of his trade taken away. I’ve been talking to Ryan about being on Radio Free Charleston soon and it’d be nice if he could recover his equipment for the taping session. If you see any of this equipment floating around out there, please contact me at rudypan@suddenlink.net, and I will pass the information along to Ryan as quickly as possible.

I’m eventually going to fix this so that it has all of our airtimes on it

Today is the day. Radio Free Charleston returns to radio in the internet age as part of New Appalachia Radio at Voices of Appalachia. I’m really excited to return to the roots of RFC and every Tuesday morning we’re going to tell you about the week’s new episode of the show.

First, it’s time for a little housekeeping. Due to a misunderstanding where I thought the show was slated to air at 10 AM on Tuesday, instead of 10 PM, which is when it’s actually slated to air, for the time being Radio Free Charleston will air twice on Tuesdays, once in the morning, with a replay twelve hours later. If this works for everybody we may just keep it this way.

Update: You can listen to this show now in the Voices of Appalachia archive HERE.

There will also be a replay Thursday at midnight, following a weekly live broadcast from Third Eye Cabaret. Eric Meadows, the head honcho at VOA has also induldged me and scheduled another replay at 2 AM Sunday, my old over-the-air timeslot back in 1989. Continue reading

Radio Free Charleston 203, “Welcome To Woodbury Shirt,” features music from Sasha Colette, Tyler Childers and Elephant in the Room, and animation from Third Mind Incarnation and Frank Panucci. This show is a bit of a showcase for how vast our archives are. We have music recorded over four years ago mixed in with music recorded as recently as last Friday night.

Part of the reason for this is to boast a bit about the new audio incarnation of Radio Free Charleston, which starts tomorrow at Voices of Appalachia‘s New Appalachia Radio. On that show I will be bringing you music from my twenty-five years deep archive. Check PopCut Tuesday morning for complete details on how and where you can hear “Radio Free Charleston: Volume Three.” Continue reading

It’s the most wonderful time of the year again, it’s Giant Robot Season! To mark the beginning of this long-running annual tradition, today’s art is a digital drawing of a giant robot. Along with the turning of the leaves and the proliferation of pumpkin-flavored everything, giant robots are one of the great American traditions that make autumn special. I hope everyone is dusting off their giant robot costumes for the big parade. Until then, enjoy today’s art. As always, click on it to make the giant robot even bigger.

It’s the time of year when every young person’s mind turns toward giant robots. To observe the beginning of the autumn giant robot season, this week we’re bringing you three videos featuring Gigantor, the favorite giant robot of both John F. Kennedy and Patty Hearst.

Above you see the first episode of The New Adventures of Gigantor, the full-color remake of the original show. Below you’ll see one of the original black-and-white Gigantor cartoons from the 1960s, and below that you will hear the theme song as performed by The Dickies, who are giant robots themselves.

Please remember to celebrate Giant Robot Season responsibly.

Austin Thomas as Joseph with Micah Atkinson as the Angel Gabriel

Over the next few weeks in this space we will be bringing you classic episodes of Radio Free Charleston that feature music from the Contemporary Youth Arts Company musical, MARY: A Rock Opera. This leads up to this year’s production, which opens November 28 at the WVSU Capitol Center Theater.

The show, created by Dan Kehde and Mark Scarpelli, has become a Charleston holiday season institution, opening every year on the night after Thanksgiving. This week we are going back to 2009 and episode 87 of RFC, where we presented a musical collage featuring several songs from the show. You can read the original production notes HERE. The show also includes a 120 Second Art Show with music by Sharon Lyn Stackpole.

Performers in this show include Molly Means, Maddy Gourevitch, Micah Atkinson, Austin Thomas, Nik Tidquist and Meredith Overcash. Molly, who played the title role of Mary in the 2009 production returns this year as the Angel, Gabriel. Austin Thomas also returns this year, returning to play Joseph five years after we recorded this show.

Over the next few weeks we’ll bring you several more episodes of RFC that showcased different productions of MARY: A Rock Opera over the last seven years.

The PopCulteer
November 7, 2014

I can officially announce it now. Radio Free Charleston will be returning to its audio roots next week via Voices of Appalachia radio. It’s a streaming service, affiliated with WVSU EDC (or DigiSo, as some folks still call it) and RFC will just be one segment of a very exciting line-up of original programming. I want to thank Eric Meadows for inviting me to be part of this great project.

You can read more about Voices of Appalachia this Sunday in The Charleston Gazette. Bill Lynch has written a comprehensive look at the exciting relaunch of VOA, and you’ll get to see the full schedule. I will offer one spoiler here: Radio Free Charleston will run Tuesday mornings at 10 AM, with repeats Thursday nights following Third Eye Cabaret and, as a favor to my nostalgic leanings, Sunday mornings at 2 AM, which was the original timeslot of the old Radio Free Charleston radio show. All times are Eastern Standard Time.

That last point is important because, being an internet station, Voices of Appalachia will be available anywhere in the world where people have access to the web. The idea is to create a venue through which the voices, art and music of the entire Appalachian region can be shared with the world.

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The PopCult Bookshelf

GI Joe: Silent Interlude
30th Anniversary Edition
Written by Larry Hama
Drawn by Larry Hama with
Steve Leialoha and Joe Benitez
IDW Publishing
ISBN-13978-1631400353
$19.99

Some people don’t believe you when you say that one of the most important comic book stories published in the 1980’s was one issue of GI Joe: A Real American Hero, a toy-based comic book published by Marvel. While some critics look down their nose at this book because it’s based on a toy, it’s telling that thirty years after its publication, this book has finally been given the respect it deserves with this cool hardcover edition.

Larry Hama had been given the thankless task of developing the GI Joe comic book and creating the personalities and characters who would populate GI Joe’s 1980’s toy universe. Hama even wrote the file cards on the back of the packages. Yet he never seemed to get the recognition he deserved for being the creative force behind what was then one of Marvel’s top two selling titles, trailing only the X-Men. Happily, he is now recognized by GI Joe fans at collector’s conventions, and hailed as one of the top triple-threat writer-artist-editors to have ever worked in comics.

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