Month: July 2015 (Page 4 of 4)

Monday will see the debut of Radio Free Charleston 209, our ninth-anniversary show.  At the head of this post, you can see our fifth anniversary episode of Radio Free Charleston. When we first started doing Radio Free Charleston as a video web show, there was no guarantee that we would even make it to the end of our first year.  Now it’s the fourth anniversary of our fifth anniversary. Ain’t that special?

Mother Nang

Radio Free Charleston has not always observed our anniversary. The first anniversary of the show fell in the middle of a hiatus we took due to a family health crisis. I don’t think we really paid any attention until episode 75, which coincided with our third anniversary in 2009.

Stacee Lawson

I considered blowing off the anniversary show in 2011, simply ignoring it, because we had just produced eight episodes in two weeks for FestivALL, and were completely burned out. After producing three hours of content in two weeks, the idea of taking the month of July off looked mighty appealing. But this was our big number “five” and we had a golden opportunity plop into our lap.

The official birthday of Radio Free Charleston is the Fourth of July and in 2011, we had two big outdoor music festivals scheduled for the second and third of July. Jammin’ On The River was a day long music fest held at Haddad Riverfront Park. Tribute To The Troops was a day long hard rock/heavy metal festival held at the Schoenbaum Ampitheatre in Coonskin Park.

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The PopCulteer
July 3, 2015

It’s the big 4th of July holiday weekend and as a result, this week’s PopCulteer is going to be lazy and not have much content in it.

We do want to alert you that Monday, the 9th Anniversary episode of Radio Free Charleston will premiere here in PopCult, with music from The Company Stores, Speedsuit, Volt 9000, and more, plus a web series trailer by Ann Magnunson and animation. We’ll tell you all about that in the production notes Monday morning.

You may have noticed this year that we did not do a big FestivALL wrap up here in PopCult. That’s because we didn’t go to much of it. Basically, your PopCulteer attended Ann Magnunson’s show and ArtWalk and didn’t make it out to anything else. There was no sinister reason behind this. The first weekend of FestivALL, we traveled to the Marx Toy Convention and had loads of fun, which we told you about HERE, HERE, and HERE.

The second weekend, we were playing catch-up with other assignments and taking it easy. So for the first time since the very first FestivALL, the PopCult/RFC cameras did not roam Capitol Street during the Art Fair. This will give absence a chance to make the heart grow fonder and we will likely return next year to capture some of the cool street performances.

Ian’s cool FestivALL piece

Luckily, I did happen to wander by Ian Bode as he was working on his big FestivALL painting and even though I was barely a presence at FestivALL this year, he included me standing next to the giant bust of John Hodgeman. It’s always an honor to be included in one of Ian’s pieces.

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The PopCult Bookshelf

This week we’re going to take a quick look at, and highly recommend, Justin Cornell’s graphic novel-turned-webcomic, Willpower. Justin has been working on Willpower for more than three years now, and I’ll let him describe it…

William was a regular, 7 year old kid. Until he wasn’t.

Inheriting his powers by facing down oblivion and emerging unscathed, but inheriting his morality from Saturday morning super hero cartoons, he has trouble adjusting and coping with the reality of the world.

Willpower is basically a superhero book, with a kid protaganist. But it’s not your typical superhero book. Justin is drawing Willpower in a style that isn’t in the traditional superhero mold.

The book is in black-and-white, with heavy tones, and Justin’s style is more along the lines of an independent book, looking almost like Manga at times, and showing the influence of Rick Geary at others. It is a refreshing change from mainstream comics with ‘roided-up heroes and coloring that buries the art under every possible color that the computer can spit out.

Having spent three years working on the book with no feedback because the sotry has not yet been published, Justin decided to post one page a week, every Thursday, at his website, for free. Justin explains his reasons for doing this thusly…

I’m going to start releasing this as a webcomic. A lot of things lead to this, and it seems like they all weighed equally into the final decision. I took a while to find a management service; I wanted something simple (uncomplicated, but mildly customizable), that I could set and forget, with simple functions on both ends (me uploading it, anyone else looking at it).

I’m sitting on a pretty large stack of finished pages that aren’t going to see print for a while. (less and less I liked the idea of being on page , say, 150 without anyone really seeing the first page. I guess I sort of want to be able to prove I’m doing something.)

Nothing else has changed, the plan is still to print it as a single volume when it’s finished.

This is a very smart idea. Fourteen pages in, I’m hooked. I can’t wait to see the entire story, and to have it in a format where I can read it all at once. For now, you can sample Willpower HERE. Check out Justin’s website HERE and visit his store, where he has the odd print or two for sale HERE.

When Willpower is released, PopCult will let you know how to get a copy. This is a fun story, with interesting implications and the art is a delightful departure from mundane genre fare.

The PopCult Toybox

Some of the most fun reissued toys coming out these days are made by Tim Mee Toys. This long-lived toy company, part of Processed Plastics Co. of Montgomery, Illinois, teetered on the edge of oblivion until they were rescued by J. Lloyd International a few years ago.

In recent years, with a little creative guidance from Victory Buy, Tim Mee has had a major resurgence, producing reissues of their classic toys from the original molds with clever packaging and in new colors, and most amazingly of all–made right here in the USA. That’s a pretty major selling point considering the holiday we’re observing this coming weekend. We first wrote about Tim Mee Toys‘ reissue program last Christmas.

Tim Mee has three cool new products just released and you can find them for sale in their Amazon store. We were lucky enough to get our hands on some review samples.

First up is the set with packaging that warms the cockles of my Subgenius little heart. People at Play is a set with six different figures depicting a classic All-American Whitebread family in various modes of recreation. Mom is gardening, Dad is smoking a pipe and carrying a hammer, Jr is tossing a football, Sis is cheerleading, Little Brother is playing fetch with the dog, and Little Sister is jumping rope while her cat looks on.

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