Month: November 2020 (Page 5 of 10)

During the month of November, PopCult’s Monday Morning Art will present pieces of art created using MAX Build More bricks. You can read all about them HERE.

Today’s piece is  a mixed-media hybrid of a building brick scultpure and digital painting. I was interested in creating a structure that would only be photographed from one angle, and then digitally attacked to create a psychedelic/impressionistic thing-a-ma-jig.

If you want to see it bigger, just click on the image. Below you can see a non-clickable image of the raw photo, before I got all painty with it.

Remember to check back with PopCult later Monday around 11 AM EST for the continuation of The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide. Today we’ll bring you three entries, with about an hour between each. One will have more than one item! You can read about it below.

Meanwhile, Monday at 9 AM on The AIR, the Monday Marathon brings you six hours of Psychedelic Shack, as we employ Nigel Pye to tie into the first entry in the gift guide.  The marathon follows the regularly-scheduled repeat of last weeks Big Electric Cat at 7 AM.

At 3 PM on Prognosis, Herman Linte brings us a show made up entirely of progressive rock that was released in the year 2020.  That’s followed by a classic Prognosis and an evening with one more NOISE BRIGADE plus Radio Free Charleston. You can hear replays of Prognosis Tuesdays at 7 AM, Wednesdays at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 9 AM. 

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

Today’s final pick in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide is a pre-order for an item that will ship on December 1. This is a new creation from Parker Jacobs, who has created art and designs for The Aquabats and Yo Gabba Gabba (and is in a cool ska band called GoGo 13!),  and it’s the kind of gift that families will want to bust out early, because it wallows in the holiday spirit.

I’m recommending the big bundle, and I’m just going to turn it over to their website entry, because it explains everything…

It’s the hottest holiday item of whatever year this is!

IT’S SANTA ON A PANDA!

The original (and not quite yet world famous) newest holiday phenomenon starting this holiday season!! Are you sick of doing Gnome on a Phone every year? US TOO! This is way more fun for everyone!

It’s the fun, wholesome story of Santa getting help from a Panda (since his reindeer are all on vacation), a boy who wants to ruin Christmas for everyone, and sharing the gift of Christmas and saving the day! Santa magnetically AND MAGICALLY attaches to Panda, and you get a hardcover book that you can read along with! OR you can just scan the code on the back of the book with your camera phone and be whisked away to a video that will read & sing the story to you! DO YOU HEAR THAT PARENTS?? KIDS CAN DO IT THEMSELVES! So you, or a fun video on the internet, can read & sing it to your kids whenever you want! The internet is open 24/7.

Included are:
– A plush Santa
– A plush Panda
– A hardcover fully illustrated book of the story of Santa on a Panda
– A QR code on the back of the book that takes you to the website to sing along to the Santa on a Panda song. Just open any phone camera app and hover over the code. It’s so easy, even Santas and Pandas can do it!
– A 45rpm (limited edition of 300) record featuring Santa on a Panda on A side and Peppermint Ice Cream as the B side. All signed and numbered by the artist and author, Parker Jacobs!

Santa measures approximately 5″ high
Panda measures approximately 13″ long
Book measures approximatly 8.5″ x 8.5″
And our love for you is, of course, immeasurable.

 

To read & sing along with Santa on a Panda:

you can go to https://tinyurl.com/yxnc5pqt as well as download the Santa on a Panda song (and the Peppermint Ice Cream song!) on all major streaming services! iTunes, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and more!

Special pre-order offer: item will ship 12/1/20

If you’re a cheapskate, you can order Santa on a Panda without the cool vinyl. You can also get T Shirts and enamel pins. You find all these things now at THIS LINK, so you can make sure that you can groove out this Christmas with Santa on a Panda. Check out the short infomercial below. This is great for kids of all ages (and Aquabats fans, too)…

Our next recommendation in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide is a slim, inexpensive collection of some of the best comic book stories ever published. Any comic reader who enjoys excellence, any fan of the legendary Will Eisner, and also any fan of crime noir will love THE SPIRIT: AN 80TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION.

THE SPIRIT: AN 80TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
by Will Eisner
Clover Press, LLC
ISBN-13: 978-1951038052
$12.99

Will Eisner’s The Spirit is one of the most important comic book features ever, due to the influence it’s had on comics since it debuted in 1940. Eisner’s mastery of short-form storytelling, combined with his innovation in building much of the language of graphic storytelling and the comic book continues to influence comic book artists many decades after the publication of new stories of The Spirit ended. Eisner was not only a master of laying out a story and panel composition, but his finished art (some of it completed by assistants under his direction) still stands out as some of the best comics has ever seen.

It is a testament to Eisner’s talents that The Spirit has remained relevant and has been kept in print for such a long time. I first discovered The Spirit in the 1970s, when Jim Warren brought the character back to newsstands in a magazine-sized reprint series.

My first impression of the character was in black-and-white, with tones added, so even forty-five years later, it’s still a little jarring for me to see the character in color.

But The Spirit was originally published in color, as a comic book/comic strip hybrid. The Spirit Section was a weekly tabloid-sized comic book, distributed as a Sunday Newspaper insert, and at its peak in the 1940s, was delivered to over five million households.

The Spirit was the masked vigilante identity of Denny Colt, a Central City police detective gunned down in the line of duty who fakes his death so that he can continue to fight crime outside of the boundaries of the law, with the approval of the city’s police commissioner.

While that might lead you to think that The Spirit is a gritty, noiresque crime drama, you’d only be partly correct. In addition to being the finest comics noir ever created, The Spirit also offered up light-hearted character studies, poignant urban fables and regularly mixed in elements of romance, comedy, horror and adventure with the not-so-standard detective stories.

THE SPIRIT: AN 80TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION is a delightful sampler, with nine vintage stories (five of them with new color by award winning colorists Laura Martin and Jeromy Cox), each with a brief introduction by a selection of comics professionals and historians, including Denis Kitchen, Paul Levitz, Craig Yoe and Kenova’s own, Beau Smith.

My only nit-picky criticism of the introductions is that they don’t all give the original date of publication of the story. Chalk that up to me being a comics nerd who was spoiled by reading reprint comics curated by E. Nelson Bridwell while I was growing up.

The intros are short and filled with great information, and the selection of stories is top-notch, avoiding the “Classics” that have already been reprinted a million times before in favor of lesser-seen, but still amazing works that show off Eisner’s range as a storyteller. We get to see The Spirit in different settings, a Western, a monster movie, a broad parody, a radio drama, a nuclear spy story and more. This volume also includes his “origin” tale, as re-told in 1946.

All of this demonstrates Eisner’s timeless quality as a writer and artist. These stories still stand head and shoulders above most of the comics produced before or since. Eisner’s work does not seem like “Golden Age” comics work, but it is. However, it fit right in with the Warren Magazines when I discovered it in the 70s, and it still stands out compared to the best of today’s comics.

If you were to compare Eisner to a filmmaker (which is easy to do because he was a pioneer when it came to bringing a cinematic style to comics). you couldn’t just compare him to one director. Eisner’s work is like the best of Orson Welles, Frank Capra, Sam Fuller and Stanley Kubrick, all rolled into one.

THE SPIRIT: AN 80TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION is a great introduction to Eisner’s work. The Spirit has been collected many times before (notably with the entire run collected as part of DC Comics’ Archives Series), but in this nicely-bound, slim but ample collection, at a low price, it’s affordable and easy to hold and read. This is in the “Graphic Novella” format, which is a softcover book with hardcover binding and trim, and only around a hundred pages or so.

THE SPIRIT: AN 80TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION is highly-recommended for any fan of comics, and can be ordered from any bookseller using the ISBN code. If you are shopping online to avoid dying from COVID-19, you can order the book from Amazon, or directly from Clover Press.

Our first pick today in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide is a companion to a cool toy I suggested last week. The Iron Giant Light & Sound Walking Robot Toy, based on the classic animated feature, walks, makes noise and lights up and he’s about fifteen inches tall. You can get him at Walmart now for fifteen bucks.

A dollar an inch for a cool toy robot is a bargain, and this is the perfect gift for any kid or adult who loves the movie, and it’s also pretty cool for folks who just like toy robots. Check out the PR…

Any fan of the hit movie “The Iron Giant” will love The Iron Giant Light & Sound Walking Robot Toy. This fun 15″ action figure is an expertly crafted replica of the character in the 1999 Warner Brothers film and features a movable arm and a chest that opens up to play cosmic sound effects with lights. The toy even walks and lights up with the four included AA batteries. A great gift for birthdays, Christmas, Hanukah, and other occasions, The Iron Giant Light & Sound Walking Robot Toy provides hours of fun and imaginative play for anyone aged three and up. The Iron Giant Light & Sound Walking Robot Toy.

Walmart licensed the rights to Robbie The Robot, from Forbidden Planet (who I told you about last week), and The Iron Giant from Warner Media, and hired one of their toymaking partners, Goldking, to create 15″ walking robots, with light and sound features.

The specs are: 15″ action figure; Expertly crafted replica of the character from the 1999 film, The Iron Giant; Features a movable arm and chest that opens up; Plays cosmic sound effects; Toy really walks and lights up for realistic play; Lets anyone recreate iconic scenes from the hit film;  Perfect for any fan of the film 3 years and up;  Comes with 4 AA batteries.

I would imagine that The Iron Giant is probably compatible with O Scale model railroads, just in case anybody wants to add some spice to their train layout.

This is a great gift for any fan of the movie or anyone who loves toy robots. Available exclusively at Walmart, online and in stores.

Today’s final entry in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide is another cool idea for fans of America’s favorite horror-host, Svengoolie. Last week I suggested the Svengoolie Action Figure Studio Set. Today I’m telling you about The Svengoolie At Home Box.

The Svengoolie At Home Box is the newest Svengoolie collectible item with only 2,000 available. It’s an activity box packed full of fun games and activities for an old-fashioned night-in!

Inside you’ll find the “It Came From Berwyn” 100-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle, the “Crack Me Up” Fun Putty Egg, and the Svengoolie Activity Book filled with 16 pages of jokes, trivia, coloring pages, and games like sudoku, word scramble, and a crossword puzzle. The box also has the Svengoolie Puzzle Cube, Playing Cards, a Plastic Spring Toy, a Squishy Bat Stress Reliever, and the Svengoolie Magic Sketch Keychain so fans can sketch their best Svengoolie (or Kerwyn!) portrait. To top it all off, the box also includes a tasty bag of microwave popcorn to enjoy while you tune into Svengoolie on Saturday night!

It’s a box loaded with fun stuff, much of it branded with Svengoolie himself, and it’ll run you $49.95 + $12.95 shipping and handling (plus sales tax where applicable) from the ME TV Svengoolie store

Quantities are limited, and you’ll want plenty of time for it to arrive, so don’t delay. It’s not cheap, but you tons of great, fun things for the price.

This doesn’t come in a custom box or anything, but it is a cool, fun assortment of stuff to help the person on your shopping list pass the time while we’re in the inevitable second lockdown due to the pandemic.

Svengoolie can be seen every Saturday at 8 PM on ME TV. It’s a great way to pass a couple of hours watching Svengoolie riff on a classic horror or monster movie. Tonight it’s Ray Harryhausen’s Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.

We all know somebody who doesn’t really get into The Chistmas Spirit, and instead wishes every day were Halloween. For that horror aficianado on your holiday shopping list, you can’t go wrong with the next entry in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide…

Frankenstein
by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
illustrated by Bernie Wrightson, introduction by Stephen King
Gallery 13
ISBN-13 : 978-1982146153
$29.99

Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is, of course, a ground-breaking literary classic. Bernie Wrightson, the co-creator of Swamp Thing and one of the greatest horror comics artists of all time, took seven years of unpaid work to create the fifty pen-and-ink illustrations that accompany this edition of the novel. Horror master, Stephen King even chimes in with an introduction, making this a must-have for fans of horror.

This is the fourth edition of the book that combines the original novel with Wrightson’s gloriously grotesque art, and it’s the smallest, measuring a mere 6 inches by 9 inches. The paper stock is not the bright white that Wrightson’s art deserves, but the earlier editions of this book are out of print, and selling for enormous amounts of money on the secondary market, so this is a relatively inexpensive way to add this to your loved one’s library, with the added bonus of being able to fit it on a standard bookshelf.

I shouldn’t have to sell you on the original novel. It’s a gothic horror classic credited as the first real science fiction novel, as well as the first true horror novel. Since it was written, over two hundred years ago, it has inspired films, operas, musicals, comic books, comedies, television shows, countless toys and even a breakfast cereal. Many people who absolutely love the story have never read the original novel.

The selling point for this edition of the book is Wrightson’s art. Wrightson was already an in-demand illustrator who made his name working in the horror genre for DC Comics and Warren Publishing, and had branched out into the world of limited-edition art prints when he began working on this project in the late 1970s. It was originally published by Marvel Comics in 1983, and then 25 years later in an upgraded large-size edition by Dark Horse. Those are long out of print, so this is the most affordable way to add this project to your collection.

Movie producer and screenwriter Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Season One of The Walking Dead) famously paid over a m

While the small size and paper stock are not ideal for Wrightson’s impressive art, which was originally drawn more than four times the size that it’s reproduced here, you can still see the brilliance and beauty of his work. Stephen King completists will also want this edition for his introduction.

Frankenstein, illustrated by Bernie Wrightson, should be available to be ordered from any bookseller using the ISBN code, or you can pick it up at a discount from Amazon.

Auto World

Today’s first pick in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide is a website recommendation if you really know the person on your holiday shopping list and  all they want  is some kind of toy car.

You can find just about every type of toy car at Auto World. They carry die-cast, slot cars, large-scale die-cast and model kits…and not just automotive model kits. You’ll find model kits of spacecraft, ships, aircraft, monsters and more, plus paints, glue and accessories. They offer full slot car sets, or customizing parts and individual cars and track pieces. You will find the Johnny Lightning brand of die-cast as well as Auto World’s own brand and lots of other cool automotive toys.

New items at Auto World include a new series of Johnny Lightning Muscle Cars, large-scale die-cast of NHRA racers and classic Muscle cars, pre-built models from Star Trek: Discovery, a snap-together model kit of the MACH 5 from Speed Racer and an HO Scale slot car set based on the 24 hours of LeMans Endurance Race.

If you’re shopping  on a budget, you can hit up their clearance section where, for under ten bucks, you can find snap-together Star Trek models, Johnny Lightning die-cast cars, classic Lindburgh Dinosaur model kits, plus a selection of nautical, anatomical and aviation models.

Auto World was the original must-have hobby catalog for child gearheads back in the 1960s, and it’s great to see the name revived for for this website that carries on the grand one-stop-shopping tradition for toy cars.

If anyone on your Christmas shopping list has an appreciation for cool toy cars, this is the place to go.

Archie McPhee

Archie McPhee is another online retailer that produces a hilarious catalog.

Originally a surplus novelty house, back in the 1980s, Archie McPhee quicky exhausted their supply of weird stuff, so they had to start making their own. You find products created for Archie McPhee under their “Accoutrements” label all over the place now, but if you want to go to the source, visit their website for a wide selection of things like rubber horse heads, super librarian action figures, squirrel underpants, chicken-flavored candy canes and stuff like that. It’s fun, and perfect for the person on your holiday shopping list with a healthy sense of the absurd.

This year the new silly stuff includes a line of pull-back racers…but they aren’t cars. You can get racing babies, grim reapers, tardigrades, possom and rubber chickens.

In fact, Rubber Chickens are a thing this year, and Archie McPhee offers a huge variety in all sizes, shapes and forms, along with ANCILLIARY RUBBER CHICKEN MERCHANDISE!

Other great new items include the Meditating Big Foot, The Squirrel Wearing Underpants Bobble Head, and a wide variety of finger puppets and jigsaw puzzles.

This is seriously one of the most fun websites, filled with tons of goofy, silly and wacky things that you can spring on your loved ones this Christmas. We have never needed a laugh more than we have in 2020, and Archie McPhee is there to give you a big one.

A laugh, that is. Although you can also find a Giant Rubber Chicken there.

Up next in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide we have a great gift for any fan of comedian, John Byner, or any fan of showbiz stories or great autobiographies.

Five Minutes, Mr. Byner: A Lifetime of Laughter
by John Byner and Douglas Wellman
foreword by Nathan Lane
WriteLife Publishing
ISBN-13 : 978-1608082346
$13.99 Kindle Edition $3.99

When I was a wee lad, John Byner was one of my favorite comedians. He was a talented impressionist (much better than Rich Little), he appeared on shows like Ed Sullivan, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Get Smart, Dean Martin and others too countless to mention. What got my interest initially was his cartoon voices, beginning with The Ant and The Aardvark  and continuing for decades, up to this day. He was even the voice of Bill The Cat in the Bloom County animated TV Special, The Wish For Wings That Work.

He was always funny, talented and very likeable.

Five Minutes, Mr. Byner: A Lifetime of Laughter, is a funny, pleasant likeable story of Byner’s life in show business. He spends some time on his early life, not dwelling on the negatives (his father passing away when he was young) but concentrating on his generally positive outlook and how he cultivated his talents into a long career. Byner, and his co-writer, Douglas Wellman, have crafted a very enjoyable showbiz book.

In briskly-written chapters, Byner gives first-hand accounts of working as a stand-up in The Hungry I, a legendary comedy club, and tells his readers what it was like appearing on shows with Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson. He talks about his many film roles, dropping some big names along the way, and gives accounts of what it was like appearing on TV shows like Soap and Bizarre, which Byner hosted for five years, and which was the show that made Super Dave Osbourne a star years after he first appeared on another variety show hosted by Byner.

We don’t get a lot of personal details, and to be honest, that’s a bit of a relief. I wanted to read the story of Byner’s career, and didn’t need to hear the warts-and-all details of his three divorces. We do get a chapter on dealing with hecklers and difficult people (like Woody Allen and Alan King), but the book is overwhelmingly positive and enjoyable.

Five Minutes, Mr. Byner: A Lifetime of Laughter is a fascinating time-capsule into show business in the 1960s and beyond that doesn’t weigh down the reader with dark stories of personal demons. It’s a quick and enjoyable read, but it’s got lots of meaty showbiz stories.

Aside from a couple of small, trivial quibbles I do recommend this book for anybody who wants to hear some great showbiz tales without any heavy overtones. Five Minutes, Mr. Byner: A Lifetime of Laughter can be ordered from Amazon in print in or Kindle form.

Our first pick today in The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide is a pair of books that collects the adventures of one of the wildest superhero teams of the 1960s. This is the perfect gift for the lover of vintage comics, and anyone who enjoys bizarre superhero adventures (or wants to see the beginnings of The Doom Patrol due to their DC Universe/HBO Max series).

Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Vol. 1
by Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani
DC Comics
ISBN-13 : 978-1401281113
$29.99

Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Vol. 2
Written by Arnold Drake, Art by Bruno Premiani and Bob Brown
DC Comics
ISBN-13: 978-1779500984
$39.99

Doom Patrol, the original Doom Patrol comic from the 1960s, was decades ahead of its time. This team of misfit superheroes brought the concept of a dysfunctional psuedo family of heroes in a world where people react to them naturally to comics long before the great wave of surrealist British comics writers transformed superhero comics forever.

These are the adventures of Robotman, Negative Man and Elasti-Girl, all working under the direction of the wheelchair-bound Chief, Niles Caulder, and alongside their allies, Mento, the world’s fifth-wealthiest man (equipped with a helmet that gives him psychic powers) and Beast Boy, a teen with green skin, who can turn into different animals.

Before Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, there was Arnold Drake. Drake was a mainstay of DC comics, but he proved with Doom Patrol that, given free reign, he could out-Marvel Marvel. Drake, working with a full script, created wild and bizarre adventures that rival (and possibly inspired some of) the work of Stan Lee at Marvel.

Unlike Lee, who took credit for plot work done by the artists under the “Marvel Method,” Drake crafted his tales on his own, pacing the stories and writing all the dialogue before sending the script off to his main Doom Patrol collaborator, Bruno Premiani.

Premiani brought those scripts to life with a fine, illustrative style that, while lacking the dynamic quality of Jack Kirby, perfectly suited Drake’s stories of a team that fought among themselves as much as they fought their enemies.

The Team was made of up three people who, due to different twists of fate, were turned into freaks with amazing powers. Brought together by The Chief, who was intrinsically tied to their mishaps, they did battle with a rogues gallery unlike any other. With an evil immortal, an alien warlord, a disembodied brain, a super-evolved speaking (with a French accent) ape, and a man with the powers of all the elements, all of them hell-bent on world domination, and all them willing to work together to kill the Doom Patrol, the stories in this volume take you on a wild ride, indeed.

These two paperback collections of Silver Age Doom Patrol stories bring us the first two-thirds of the team’s original comic book run, and if DC holds true to formula, in about two years we should see the final volume in this series. They are also collecting the later versions of the team, all of which are used in the streaming TV series.

These stories, originally published from 1963 to 66, put the lie to the myth that DC was just publishing staid, traditional superhero comics during the heyday of Marvel. Doom Patrol, which had an obvious influence on Marvel’s X-Men, holds up a lot better than many of Marvel’s lesser titles, and at times rivals the work of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko in terms of pure imagination.

The Doom Patrol (Spoiler Alert here) were killed off in the final issue of their comic a couple of years after the stories collected here. It was nearly a decade before DC resurrected the team, with only Robotman surviving from the original team. The revived team, originally written by Paul Kupperberg, went through a few changes and reboots until the early 1990s when Grant Morrison took over writing the adventures of the team, and managed to out-weird the original run.

The TV series, which debuted on DC Universe and then moved to HBO MAX, is based on parts of all three eras of the Doom Patrol, but the core of the personality clashes between Robotman, Negative man and Elasti-Girl, are found in the original series.

A lot of the roots of modern superhero comics can be traced back to the Doom Patrol. These collections are a great sampler.  I hope that DC comes through with a third volume ahead of schedule. My only complaint is that the final issue collected in volume two is the first half of a two-part story, and ends with a big cliffhanger. I don’t want to wait two years to see how it all turns out (and I don’t want to have to buy the original comics).

These comics were among the first I remember ever reading as a young child, and they’ve stuck with me for more than five decades. I can’t recommend them enough. You can order Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Vol. 1 and Doom Patrol: The Silver Age Vol. 2 from any bookseller using the ISBN code, or get them from Amazon by clicking on their titles above.