Month: September 2025 (Page 3 of 4)

It’s still technically summer, even though some recent cool days and a month-long drout has leaves changing early in places, and it just seems sort of Autumnal.  However, rest assured that unberable heat is back in the forecast for the next week or so, so it’ll feel like July again soon.  And now with the ersatz weather report out of the way, how about we jump all over the state for even more STUFF TO DO?

As always, you should remember that THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS.  It’s just a starting point, so don’t expect anything comprehensive, and if you feel strongly about me leaving anything out, feel free to mention it in the comments. Also, if you have a show that you’d like to plug in the future, contact me via Social Media at Facebook, BlueSky , Spoutible, Instagram or possibly Elon’s beast, if it should ever choose to forgive me.  I dont charge for this, so you might as well send me something if you have an event to promote. Note that some links look like they shouldn’t work because they have lines through them, but that’s just a WordPress glitch, so click on them anyway. They should still work.

We are also very happy to remind you that Cristen Michael has created an interactive calendar that is way more comprehensive than this list of STUFF TO DO, and you can find it HERE. Just click on the day and the event and you’ll be whisked away to a page with more details about loads of area events.

City Center Live at Slack Plaza in Charleston has announced their schedule for the summer.  You can find their schedule HERE.

You can find live music in and around town every night of the week. You just have to know where to look.

Most Fridays and Saturdays you can find live music at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. This weekend they have Steve Himes on Friday, and Ken Kruger with Anne McConnell on Saturday.  Sunday at 2 PM you can hear Ray + Jon during the open house memorial for Taylor Books’ founder, Anne Saville, who passed away earlier this week.

You can find live music every night at The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe. Mondays feature open mic night. The first Tuesday of every month sees the legendary Spurgie Hankins Band perform. There’s both Happy Hour music and local or touring bands on Thursday and Friday, and live bands Saturday nights.  On Sundays when there’s a new Mountain Stage, musicians from the legendary WV Public Radio show migrate to The Glass for the Post-Mountain Stage jam.

Live at The Shop in Dunbar hosts local and touring bands on most weekends, and is a nice break away from the downtown bar scene.

Louie’s, at Mardi Gras Casino & Resort, regularly brings in local bands on weekends.

In Huntington, local institution, The Loud (formerly The V Club), brings in great touring and local acts three or four nights a week.

The Wandering Wind Meadery holds several events each week, from live piano karaoke to bands to comedy to burlesque.

The multitude of breweries and distilleries that have popped up in Charleston of late bring in live musical acts as well. I tend to miss a lot of these because, being a non-drinker, they fly under my radar.

Roger Rablais hosts Songwriter’s stage at different venues around the area, often at 813 Penn, next door to Fret ‘n’ Fiddle in Saint Albans and also at The Empty Glass many Tuesday evenings. You might also find cool musical events at Route 60 Music in Barboursville and Folklore Music Exchange in Charleston.

To hear music in an alcohol-free enviroment, see what’s happening at Pumzi’s, on Charleston’s West Side. Pumzi’s looks to be beefing up their offerings in the coming weeks and months, so be sure to check that link in case we miss something.

You can also visit Coal River Coffee in Saint Albans for live music in an alcohol-free environment. This Friday at 7 PM  Coal River Coffee features Minor SwingI am looking to expand this list, so please contact me through the social media sites above if you know about more alcohol-free performance venues. The Huntington Music Collective has recently started hosting all ages shows at Event Horizon.

For cutting-edge independent art films, downstairs from Taylor Books you’ll find the Floralee Hark Cohen Cinema by WVIFF. Each week they program several amazing movies in their intimate viewing room that you aren’t likely to see anywhere else.

Please remember that viral illlnesses are still a going concern and many people who have very good reasons are still wearing masks, and many of us, understandably, are still nervous about being in crowds, masked or not. Be kind and understanding  while you’re out. And if you’re at an outdoor event, please remember that it’s awfully inconsiderate to smoke or vape around people who become ill when exposed to that stuff. If somebody asks you to refrain, don’t be a jerk about it.

Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.

Here we go, roughly in order, it’s graphics for local events happening over the next several days that I was able to scrounge up online…

Continue reading

To be clear here, today I’m going to bring you a post from exactly twenty years…and one day…ago in this blog. For some reason (and this was just in the second week of yours truly blogging), I had four posts go live on September 9, 2005, and then no more for a few days afterward. But this is an important one, so I’m going to revisit it here, with newly-restored graphics. PopCult shares a birthday with Jack Kirby, the man who created the bulk of the Marvel Comics Universe. In this post, I was a little timid about challenging the claims that Stan Lee was the main creator, but I’ve since corrected the record. 

This early in the blog, I was trying to establish my take on pop culture with my readers, and this was the first mention of Jack Kirby, and I thought that, since I’ve got outside work tying me up today, it might be a good time to look back at what I was writing two decades ago. 

Okay, there are few things cooler in this world than the creative legacy of Jack Kirby (1917-1994).

This is the guy who co-created Captain America in the 1940s, and gave the comic book world loads of memorable characters like The Newsboy Legion, The Vision, Sandman, The Challengers Of The Unknown, among other classics.

With his partner Joe Simon, he was responsible for the first horror and romance comics. Simon and Kirby split up in the 1950s, and on his own, Kirby was responsible for great work for DC, Marvel, and newspaper comics.

Kirby teamed with Stan Lee at Marvel Comics in the 1960s, and together, they created the Fantastic Four, and laid the groundwork for the Marvel Comics empire. When you see The X Men, The Fantastic Four, The Silver Surfer, The Hulk, and almost all the other Marvel heroes, you’re looking at Jack Kirby creations.

When he left Marvel to work for DC Comics, at an age when most cartoonists are contemplating retirement, he still had enough left in his tank to bring us classics like Kamandi, The New Gods, Mister Miracle, and Etrigan, the Demon.

Perhaps because he’s not the one whose uncle owned the company, Kirby gets a bit of a short shrift when it comes to things like putting his name on blockbuster movies based on his Marvel co-creations (Fantastic Four, Hulk, X Men), and his estate doesn’t even get paid royalties when Marvel reprints his classic work. Even when they do it in a coffee-table book called “Marvel Visionaries: Jack Kirby.”

DC treats Kirby better, but he’s responsible for so much of what makes up comic books today that he really deserves more acclaim.

So, it’s really cool that Kirby now has a museum dedicated to his work. It’s about time the guy got the credit he deserves. This is a guy who was creating memorable characters from the 1930s to the 1980s. Most of the modern-day universes of both Marvel and DC Comics are deeply-rooted in Kirby’s concepts and creations.

The museum is an online presence for now, with the stated goal of developing a traveling retrospective of Kirby’s work. Brought to life by Randolph Hoppe, Kirby’s daughter, Lisa, and John Morrow (publisher of JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR ,along with other great books and magazines that preserve comic book history), the Jack Kirby Museum is a long overdue honor for the man who almost single-handedly created the modern comic book. Check out the Kirby Museum here

It’s a good start when it comes to recognizing the plucky little Brooklynite, without whom we would not have two-thirds of today’s most recognizable comic book favorites. And think how cool it would be if the Avampato Museum at the Clay Center could sign on to host the traveling retrospective when it starts in 2007. {Update: It hasn’t happened yet}

Tuesday is another great day to tune into The AIR  with a new episode of Radio Free Charleston to tickle your fancy! To listen to The AIR, you simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay here, and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page.  

You can hear Radio Free Charleston Tuesdays at 10 AM and 10 PM, with boatloads of replays throughout the week.

While today is a great day to tune into The AIR, yesterday wasn’t such a great day to record a radio show. The city decided that Monday was a great day to rip up and replace the sidewalk across the street from my office (where I record the show), so I only did one hour of new stuff, and then reached deep into my archvies for a two-hour edition of RFC Volume 3, that originally ran over ten years ago on Voices of Appalachia/New Appalachian Radio.  This is a gem of a show that I’ve been saving for when it was most needed, and that time is now.

Before we get there, our first hour opens with a new tune from Ron Sowell.  Following that we have the RFC return of Dropcoat, plus some great new tracks from Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess, The Settlement, M, Vinto Van Go, Blood Orange, The Surfrajettes, The M.F.B., Brian Diller and more. It is our usual combination of excellent local, independent and cult musical artistes.

Our second and third hours take us back to May, 2015, when we wer doing the show as a podcast while waiting for technical issues to be worked out at Voices of Appalachia. This was a show with a mix of then-new and archive music from local and regional musical artists for the first half, while the second half was a solid block of Boone County’s own, Hasil Adkins.

So this week our third hour celebrates the music of Hasil Adkins. Born in 1937 and gone for just over twenty years now, Hasil Adkins was a West Virginia original. Acording to Wikipedia, the Boone County native’s songs “explored an affinity for chicken, sexual intercourse and decapitation, and were isolated in obscurity until being unearthed in the 1980s.”

That’s a pretty good bonus, you know, getting an hour of The Haze because it was too loud for me to record a whole, three-hour show. You should thank the City of Dunbar.

Hasil was the second local artist played on the RFC broadcast radio show, back in 1989.  The first was the daughter of a car dealer who advertised on the station, so Hasil was the first local music I played of my own choosing.

Check out this playlist, with links to the artist’s page, where available…

RFC V5 240

hour one
Ron Sowell “Dance Till The Music Stops”
Dropcoat “It Can Only Go Up From Here”
Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mes “Lie To Me”
The Settlement “The One That Got Away”
Vinto Van Go“Zelda Outside Havana 1939”
Neil Finn “The Rest of the Day Off”
A Tale of Two ” “Gun Street Girl”
Brian Diller “Heroes”
The M.F.B. “Dr. Feel”
Blood Orange “The Train (King’s Cross)”
M Robin Scott “Cut The Cards”
The Surfrajettes “Banshee Bop”
June Swoon “Marrying Kind”
Cold Slither “Zartan’s Revenge”

hour two
Crystal Bright and The Silver Hands “Earth Above My Roots”
Byzantine “You Sleep, We Wake”
The Lunatic Society “Dead Inside”
No Pretty Pictures “Go Mart Crack Lighter”
Alan Griffith “Blowin’ In The Wind”
Alan Griffith “Samson and Delilah”
Go Van Gogh “I Don’t Want To Be Your Hero”
Go Van Gogh “I Can’t Sleep At Night”
J Marinelli “Month of Mondays”
The Company Stores “Silence”
Radio Cult “Ace of Spades”
Wolfgang Parker “Mata Hari”
The Renfields “Killer Klowns”
Under Surveillance “I Don’t Think It’s Me”
Pepper Fandango “Wishbone Blues”
William Matheny “If You See Him Tonight”

hour three

Hasil Adkins

“The Hunch”
“Chicken Walk”
“Ugly Woman”
“If You Want to Be My Baby, Baby”
“Get Out of My Car”
“Rock The Blues”
“Jenny Lou”
“Donnie Boogie”
“I Don’t Love You”
“No More Hot Dogs”
“Truly Ruly”
“Rock N Roll Tonight”
“She Said”
“Shake That Thing”
“Let’s Stop Tonight”
“Tell Me Baby”
“Big Fat Mama”
“Walk and Talk With Me”
“I Need Your Head”
“I Want Some Lovin’”
“Shake With Me”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Wednesday at 9 AM,  Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight, Sunday at 8 PM and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different classic episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

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 last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM  The Swing Shift is an encore of two classic episodes.

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Thursday at 9 AM,  Friday at 10 AM and 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursdays and Sundays.

So, thirty days ago I was sitting in an ice cream parlor inside Cinncinnati’s Union Terminal Station/Museum Center, and being in ground central of Art Deco, I was struck by the elegance of the light fixtures in said ice cream parlor. So I decided to paint them.

This is a small study, mixed media (but mostly acrylic) on illustration board. I used some of the lessons I’ve learned imitating Hopper, but tried to put a bit of my own spin on it.

I have not yet decided if I want to take this to a larger canvas. I’m a little skittish about spending my art copying somebody else’s art, and that’s basically what I’m doing here–copying the cool Art Deco designs.

You can expect to see a lot more pieces inspired by the Union Terminal, though. It’s so visually stunning I have to try to capture it. I mean, these are just the lights in the ice cream parlor and they look like something out of Metropolis.

If you want to see this image larger, click HERE.

Meanwhile, over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you an encore of a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM we do the same with Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis.  You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player elsewhere on this page.

Psychedelic Shack can be heard every Monday at 2 PM, with replays Tuesday at 9 AM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday at 9 AM. You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 10 AM.

At 8 PM you can hear a classic episode of The Comedy Vault devoted to live performances by Monty Python.

Tonight at 9 PM we bring you our new Monday night line-up featuring two hours each of Curtain Call and Beatles Blast, plus six hours overnight with an assortment of our programming from Haversham Recording Institute: Psychedelic Shack, Sydney’s Big Electric Cat and Prognosis.

Forty-seven years ago today, the world lost Keith Moon, the irrational force of nature that played drums for The Who.

To commemorate his life, this week we present The Who, live in concert, at Tanglewood in Lenox, MA on July 7th, 1970. This is a compilation of several bootleg films and videos of the show. This is when the band was touring o suppot the Tommy album, and they perform it, pretty much intact, here.

The set list:

Heaven and Hell
I Can’t Explain
Water
I Don’t Even Know Myself
Young Man Blues
Overture
It’s a Boy
1921
Amazing Journey
Sparks
Eyesight to the Blind
Christmas
The Acid Queen
Pinball Wizard
Do You Think It’s Alright?
Fiddle About
Tommy Can You Hear Me?
There’s a Doctor
Go to the Mirror!
Smash the Mirror
Miracle Cure
I’m Free
Tommy’s Holiday Camp
We’re Not Gonna Take It
See Me, Feel Me
My Generation
Cinnamon Girl Jam

This week we take you to March, 2012, where after almost four month’s off, we got back into the thick of things with Radio Free Charleston 151, “The Tom McGees Shirt.” It was our first all-new episode of 2012.

In this show, you will find music by Buddy Black, Johnny Compton with Prank Monkey and Karma To Burn We also get a preview of Danny Boyd’s graphic novel project, “Carbon.” Host segments were shot on a beautiful, windless, Sunday morning at Haddad Riverfront park.

Our first musical guest was Canadian punk rocker Buddy Black. Black was such a huge fan of the Danny Boyd’s classic West Virginia Horror movie, Chillers, that he recorded a tribute EP devoted to film. He came to Charleston to film two music videos from the EP, and we were proud to bring you one in this episode. “Xipe,” directed by Curtis Baskerville, and filmed in Dunbar and Institute, is a beautifully-crafted, catchy punk rock gem.

After a couple of plugs for then-happening events, this episode brings you an animated (sort of) video of an instrumental tune by Johnny Compton and Prank Monkey that featured digitally-assaulted graphics so that the video looks like an oil painting come to life.  The tune is one that Johnny Compton plays to salute fallen friends and loved ones. This week we featured Johnny with Jamie Skeen and Mike Vandergriff performing “Until We Meet Again.”

This show closes with two numbers (literally) by the legendary Karma To Burn. Recorded the previous fall at Mission Coalition, you get to hear “19” and “36.”  These was an incredible night and it’s cool to see that I used more footage from that show than I recalled.

You can read the full production notes for this episode HERE.

The PopCulteer
September 5, 2025

Okay, it’s a rare PopCulteer Friday edition of STUFF TO DO, and we’re going to showcase the inaugural HurriCon Pop Culture Convention in Hurricane as our main feature.

That is, after I remind you all that today is Bandcamp Friday, and if you buy music on that platform, all the money goes to the artists. I plug this all the time on Radio Free Charleston, and if you scroll down to the RFC notes in this blog, you can find direct links to many of the artist’s pages.

Our lead event is HurriCon. It happens Saturday and Sunday at Valley park in Hurricane, WV, and it is loaded with cool stuff. There will be special guests, live music, food trucks, vendors out the wazoo, cosplay, panels, a movie screening and more.

This is all to benefit The Amercan Cancer Society and it promises to be a lot of fun for a very good cause.

Among the guests are my old buddy, Daniel Boyd, his old buddy William Bitner, and big-name actors like Jennifer Nash, Marcus Nash, Robert Ray Shafer and Meredith Garrettson. Live music will be provided Saturday by RFC regulars, The Heavy Hitters Band, and Sunday by Dam Near,  who we’ll have on the show as soon as we find some of their music.  DJ Raidar will also be providing music all weekend.

NASA Solar System Ambassador, William Blake will be on hand all weekend, looking to the stars.  Marcus Nash’s movie, Bigfoot je t’aime, will screen as a special preview Friday night, and again Sunday evening. Our old friend, West Virginia’s Doctor Who, Ronn Smith will be on hand as a vendor all weekend long, as well.

You can expect podcasters, cosplayers and food trucks…maybe even all at the same time!

Go to their website for more details and information on the very affordable admission fees.

Check out the graphics around and below this text to get you all excited and stuff.

And now, how about we jump all over the state for even more STUFF TO DO?

As always, you should remember that THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS.  It’s just a starting point, so don’t expect anything comprehensive, and if you feel strongly about me leaving anything out, feel free to mention it in the comments. Also, if you have a show that you’d like to plug in the future, contact me via Social Media at Facebook, BlueSky , Spoutible, Instagram or possibly Elon’s beast, if it should ever choose to forgive me.  I dont charge for this, so you might as well send me something if you have an event to promote. Note that some links look like they shouldn’t work because they have lines through them, but that’s just a WordPress glitch, so click on them anyway. They should still work.

We are also very happy to remind you that Cristen Michael has created an interactive calendar that is way more comprehensive than this list of STUFF TO DO, and you can find it HERE. Just click on the day and the event and you’ll be whisked away to a page with more details about loads of area events.

City Center Live at Slack Plaza in Charleston has announced their schedule for the summer.  You can find their schedule HERE.

You can find live music in and around town every night of the week. You just have to know where to look.

Most Fridays and Saturdays you can find live music at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. This weekend they have James Romano on Friday, and Two Roommates on Saturday.

You can find live music every night at The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe. Mondays feature open mic night. The first Tuesday of every month sees the legendary Spurgie Hankins Band perform. There’s both Happy Hour music and local or touring bands on Thursday and Friday, and live bands Saturday nights.  On Sundays when there’s a new Mountain Stage, musicians from the legendary WV Public Radio show migrate to The Glass for the Post-Mountain Stage jam.

Live at The Shop in Dunbar hosts local and touring bands on most weekends, and is a nice break away from the downtown bar scene.

Louie’s, at Mardi Gras Casino & Resort, regularly brings in local bands on weekends.

In Huntington, local institution, The Loud (formerly The V Club), brings in great touring and local acts three or four nights a week.

The Wandering Wind Meadery holds several events each week, from live piano karaoke to bands to comedy to burlesque.

The multitude of breweries and distilleries that have popped up in Charleston of late bring in live musical acts as well. I tend to miss a lot of these because, being a non-drinker, they fly under my radar.

Roger Rablais hosts Songwriter’s stage at different venues around the area, often at 813 Penn, next door to Fret ‘n’ Fiddle in Saint Albans and also at The Empty Glass many Tuesday evenings. You might also find cool musical events at Route 60 Music in Barboursville and Folklore Music Exchange in Charleston.

To hear music in an alcohol-free enviroment, see what’s happening at Pumzi’s, on Charleston’s West Side. Pumzi’s looks to be beefing up their offerings in the coming weeks and months, so be sure to check that link in case we miss something.

You can also visit Coal River Coffee in Saint Albans for live music in an alcohol-free environment. This Friday at 7 PM  Coal River Coffee features Minor SwingI am looking to expand this list, so please contact me through the social media sites above if you know about more alcohol-free performance venues. The Huntington Music Collective has recently started hosting all ages shows at Event Horizon.

For cutting-edge independent art films, downstairs from Taylor Books you’ll find the Floralee Hark Cohen Cinema by WVIFF. Each week they program several amazing movies in their intimate viewing room that you aren’t likely to see anywhere else.

Please remember that viral illlnesses are still a going concern and many people who have very good reasons are still wearing masks, and many of us, understandably, are still nervous about being in crowds, masked or not. Be kind and understanding  while you’re out. And if you’re at an outdoor event, please remember that it’s awfully inconsiderate to smoke or vape around people who become ill when exposed to that stuff. If somebody asks you to refrain, don’t be a jerk about it.

Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.

Here we go, roughly in order, it’s graphics for local events that I was able to scrounge up online…

Continue reading

Not quite four years ago, I alerted my readers to a very cool comic book project, The Masters.

This is a really fun comic book mini-series, created by Austin Hough and dripping with retro 1970s style.

With the aid of several respected comics veterans, All five issues of The Masters have been Kickstarted and published, and now you can help make the deluxe collected edition a reality.

The Masters is a really cool concept that mixes villains inspired by famous artists with some lesser-known, but still iconic, superheroes.

This is the complete collection of The Masters Issues 1 through 5, plus the exclusive “Issue 0,” chronicling the story behind the story of the creation of The Masters.  It contains: all of the content from the first five issues; including all of the artist bios, mazes, parody ads, and editor’s notes.  Bonus materials include: All of the variant covers; All of the bonus Kickstarter pin-ups and posters; The complete Easter Egg reveals; Images of the original black and white art; Emails between artists and author; Original model sheets; Rough sketches; And images of original notes from the author, Austin Hough.

All in all, you’ll get 360 pages of homage-laden, cruncy Bronze-age wonderfulness!

Austin has gathered together a “who’s who” of classic silver and bronze-age comic book artists to pit the villains he’s created against a wild collection of some of the most fun public domain superheroes available. A partial list of the artists involved include Ramona Fradon, Pablo Marcos, Mike Grell, Joe Staton, Bob Hall, Romeo Tanghal, Alan Weiss, Mike Vosburg, Val Mayerik, Joe Rubinstein, Ron Wilson, Alex Saviuk, Arvell Jones, Al Milgrom, Kerry Gammill, Chuck Patton, Tom Grummett, Geof Isherwood, Bart Sears, Darryl Banks, Stéphane Roux, Mike Lilly, Art Baltazar, Jimmy Palmiotti, Tom Morgan and more. Quite a bit of work on this book, including the hilarious Hostess snacks parody ads, were the work of Mort Todd, who passed away just a couple of weeks ago.

The story pits a group of super heroes against the villains in the manner of the classic Batman team-up comic, The Brave and Bold, so that in each issue we had two or more of our revitalized Golden Age heroes teaming up to take on our artistically-influenced bad guys. Not only do my comic book nerd buttons get pushed, but also my art nerd senses are tingling as we are treated to Villains inspired by the works of Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte,Keith Haring, Ansel Adams and Toulouse Latrec.  The Masters are: Sir Real Ordeal, The Clerk, Graffiti, Panorama, and Monsieur Petit Renard.

The covers to the comics pay homage to classic covers from the 70s, and 80s, and the rewards for this Omnibus are vast and exceedingly clever.  Plus they’re loads of fun and will tickle the nostalgic fancy of comic book fans of…ahem…a certain age.

Available add-ons to the Omnibus include a variety of great posters, plus several terrific homage items, like  A treasury-sized reprint of the fifth issue, a 2026 Calendar that may seem very familiar to comics fans from fifty years ago, a set of Slurpee Cups with the heroes on them, stickers and trading cards very much like the ones some of us grew up collecting, as well as pins, pin-ups, Halloween masks, jigsaw puzzles, action figures and more.

It’s all loads of fun and might make you feel like a kid again. You ucan find the Kickstarter campaign HERE.  A quick check tells me it’s already fully-funded. Check out this trailer video, and below that catch a glimpse of just some of the cool add-ons:

The PopCult Bookshelf

The Art of George Wilson
by Anthony Taylor (Author), Daniel Herman (Editor), George Wilson (Artist)
Hermes Press
ISBN: 978-1-61345-288-2
$75.00

The Art of George Wilson is an absolutely gorgeous hardcover coffee-table book that collects and celebrates one of the most widely-distributed artists of the 20th century, who sadly did the vast majority of his work anonymously.

Anthony Taylor (disclosure time: Anthony is a friend and I bought my copy of this book from him after hanging out at the Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo in July), has managed to uncover the life story of a very private man who would probably be extremely pleased, and equally perplexed to be getting so much recognition.  Along with Taylor’s great bio, the book includes the only known interview with Wilson.

Taylor even relates a secret from his past that Wilson couldn’t talk about during most of his lifetime. During WWII Wilson was part of the “Ghost Army” crew, a member of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, whose exploits might be familiar to regular readers of this blog. Their work was classified up until two years before Wilson passed away.

This book is an invaluable and long overdue recognition of a man who was part of the lives of millions of kids who never knew his name. It’s a missing piece of comic book history.

Let me quote the book’s PR blurb:

What made many of the great adventure comics of the 1960s so attractive were their fantastic painted covers by artist George Wilson. Unlike other comic book covers of the era, Wilson’s covers harkened back to the era of pulp magazines and were spectacularly eye-catching. He turned in efforts for literally hundreds of comics titles including: Classics Illustrated, The Twilight Zone, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Dr.Solar, Magnus Robot Fighter, Turok, Son of Stone and Star Trek, to name but a few.

This new art book focuses on over 300 examples of his cover art and features numerous examples of Wilson’s artwork scanned from the originals together with many of the book covers he created including his extensive run on Avon’s The Phantom (as well as his work on the Gold Key version).

The reason Wilson is so deserving of the accolades is that his work is just so damned impressive. There is a long standing snobbery in the world of fine art that looks down on commercial artists. Despite the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, even today we find resistance to the idea of commercial illustrators and comic book artists being considered alongside the artists who play the gallery game.

Unless, of course, those artists had their work traced by Roy Lichtenstein.

This book should help change that skewed perception. Wilson’s work, produced quickly on a tight deadline, could hang in any gallery and outshine many of the “fine artists” who are critically acclaimed, but fail to create any meaningful emotional connection.

Seeing so much of Wilson’s work in one place, most of it free of the text and trade dress that obscured it on comic book covers, reveals that Wilson was a technically brilliant painter, working mainly in gauche, who had a mastery of light and shadow in a league with Edward Hopper, mixed with a sense of drama and fantasy that rivals the best of the surrealists.

The Art of George Wilson is relevatory for art lovers, and is a nostalgic treat for those of us who grew up seeing those spectacular comic book covers that captured our imagination…and made us wonder who painted them. Also of note is a great introduction by contemporary artist, Joe Jusko that really illustrates the influence that Wilson had on a generation of artists, most of whom never knew his name.

The Art of George Wilson can be ordered directly from Hermes Press. You may be able to order it through your favorite bookseller by using the ISBN code, but the distribution of this book has been hampered somewhat by the bankruptcy of Diamond Distribution.

Tuesday is a great day to tune into The AIR  with a new episode of Radio Free Charleston to thrill and delight you! To listen to The AIR, you simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay here, and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page.  

You can hear Radio Free Charleston Tuesdays at 10 AM and 10 PM, with boatloads of replays throughout the week.

This week  Radio Free Charleston is loaded with an hour of great new music from old friends and new favorites and two hours of music recorded at The Empty Glass, in Charleston, West Virginia.

Our first hour opens with a brand-new tune from Deni Bonet.  Following that we have some great new tracks from Terry White and Pramuk, courtesy of our Chicago pipeline, as well as new tunes form J. Marinelli, Novelty Island, Erik Woods, Fiona Apple and The Paranoid Style.

I also remind you a few times that this coming Friday is Bandcamp Friday. You know what to do.

Our second and third hours are comprised entirely of music recorded live at The Empty Glass.  Chris Chaber,  the beloved former longtime owner of the Glass passed away over the weekend, following a long illness that saw him sell the bar and move to Connecticut. Chris was a tireless champion of local music and his loss will be felt for a long time by many.

I didn’t know quite the best way to acknowledge his passing here in the blog, then I realized that there was no better way than to play the music he loved so much. I will be forever in his debt for letting us record so many video episodes of RFC at The Empty Glass, and for all the support that he’s shown every musician and music lover in this city.

He was one of the best, and it sucks that’s he’s gone.

Check out this playlist, with links to the artist’s page, where available…

Radio Free Charleston V5 239

hour one
Deni Bonet “(All Around The World) Music Is Love”
Terry White “Out of Reach”
Novelty Island “The Only Train Driver In England”
The Paranoid Style “Tearing The Ticket”
Pramuk “Mystery Man”
Erik Woods “Liberated”
A Tale of Two “Devil Did The Deed (Not me)”
J Marinelli“Casey Jones (The Union Scab)”
The Strawbs “Part of the Union”
Feast of Stephen “Coal Tattoo”
Farnsworth “American Dream”
Byzantine “Servitude”
Jethro Tull “Working John, Working Joe”
Fiona Apple “Heart of Gold”
Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess “Sour”

hour two
Pale Nova “In Your Direction”
Speedsuit “The Game”
Spurgie Hankins Band “Seagull”
Nixon Black “The Sun Also Rises”
Baked Shrimp “NO2-4U”
Nola Bean “Buggaboo”
Hybrid Soul Project “It’s A Love Go-Go Set”

hour three
Mike Pushkin “Wrecking Ball”
David Mayfield Parade “Blue Skies Again”
Diablo Blues Band “Hell To Pay”
Mojomatic “Sinner’s Prayer”
Keneally Bendian and Lund “Pride Is A Sin”
Morglbl “Brutal Romance” ”
John The Conqueror “She Said”
The Big Bad “See You In The Shadows”
Steve Clever and Kenneth Starcher “Carnival Ride”
Harper and the Midwest Kind “Love = Peace = Freedom”
Southern Culture On The Skids “King of the Mountain”
John Lancaster “Something To Fade Into”
Mother’s Nature “Stand Back”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Wednesday at 9 AM,  Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight, Sunday at 8 PM and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different classic episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

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 last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM  The Swing Shift, like all of our non-RFC music speciality shows, is an encore of last week’s show, to make up for the replay disruptions from our anniversary celebrations.

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Thursday at 9 AM,  Friday at 10 AM and 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursdays and Sundays.