The PopCulteer
October 3, 2025

This week we’re going to talk a little bit about Kickstarter and it’s use to fund comic book projects. Before I get deep on that, let me tell you about a very cool upcoming project that collects, colors and updates a book I first reviewed in this blog over sixteen years ago.

I’m going to recycle bits of my original post because I did a pretty good job explaining the concept back then.

Brian Bolland’s The Actress and the Bishop Coming Back In Print In Color

You can go HERE to pre-save the Kickstarter campaign and be notified for a newly-colored collection of Brian Bolland’s classic comic strip.

Bolland is veteran British comic book artist, best known for illustrating “Batman: The Killing Joke” (written by the legendary Alan Moore), and the ground-breaking maxi-series “Camelot 3000.” He’s spent most of his career as a cover artist, applying his meticulous pen to such characters as Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Judge Dredd and The Invisibles, among others.

Created originally as one plate of a limited-edition art portfolio, Bolland’s strip “The Actress And The Bishop,” ran as three-page installments in the first two issues of the anthology comic, A1 in the late 1980s. The third strip, a 17-page epic, was drawn in the early 1990s, but remained unpublished until a collection of Bolland’s work was released as a hardcover nearly twenty years ago.

“The Actress And The Bishop,” taking it’s title from an obscure (to the US) bit of British slang, tells, in rhyming couplets, the story of the unlikely pairing of an elderly Anglican Bishop, and his beautiful lady of the evening (“Actress” is a very polite British euphemism for prostitute).

The rhymes and stories are clever, but the real star is Bolland’s ultra-detailed art. This is eye candy so good you can actually gain weight looking at it. The level of detail is just amazing. The fact that Bolland draws some of the most beautiful women in comics is a bonus. You don’t get to be the cover artist for Wonder Woman by drawing ugly women.

“The Actress And The Bishop” is a unique, very British, work of art. It’s poetry. It’s comics. It’s drawing. It’s entertaining, charming and engaging. I heavily recommended it back in the summer of 2009, and now that Bolland is coloring it and adding a more recent installment, I’m pretty much on board instantly.

Let me quote form the campaign:

Brian Bolland’s amazing The Actress and the Bishop in a Deluxe Collectors form -gathering all the strips in FULL COLOUR FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER plus prose and illustrations. Available with a companion black and white volume, showcasing Brian’s incredible linework.

A beautiful Hardback with gold foil accentuated dust jacket, printed endpapers, coloured head and tail bands, ribbon and signed – this is the ultimate collection of Brian Bolland’s Actress and the Bishop.

Featuring the strips The Actress and the Bishop Go Boating, The Actress and the Bishop Throw a Party (originally printed in A1), The Actress and the Bishop and the Thing in the Shed (from Bolland Strips!) and finally The Actress and the Bishop Go to the Seaside (printed in Shift Anthology volume 2 issue 5).

Also rounded off with two prose stories with spot illustrations from Brian – The Actress and the Bishop Go Shopping and The Actress and the Bishop Take Up Sport, plus pin ups, covers, preliminary art and an interview.

Brian is colouring the strips over the coming months, for an estimated delivery in November.

The collection I wrote about is long out of print and commanding collector prices. This is a great chance to get an exquisitely beautiful collection of comics from one of the finest illustrators of the last century.

About that black and white linework available in the companion volume, I originally wrote, “It’s in black-and-white, which shows off Bolland’s artwork in sparkling clarity.”

The Actress and The Bishop is definitely not for kids. The Actress spends much of the comic book sans clothing. That’s not really a negative. Any fan of offbeat comics and fantastic art should seek this out. Go HERE to be notified the day that the campaign goes live, which should be any day now.

Speaking of Comics On Kickstarter

You may have noticed that I haven’t been plugging too many comic book projects over on Kickstarter (or other crowdfunding sites) lately. There are a few reasons for that.

I’m still supporting a few of my favorite creators, folks like Anthony Stokes, Austin Hough, Karl Kesel and Jason Pell, and I’ve been keeping up with a few reprints of Golden Age classics, but I have almost completely stopped supporting campaigns by folks who aren’t known to me.

For a while there, I was taking more chances, snapping up books by more unknown talents and looking for fun, new kinds of work.

But it got to be too costly. See, I hate to read comics digitally. I literally will only do it if I’m writing a review and that’s the absolute only way to read a comic. If this makes me sound like I’m older than sin and out of touch…well, you may have a point.

But I remain defiantly within my old fartedom to the point where I will never pay money for a digital comic book again. I have Myasthenia Gravis. Trying to work a touchscreen is torture for me. I look like a bear trying to solve a Rubik’s cube.

And reading on a computer screen is what I do for work all day. It’s not relaxing to me. If I’m reading a comic book…something I’ve been doing for going on sixty years, I want to hold it in my hands.

So I have to go with print versions of the comics I support, and the prices on those have skyrocketed, along with the postage. I understand and accept that it costs more to make physical comics now, but the cost has gone up so much that I have to be pickier about what I support.

Most of the time, a single comic book, after the postage is added in, will set me back more than twenty bucks on Kickstarter. And I can’t just gamble that on an unknown quantity.

With the creators I support, I have no problem paying enough to cover the shipping costs, printing costs and a decent wage to the creative team. But if I’ve never heard of the artist or writer, and the concept is sorta stupid and you’re asking me to cough up over twenty bucks for a print copy…I’ll take a pass.

What’s worse is when you somehow get on somebody’s email list and get inundated with plugs for campaigns where, in many cases, they don’t even bother listing the names of the writer or artist.

Another reason I’ve stopped gambling on new comic book projects is that my bets haven’t all come in. Some show up and just aren’t very good. Others take their sweet damn time showing up.

ZOOP! is a competitor to Kickstarter. They run campaigns for larger collections for books, with deluxe features and first-rate production and printing. Often their books are in support of a great cause like supporting victims of war and wildfires and such. When you support a ZOOP! project, you feel like you’re donating to a charitable cause.

The main reason for that is that you’re lucky if your book shows up within two years.

I have supported three books via Zoop! The first one showed up 26 months after the campaign closed. The latest one is closing in on the two-year mark with no publication date in site. It was supposed to have been delivered in April, 2024.  The one in the middle showed up about a month ago. It was a shock to me because it had been so long since the campaign ended that I totally forgot I had ordered it.

In fact, I still don’t remember ordering it. When it did finally appear in my mailbox, it seemed like the first time I’d ever heard of it.

There are other things that bug me about crowdfunded comics. I realize that this next one is a bit of a necessary evil, and without it the creators would be leaving money on the table, but I personally despise variant covers.

And I find it pathetic that so many of the variant covers are “naughty” with gratuitous nudity. I’m not a prude by any means. I wouldn’t have plugged The Actress and the Bishop if I were. Don’t get me wrong…I’m a huge fan of gratuitous nudity, but living in a world where real women are naked all over the internet for free, it’s beyond my understanding why somebody would pay ten or twenty dollars extra for a comic book just because it’s got a poorly-drawn tit on the cover.

Some of these artists draw like they’ve never seen a naked woman in real life. it’s weird as hell to me. Some of these girls don’t even look human. What manner of meat-beatery be this? I mean…how hard up are the people buying these things?

But I can’t blame the folks making the comics for indulging in a little softpore cornography if it puts more money in their pockets. This is more just me being cranky in my old age…and really embarrassed for the younger generation.

It strikes me as weird that, in a time where raw boobage is abundant and universally free to anybody with a smartphone, folks will still plunk down money for a crudely-draw nude chick on a comic book cover.

Another annoyance is something that’s happened to me three times in the last two years.  I have Kickstarted books that became fully-funded, then changed their publishing plans and delivered books to comic book stores months before they were delivered to Kickstarter supporters. That might’ve been the biggest thing that soured me on crowdfunding.

Anyway, that’s my venting about Kickstarter and comics for now. I’ve get to get up early in the morning to go yell at some clouds.

Now, as far as using Kickstarter for other kinds of projects…the tariffs have pretty well killed off most crowdfunded action figures, but non-sport trading cards are still going strong, and I’ll be telling you about some of those in a week or two.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for fresh content every day and all our regular features.

Earlier this week the news broke that this year the West Virginia International Film Festival would take place, in part, at the currently-shuttered Park Place Stadium Cinemas in Charleston. This is great news on a couple of fronts.

First, it means that the folks at WVIFF expect crowds that will be larger than the Floralee Hark Cohen micro Theater can hold. It’s a nice space, but it is tiny. Second, that means that Park Place is being kept in decent enough shape that it could be up and running in short order should a new owner be found. It’d be great to see that happen. It’d be even better if the new owners don’t try to turn it into some kind of “drafthouse” theater. Charleston needs to have at least one thing going on that doesn’t involve beer. 

You can find the full schedule and details about the Film Festival HERE.

Meanwhile, all this talk of movie theaters took me back to an early post in this blog, twenty years ago today, to be exact, where I was very enthusiastic about a then-new theater in the area. Happily it’s still in business, and it’s also the the movie theater where I saw two movies last year. Those were probably the only two movies I’d seen in a full-blown theater in about a decade. I’ll talk about that at the close, but for now, here’s the original PopCult post from October 2, 2005.

To give you the short background  story…from 1991 to 2005, Mel Larch and I, as part of the Animated Discussions column for The Charleston Gazette, reviewed animated movies. That Gazz link is long dead. 

We had some wonderful experiences seeing some fantastic films. Watching The Lion King after midnight in an otherwise-empty theater in Kanawha City the day before it opened is a fond memory.

However…reviewing movies at the Marquee Cinemas at Southridge made me hate seeing movies in a theater. I NEVER had a positive experience seeing a movie there. Even if the film itself was great, we had to endure lousy sound, audio bleeding from ther theaters due to the paper-thin walls, out-of-focus pictures, poorly-behaved fellow audience members and just a general malaise at having to watch movies in a glorified shoebox. Marquee destroyed any desire I had left in me to ever see a movie in a crowded theater again. 

In the twenty years since I first posted about what is now The Regal Cinemas in Nitro, I have not set foot in the Marquee…and I never intend to. The pandemic taught the world how wonderful it can be watching a movie at home, without the expense of going out or the forced interaction with other humans, who en masse tend to suck. If I do go out to see a movie, I still head to Regal. 

Somehow we made it to October.  Pumpkin spice is infecting the world and All Hallows Eve is looming, and of course, we still have a whole bunch of STUFF TO DO in and around Charleston and West By God Virginia to tell you about.

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.

There are some big things happening this week. FunktaFest will take over Huntington Friday and Saturday, and you can find a complete schedule of the cool stuff happening there HERE. This is a great show where you can hear lots of the bands we bring you on Radio Free Charleston, as well as tons of other cool things.

We have a pretty huge show in Dunbar Friday night as well. Friday at The Shop in Dunbar, it’s The Chris Chaber Community Garden Project. This is a fundraiser to name the East End Community Garden after the late and much-missed Chris Chaber and make some improvements to it to make it even better.

This epic shows starts Friday, October 3rd at 5 PM at The Shop, in Dunbar.

For 25 years, Chris Chaber poured his heart into the East End community—lifting up local music, connecting people, and supporting neighborhood projects that made Charleston a better place for everyone. Now we have a chance to honor Chris by renaming the East End Community Garden in his memory, and restoring an agricultural water account at the property to keep the garden thriving.

There will be Live Performances All Night in Chris’s Honor. Here are just a few of the names you’ll see on stage: Andy Frampton; Jeff Haynes; Tony Harrah; Johnny Compton; Nolan Collins; The Spurgie Hankins Band; The Carpenter Ants; Jerks; Duck City Music; Justin Steele; C.W. Vance; Christopher Carter (Hurl Brickbat).

Plus you can see live artist: Eric Thomson and you can expect a guest appearance by John Chick.

There will be a suggested donation at the door, but you should give more than that because every dollar goes directly to officially dedicating the garden as “The Chris Chaber East End Community Garden.” As it says on the Facebook Event page where I swiped most of this info, “Come for the music, stay for the community. Invite your friends, spread the word, and help us honor a legend the right way.”

Those are the two big shows, but there’s always more than just two things going on around here.

We are 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.

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

Most weekends you can find live music at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and Friday and Saturday shows start at 7:30 PM. This weekend they have The Lone Canary on Friday, and Ar Lewi 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, or at The Cavern on Charleston’s West Side, and also at The Empty Glass many Tuesday evenings or Sunday afternoons.

There’s also some cool stuff hapening at Slack Plaza in Downtown Charleston, as part of City Center Live. Check out the graphic at right.

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.  I 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 and those look to be incredible.

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 illnesses 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…

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