The PopCulteer
July 30, 2021

Your PopCulteer is on his way to the Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo (read about it HERE), so this is going to be a short column this week. However, it’s going to turn you on to two very cool Kickstarter projects, so don’t skip over it. Best of all, both of these Kickstarter campaigns are already fully-funded, so you know you’re going to get the rewards for your pledge.

Fearsome Weirdos Return

First up we have Fearsome Weirdos: Harvest of Horrors by  Robert Jiminez. I told you about the first series of Fearsome Weirdos in The PopCult Gift Guide a couple of years ago.

Robert’s work has appeared on album covers, in publications such as THE THING: ARTBOOK, VISIONS FROM THE UPSIDE DOWN: STRANGER THINGS ARTBOOK, Tiki Magazine and Pinstriping & Kustom Graphics Magazine, and has shown in galleries including Disneyland’s Wonderground, Harold Golen, M Modern, Creature Features, and Bear & Bird among others.

You can also see Robert’s work in trading card sets for Topps, Cryptozoic, and Upper Deck on licenses such as Garbage Pail Kids, Wacky Packages, Mars Attacks, Star Wars, DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Rick And Morty, Ghostbusters, Adventure Time and more. Most notably, Robert worked on 8 paintings for the Upper Deck trading card set FIREFLY THE ‘VERSE and 9 paintings for WACKY PACKAGES GO TO THE MOVIES by Topps.

Robert is also the author and illustrator of the books LAST CALL AT TIKILANDIA, STRANGEWISE NO.9, CHIMPS & TIKIS AND RAVEN-HAIRED BEAUTIES: AN ADULT COLORING BOOK, NOSFERATU’S CHRISTMAS IN NEW YORK and WEIRD-ASS FACES VOL.1, SOPHISTICATES AND WEIRDOS and the trading card set FEARSOME WEIRDOS.

There are 6 days left in the campaign for Fearsome Weirdos: Harvest of Horrors so you need to act fast. Luckily a bunch of people already acted very fast and the campaign was fully-funded in under an hour. Check out this cool trailer…

Harvest of Horrors is a follow up to the Fearsome Weirdos trading card set. This Fall Special mini set consists of 16 All-New cards inspired by some of Robert’s favorite things, monsters and parodies of products and with this set, parodies of some of his favorite authors!

Included are:

10 Petrifying Product Parodies

5 Alarming Authors

1 Wrapper Card/Checklist!

PLUS! 2 Bonus Cards!

Also included is a bonus Metal Card, featuring H.P. Hovercraft and a Taco Hell sticker.

You can get all this for twenty bucks, plus shipping, and if you want you can add on some other cool stuff, too.

To make sure you get your set of Fearsome Weirdos: Harvest of Horrors  just click the title of the set.

Making Fun of Jack Chick!

This next Kickstarter campaign is for a project that pays tribute to what is probably my guiltiest of pleasures.

A few years ago (May, 2009 to be exact) I went to see a really interesting documentary that the WVIFF brought in to the Capitol Theater with the admission being one thin dime. The film was Gods Cartoonist, and it was all about the eccentric and reclusive Christian cartoonist, Jack T. Chick, who has published and distributed hundreds of millions of his unintentionally hilarious religious tracts all over the world. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but I was in for a series of surprises.

First, the documentary was somewhat respectful in the beginning, but started to lean to the entertainingly bizarre as it progressed.  We see interviews with sincere folks who worked with Chick (Jack Chick would not grant an interview, but he gave consent for everyone who worked with him to do so), and then the documentary takes a bit of an irreverent turn. We get interviews with famous people who collect Chick Tracts and then we hear from The Reverent Ivan Stang, of the Church of the SubGenius.

That was like finding a wadded up piece of paper on the sidewalk and unfolding it to discover it was a million-dollar bill.

Anybody who’s watched Radio Free Charleston knows that we endeavor to hold up the principles of Slack and adhere whenever convenient to the teachings of The Church of the SubGenius.

So I’m sitting in the theater with a huge grin on my face, waiting to tell all my friends who decided not to go what a gem they missed out on, and I get the second big surprise of the afternoon.

The credits rolled and the last one was for the film’s writer/director, Kurt Kuersteiner.

I had been trading email messages with Kurt for weeks for an article I was writing for Non Sport Update. Kurt, in addition to making this movie, also runs Haunted Houses in Florida and produces trading cards based on really cool things.

He never mentioned the movie when I was asking him about the cards. My mind was blown.

The next day I called him and we talked for a couple of hours, and I ordered his book and the DVD of the movie and in the ensuing dozen years I’ve written about his projects for both Non Sport Update and PopCult.

And now he has a Kickstarter campaign for a parody of a Chick Tract, called “The Collector.”  Best of all, you can get this parody tract for three bucks. There are several great add-on rewards, including the book and documentary I mentioned above, and the rewards are all very reasonable, price-wise.

Check out this trailer…

In his pitch, Kurt writes, “Perhaps the best way to remember such an artist is with cartoons. I’m asking fellow comic fans to join me in publishing a top-notch Chick tract parody as an actual 24 page tract. Obviously, it will cost more than my funding goal to produce, but this amount will help with the final phase (the printing). And this campaign will help put these tracts in the hands of people who can help distribute them to other collectors– including future fans who don’t know the colorful history of Chick tracts but will want to collect them once they realize how cheap, intriguing, and/or amusing they are. ”

This project is fully-funded already (more than ten times over) and there’s almost three weeks left, so if, like me, you find the hate-filled hardcore fundamental Christian rhetoric in the famous Chick Tracts to be uproariously funny, you might want to get in on this, at this link.

It’s part tribute, part parody to the late Jack Chick, who five years ago passed on and discovered that he was right about God being a giant faceless entity with a book of his life…right before he cast Chick into the lake of fire.

And with that, we are done with this week’s PopCulteer. Now go support those Kickstarter campaigns while I’m in Louisville buying cool toys. All our regular features will be here as we post fresh content every day, even if some of it is prepared in advance and then warmed up.