Still in Chicago, this week’s art is a pastel crayon/acrylic painting on paper for pens that takes its inspiration from a really blurry photo I took from the L, in the Loop, looking East on West Adams Street. I take a lot of photos on the L, even though they’re pretty unusable as photos because they’ll be blurry, or the windows will be smudged, or I’ll have all sorts of reflections gumming up the works.

However, if I just use these images to inspire a painting I can “fix” these issues and come up with a better image.  In this case, it was a shot of a big red “W” that made me think of the classic 1963 movie, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. However, instead of marking the site where loot from a bank heist was buried, this “W” designates The W Hotel City Center, which aside from having a big “W” on it, is of little interest to me since it’s not a Hilton property and I wouldn’t get any points by staying there.

Anyway, this is a good example of how I’m tryng to incorporate the lessons I’ve learned by studying the work of Edward Hopper into a painting that doesn’t exactly follow his compositional or rendering style that closely.  Working this way also lets me eliminate any annoying features, like ugly cars or extraneous people. It took about three weeks to finish, working on and off, around the Myasthenia Gravis.

If you’re curious about where this photo was taken, here’s a reverse view with the L in the background, courtesy of Google Street View…

To see the painting bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a new, slightly-spooky episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a new slightly-spooky edition of 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.

We do not have playlists for either show, because our friends over at Haversham are buried under work providing support to international news correspondents, but Nigel tells me his Halloween-season show is devoted to scary-sounding Swedish Psychedelic Rock, while Herman has devoted his entire show to the first two albums by The Alan Parsons Project. Those are great for the season because the first album is based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, while the second is a musical adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s I Robot.

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. You can hear two classic episodes of the show Sunday at 2 PM.

At 8 PM you can hear an hour of The Frantics on last week’s episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM the Monday Marathon presents ten more hours of Halloween themed programming, to get you in the mood for the season. 

We are nine days out from Halloween and due to popular demand, combined with the desire to be lazy, we are once-again running one of our most-watched videos.

Our video tonight is one created a few years ago by yours truly and his wife. Recorded May 30, 2015 at WonderFest USA in Louisville, Kentucky. The above video was shot by Melanie Larch and edited by your PopCulteer.

The PopCult and Radio Free Charleston crew stumbled onto this incredible collection of delightfully cheesy, vintage Ben Cooper Halloween Costumes, tucked away in a little room just off from the main hallway at WonderFest USA, the annual fantasy and SF modelers convention.

Presented by a die-hard collector named Jeff Stringer, this was a fun and surprising little diversion to find just as we were on the way out the door to come home. We didn’t get much information about Jeff’s collection, but it sure looks cool and has lots of very rare items. This incredible collection of delightfully cheesy, vintage Ben Cooper Halloween Costumes, was tucked away in a little room just off from the main hallway at WonderFest USA, the fantasy and SF modelers convention.  We were actually alerted to this treasure by our friends from JoeLanta, who were also at WonderFest, taking in all the coolness.

As for Ben Cooper Inc., the costume-maker struggled through a few bankruptcies and other setbacks before shutting down over thirty years ago. In recent years the descendants of the original owners seemed to be staging a comeback, licensing their designs to folks like Retro-A-Go Go (who have just released a new series of Cooperesque masks and wall hangings), and NECA, who are producing MEGO-scale action figures of kids wearing Ben Cooper costumes.

Once again we present this video valentine to Halloween to get you in the holiday spirit. Plus we have a few newly-resized photos, if you want to take a closer look…

Jackie Kennedy and JFK. For some reason these didn’t sell too well after 1963.

What kids doesn’t want to dress up like an astronaut?

Okay, maybe the kid who wants to dress up like Mr. Potato Head doesn’t want to be an astronaut.

The Six Million Dollar Man, autographed, with an autographed Bionic Woman in the background.

Extremely rare Tron merchandising.

When Star Wars knockoffs are done up Ben Cooper-style, they really look way more like Star Wars stuff.

We go back to August, 2008 for Episode 49 of Radio Free Charleston. “The Concept Shirt” is our Flashback this week. This episode features eclectic music from Asheville, North Carolina’s The Hellblinki Sextet, and Charleston/Huntington’s The Button-Flies–both of these bands making their RFC debuts on the show–plus you’ll get more relaxing animation from Frank Panucci and a preview of then-upcoming shows by The Ghosts Of Now, The Concept, and Under The Radar, three bands that are no longer playing together, which isn’t such a strange thing when you consider that this show is more than fifteen years old.

You can read the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
October 20, 2023

I’m still playing catch-up when it comes to reviewing toys (and comics and books), so this week our PopCulteer is devoted to three photo-reviews of cool new toys. We’ll be looking at an action figure, a slot car and a model railroad accessory, and all of them are still available for purchase. Details will be included with each review.

I’m trying to clear the decks a bit before we jump headfirst into The 2023 PopCult Gift Guide, which is going to be smaller this year than it has in previous years. The plan is to begin on November 1, with three-to-five gift suggestions each weekday, while flashback gift ideas from previous gift guides, plus general retailer spotlights will be offered up on the weekends.

And it’ll wrap up the day before Thanksgiving, so I can take some time to enjoy the holiday season without stressing myself out. The Master List will run on Black Friday.

But now, we dive back into…

The PopCult Toybox

Tura Satana Action Figure
by Odeon Toys and White Elephant Toyz
$25-$30

Tura Satana is a cult icon movie star, exotic dancer and feminist hero, famous for appearing as “Varla” in Russ Meyers’ 1965 exploitation classic, Faster Pussycat, Kil, Kill and the sci-fi shlock epic, The Astro Zombies.

With a life that at times seemed more exciting than the wild movies in which she starred, this martial-artist who took revenge on her rapists in Japan, danced burlesque at the famed Trocadero nightclub, posed nude for Harold Lloyd, turned down a marriage proposal from Elvis Presley and survived being shot and breaking her back in a car wreck managed to live life on her own terms and inspire independent women along the way.

She became an underground movie favorite and was sort of a Japanese-American Bettie Page who could easily kick your ass. Satana was popular at comic book and pop culture conventions, and enjoyed a huge resurgence in her popularity and acclaim before she passed away in 2011.

Odeon Toys, who are the toy company arm of our friends at Plaid Stallions, previously made the Brick Mantooth action figure, procured their first-ever license to produce a MEGO-scaled version of Tura Satana, dressed in her iconic Faster Pussycat outfit. They teamed with White Elephant Toyz, who are producing all kinds of terrific collectible toys right now, and they signed big-name artist, Joseph Michael Lisner, to create the package artwork.

The packaging, as you can see on the right, is a bit of a tribute to the Big Jim’s P.A.C.K. package artwork of the 1970s. Tura comes packaged in a top-opening box that will fit right in with your vintage or recent MEGO boxed figures.

The articulation is terrific. She bends and holds her poses very well. The rooted hair gets a little hard to tame, like Ms. Satana herself, and actually makes her look even more like she did in Faster Pussycat.

The end result is a killer action figure who seems ready to burst out of her package and beat the living crap out of your MEGO-sized Batman and Spider-man figures. You can order Tura from either of the links above.

Now the photos…

A close up of that face, an incredible likeness.

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The PopCult Bookshelf

The Pacific Comics Companion
by Stephan Friedt, edited with additional writing by Jon B. Cooke
TwoMorrows Publishing
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1605491219
$29.95

The early 1980s was a great time to be a comic book fan. Although mainstream comics were disappearing from newsstands, as companies like Gold Key, Charlton and Harvey struggled through their final years, the rise of stores devoted to comic books and the direct market created a demand for more sophisticated storytelling and more creator-friendly contracts for the hottest artists and writers who’d sprung up in the previous decade.

The first company to meet that demand with independently-produced four-color comics in the traditional format was Pacific Comics. The Schanes Brothers, Bill and Steve (along with their eventual editorial director, Dave Scroggy), had been running a successful chain of comic shops and a distributor for the direct market, handling DC and Marvel as well as underground comix and “ground level” publishers like Star Reach and Eclipse, decided to take the plunge into publishing and make their own comic books.

They began by seeking out top-name talent who’d left comics for greener pastures. Their first book published was Captain Victory by Jack Kirby, who had famously been screwed out of full credit and fair pay for essentially creating most of Marvel Comics’ characters. The first artist signed, but the second published was Starslayer by Mike Grell, who had created the successful Warlord for DC, and who had become a fan favorite, but who had moved on to the Tarzan comic strip because the pay was better. By offering contracts where the creators retained ownership of their characters and received a more equitable split of the profits, Pacific Comics changed the way comics publishers did business.

Pacific was a huge success, and following their lead, Eclipse jumped into color comics, as did Capitol Distribution, First Comics and eventually Comico, Malibu, Dark Horse and dozens of other smaller publishers. Sadly, Pacific Comics expanding too rapidly while trying to compete with all the new companies and with Marvel and DC who became much more aggressive in the direct market, and after only a few years of publishing some of the most interesting comics around, Pacific went belly-up. The Schanes Brothers and Scroggy remained in the industry as key players at Diamond Comics Distribution, Dark Horse Comics and other companies.

But those four years worth of Pacific Comics’ books are phenomenal. Not only did Pacific commission and publish Dave Stevens’ Rocketeer, but they also published early work by Peter Milligan and Brendon McCarthy, Mike Baron and Steve Rude, David Lloyd, Dave Campiti and others who would become legends in the field, they also hooked up with established creators besides Kirby and Grell, like Neal Adams, Steve Ditko, Jim Starlin, Sergio Aragones, Bernie Wrightson, P.Craig Russell, Roy Thomas, Al Williamson and more.

They also contracted with Warren, DC and Marvel veteran, Bruce Jones, who packaged titles for them that featured amazing writing and some of the best art in comics from the likes of Rich Corben, Nester Redondo, Ken Steacy, Bo Hampton, Roy Krenkel, George Pérez, Bret Blevins, Rand Holmes and so many more that I could devote a whole post to just listing the talent roster.

The Pacific Comics Companion is a comprehensive oral history of what went right and what went wrong with this maverick publisher. Stephen Friedt, with fresh interviews and quotes from contemporaneous interviews with the key players tells the entire story of the meteoric rise (and crater-inducing fall) of this pioneering comic book company which was the first successful publisher of the direct market comics era. Written with the editorial assist of Eisner Award-winning historian Jon B. Cooke, this book is a vital examination of a key publisher in the development of the creator’s rights movement.

Aside from the historical import, The Pacific Comics Companion is also a nostalgic goldmine for those of us who were lucky enough to live through those times. DC and Marvel were struggling to stay afloat on newsstands and had yet to fully take advantage of the direct market for comics. Creators were still leaving the industry in droves due to the lousy contracts, low pay and editorial interference. It was only due to the success of Pacific and other new publishers that DC and Marvel reformed their contacts and began to pay royalties, return original art and offer more flexible creator contracts.

I still remember the excitement of buying the first issues of Captain Victory and Starslayer, and I recall having my mind blown at the awesome artwork of Dave Stevens on The Rocketeer. The Bruce Jones’ books (Alien Worlds and Twisted Tales) remain among the finest anthology comics ever assembled and it’s nice to be reminded that for four brief years, there was one comic book company who was consistently entertaining. Even their missteps were worth looking at. I recommend The Pacific Comics Companion for any comics fan who lived through that era, and any younger fans who want to find out what they missed, and how much of a debt they owe to this company. It’s possible that, without Pacific Comics, we might be stuck with just Marvel, DC and Archie Comics today.

Available from TwoMorrows Pubishing, or from any bookseller by using the ISBN Code.

This week finds us even closer to Halloween, and there are several spooky events sprinkled in among the book festivals and other cool things for you to get into around the Mountain State and a few points beyond. In fact, it seems like a lot of folks are jumping the gun and getting their Halloween parties out of the way a week and a half early.  As I have been doing of late, this a good time to remind you 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.

ArtWalk happens in Downtown Charleston Thursday, October 19 from 5 PM to 8 PM, and as part of that they’ll be unveiling the new ART BUS at Slack Plaza at 5 PM.

This weekend at the Charleston Coliseum and Convention Center get ready for the annual West Virginia Book Festival.  Here’s the graphic below, and you can find all the details about it HERE.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM.  Friday Chet Lowther takes the stage. Saturday Swingstein and Robin performs, along with Stefan Cotterat the beloved bookstore/cafe/art gallery.

The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe has some great stuff this week  to tell you about.  Thursday at 5:30 PM, Swingstein and Robin return with Swing for a good cause. Friday Tim Courts plays during happy hour.  Friday at 10 PM The Scott Bane Quartet return to The Empty Glass. We have graphics below for the rest of the weekend shows at The Glass.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. It’s still a going concern with the ‘rona surging again. And now there are seasonal allergies, the flu, Peruvian marching toads, stinky leaf peepers, gestacular mondamenments and other damned good reasons to be careful. 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.

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

If you’re up for going out, here are a few suggestions for the weekend, roughly in order, after the jump…

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It’s “Milestone Week” on The AIR as we debut the 150th episode of Radio Free Charleston Volume Five and also episode number 150 of The Swing Shift on Tuesday! 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 tons of replays throughout the week.  This week we have three full hours of glorious free-format radio with lots of local acts mixed in with independent artists from around the world and a few classic tracks from major artists, just to keep you on your toes. But that’s not all, even though this is not a huge milestone, since RFC has been around in four previous incarnations since 1989, it does mark 150 episodes in the three-hour format that we introduced in January, 2020.

Our first two hours are a sort of normal RFC, with a mix of local, independent and big fancy-ass musical artists, while our final hour is an all-local mixtape.

We open with a newly-remastered song by The Tunesmiths. This band was Mark Beckner, from Go Van Gogh, and Mark Mingrone, and it was around back in the original RFC days. Mark has been cleaning up his archives, and I hope he’ll be putting it up on Bandcamp soon. This song was recorded by The Tunesmiths right before they left to form Hitchcock Circus in Nashville, and I don’t think I’d heard it before.

We also have great new tunes from Hello June, Corduroy Brown, Todd Burge, Ringo Starr, The Dollyrots, Jerks, Hawthorn Heights and more. Plus we play another track from Sideshow Villains, who have a very cool show coming up next Sunday in Chicago. You can find ticket details on that show HERE.

The third hour this week is a mixtape with a solid uninterrupted hour of local artists (or expatriot artists) and it’s a deep-dive into the RFC archives, with some tracks being more than thirty years old.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store. Live links will take you to the local and indie artist’s pages (where possible)  so you can find out more about them, buy their music and find out where to see them perform live…

RFC V5 150

hour one
The Tunesmiths “Farewell”
Hello June “23”
Corduroy Brown “I Think I Like When It Rains (live)”
Todd Burge “Weed”
boygenius “Powers”
Mapped By A Forest “Even We Are Wrong’
Ringo Starr “Rewind Forward”
The Dollyrots “Hot Mom With The Skinny Pants On”
Jerks “ESA”
Golden “I Want To Run”
The Living End “Prisoner of Society”
Stereophonics “Roll Up And Shine”
Hawthorne Heights “Storm”
Sideshow Villains “Monsters”
Galen and Paul “Room At The Top”
Crystal Bright and the Silver Hands  “Drowned Out”

hour two
Aaron Emerson and Friends “Lucky Man”
The Paranoid Style “Print The Legend”
Miniature Giant “Leave Me Out”
Sgt. Van and the Highway Dogs “Exit Only”
Astrodot “The Impossible Mission”
Backstreet Girls “Too Cool For You”
R.E.M. “Radio Free Europe”
Human League “Love Is All That Matters”
Klaus Nomi “The Cold Song”
Abandon The Ship “Bottom Feeder”
Bane Star “The Thrall”
Guitarmy of One “Top Secret Agent Man On A Wire”
The Madeira “Into The Deep”

hour three
Ann Magnuson “It’s A Great Feeling”
Farnsworth “Erased”
Feast of Stephen “Forbidden Dance”
Mother Nang “Knee Deep In Wine”
The Amazing Delores “Love Magic”
Three Bodies “Shingles And Tar”
Strawfyssh “Graveyard Shift”
Mad Scientist Club “Save The Whales”
dog Soldier “Blanket”
Joe Vallina “Suzy Said So”
HARRAH “Gotta Get Out”
Emmalea Deal “Ghost”
Brian Diller & The Ride “Caroline”
Go Van Gogh “Shut Up I Love You”
Stark Raven “Why Can’t White Boys Dance”
The Tom McGees “Country Roads”
The Panucci Brothers “Dancing Midget Spider-man Fantasia”

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,  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 we offer up a brand-new episode of The Swing Shift.  This week our showcase of more than a century’s worth of Swing Music also hits episode 150, which is a teensy bit embarrassing since I’ve been doing this show for more than seven years, but have had to take a lot of weeks off.  However, I did pull out the stops and assemble a killer show will full announcing and I think it’s a good example of what The Swing Shift should be.

Check out the playlist…

The Swing Shift 150

Lavay Smith and her Red Hot Skillet Lickers “It Don’t Mean A Thing”
Artie Shaw “Special Delivery Stomp”
The Gentlemen’s Anti-Temperance League “Stella”
Squirrel Nut Zippers “Pay Me Now (Or Pay Me Later)”
Lil Hardin Armstrong & Her Orchestra “Harlem on a Saturday Night”
Megan & Her Goody Goodies “Do Your Duty”
Tyler Pederson “53”
Woody Herman “Who Dat Down Dere”
Marcella Puppini “I Do (Do I?)”
Louis Prima “You Rascal You”
Lester’s Blues “The Goon Drag”
Slim & Slam “The Flat Feet Floogie”
Cherry Poppin’ Daddies “Dr. Bones”
Brain Setzer Orchestra “My Baby Only Cares For Me”
Royal Crown Revue “I Love The Life I Live”
Lionel Hampton “It Don’t Mean A Thing (Electro Swing Remix)”

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 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 Thursday and Sunday evenings.

Yeah, I’m still doing Chicago-inspired art. This week it’s a pastel crayon tiny sketch that I may take up as a watercolor study at some point, and consider as a candidate for canvas. I’m still undecided. This was done on textured paper, scanned, color-corrected and cropped. It’s based on a blurry photo taken from the Brown Line on the L, as it was crossing the Chicago River, leaving the loop.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you encores of a recent episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a recent edition of 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. You can hear two classic episodes of the show Sunday at 2 PM.

At 8 PM you can hear an hour of The National Lampoon Comedy Hour on last week’s episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM the Monday Marathon presents ten hours of Halloween themed programming, to get you in the mood for the season. 

Above is an appropriately creepy for the spooky season short film.

2088 was made by Toni V. Genov, a Bulgarian filmmaker based in Denmark. This short film is a wonderful and brief bit of paranoia-inducing creepiness, but aside from the high quality of this project, it has another characteristic that makes it a great film to share with you today. You can read a terrific essay and watch a “making of” video with full details on the creation of this Six-and-a-half minute film HERE, but the key takeway is that all the video in this production was shot with a fifteen-dollar toy camera.

And today, October 15, is World Toy Camera Day.

Enjoy the movie!

Radio Free Charleston 48 was our tribute to the Randy Lee Walden, the lead singer and bass player for Quick And Dirty, who appeared on RFC 44 in June, 2008.  This was a pretty somber show, the first time that RFC had to deal with death. Sadly it was not the last.

Randy was found dead in Quick And Dirty’s rehearsal space before a scheduled show by the band on June 30.  It was an apparent cardiac arrest.  Randy was only 30. This tribute show originally ran in July, 2008. The original production notes are HERE.