Our previously-announced video and photo essay will be delayed until later this week.

Above you see a video of my friend, Danny Boyd, talking about writing horror at ShockaCon in 2015. This is Danny in his element, teaching storytelling technique.

Danny passed away Friday. I’m not exactly sure what happened, and I don’t want to speculate. I just know that, for the fourth time in four months, I got caught off-guard by the loss of a close friend.

Professionally, Danny was “Daniel Boyd,” and his resume is diverse, impressive and also random as hell. Yes, he was a retired college professor. He was also an award-winning documentary filmmaker. He was a Fullbright Scholar. He built a film school program at West Virginia State (first College, now University). He wrote and directed delightful low-budget movies, some of which were picked up for distribution by Troma. He wrote magazine articles, children’s books, a novella and more. He taught graduate-level courses on creating graphic novels and wrote a few of his own. On top of that, at the age of 48, he decided to pursue a career as a professional wrestler, and as “Professor Danger,” he worked all over the world for major US independent companies and even for AAA in Mexico. I almost forgot, he adapted two of movies into stage musicals, working with Marc Scarpelli and Larry Groce. The man never went long without a project or five in the works.

And he was always “Danny” to me.

When Danny was persuaded to come to teach at what was then West Virginia State College in 1983, I was one of his first students. We hit it off immediately and became friends. I am proud to say that I aced every class I took from him.

Of course, those classes included “Horror and Fantasy in Film,” and “The Importance of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone,” but still, for me that was an accomplishment.

I would tease Danny that he waited until I was gone to start teaching the meaty film making classes, and he’d tease back that, as a student, I was his guinea pig.

Danny was one of the few friends I was able to maintain contact with during my hellish first marriage. I’d introduced Danny to my brother, Frank, and they became close friends and collaborators, so he’d check in on me from time to time. For a while there, we became “divorce buddies,” commiserating through the ends of our respective unions.

When I finally broke into radio, Danny was one of my biggest boosters, and he played a key part in hooking me up with Michael Lipton, which would lead to a profile of me appearing in The Charleston Gazette, and that would be seen by one Melanie Larch, who decided she wanted to meet me.

Once again, I have lost a friend for decades who was very consequential in my life.

Danny was very supportive of me, as he was of all of his former students. Once I started writing PopCult, he became a regular presence at this website. Danny was also a contributor to the video incarnation of Radio Free Charleston. He very generously allowed me to butcher his short film, Coal Dust, Fairy Dust into a gag movie trailer, and contributed music videos and other short films, including an unreleased comedy short he did featuring animation by my brother.

Danny’s influence on me and on the late Brian Young shaped a great deal of the guerilla filmmaking style we used on RFC.

There are well over a hundred references to Danny in the twenty-years of this blog, with the first being less than a week after PopCult began, and the most recent being last September, when I was plugging his appearance at the first HurriCon.

That was the last time I saw Danny. I’d decided to go to the con as a civilian, so I didn’t take any photos or anything, but I went to Danny’s table and we spoke for nearly an hour. It was just two old friends catching up. I bought a copy of his novella, which I still have not had time to read, and he asked me how Frank was doing and we talked about some of the cool stuff that was happening locally. We also both felt really old when I reminded him that, when I took his film class, we had to shoot on Super 8 film because the Communications Department didn’t have portable video cameras yet, and the only 16 mm camera was bolted to an animation stand.

It was great catching up with Danny. It was always great seeing my old friend. I’m really going to miss him. I am far from alone in that. Danny had thousands of friends and former students who adored him, and he’s going to leave a huge void in West Virginia’s creative community.

He was a rare breed…a creative and energetic soul who was a tireless self-promoter, but also a generous and nurturing teacher and mentor. You don’t usually find all those qualities in the same person.

But you did with Danny. His legacy lives on with the works of his students and colleagues.