It’s fall and that means it’s time for my annual Baltimore Comic-Con coverage! This year, I decided to spend two days at the convention, so you get twice the coverage! Join me as I talk about going both Friday and Saturday along with all of the random stuff I got. I’ve also got interviews with people in artist alley and I sit down with Stella to get her take on the weekend.
I was recently on an episode of FW Presents where Paul Kein, Rob Kelly, The Irredeemable Shag, and I riffed about independent comics. Much of my original exposure to indies was through tie-ins. Comico’s Robotech and Dark Horse’s Aliens books were some of my first steps out of the Big two, although with the exception of Image and the occasional Valiant comic, I didn’t start reading true independent comics until the late ’90s or early 2000s.
The formative event for me when it comes to independent comics was the 2002 Small Press Expo. I hadn’t been to a comics show since I went to a comic show at Nassau Coliseum in 1993. I’d been invited by my friend Paul, who’d become my “older cool comics geek friend” and honestly didn’t know what to expect. Frank Cho was the only signature I was looking for, and I had him sign some Liberty Meadows. Otherwise, my time at the Holiday Inn in Bethesda, Maryland was a lot of wandering around and trying to find something that might be remotely interesting. Among a lot of comics that ranged from the hand-made to the weird and the pretentious, there were a few books I found interesting enough to buy. One was Fade From Blue.
I happened upon the table of Second 2 Some Studios and stopped because the artwork on the covers of the three issues they were selling looked great. At the time, I was still reading a lot of superhero comics, and while this wasn’t one, I could see that the creators–Myatt Murphy and Scott Dalrymple–were influenced by a number of artists I was familiar with. So I talked to them for a while and bought issues #1-3, which they signed. After I read them, I immediately put the title on my pull list, which helped because publishing schedules for a series from such a small press were sporadic at best, and Kickstarter didn’t exist yet, so they were solely relying on sales at shows like the SPX and their listing deep in Previews to get the next issues out. Fade From Blue ran for ten issues and I still have all of them.
While they probably pale in comparison to their predecessor as well as some of the more iconic albums that were released around the same time, I consider Guns n’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion albums–released 35 years ago today–formative. Especially Use Your Illusion II, which was the first full album I dubbed from a friend’s tape using my parents’ stereo. It was probably the first hard rock/metal album I owned, and definitely the first one I had with a “Parental Advisory” sticker on the cover (even though I didn’t own the actual tape). Prior to that, my miniscule cassette collection was pretty safe: Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, and random movie soundtracks like Top Gun, Footloose, and Over the Top. Nobody was confiscating those the way parents were searching through my classmates’ bedrooms for Girls Girls Girls or Appetite for Destruction.
I had very little knowledge of anything music at the time–to be fair, I’ve always been behind the curve–and I hadn’t heard anything from the band beyond “Welcome to the Jungle,” “Sweet Child O’ Mine”, and “Paradise City.” But because they were controversial and more “adult” with their content, I think some part of me reveled in owning something my mom would have questioned and the sneaky way I went about procuring it. As if it was an issue of Playboy or something.
Anyway, I listened to my copy of Use Your Illusion II on a loop for weeks, probably annoying the hell out of anyone in the house when I played it in my room and damaging my ears when I threw it in my Walkman. I’d soon dub my friend’s copy of the other Illusion album and wear that one out as well, but eventually would settle on listening to a handful of songs from both. “November Rain,” which I talked about in the third episode of my podcast all the way back in 2013 (check) was one of them. Another was the corresponding epic piano-heavy ballad from Use Your Illusion II: “Estranged.”
The second-longest song in Guns N’ Roses’ catalog (the 15-minute “Coma” is the longest), “Estranged” runs for nine and a half minutes and is a piano-forward power ballad (perhaps an epic ballad) that is about lost love and loneliness. I was obviously drawn to it because of the piano (“Breakdown,” another track on Use Your Illusion II drew me in the same way) and remember being blown away by both how long it was and how complicated it seemed. It was a “two-sided” song on my copy–I was a complete amateur when it came to dubbing things and had to split the song between the end of side A and the beginning of side B of the tape–and like “Coma,” just … kept … going. By the time I’d finally get the album on CD (part of my Columbia House 13), “Estranged” was in my top 5 favorite songs by the band.
I got reminded by George Takei’s BlueSky account that this week marks 60 years since Star Trek debuted. I haven’t done much regarding Trek in recent years. I read both DC Comics’ series, re-watched the original crew novels and read the novelizations, and Gene Hendricks and I talked about our Trek stories on episode 112 of the podcast.
One thing I mentioned on that episode was the 25th Anniversary special. It aired September 28, 1991 in the middle of a big celebration year for the franchise. The Next Generation was going strong, novels and comics were coming out on the regular and were successful, and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country would be released on December 6.
I watched the show when it aired on WPIX, and the station preceded it with a marathon of original series episodes, packaged as a top ten of all-time. I caught a few of them and taped them, especially “Space Seed” (ranked #2) and “The Trouble With Tribbles” (ranked #1). And I also taped the special, which was two hours (with commercials).
That tape, believe it or not, was still in my basement among the other VHS tapes I’d held onto over the years. I’d thought about popping it in and watching it, but there was an excellent, crisp transfer from LaserDisc on YouTube.
I had forgotten it was as long as it was, and while I knew that it was hosted by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy from a TV control room, I couldn’t remember much else. I was also a little wary. These specials can sometimes be too short and skip over a lot; sometimes, they are cheesy and don’t take the material seriously. So I was pleasantly surprised at how well it was done.
Remember being in school and the teacher wheeled the TV/VCR cart into the room? You knew that it was going to be the most amazing part of the school day. Well, this time around, I go back through my memories of watching educational films in school. Starting with kids movies and Afterschool Specials in elementary school and up through AIDS education films in high school, I go through the movies I remember the most.
It’s part two of a two-part crossover with Required Reading With Tom and Stella. In part one, we looked at Homer’s The Odyssey. Here, we take another look at The Odyssey, this time looking at the recently released blockbuster movie directed by Christopher Nolan. What did we think of the film? What did we think of the film as an adaptation of The Odyssey? Listen and find out!
In 1990, Fox debuted Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, a show about a charming teenager who always seems to get his way. Comparisons to Ferris Bueller abounded, but the show went beyond that and made the idea its own. For three seasons, the antics of Parker and his Buds–Mikey and Jerry–along with Kubiak, Shelley, and Principal Musso were unlike any other sitcom. Join me as a I take a walk through the show by talking about its history, its cast and characters, and some of my favorite moments.
In episode 172 of the podcast, I talked about the Fox Network, and at one point, I played part of the “It’s on Fox!” promo that first ran in 1990 and was a showcase for their then-new five nights a week programming. I’ve seen promotions like this in the years since, like when the WB and UPN premiered in the mid-1990s, and old promos for the big three networks that made the rounds on YouTube. With the exception of “It’s on Fox!”, I don’t remember most of them.
On the other hand, I clearly remember some of the promotional commercials for my local television stations. Since I was watching the NYC stations, they were fairly well-produced, catchy, and reran a lot during commercial breaks, especially in the late afternoon when I was watching cartoons, sitcoms, and the news.
Syndicated stations usually had the most of these, and often ran advertisements for specifical programming blocks. You’d have “A full hour of The Simpsons every night on Fox 5″ or “The Brady Bunch Hour on Channel 11.” Then there were special movie months like Shocktober. In fact, Channel 11 was the best with these ads as well as station theming (they were “11 Alive” for a number of years in the Seventies and Eighties). My favorite had to be the commercial that was simply a montage of slows WPIX aired set to Huey Lewis’ “The Power of Love.” I’m sure nobody else but me remembers it; in fact, I can’t find it anywhere.
But what I could find were two ad campaigns from the late Eighties and early Nineties for WABC and WNBC, channels 7 and 4 in New York.
90210, The X-Files, The Simpsons, In Living Color,21 Jump Street, and … Herman’s Head? Join me this episode as I take a trip back into the late 1980s and the first decade of the Fox network. I go into the network’s origins as well as its early programming (some of which were hits and many of which were not), and then will talk about some of my favorite or most-remembered shows in various genres.
It’s the early ’90s. It’s my adolesence. And yes … it’s on Fox!
Barrett Beach/Talisman (picture from the National Park Service)
I’m nine years old. John and I are on Boogie Boards. He’s going into the surf and gliding back in while I play in the tide because I am a horrible swimmer. We hear a whistle. It’s his dad, sitting in the lifeguard chair, waving for us to come back because we’ve drifted too far down the shore. We pick up our boards, drop them by the lifeguard stand, then grab shovels and start “digging for water.”
I’m ten. My friend Evan has joined us for the day and we’re on the playground. We’re sprinting around a wooden merry-go-round, trying to get it moving as fast as possible so we can hop on and then jump right off. He’s much better than I am at catching air, but it doesn’t matter because those few seconds before I land several feet away are the closest I ever get to flying.
I’m eleven. My sister and I are always trying to get a good volley going with our Pro Kadima paddleball set. After one too many frustrated sighs and digging through the sand for the navy blue ball, she goes back to the blanket and I decide to see how many times I can bounce the ball off the paddle. After I get past 100, I join my dad and my sister in creating a sandcastle that he expertly helps us sculpt using the edge of a credit card.
In all honesty, these may have been from the same summer. They may have all happened repeatedly over three or four summers. The years at Barrett Beach on Fire Island are all one continuous memory that begins when I’m probably about five or six and ends in the middle of junior high school. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, if we were free on a weekend (or sometimes a weekday when school was out), we’d head over to the marina and catch the ferry to Barrett, one of four communities that had ferry service running out of Sayville (the others being Sailor’s Haven/Sunken Forest, Cherry Grove, and The Fire Island Pines). At the end of the day, we’d get on the boat and come home, the smell of the beach staying with us as we hosed down our beach toys and ourselves in the backyard.
