Hi there cats and kittens, this week’s episode of The High Five podcast gets hep with a quintet of musicals from the 1980s that have roots going back to the 1950s! We have Happy Days and Grease to thank for these, plus the eventual power that kids who grew up in that older decade had in the latter one! This one was a real wild trip, but I had a gas putting it together!
Oh and if you want to list to the Spotify playlist I put together based on some of these films’ soundtracks, check it out!
Here’s a few cool pieces of Little Shop Of Horrors art too!
On this week’s High Five Podcast I’m joined by not one, but two very special guests: my kids! On this one, the three of us discuss our favorite TV show watching experiences of last year. It might sound a little funky because it was recorded differently than the others, but I hope you’ll enjoy our takes on some of the best shows for families around!
On this week, I’m celebrating Black History Month by running down five of my all time favorite black comic creators. This was a delightful trip down memory lane, but also a great look at some of the greatest comic writers and artists around. I hope you enjoy it!
If you’re interested in the links I mentioned in the episode, here’s the CBR interview I did about Goldie Vance. If you want to find out more about McDuffie being let go from Justice League of America, you can read the initial Lying In The Gutters column here and then the news itself about him being ousted here. Finally, enjoy a few pics I snapped while putting this episode together including the fantastic Kyle Rayner sketch Darryl Banks did for me!
On this week’s High Five Podcast I’m celebrating five fantastic female horror directors making awesome movies right now! The list includes Anna Biller, Ana Lily Amirpour, Natalie Erika James, Jennifer Kent and Karyn Kusama, five of the best the genre — and many others — have to offer right now!
I threw all my plans out the window when I got a very cool package in the mail from a cool PR person! As a result, you’ll have to wait to find out more of my favorite 2020 film experiences and instead dive into my all-time favorite body swap stories from TV, animation, movies and comics!
Hi gang, as you can tell from the title here, I’m launching a brand new podcast called The High Five. The idea is that I love pop culture so much and want to get the word out to as many people as possible, so I’m creating High Five lists each week that celebrate the worlds of film, TV, comics, books, toys, music and even other podcasts!
To kick things off, I’m doing a series of episodes looking back on the very bad year that was 2020 with an eye towards some of the great media I put into my brain. This first one gets into my favorite comic and book reading experiences of the year. You might notice a lack of horror titles and that’s because I’m going to do a whole separate list focusing on just that genre for most of these categories because I absorb so much of it.
The High Five Podcast Episode 1 – Best Comics & Books Of 2020
I hope you enjoy the episode. If you’re looking for a rundown of what I talked about, hit the jump and see the comics and books as well as some other helpful links!
I really can’t understate how influential Wizard was to me as a budding comics fan. I’d been going to the comic shop for a few years by the time I discovered the mag at a mall book store. I started out reading Superman and Batman comics and added other DC comics because I knew about them from the house ads, but it wasn’t until Wizard that I really began to learn more about comics as a whole. I’ve always been pretty risk-averse and budget conscious, so it took an extra push to spend my limited funds on something new. With Wizard, I found a group of writers who opened up my world to all sorts of new books I’d never heard of including, but not limited to Hellblazer and The Goon, both of which I’m writing about here today!
When I was a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, there were so many incredible, robust toy lines to get into. I was a big fan of He-Man, Transformers, M.A.S.K., G.I. Joe and the Ninja Turtles, but there were even more ideas that seemed to just hit and disappear forever. So, you might go to the store, get something cool, tear open the box and then never know what that thing was actually called. For years, that was the case with a Pepsi can toy I have that splits open to reveal a tiny robot man and a flying…chair or something for him. Only years later would I come to find out the line was called Computer Warriors and had this great commercial!
Just look at how glorious these toys are! I was already a fan of small toys that looked like other things and could change! Plus, you add in the mystery of those things I kept hearing about called home computers and you have the recipe for something incredible! Also, maybe this is where I realized that soccer is evil!
Alas, the Mattel line apparently didn’t do as well as they hoped and it only lasted the one wave. I did just discover that there was supposed to be a cartoon as well, though it never got past the pilot stage! Oh what could have been. Actually, thinking about it, this idea could easily be brought back right now. I’ve got two kids and it seems like everything’s already about being these cool, tiny little toys. Include some blind bag options and, like, an iPad that turns into something and you’ve got a hit on your hands Mattel!
I’ve spilled a lot of digital ink this season talking about how much I love Kelley Jones’ work, especially on Batman (in posts here and here), but there’s another artist whose work is synonymous with horror in my mind: Mike Mignola. The genius behind Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. has done all sorts of work in the comics world and this post will give some love to a few of his other works that are lots of spooky fun! Here are some interesting comics you might want to check out if you don’t want to dive too deeply into those sprawling epics.
In the very same year that Gordon Hessler unleashed the very bad Cry Of The Banshee he teamed with Vincent Price again for another picture, the delightfully titled Scream & Scream Again. If you’re curious, Scream actually came out first in February followed by Banshee in July. Though I enjoyed his bonkers KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park, I was not sure how well his other film would land in what has mostly been a successful It’s All Connected. So, how’d it go?
