Kirby Studies

Reminder: Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby runs until Saturday, Oct. 10, at the CSU Northridge Art Galleries! Come see if you can!

NEWS! The show has been getting some terrific coverage. On Sept. 1, Tom Kraft and Rand Hoppe of the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center filmed a video walk-through of the exhibition with me: a half-hour curator’s talk, or ramble, through the Gallery. You can see this walk-through at the Museum’s online journal, The Kirby Effect, right here. Thanks, Tom and Rand! This is the best way to experience the show if you cannot visit in person.

Also, back on Aug. 25, Gabriel Valentin and Dan Brozo of the Digital Lizards of Doom webcast (sponsored by Meltdown Comics) interviewed me in the Gallery. Watch it right here, or via Meltdown’s site. Our conversation starts about six minutes into the webcast and lasts about an hour. Thanks for a great experience, Gabriel and Dan!

AND: This past Monday, Sept. 7, Labor Day, Ted Coe of radio station KCSB at UC Santa Barbara (91.9 FM, kcsb,org) interviewed me about Kirby and the exhibit for a marvelous edition of his show The Freak Power Ticket. An edited podcast of that live interview is now available for streaming or download through the KCSB website, right here. Our conversation starts about 11 minutes in, and goes for about an hour and a half. Ted, thanks for a delightful talk, and for the chance to reconnect with my alma mater, UCSB!

Finally, thanks to Artillery magazine for the nice shout-out. 🙂

Come to our panel discussion on Saturday, Sept. 26, at 1pm! It’s going to be a doozy. Details TBA!

Tomorrow, Labor Day, I’ll be on the radio, talking about Jack Kirby and Comic Book Apocalypse. Specifically, I’ll be on UC Santa Barbara’s station, KCSB, doing an interview on Ted Coe’s show, The Freak Power Ticket, between 11:00am and 1:00pm PCT. I can’t wait!

The Freak Power Ticket is an wide-ranging and phantasmagorical show described by producer/host Ted as a “wondrous boatride” among rock’n’roll and other music, movies, pop culture, counterculture, and various esoteric but vital forms of art and expression. Ted interweaves interviews and tributes with eclectic music and audio tidbits from movies and obscure recordings. Most episodes are curated around particular themes or guests. Tomorrow the theme is Kirby!

All this takes me back a bit. Years ago—say about thirty—I myself went to UC Santa Barbara, and got my BA in English there. Heady days. I lived for a couple of years in Isla Vista, that curious unincorporated community attached to the UCSB campus, and fell in with a loose circle of esoteric music buffs, comics fans, nerds, neopagans, creatives, and Ren Faire anachronists—my peeps. One of the things I most enjoyed doing in those days was tagging along when my friend Dio Sanchez (RIP) did his late-night prog rock radio show, Willow Farm, on the campus station, KCSB. I too got an FCC license, and did some subbing for Dio. I also ran, briefly, my own wannabe prog show on the station’s closed-circuit AM feed (which only reached the dorms). Naturally I spent a good deal of time listening to other KCSB programs, including a late-night ambient show called Sonic Gallery and Pat Cardenas’s wonderful folk show The Black Nag, which is still going strong after all these years. I can’t claim to know much about KCSB or the station’s history, but I’ll always fondly remember my brief time there.

So I’m delighted to be joining Ted Coe (Ted C.) tomorrow for a show that is clearly a labor of love. We’ll talk about Kirby, comic book labor, and art, Kirby’s relationship to the Marvel Universe, and of course the exhibition. Ted has a cornucopia of music and sound bites prepared, all of it related to Kirby or comic books. That’s The Freak Power Ticket, from 11:00am and 1:00pm Pacific Time, tomorrow. I hope you can tune in—and support independent radio!

Here’s KCSB’s official announcement about tomorrow’s show.