Transmissions

If you were a young kid anytime between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s, you probably remember him. He had a funny haircut and a mustache, and he wore a jacket with enormous pockets. He welcomed you every morning at eight o’clock into a place he called the Treasure...

I recently finished reading The Dime Detectives, Ron Goulart’s comprehensive history of the genesis of modern American detective fiction. The 238-page journey took me much longer than it should have, because a demanding writing schedule since the beginning of the year...

With the exception of Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters, few blues artists of the 20th century were more influential and enduring than guitarist, singer and songwriter B.B. King. In a span of nearly seventy years, he cemented a reputation as the primary ambassador of the...

I was not even two years old in mid-September of 1965, so I have no memory of the premiere of Lost in Space on network TV sixty years ago. I vaguely remember watching an episode here and there from the final season in 1968, but that’s the extent of my connection to...

“If you write one story, it may be bad. If you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.” —Edgar Rice Burroughs   When I was about twelve years old, my aunt gave me the first five books in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan series as a gift for either my...

Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen’s third studio album, turns fifty this week. A half-century after the fact, most rock critics and historians consider it a monumental recording. At the time, though, it was a struggling musician’s Hail Mary. By the end of 1973, the...

Film noir is like any other creative aesthetic or artistic movement. The closer the examination, the more difficult if not impossible it becomes to define exactly what it is or exactly when or where it started. I’ve said the same about music in the past. Fill a room...

The surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945, marked the beginning of the end of World War II, but VJ Day – shorthand for victory in Japan – was the end of it all. Eighty years ago this week, after U.S. planes dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on...

Pulpfest 2025 is less than a week away, beginning on Thursday, August 7, and continuing through mid-day Sunday, August 10. For the uninitiated, Pulpfest is an annual convention of pulp fiction collectors and dealers, as well as writers and publishers of modern-day...

A couple weeks ago in this space I mentioned that the animated Superman cartoons produced by Filmation Studios for Saturday morning TV in the late '60s were my gateway drug to comic books a couple years later when I started reading. But there was another animated...