Mutiny to Host the Live Comic Book Radio Show You Never Knew You Needed

Jeff LaGreca and Suzanne Slade are spouses, but their idea of a romantic New Year's Eve is a little different from that of most couples. The two plan to share the final hours of 2024 in a comic book shop — not shopping for comics, but acting them out on stage.

"It's based on this old 1952 horror story called 'The Screaming Skull,'" LeGreca says of The Jack Kirby Radio Show, a live, retro-pulp performance that he and Slade patterned after the mystery radio programs of the 1930s and ’40s. The show is the main attraction at Nerd Year's Eve, a multimedia celebration of geekdom that will be held on December 31 at Mutiny Comics & Coffee. Adds LaGreca, "I've taken all the pages and added limited animation to them so that they can be projected behind us. Then we wrote a script for it, and we act out the story like we're doing a live radio broadcast."

Along with a fluid troupe of several additional actors, LaGreca and Slade founded the Jack Kirby Players — named after the legendary comic book artist — to bring the innocent wackiness of vintage comics to a fresh audience. Case in point: The premise of "The Screaming Skull" is summed up, in the story's own words, with this: "After searching for twenty years, two explorers discovered a chest containing the green god of death in the jungle."

"We can be tongue-in-cheek sometimes," LaGreca says. "We just love those really fun, old-timey comic books."

"Everyone in the cast gets handed the script when they go on stage," Slade explains. "They don't learn their lines in advance. It's a cold read. We have a musician on keyboards who adds, like, drama and ambience. And we have a Foley table where we pull up somebody from the audience as a volunteer and they're kind of our sound effects artist. The table has all these fun, ridiculous things they can use to add sound effects, like a hair dryer or a couple of rocks from a garden. Just weird, stupid stuff."

When Slade calls something weird and stupid, she does so with love. In the past, she and LaGreca have collaborated on a wide range of wonderfully geeky projects. Like their Game of Thrones-themed band, Daenerys and the Targaryens. Or their sci-fi, pop-punk outfit, H2Awesome!. Or their central roles — she played the lead, he was the director — in local creator Dana Cain's post-apocalyptical musical, The Android's New Soul, which debuted at the Bug Theater in September 2024.

LaGreca is also known as one of the founders of DINK, Denver's independent comics convention, which he launched with his brother Charlie in 2016. DINK didn't survive the pandemic, but its demise did leave LaGreca free to start Nerdorrific Enterprises with Slade. Nerdorrific specializes in geek-culture events, with Nerd Year's Eve being the most ambitious so far. In addition to The Jack Kirby Radio Show, Nerd Year's Eve will include pinball matches, a board game tournament, a comic book draw-off, an interactive sci-fi audio adventure, cosplay, prizes, food and a dance party to carry revelers into 2025.

"I've always tried to think of fun ways to combine things that I love," LaGreca says, "and two things that I love are live performance and comic books. So this is bringing those things together in a really whimsical, exciting way."

"It seems like just having a good time became kind of uncool for a while," Slade adds. "Jeff and I always talk about being in high school and just the stupid stuff that you do when you're a kid. We lose that sense of adventure and that creativity and just laughing and getting to know everyone. We want Nerd Year's Eve to be as inclusive as possible and just allow people's freak flags to fly. We're just a bunch of weirdos wanting to have fun."

Nerd Year's Eve 2024, featuring the Jack Kirby Radio Hour, 7 p.m. Tuesday, December 31, Mutiny Comics & Coffee, 3483 South Broadway, Englewood. Tickets for the all-ages, alcohol-free event are $25 in advance and $30 at the door for adults, $10 for children under 12. For tickets and more info, visit nerdyearseve.com.