Nine men and women of medicine who once led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under both Republican and Democratic administrations have written an open letter you might want to read. If you don't have the time, I'll summarize it for you: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a fucking idiot who doesn't know the first thing about medicines, diseases, vaccines or health and his uninformed decisions are going to get a lot of people killed.
I do not understand why Kennedy has any support from anyone. If nine people with a long history in the field of fire prevention told you that your home was in imminent danger of a major blaze, would you instead believe some guy who didn't understand what a hydrant was?
Just did some surfing on the Internet and saw an amazing number of rumors that Donald Trump is dead, is about to be dead, had a stroke, is having some limb amputated, etc. As far as I can tell, not one of these comes from anyone who would be in a position to know if one of those things was true. Someone heard it from someone who heard it from someone who heard it from someone who heard it from someone who heard it, etc…
I wish people wouldn't do this. I also wished that when other "sources" who also had zero credibility were saying Joe Biden's health was much worse than it obviously was. Some guy who got onto my Facebook friends list was at one point telling everyone that Biden had died…then when Biden was suddenly out in public again and looking pretty healthy, the "friend" decided that "That's a double who's been made up to look like Biden" was a more plausible explanation than "I was wrong." Needless to say, that rumormonger is no longer on my Facebook friends list.
It's September…the time when Summer winds down, the kids go back to school and Evanier hits you up for money. This blog costs me several thousands dollars a year to maintain and keep running…and yes, it can be done for less. But some years ago, I tired of it occasionally crashing and being off-line and I had one too many episodes where things went wrong from a technical standpoint and I had to drop everything — including paying work — and put in the hours to undo what had gone kablooey.
Also, the "tech" side of maintaining a blog was getting to be a little too much for my limited expertise in that area. Twice in the last twelve months, I've had to pay a few hundred bucks to a WordPress Expert to do things that would have made me feel like one of the Three Stooges trying to remove someone's spleen.
So I signed up with a service that has kept things online for your (and my) pleasure. It makes things easier for both of us but now, once a year, I ask you to donate so I can make up the outta-pocket expenses of blogging almost every day. I have turned down offers to sell paid advertising or allow sponsored guest posts or to section off parts of the blog that will be open only to subscribers…stuff like that. I want to keep it absolutely free for all and "free" can sometimes be expensive.
Thus, today we start a Send Me Money campaign that will annoy you no more than reading this post and subsequent reminders…and the reminders will go away as soon as I receive enough to cover my expenses. If you can't afford it, fine. I understand…and I want this blog to be not only ad-free but guilt-free, as well. If you can afford it, thank you very much…
I gave up watching most of Bill Maher on HBO because I felt that more and more of what he said and did on Real Time was click-baity (to coin a new term we need). He also got on a kick of discussing medicine and health with all the expertise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on a bad day. Once in a while, Maher presents something I think is very perceptive and even very funny but not often enough to make it Must-See-TV for me. I like him a little more on his Club Random podcasts if/when he gets a guest who interests me (as he does occasionally) and lets them talk (as he also does occasionally).
That said, I found it well worth my time to sit through all of the hour-and-a-half he spends this week with Woody Allen. If you do, you'll wish Maher fawned less and talked less but there's a real good interview in there if you're patient…
I kept meaning to post this but I also kept not getting around to it. This was on Seth Meyer's show a few weeks ago and it's one of the cleverest things I've seen on late night teevee in many a year…
A recurring message on this blog is not to get your medical advice from (a) The Internet or (b) anyone who seems to have studied medicine on The Internet. Even before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stepped into power and began managing our country's health care without the slightest fucking clue as to what he's doing…replacing the counsel of learned Men and Women of Medicine with the whims of know-nothings…I've been urging you to not believe what you see and hear online.
This does not apply to one corner of The Internet. The American Medical Association is stepping up to fill that void via this YouTube Channel. But even there, they constantly advise you to believe Your Doctor over anyone with a keyboard who thinks they know all about diseases and aches and chronic conditions…
I haven't mentioned it lately on this blog but I have an odd semi-preoccupation in the kind of high-speed car chases that seem to pop up about once a day in Southern California and, obviously, elsewhere. My main fascination is with how the news covers them. A police pursuit is one of the few times that TV brings us something live with no idea what might happen, when it will happen, etc.
On your local news, when the News Director decides to pre-empt regular programming or turn the news telecast over to one of those live events, he or she has no idea how long they'll be locked into that coverage and if it will end peacefully or with someone dying. Many of them lead us on and on and on and then turn out to be not very interesting. Sometimes, they last so long that the TV station has to cut away or their helicopter has to turn back without showing us the resolution.
But I'm also interested in the mechanics of how the police handle such matters. Somewhere back on this blog a few years ago — I can't locate it at the moment — I mentioned a new invention that was being tested out as a way of stopping fleeing automobiles. It's called The Grappler and some police forces around the nation have been using them.
Here's a recent chase in which the car being pursued was stopped by The Grappler — and what happened when the driver being pursued tried revving his or her engine to perhaps break free of that Grapple. There's no audio on this…
Every year on Saturday at Comic-Con, I host two back-to-back panels — Quick Draw! and Cartoon Voices I — that fill Hall 6BCF to the point where hundreds of folks who want to get in can't get in. And every year, some person posts on Facebook or somewhere that one or both of these panels failed to attract much of an audience. I don't know why they do this in their off-time from, I'm guessing, handling the fact-checking at Newsmax.
So every year (starting last year), I post a photo of the audience just to remind you that you can't believe everything (and sometimes, even anything) you read on the Internet. Here is a shot from the stage during this year's Quick Draw! game…
If you click on that image, it will get taller and wider on your screen. It was taken by Tom Richmond, who was one of our competing cartoonists in the game. Does that look like not that much of an audience to you?
Can you spare an hour and twenty-four minutes? I've been sleeping weird hours and this morning at 3 AM, I was lying awake in bed, trying to decide whether to get up and go to my office or try to get back to sleep. I picked up my cellphone, flipped over to YouTube and randomly began watching this interview with Stephen Colbert at the 2024 Paley Festival. I ended up watching the whole thing and found it fascinating and enlightening and it confirmed my belief that Mr. Colbert is one of the smartest people ever to appear regularly on television.
Ben Schwartz is the interviewer and he's also great. The conversation is not political and, of course, not about the current situation. It's just about Colbert and who he is and how he got that way and I couldn't go back to bed after watching every minute of it…
Believe it or call me a bigger liar than our president…but it's almost time to start thinking about next year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. As the subject line says, we have 328 days until it convenes — which, by an odd coincidence, is the same number of panels I expect to be hosting at the event.
But they've just announced that Returning Registration will take place on Saturday, October 4, 2025 at 9 AM West Coast Time. That means that if you had a paid attendee badge for the 2025 gathering, you can log in then to try and score one or more for '26. You can verify your eligibility for that badge sale by logging into Member ID account on this page. If you aren't eligible for this scramble, don't worry. Your day will come.
And I'm only kidding about the 328 panels. I probably won't even do half that number.
A lot of folks think that all the comic book creators of "The Golden Age" are gone. Well, almost. There are a few of them still with us…like Sy Barry, the longtime artist of the newspaper strip, The Phantom, and an important contributor to DC Comics, among other firms, from the late forties to the late fifties. Read all about him and a recent honor.
Some people (including Donald Trump Jr.) are claiming that trans people commit a disproportionate percentage of mass shootings. This is, of course, a lie.
The guy in the Oval Office — who, by the way, is redecorating it to look like a bathroom in Liberace's house — is claiming that since returning to that office, he has ended "six or seven" wars. You will not be surprised to learn that the list of them says otherwise.
And Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is lying again. I should probably make this a regular feature of these compilations.
Here's an episode of The Red Skelton Hour for January 29, 1963 with Red's guests Mickey Rooney and the Paris Sisters. I vaguely recall watching this when I was eleven and it helping form my opinion that Mickey Rooney, who later could be found all over television praising folks like himself who had God-given talents, didn't get a lot of them. Or at least enough of them to carry him past the time he'd outgrown the role of Andy Hardy. When he taped this appearance with Skelton, Mr. Rooney had recently wrapped filming on what would turn out to be my favorite movie.
I didn't think he was very good in it and I don't think he was very good in this hour with Red…although the long sketch is somewhat carried by Skelton's joy of performing and solid back-up support by character actors like Robert Strauss, Herb Vigran, Doris Singleton and a gent named Ray Kellogg, who was on almost as many episodes of Red Skelton's show as Red.
There's a musical number in there in which Mickey — surrounded as was inevitable by chorus girls taller than he was — does an awful job of dancing and lip-syncing to a pre-recorded voice that may have been that of a soundalike. If you're in my age bracket and the chosen song sounds familiar to you, here's where you know it from: It was used as theme song on The Bob Cummings Show. Watch a little of it if you can and catch some of the Silent Spot comedy bit at the end in which Skelton does a version of the hoary half-man/half-woman vaudeville routine that was otherwise extinct by 1963. The whole hour is an interesting glimpse into comedy-variety in the days of yore…
I feel like I need to ask your forgiveness for making this as personal as it's going to be…
I grew up — to the extent that I grew up at all — wanting to be a professional writer. From about age seven and beyond, that was my only answer to the question you get asked incessantly at that age, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I didn't know what I wanted to be a writer of because I didn't know what might be possible when I reached the age when I might be able to secure writing work…
But I was going to be a writer. I never doubted that for a moment.
Among the possibilities were the things I loved then: Comic books, comic strips, animated cartoons, non-animated TV shows, movies, novels, non-fiction books…maybe just plain, old-fashioned comedy in any form. I guess I figured that with all those possibilities, I could find an opening in one of them…and one was all I wanted or expected. I don't recall ever having a clear preference and I don't recall ever thinking I might be able to work in as many of those fields as I have.
In my teen years, I was kinda hoping for whichever field might have presented the greatest opportunity to meet cute girls. (If you've ever been a teenage boy, you might completely understand that.) Comic books didn't sound like they'd be that…and also, every interview I read with someone who worked for the New York comic book companies said that in order to work for them, you had to live near them. Living anywhere other than my native Los Angeles was — and still kinda is — a deal-breaker for me. I later turned down staff jobs at DC and Marvel because they required relocation.
For reasons I can't explain, it didn't dawn on me that there could be work writing for the Los Angeles office of Gold Key Comics — the Disney comics, the Warner Brothers comics, the Hanna-Barbera comics, etc. And for reasons I shouldn't have to explain, it didn't occur to me that Jack Kirby might move to Southern California and want to hire a couple of assistants. But by my eighteenth birthday, I was working with Jack and I was writing comics for Gold Key — for a gent there named Chase Craig.
Jack on the left, Chase on the right
I probably don't have to tell anyone who'd find their way to this blog what an extraordinary, wonderful man Jack Kirby was. We've cheapened the word "genius" down in this world by applying it at some point to just about anyone who can do anything, which is a shame. We should have preserved it for a guy like Jack who had more brilliant ideas than any twenty other people in the comic book industry combined and who certainly never acted like the "King" that everyone called him.
You don't need me to tell you how much he invented, how well he drew and how important he was to comics. Fortunately for me, I was in a position to be able to testify what a decent, honest and nice man he was. And if for any reason you don't want to believe me on that point, ask anyone else who had the privilege of knowing him. Anyone else.
Jack was one of the reasons I've spent my adult life as a professional writer. Chase Craig was another.
Chase worked for Western Publishing Company, creating and later editing Dell and Gold Key Comics from around 1942 (even he couldn't remember exactly when) until 1975. I was among the hundreds of people who worked for him on — in my case — the Gold Key books he edited in his last years there. Later, he briefly came out of retirement to run a comic book division for Hanna-Barbera. I was one of the first people he hired, I wound up writing everything the office produced for a while, and then Chase decided to retire again and turned it all over to me.
He was a benevolent, smart and very, very experienced editor. Given all the comics he'd supervised over the years, including those by Carl Barks, he kinda had to be. I learned from Kirby but I also learned from Craig…and if I had to be more specific, I think I learned whatever big things I managed to absorb came from Jack and the small — but still vital — things from Chase.
I'm about 95% certain the two men never met and if they had, I'm not sure what they would have said to each other. I'm pretty sure they never read each other's work. They might have had some discussions about how annoying that Evanier kid could be at times.
That Evanier kid and Chase, 1982
If they had met — which I'm pretty sure they didn't — it would have been at the 1982 Comic-Con in San Diego. I persuaded Chase to attend for a day and I persuaded the con to give him an Inkpot Award and to let me interview him for an hour. Chase was very pleased by the award and that there were fans there who attended that talk and knew who he was. There weren't many, I'm afraid…because, you know, he never worked on Batman or Spider-Man. Still, he was happy to meet anyone who knew what he'd done and he signed a number of issues of Disney comics, Tarzan comics and Magnus, Robot Fighter. He left us in 2001.
I've written tons of pieces about Jack but nearly not enough about Craig, to whom I will also be forever grateful. And in case you're wondering why I'm writing about these men today…well, today is August 28. Jack Kirby was born on August 28, 1917 and Chase Craig was born on August 28, 1910. Thanks to both of these Birthday Boys.
