We have a new Fred Kaplan report on the military ineptness of the Trump Administration. The headline on it is "Trump Is Turning His Back on Most of East Asia — and Embracing Kim Jong-un." Here's an excerpt…

With one action and one statement over the weekend, President Donald Trump has pretty much vaporized the United States' reputation as a serious power in East Asia — the region that includes China, Japan, and the two Koreas — and with it, possibly, in much of the rest of the world.

The statement, which he filed on social media late Sunday afternoon, ordered the Pentagon "to substantially reduce" joint military exercises with South Korea. He gave three reasons for his order. First, the exercises are "costly." Second, they send a "signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile" to North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, who, "as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful." The third reason for the cutback is that South Korea's president refused "to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran." With one action and one statement over the weekend, President Donald Trump has pretty much vaporized the United States’ reputation as a serious power in East Asia — the region that includes China, Japan, and the two Koreas — and with it, possibly, in much of the rest of the world.

I don't even know what to say to this apart from "This guy has gotta go!"

I'm kidding, right?  I haven't fully unpacked from this year's Comic-Con International and I'm going to start posting about next year's Comic-Con International?  Am I mad?  Well, probably yes but I'm doing it anyway.

As you've seen me post here 364.8 times, the secret to having the best possible time at Comic-Con in San Diego is planning ahead.  And having the best possible time involves gaining admission to Comic-Con International and that too involves planning ahead.

Not that you can't have a great time there without getting in.  A few days after the con went away for this year, I spoke to a couple folks who couldn't score badges but they went to San Diego anyway while the con was in progress. There were various "street fair" events — music, cosplay, giveaways, etc. — that took place around and about the convention center.  These probably didn't have the best possible time but since they couldn't get inside, they didn't let that stop them and had the second-best possible time. Which, they said, was still pretty good.

But I know you.  You want to get inside that building if only because that's where I do my couple thousand panels and I've heard there may be other good things, as well.  If you don't have some "in" to get professional badges or exhibitor badges or volunteer badges, you're probably reliant on the online sales.  That may or may not get you what you want but it'll be your first opportunity to try.  If you had a paid 2026 badge, you're able to participate in Returning Registration.  That will take place this year on Saturday morning, October 17.

(There's also some sort of deal where if you didn't have a paid 2026 membership, you can still get in on Returning Registration if you attended the smaller-but-still-pretty-darned big WonderCon Anaheim and stayed at least two nights at a hotel in the official WonderCon hotel block. But I don't understand how or when that works so I won't attempt to explain it.)

A large chunk of the available badges will be snatched up in that Returning Registration sale. Another large chunk will be available for Open Registration. That's open to anyone including folks who qualified for the Returning Registration sale but got shut out. Open Registration is scheduled for Saturday, November 14.

After that, obtaining badges becomes a lot more difficult. Unless you want to become a member of the Comic-Con Museum at the "Legend" level — very expensive, indeed — it's pretty rough and I don't know what to tell you…

…except this: Don't decide next May that you want to attend Comic-Con 2027. Decide now…or at least in time for online registration. The longer you wait, the less possible it becomes.

Neil Patrick Harris and a bevy of guest stars…

George Carlin explains The Safety Lecture as only George Carlin can — or could.  He's such a presence on The Internet that it's hard to remember he ain't with us anymore.  Wish he was…

Rosie O'Donnell, who all but disappeared from my television for years, may be getting back into the talk show business. The main thing that I liked about her old show was that she featured a lot of numbers from what was currently playing on Broadway. At this link, you'll find a nice collection of some of those numbers.

Last evening, my pal David Schwartz — not to be confused with two other pals I have named David Schwartz — came over and we watched Stan Lee: The Final Chapter. This is a just-released documentary made by a gent named Jon Bolerjack who was Stan's assistant/driver/friend for a goodly portion of Stan's final years. It's a hard film to watch especially if, like me, you knew Stan and have, as I do, extremely mixed feelings about the man.

Stan could be very charming and funny and ingratiating. But like the stereotype of a Marvel Super-Hero or certain Super-Villains, he was not all-bad or all-good.  Sometimes, with folks who worked a lot for or with him, I've found myself in long discussions on exactly how you process that duality. No one though would have wished on him (or anyone) what occurred when he was in last years on this planet. I can't help but view it as a severe case of "Be Careful What You Wish For."

Like just about all human beings, Stan wanted to be wealthy and like many, he wanted to be famous. I've known a lot of famous people but I can't think of anyone who wanted to be famous as much as Stan Lee wanted to be famous. Even his loudest detractors would tell you that much of the success of Marvel had to do with the good job Stan did of promoting the company. In a way though, that was Stan promoting Stan and he couldn't do that without promoting the company as well.

In his nineties, he was very famous and he loved it. Absolutely, positively loved it. He loved going to conventions or other public gatherings and being greeted by huge crowds and long lines of people willing to pay serious bucks for his autograph and/or a little Stan Time. That should have given his life a happy ending but at some point, it got out of control…or, rather, into the control of others. The documentary shows you that period, attempts to assign blame to those others and suggests they got an awful lot of the money that should have gone to the old guy doing endless hours of autographing.

I have no idea if that's a proper assessment of the situation but you do see a lot of Stan being unhappy, exhausted and in a fair amount of depression, especially after his wife of 60+ years died. The documentary is dead-on right about how happy the two of them were together. It also takes close to two hours to tell a story that could have been told properly in under thirty minutes. It's like someone thought we'd enjoy as much footage as possible of Stan in pain.

I sure didn't. I have a book coming out next year about Jack Kirby, who of course did most of the heavy lifting in the Lee-Kirby collaborations on which The Marvel Age of Comics was built. The film makes no mention of Jack, Steve Ditko, anyone named Buscema or the rest. It exists in a universe where Stan was the sole genius. My book will explain way more about what I — the only person alive who worked for both men, I believe — believe. I do feel that Stan wronged Jack and many of his other co-workers and I am pleased at how far public opinion on this seems to have swung in that direction.

Still, what happens to Stan in this film is at times very painful and frustrating and I'm not including a link here to where you can see for yourself. You can if you want but I'm not going to help you do that. Maybe it's a story that had to be told but I don't want you blaming me if you seek it out, pay for it and wish you hadn't.

It's been a while since I had a Lewis Black clip up here. But here he comes to tell us all about Labubus…

One of my favorite comic book creators of all time was a man named Sheldon Mayer. He was a cartoonist who got into comic books about the time comic books started getting onto newsstands. At some point, he found himself on the editorial end of the business when he might have preferred to spend 100% of his time — instead of maybe half — at a drawing board, writing and drawing cartoony things.

(And I can't mention him without mentioning this: He did good at the editorial end of the field, especially when he helped turn an unsold comic strip by two kids named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster into perhaps the hottest comic book property the industry has ever known. Hint: It was the comic about the guy with the big red "S" on his chest.)

In the early forties, he was the editor at a firm called All-American Comics which birthed, under his supervision, characters like Wonder Woman, The Flash and Green Lantern. In 1944, All-American, its properties and staff were absorbed by DC Comics and Mayer became an editor for DC, though he made time to do as much cartooning as he could. By 1948 though, he basically decided that the cartooning was good for his health and the editing was not so he gave up the latter. He spent the rest of his life on the DC Comics payroll and among the things he did to earn that salary were comics like The Three Mouseketeers and Sugar & Spike.

Sugar & Spike was his best, longest-enduring creation. The comic book appeared on American newsstands from 1956 until 1971, ending partly due to low sales but mainly due to vision problems that Mayer was experiencing. He then did some work writing for DC's non-funny comics for a while until cataract surgery enabled him to return to the drawing board.  Back where he belonged, he produced more Sugar & Spike material. Certain foreign publishers had been buying and reprinting (and reprinting and reprinting) Mayer's older stories and were delighted to be able to purchase and print new stories. Mayer produced them as long as he could and finally passed away in 1991.

In 1977, a fellow I knew through the mail, Jay Zilber, published what I believe was the one and only issue of a fanzine called Glx Sptzl Glaah! devoted to Mayer's work. The characters of Sugar and Spike were babies and they sometimes spoke so we could understand them and sometimes spoke in a language known only to infants. "Glx sptzl glaah" meant something in that language but, not having been an infant except, sometimes, emotionally for about 73 years, I can't tell you what it means. It made a great fanzine title though.

I drew the cover and wrote an article for it. At the recently-concluded Comic-Con International in San Diego, I spent some time in a booth signing copies of this thing and someone brought me a fragile but whole copy of Glx Sptzl Glaah to autograph.

I have a copy or two of it — or at least, I'm pretty sure I have a copy of it. Exactly where it might be in my home is a darn good question…one I hope to answer some day. That moment at Comic-Con was the first time I'd held a copy in…oh, about 46 years. If and when I find my copy, I hope I find with it a letter I received because of that cover. It was typed (poorly) on yellow paper and it was from Sheldon Mayer.

He thanked me for what I'd written and told me something that I hope was not just one of those things you say to be nice. He said he'd always cringed and felt uneasy when he saw someone else drawing Sugar and Spike. My cover was the first he'd ever seen that didn't induce such a cringe. In a way, that didn't flatter me as much as it might have because I didn't think of what I'd produced as a drawing. To me, it was a forgery, carefully copying — almost tracing — pieces of different Mayer drawings to create a replica. If I'd drawn his characters without doing that, I'm sure he'd have cringed aplenty.

A year or three later, I received a call from Nelson Bridwell, who was an editorial assistant — or somesuch title — at DC. He told me that Mr. Mayer had retired once and for all from producing those new Sugar & Spike stories. The topic had come up of maybe having someone else continue producing them and Mayer had said something like, "I'd rather you didn't but if you have to, get that guy who drew that fanzine cover."

Nelson was not calling to offer me that job. No decision had been made to continue the series with me or anyone. He just wanted me to know that if they did and if I was going to do them, he hoped he could write some of them. I told him there was no earthly way I could draw a comic book like that. "It was one drawing," I explained. "It was more like a magic trick…like me making you think I could have you pick a card, look at it, put it back in the deck and then I'd read your mind and tell you what card it was. I can draw like Sheldon Mayer the same way I can read minds."

Nelson understood. And I don't think it was because of that call that I never heard anything from DC about me doing any Sugar & Spike stories. I think they just realized that having anyone do that was a bad idea.

The gent who brought me the fanzine to sign at the con said, "I didn't know you could draw." Well, maybe that's because I can't. Not the way a real artist can draw and these days, I don't even forge. I've written here before about why I don't and why I can't and why it doesn't bother me. But I have a couple of stories to tell about that lost ability and I'll tell one or more of them here in the next few days.

Here's Noah Sunday Lefkowitz with a musical tour of extinct attractions at Disney Theme Parks. He left out my favorite — the 3-D Muppet Show — but it's otherwise quite a list…

I'm posting links to all of Fred Kaplan's war reporting on Slate because I think he's really good at reporting what's actually happening and explaining it in terms even I can understand. Here's his latest which is about J.D. Vance and his odd relationship with Volodymyr Zelensky. There's so much in the news about ballrooms and reflecting pools and Epstein files and ICE that it's easy to forget we're still involved in what's transpiring with Iran and Ukraine.

Of all the guests Jon Stewart has interviewed, who was his least favorite? Click below to find out…

"From the time you decided you wanted to be a professional writer, how long did it take you to succeed at that?" That's a simple question I got from someone at Comic-Con last month and the answer is unbelievably complicated.  It's not something you can explain with any depth while you're rushing from hosting one panel to the next.  When you're asked by someone who is seeking counsel on what may be a serious life choice, you'd kind of like to give him an answer deep enough to be of some genuine value.  I'll take a stab at it here…

I tried to sell some of my writing when I was still in high school. I had a few successes, a few turndowns and — most often — responses in a third category which was the most maddening of the three. I'm not sure what to call this third category but it kinda worked like this. By the numbers…

1. The editor (or other person who might pay me for my writing) would say something like "I need stories about people eating bagels!" This would be writing "on spec," meaning that if they liked it, they'd pay me and if they didn't like it, I'd have done a lot of work for nothing.
2. I would do research and then write and submit a very good (I thought) story about someone eating a bagel.
3. The editor (or other such person) would tell me, "Thanks, Mark, but our needs have changed and I have no use now for an article about anyone eating a bagel!"

Or the editor would be fired. Or the magazine for which the article was solicited would be canceled. Or his superior would have just told him, "No more articles about folks eating bagels." Or something else which would mean I'd wasted my time and brain cells. In many ways, this would be much more frustrating than if he'd still needed such articles but decided mine was lousy.

You probably can't become a professional writer without writing a lot of things on "spec."  What you can do is be conscious of the three categories of spec — (a) writing you can sell elsewhere, (b) writing you can't and (c) writing you might with some effort be able to rewrite for some other market. The trick is to only write on spec if (a) is operative and maybe, once in a while if the situation seems to warrant it, (c).

Obviously, it helps a writing career to simply get better at writing. I think it also helps a lot to get better at knowing which opportunities fall into which categories — and that might not be achieved through deductive reasoning. It might be a matter of getting burned enough times to develop a good Spidey-sense.

I didn't sell anything that mattered while I was in high school. I sold a few things but they were low-paying flukes and not-to-be-repeated situations. I think I've also told the stories here about how I was asked to submit scripts to two editors at DC Comics and one at Charlton Comics. All three matters turned out to be like #3 and the result of each was No Sale.

After I got the hell out of University High (rah) I decided to get more serious about becoming a professional writer. Two weeks after Graduation Day, I made a pretty good sale. An editor bought several pieces I'd written and paid me pretty well. Not only that, he encouraged me to submit as many more as I could. I wrote a few more and he bought them. "This is easier than I thought," I thought —

— and then when I brought in the next batch, it turned out that editor had been fired, the magazine had been discontinued and I was back in #3 territory.

When that fellow at Comic-Con asked me for advice — and I hope he reads this blog — I didn't have the chance to tell him any of this. I also didn't have time to point something out. I made those first few sales, the ones that made me feel I was functioning the way a professional writer oughta function, the last week of June, 1969. I have therefore been a professional writer for 57 years plus about a month and a half. That might (emphasis on the "might") mean that I really understand how to build a career as one.

But it also might mean that a lot of my alleged expertise is useless because the business had changed so much. I became a professional writer working on a manual typewriter —

— that's a photo of the model I used — in a world with a lot more magazines, books only on paper and no Internet. The Internet has changed just about everything about writing except that it still involves the arrangement of words. At times, it looks like A.I. is even changing that.

Around the time I was seventeen, I met a man named Frank Gruber. Frank Gruber was one of the more prolific writers who wrote for what they called pulp magazines in the thirties and forties. It was a marketplace that atrophied in the forties, in no small part due to the rise of these things called comic books. Here are the kinds of publications via which Mr. Gruber made his living for years…

…and then when they died out and he lost a lot of his writing energy, his income came primarily from paperback books that reprinted the best stories he'd written for the pulps. He was, he told me, not able to make a lot of in-roads to the magazines of the period when I met him. But he gave me a lot of advice, much of which would have been handy if I'd wanted to sell some stories to publications that went out of business twenty years before I was born.

But some of it was useful. Some things about writing never change, whether you're pounding the keys of an old Olivetti-Underwood like in the photo above the image of the old pulps — or writing, as I now am, on a Redragon keyboard connected to a Dell P.C. and a Samsung monitor. I learned some things from him about organizing a story in your head and forcing yourself to write when you have a deadline and don't feel like writing.

He also taught me some things about going back over what you've written and trimming out needless words. He added, "It makes things flow better but don't do this when you're being paid by the word like I usually was." When he was writing detective stories, the hero never rolled down a hill. He rolled and he rolled and he rolled and he rolled and he rolled. At two cents a word, that was another 24 cents.

I'm almost never paid by the word so I go back and try to trim needless words, which is a lot easier on a computer. When Mr. Gruber did it, he had to either retype whole pages or hand in manuscripts full of cross-outs and deletions.

I think that's enough for this installment. There will be more of these and at some point, maybe in the next one, I want to write about how these days, it feels like everyone's a freelancer and a "steady gig" is something that looks like it'll last more than six months. I have a lot to say about freelancing. After all, I've been doing it for 57 years plus about a month and a half. Here's how I get paid for things like this…

The history of Disney theme parks from Noah Sunday-Lefkowitz…

Due to a death threat that apparently worried those in charge of protecting our president, there was some sort of switch where he flew back from Turkey in a catering truck, not the plane everyone thought he was on.  The details are not clear and this article attempts to sort out how and why this was done.

I'm not particularly interested in the how or why of that.  What I am wondering is why we know at all that this was done.  Isn't this the kind of thing you want to keep secret in case you have to do it again?  I'm all for transparency and Freedom of the Press and all but maybe something like this is a reasonable exception.  And what about the folks who actually were on the plane that the alleged would-be assassins thought Trump was on?  Did someone decide it was okay to shoot that plane down…or whatever they were going to do?

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