Avi Green wrote me to ask…

Hello, I'm a Pennsylvania native who now lives in Jerusalem, Israel, and I've looked at your site once in a while. I watched Garfield and Friends in my childhood, and I know about your Judeo-Christian background, which is why I decided now to ask for your "Ask Me Anything" category: have you ever visited Israel, and ever wanted to familiarize yourself with your heritage connections?

Come to think of it, have you ever wanted to visit Armenia as well? On the former country, where I live today, there are plenty of great sites you might want to visit, like Jerusalem itself and the Old City, Hebron's Cave of Patriarchs, the Galon Fortress, which was recently renovated, and even the Israel Museum in Jerusalem as well as the National Library. Why, come to think of it, if you ever decide to visit Jerusalem, you might even want to try riding the light railway system that's been in operation for 15 years now. And if you visit Holon, they have a cartooning museum located there that can be worth checking out as part of your own career in animation and comics.

So, have you ever paid Israel a visit, or would you want to for as long as it's possible?

Never visited any of those places, nor had any interest in that kind of travel. I could give you a whole list of reasons starting with my food allergies and my dislike of sitting in an airplane for more than a few hours at a time, as well as my complete inability to learn more than a few words of any foreign language. But really, I've just never had much interest in sightseeing or going to places I've never been just because I've never been there.

I keep getting and declining invites to comic conventions in the United Kingdom or South America and, once in a while, Asia. No, thank you. Not interested, especially now that I'm having trouble walking. I used to love going to Las Vegas and now I don't have the slightest urge to go there…and I don't see that changing.  But thanks for asking.

Fred Kaplan has an article up with the startling headline, "In a Shocking Update, Netanyahu's Main Opponent Is Joining With Two Arab Parties to Make a Government." Here's an excerpt…

Fast on the heels of Tuesday's mind-blowing American midterm elections, Israelis are forming a new government that seems hardly less astonishing — a ruling body for the Jewish state that includes Israeli Arabs.

Israel held its own national election last week, but it resulted in a stalemate. Neither of the two main coalitions — one helmed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the other by opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot — on a majority of seats in the parliament. Thus, neither could form a government. But there was one intriguing outcome in the vote count: Two Arab parties together won 19 seats — almost twice as many as the 10 seats they won in the previous election. If either Netanyahu or Eisenkot invited the Arabs to join his coalition, he would have enough seats to win.

Kaplan doesn't foresee a long life for any new government who might emerge from this marriage…but it oughta really shake things up while it survives. And might cause the end of Benjamin Netanyahu's time in power.

Sorry to hear that the online magazine Salon is shutting down. I've linked to many articles there and found many more that I enjoyed. They're apparently keeping the archives online indefinitely so you can still read what's there, at least for a while. Enjoy it while you can.

It's been many moons since I posted one of these and I'm going to try to get to the end of the series soon. This entry was another "oldie" when I made my mixtape in 1972.  "Have I the Right?" was eight years old then…the creation of a British group called The Honeycombs. They were kind of one-hit wonders. This one topped the charts but nothing else they were recorded did. I liked it at the time; not so much now when I just heard it again for the first time in many a year.

Here's a video of them lipsyncing to the record and pretending to be playing their instruments, years before musical groups would be playing on wireless electric guitars. So they didn't even try to pretend they were actually playing…

My friends Brendan Foley and Shelly Goldstein (Man and Wife) have a genuine hit show in Sherlock & Daughter. It's been a big hit throughout most of the world for the last eighteen months but now it's finally (finally!) debuting in the United Kingdom — today, I think.  If you haven't seen it, see it.  And don't take my word for it.  Here's a small bit of a review in the current issue of Good Housekeeping…

The upcoming series, which is arriving on our screens imminently, will transport us to 1896 — a period in time when Sherlock Holmes (now played by David Thewlis) is in serious trouble. He's caught up in a conspiracy and, instead of cracking the case, he ends up getting his friends kidnapped and making the whole situation worse. And it seems there's only one person who can help him — Amelia (Blu Hunt), whose mother has been murdered and who believes Sherlock is her long, lost father. But is he really?

Speaking to Variety about creating a new iteration of Arthur Conan Doyle's character, creator and writer Brendan Foley explained that this Sherlock is a "classic Sherlock," but with a twist. "He's a lion in winter. He's older, grumpier, and then we're able to play with the other side," he said. "Amelia lands like a spunky meteorite, right into poor old Holmes' tidy little world. He's a big experimenter, so is it possible that just once in his life he might have thought: 'What’s all this human emotion stuff about? I'd better try it.' And what if that went as badly as possible on that one occasion? Everyone has emotions. It may be hidden, but it's there. We dig it out."

And you don't have to go to England to watch it. Not if you get the CW Network on your telly here. Give it a peek.

And now we have Fred Kaplan weighing in on how the elections yesterday may impact the U.S. Military. Among other things, he says…

Conventional wisdom holds that foreign policy doesn't affect the outcome of American elections, but it cratered President Donald Trump's party in this one, at least indirectly. High prices, which swelled the magnitude of the "blue tsunami," were clearly the result of Trump's tariffs and his war on Iran.

One question now is whether the Democrats will be able to use their overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate to push back on those policies. Trump will probably resist the effort, claiming his powers, under Article 2 of the Constitution, as the armed forces' commander in chief. He also threatened to veto bills that he considers "insane," a term he applies to anything that challenges his prerogatives and priorities.

And then Fred goes on to discuss different scenarios. Give it a read if you can. It might turn out to be the most significant result of what happened in this country yesterday.

I was just watching some leading and/or newly-elected Democrats on the news. They were talking about ending the war, bringing down the cost of food and gas, making sure people have healthcare, holding lawbreakers accountable…topics like that.

Then I changed to another channel and there, live, was Donald Trump giving America a report on how construction of the ballroom is going.

I made that WOW! graphic up a few years ago and was waiting for an appropriate post to use it. Last night, things couldn't have gone much better for the Democratic Party and, I'd like to think, America.

I was channel-hopping all last night until about half past Abdul El-Sayed winning in Michigan…and maybe I just missed it but as newsfolks, talking heads, pundits and winning candidates groped for the right things to say, there was much that I didn't hear. Maybe someone said it on channels I wasn't watching when they said it but I didn't hear anyone say "impeachment" or "Jeffrey Epstein" or even "insider trading."

I didn't hear anyone say that any votes were rigged or miscalled. As so many expected.

I have one friend who was dead certain that if that Blue Tsunami seemed to be forming, Trump would do something like declaring Martial Law and calling out the National Guard to stop the counting and impound all the voting machines. Not a peep about that kind of thing.

I did hear that guy who kept saying "Vote like I'm on the ballot" quoted as reminding people that he wasn't on the ballot. And I heard people say that the Republican party now has to turn itself into something that isn't The Party of Donald Trump. That would be nice. And I heard a lot of people say "Wow!" That's putting it mildly.

Now I'm not going to get my $5,000 check from Donald Trump. Damn.

I haven't quoted it lately but I used to often quote the late newsman Jack Germond who once said — approximately — "The trouble with news reporting is that we aren't paid to say 'I don't know.' So we have to say things when we don't know."

I was reminded of that by a brief scan just now of the news channels and sites. Everyone is eager to tell us how the vote is going and they're not letting not knowing anything stop them. So we're getting a lot of meaningless "facts" which will eventually be replaced by real information. I think I'll wait until they are to start paying attention.

Like most of you, I'm eager to see what our democracy (assuming we still have one) looks like when all the votes are counted tonight…and they probably won't all be counted tonight. Here's a handy guide to when the polls close in the key races. When they close may have little to do with when we know who's won what…and we can probably expect some challenges and screams of rigging and one or more premature assertions of victory. My only prediction is that it won't be over as soon as we'd like it to be over.

Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers are not doing shows tonight. Jimmy Kimmel and The Daily Show are but neither show will be live so don't look to them for indications of how the vote is going. I'll be flipping channels, including a couple that are online like The MeidasTouch Network. And I'll be trying to remember the lyrics to the song, "It's Not Where You Start, It's Where You Finish."

From The Ed Sullivan Show for April 30, 1961, here's one of the funniest human beings it was ever my honor to know and work with — The Amazing Ballantine…

The start of this long, wandering essay can be found right here. I'm still not sure where and when the end will be.

As I've mentioned often here, I can't recall a time in my childhood when I didn't have comic books. My parents couldn't, either. They were buying them for me before I could read what was in them. In fact, I believe I learned to read in large part because of them.

It was Dell Comics at first, particularly Dell Comics that featured cartoon characters I knew from TV — Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Woody Woodpecker, etc.  — all characters with tails except Elmer Fudd.  I collected them, read them and tried to draw the characters I saw in them.  Much inspiration came from drawing lessons that Walter Lantz gave between cartoons on The Woody Woodpecker Show and from a book called Easy Way To Draw which I wrote about here and other places on this blog.

One day in early 1959, I began adding super-hero and adventure comics to the mix. I started with comics featuring Superman, a character who I, of course, knew from TV. The George Reeves TV series was on several times a day in Los Angeles and Engineer Bill, a local kids show host, showed the Fleischer/Paramount Superman cartoons again and again and again. There were only seventeen of them.

I loved Superman with this reservation: I was able to draw the funny animal characters fairly well for a kid my age.  But no matter how I tried — and I tried and I tried —  I wasn't able to draw what I considered a decent Superman.  The best I could so was to draw his chest insignia.  That, I mastered pretty well by the age of eight.  Ten years later, I worked for a man named Jack Kirby who, largely against his will, was drawing the Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen comic book and Jack would sometimes have me draw or redraw Superman's chest insignia.

Buying Superman comics in '59 quickly led to Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern and others. And then, shortly after Christmas of that year, I found a comic on the newsstands that excited me in a way no comic book ever had or has since. It was The Brave and the Bold #28 and it introduced The Justice League of America. It featured Aquaman, The Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, John Jones (aka J'onn J'onzz, aka The Manhunter From Mars) and maddeningly brief cameos of Superman and Batman.

Even the cover thrilled me.  I still don't know what the hell Wonder Woman was doing with her golden lasso connecting to nothing but I will always love that cover…

Ganging up characters like that is pretty common now. In fact, these days readers complain if any two characters don't appear together now and then. But when I was seven years old, as I was in '59, that was something special…something very special.

The Brave and the Bold had become a "tryout" comic and that issue was the tryout for the Justice League to see if readers would buy enough copies to warrant a regular J.L.A. comic. I don't see why they needed a tryout. Of course, it was going to sell. But there were two more issues of the J.L.A. in The Brave and the Bold. One came out the following March 1 and the next came out a bit less than two months later.   Then in August, they brought out Justice League of America #1 as a bi-monthly. DC was ridiculously cautious then about starting new comics.

It was edited by Julius Schwartz and written by Gardner Fox.  It was drawn by Mike Sekowsky doing what I later heard some of his fellow artists describe as The Hardest Job in All of Comics.  To draw all those characters and to sometimes fit all of them into one panel along with Fox's often-excessive captions and dialogue?  One of those fellow artists, Gil Kane, once told me, "It's not that I couldn't have drawn that comic as well as Mike Sekowsky.  I couldn't have drawn it at all."

The Schwartz-Fox-Sekowsky issues of that book became my favorite comic of the day and I think it's still one of the two best "team" comics ever done.  The other, which came along two years later, was the Lee-Kirby Fantastic Four.  In the next part of this, I'll tell you how I came to know and work with Mike Sekowsky and I may finally get to the part where knowing him convinced me to give up drawing.

Allan J. Lichtman believes that Donald Trump's major accomplishment will forever be that "He has done more than any American in history to convince his fellow citizens that their votes are not counted honestly."  And he points out that this is in spite of the fact that — and I quote — "Six years after Trump claimed that millions of illegal votes were cast against him in 2020, he [has] failed to document a single illegal vote."

Some recent stories from The Daily Show…