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?

This blog is, as I'm sure you've realized, completely free.  Always has been, always will be and I do not accept advertising.  Anything you see in the margins here that looks like an ad is something I put there, sans payment, to plug a site I thought would be of value to you.

So it's free…for you, not me.  Each year it costs me several thousands of dollars including a big payment I make to my hosting company around this time.  This is when I solicit donations…and I'll continue to post the banner below until I break even on the deal.  Please do not give if you can't afford it but if you can afford it, click below.  Or if you have some deep religious objection to PayPal, you can send a check to the address on this page.  Thank you!

If you're interested in the whole Reflecting Pool mess, here's a nice overview of where things stand at the moment.,,

Years ago, a great many short-lived TV shows and unsold pilots came from a simple thought: What if we combined the formats of a situation comedy and a variety show?  Someone said to someone, "It'll be an hour like most variety shows and there will be songs and dancing every six or eight minutes like on a variety show…but instead of comedy sketches in-between, we'll have short stories or chapters of stories like on a sitcom with a little coterie of regular characters!"

I guess in the meetings, it sounded like a great idea but I can't think of an attempt that resulted in a successful, ongoing TV series.  I can, however, think of a lot of times when it was tried and it failed.  Here are just a few examples…

In the early seventies, there was a series called The Funny Side created by Bill Persky and Sam Denoff, two of the main writers on successful sitcoms like The Dick Van Dyke Show and That Girl.  But The Funny Side — an hour-long sitcom with songs –didn't last long.  Neither did The Brady Bunch Variety Hour or a couple of other pilots my frequent employers Sid and Marty Krofft attempted.

Neither did That's Life! starring Robert Morse in an attempt to do an hour-long musical comedy each week.  Jackie Gleason briefly had some success trying to do weekly musicals with some Honeymooners episodes but they petered out.

When The Dean Martin Show was running out of gas, its producer — Greg Garrison — experimented with a format that had Dean running a swank nightclub with funny little mini-sitcom scenes between musical performances. Didn't work.  When Mary Tyler Moore tried to make a comeback in a variety show format, they tried weaving a storyline between song and dance numbers. Didn't work.

George Schlatter produced an hour of Li'l Abner with various actors portraying the characters from Al Capp's famous newspaper strip.  Sometimes, they'd be signing and dancing.  Sometimes, they'd be doing short sitcom-type segments.  The only good thing that came of that attempt was that my partner Sergio Aragonés was hired to design some of the cartoony sets and because of that, he met an actress-dancer named Charlene Ryan who was playing Stupefyin' Jones. The Li'l Abner sitcom/variety show disappeared quickly but Sergio and Charlene have now been happily married for several decades.

There were other attempts before the TV industry gave up on variety shows with or without sitcom elements. I was only involved — slightly — with one attempt. In 1976 when I was a story editor on Welcome Back, Kotter, its producer Jimmie Komack made two pilots that tried to build one of those sitcom/variety hybrids out of the Archie comic books. You know: Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead, Reggie, et al.  Those characters.

Komack had this odd notion of how to approach doing an adaptation of an existing property. His view was that it should be done by writers and producers who were completely unfamiliar with the source material. That way, their minds were uncluttered by what had been done before. While I was working for him, he also tried it with a spectacularly unsuccessful pure sitcom revival of Dobie Gillis that didn't much resemble the old Dobie Gillis.

The folks on the creative staff engaged for Archie were not totally unfamiliar with the property. How could they be?  Still, Komack insisted they not read the old comics and instead work from a rough outline someone had written about who the characters were.  His goal was not to replicate comic books.  He wanted to reinvent the franchise for television, the better to make it appeal to the zillions of viewers that didn't know and love the comics.  Somehow — I know not how — John Goldwater got worried about what "those TV people" were doing to the property on which his whole company rested.

John L. Goldwater — a distant relative of Barry, I've heard — was the founder of the Archie company and I'm not sure if he was the owner or co-owner then but he certainly was the man to please.  He also considered himself the creator of the Archie property.  Some historians will tell you otherwise but there would be a credit line of this show that said "Based on the comic strip characters created by John Goldwater."  He'd been quite happy with the various Archie cartoon shows that were coming out of the Filmation Studio.  He arranged a visit to Komack's office hoping to be assured he'd be happy with the live-action version.

The first I heard of this possible problem was when Jimmie summoned me — and only me, not me and my writing partner Dennis Palumbo — to his office.  He asked me, "You know all about comic books, don't you?" I said I did. He said, "Archie Comics?" I said I did.  "Good," he said.  "A man named John Goldwater is coming by later today and I'd like you to be in the meeting."

Later that day in the meeting, Jimmie introduced me as one of his best writers — the only time I ever heard him say anything like that — and said I was a world-class expert at Archie history.  Without saying it directly, he gave Mr. Goldwater the idea that I was one of the writers on the Archie pilot (I wasn't) and that I was making sure everything on it would be faithful to Mr. Goldwater's vision.  I wasn't doing that, either.  Then Jimmie asked me to demonstrate how much I knew about Archie.

I felt I had to play along with this role I had been cast in without my consent.  I explained to Mr. Goldwater that I'd written many comic books and that I'd apprenticed with Jack Kirby. Mr. Goldwater was impressed at the mention of Jack, who'd worked for his company a few times. We spoke for a few minutes and somehow, I managed to wedge in a nice nugget of trivia.

Kotter had just begun sharing its stage  with a new ABC sitcom called Fish, a spin-off of Barney Miller that I don;t believe was on the air yet.  It starred Abe Vigoda and I mentioned that Abe Vigoda's brother Bill Vigoda had been a top artist for Archie. "Is that true?" Jimmie asked, incredulously. Goldwater nodded it was true…and that seemed to convince him that I would make sure that Archie on TV was the Archie of the comic books and that Betty would be Betty and Veronica would be Veronica and so forth.

I don't recall that I actually said anything about the casting or the format or the script — none of which I'd seen — but Mr. Goldwater seemed somehow reassured.  And since he seemed to be that, Jimmie decided to quit while he was ahead and send me back to work on Kotter.  I never got to talk further with Mr. Goldwater. Later, Jimmie did consult with me on a number of points including some of the final casting — but I didn't write on the first pilot nor was I credited or compensated in any way.

At the time, I was annoyed that he'd tapped me for so much expertise without offering work or money or anything. Later on, I was happy not to have the failure on my résumé.  That left plenty of room on it for the failures on which I actually worked.

Komack's Archie pilots starred Audrey Landers as Betty, Hilary Thompson as Veronica, Mark Winkworth as Reggie, Derrel Maury as Jughead, Jane Lambert as Miss Grundy, Susan Blu as Midge, Jim Boelson as Moose, Whit Bissell as Mr. Lodge, Michelle Stacy as Little Jinx, Tifni Twitchell as Big Ethel and Amzie Strickland as Mrs. Lodge. Byron Webster played Mr. Weatherbee and Gordon Jump played Archie's father.

You may be familiar with Gordon Jump from his role later on WKRP in Cincinnati or his years as the Maytag washing machine repairman in commercials. He came in to audition for Mr. Weatherbee and got the part. Then, since the producers couldn't properly cast the role of Archie's father, they moved Jump to that slot and put their second-choice in as Mr. Weatherbee. No one thought to tell Mr. Jump when the final shooting scripts were delivered so on the first day of rehearsal, he showed up with the wrong role memorized.

Who played the title role of Archie Andrews? Well, that's an interesting story in itself. After extensive auditions and screen tests, they picked a young man with brilliant red hair but no real acting experience, at least on television. Somehow, things didn't work out in the contract phase. I never heard exactly what happened but suddenly, the morning of the day rehearsals commenced, the role of Archie was being played by the producers' second choice. It was an actor named Dennis Bowen who had appeared a few times on Kotter in the recurring role of Todd Ludlow, an honors student who clashed with the "teen" characters on the series.

Somehow, the ABC publicity department never got the word and all the p.r. they issued for the show contained the name of the first actor, the one who was replaced. Poor Dennis Bowen had to endure publicity photos that displayed his face but identified him as the first guy. Years later when the Archie comic book folks published a book on the character's history, they said the first guy had played the role. The first guy was David Caruso, later known for his roles as Detective John Kelly on NYPD Blue and Lieutenant Horatio Caine on CSI: Miami, among other credits.

He was fortunate to be out of it too. The show was a mess for many reasons. It was being targeted for the 7:00 Sunday evening slot and I recall a lot of argument over how many scenes there could be of Betty, Veronica and a number of good-looking female extras in swimwear and sleepwear. The writers had scripted several quick jokes at a swimming pool, and one of the short stories involved the boys crashing a slumber party that Veronica was throwing at the Lodge mansion. Both had been planned expressly to get the ladies into scanty outfits, which the ABC programming department encouraged.

At the same time, their Standards and Practices folks ran around demanding less-revealing bikinis and nighties. Some of the best jokes in the show wound up being cut because the ladies were showing a half-inch too much of their physiques.  This kind of thing mattered a lot on TV shows, B.C.  That means "Before Cable."

By the way: If you ever produce a TV show and want to have a mob of male crew members hanging around on the set, just have scenes where a lot of actresses are in sexy nightgowns.  The stage was packed with men those days, all standing around debating who was cuter — Betty or Veronica.

Like all these hybrid variety-sitcoms, there were blackouts and little, self-contained storylines of a few minutes each. Between these, the focus would shift to a rather generic rock band that played bubble-gum style music. But the sitcom-type scenes were too short to really get to know the characters and the generic rock band was not very good and utterly irrelevant to the Archie characters. The show was shot with no studio audience and the network execs particularly hated the overly-delighted laugh track. It was quickly declared DOA at ABC well before it aired on December 19. 1976.  I never heard what John Goldwater thought of it but I would guess he was undelighted.

That would have been the end of it but Komack's agents — he had great agents — had forced the deal to be for two pilots so Jimmie had another shot at it. I recall some bickering and delays as ABC decided they didn't want a second pilot and tried to buy or trade their way out of that commitment but Komack wasn't giving up. A month or two later, production started on that second pilot. The cast would be the same. The sitcom elements would be lengthened. The generic rock band would be replaced by the Archie characters themselves singing and dancing, even though those actors had not been chosen for any musical abilities. The laugh track would not get overly hysterical over every line of dialogue.

By this time, we'd finished the season on Welcome Back, Kotter and I had my agent tell the Komack people I did not want to return for another year. I was on to other things and was surprised when I was offered a job writing on that second pilot. Komack had decided to try the wild and crazy idea of having someone writing on this version who'd actually read an Archie comic book and I may have been the only person he knew who fit that qualification.

I guess I was kind of hired but we never closed a deal and I left after two days of meetings with Danny Simon, brother of Neil, who had been hired as Head Writer. Danny was a delightful, funny gent but he had a vast knowledge of old, tried-and-true comedy sketches from fifties television.  I just noticed and fixed a typo in the previous sentence where I'd typed "tired-and-true" but that also applied.  Anyway, Danny's idea of writing this second pilot was taking those old sketches and making one character in them be Archie and another character would be Veronica and so on.

It's all a little fuzzy today but I remember calling my agent, telling him I wanted out and he said something like, "I'll see what I can do but don't report to the studio until we get this settled." And then the show was never mentioned again and it went ahead without me…to the same fate as Pilot #1.

At some point during the above paragraphs, you probably got to wondering why I was telling you all this now. I have a reason — maybe not a good one but it is a reason.

Since those two pilots crashed and burned, I've been kinda looking for a recording of one or the other…and so have some of the people who were involved, in front of or behind the camera. I've run into many of them and no one had a copy of it. Well now, they can, sort of. Someone has uploaded an imperfect recording of Pilot #1 to this thing we call an Internet. There are a few bad edits in it but here it is. See if you think ABC made a bonehead mistake by not immediately giving it a full season pickup.  I am in no way responsible for any part of this.  I was just on the premises, especially when they were taping the scene with the girls in nightgowns.

In case you missed this week's episode…

I'm not seriously following the current state of things in The War With Iran. That's because I know the current state today will not be the current state on Wednesday, which will not be the current state on Friday…and so on. And you certainly couldn't figure it out listening to our Commander-in-Chief, who keeps saying we're winning and they're losing, then acting as if those roles are reversed. So I just wait for the latest Fred Kaplan article. The one from today starts with…

Iran's latest demands in the diplomatic quarrel over the Strait of Hormuz may seem excessive — Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said they "could never be an acceptable condition of any deal" — but in fact they were part of the deal that President Donald Trump agreed to two months ago.

The proposal, issued Saturday by the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, stated that Iran would not open the strait — the waterway for a quarter of the world's seaborne oil traffic — until the United States ended its naval blockade, lifted sanctions on Iran's oil exports, released Iran's frozen assets, withdrew its military forces from the area around Iran, and paid reparations for the damage inflicted by its massive bombardment of the country since February.

Looks like Trump's plan is to surrender, then make a full court press to convince as much of America as possible that he won the war and that any suggestion otherwise is treasonous fake news. We'll see how well that works.

Ken Williams wants to know…

Why are the producers of Boop! The Musical doing the national tour as Non-Equity? If they're paying the actors less, it stands to reason that they won't be getting the best possible actors which would probably result in the show not doing as well as it might. What am I missing here?

I may have told this story before but many years ago, I worked on a TV show that involved a whole bunch of wrestlers who were in what was then called the World Wide Wrestling Federation. The absolute monarch of the W.W.W.F. was Vince McMahon and he was also involved. At the time, Mr. T (the guy from whichever Rocky sequel he was in and The A-Team) was turning up, usually as a surprise combatant, in W.W.W.F. wrestling matches. Just to make conversation, I asked McMahon how he got Mr. T to do that.

Slowly — like he was talking to a very dumb small child — Mr. McMahon said to me, "In the history of professional wrestling, no one has ever done anything for any reason except for money." That is a verbatim quote. It was the moment I suddenly understood everything I ever needed to know about professional wrestling and probably a lot of other endeavors as well.

It's a little too cynical even for me and I have learned there are exceptions — but not many.

There's a hard reality in the entertainment field that everything is, at some point on some level, about the money. And looking it from the POV of those behind Boop!, you have to remember that the Broadway show was capitalized at a reported $26 million bucks and lost all of it. If that number isn't right, the real number is in the same expensive neighborhood. The show had investors who would like its producers to do what they can to recoup some of that.  That would include merchandise , the cast album, perhaps a movie or cable deal and other productions, both foreign and domestic.

I don't know — and you probably don't know, either — enough about the math on a national tour to assess the risks. Maybe going Non-Equity will yield less income but someone who's supposed to know about these things thought otherwise. I would imagine they took into consideration that the show, having not been successful in New York, does not have the rep of a show that ran for years in New York, won Tonys, had people paying huge amounts for seats, etc.

You'll note on the tour schedule they're in many cities for just five days.  Someone, probably looking at what similar shows have done in those theaters, think that's sufficient to sell all the tix they're likely to sell in those cities.  I'm not excusing non-union shows…just trying to explain them.

I would disagree with you if you're saying that paying less for actors will necessarily mean inferior actors.  Maybe…but I remember seeing a Non-Equity tour of Catch Me If You Can and the guy playing the Aaron Tveit role was terrific — too good to be working Non-Equity but I guess that's what he could get.  I did see both the Equity and Non-Equity tours of Something Rotten and the Equity tour starring Rob McClure was sensational.  The Non-Equity version was nowhere near as good but there were still some folks in there who were of Broadway quality.

Acting is a rough business.  Very few performers ever get most of the jobs they deserve.  I'm very pro-union, having been on the warfront of efforts to unionize Animation Writers.  I wish every theater and every production in every theater was Equity but I can't find it in me to fault those who have to settle for what they can get.  And I still don't know if I'm going to see Boop! when it gets to Los Angeles.

Here's a segment from Pawn Stars. A lady brings a copy of MAD #1 into the shop and –well, watch this and then we'll discuss it…

Okay. There's a lot wrong here. It makes it sound like the Comics Code was some sort of government-decreed censorship board.  It wasn't. It was something most of the major comic book publishers at the time assembled to try and ward off government action against comic books. It also makes it sound like Dr. Fredric Wertham was the driving force. Wertham was very vocal and visible but he had no actual power and, in fact, never endorsed or even approved of the Comics Code.

But here's what's really wrong: MAD did not convert from a 10-cent comic book to a 25-cent magazine to avoid the Comics Code. It's an easy mistake to make if you look at the timing.  Its publisher, William M. Gaines, tried to get around submitting his comic book line — E.C. Comics — to the Code for approval.  He replaced comics like Crime SuspenStories with more pro-social titles like Valor but his distributor insisted: No code, no distribution.

So everything he published except for MAD began sporting the "Approved by the Comics Code Authority" seal beginning with books that went on sale in March of 1955. The last comic book issue of MAD (#23) came out that month without the Code stamp. The first magazine issue of MAD (#24) hit newsstands in July.  So yes, it looks like he converted MAD to a magazine to dodge the Code. In truth, he converted it so he didn't lose its editor, Harvey Kurtzman.

The comic book MAD was almost pure Kurtzman. He edited it. He wrote it. He did some of the art. He did layouts for the artists who did the drawing he didn't do. When the publication caught on big, Gaines became convinced that MAD would be the salvation of his small publishing company.  Just about everything else he had was under fire.  But he was also convinced that if Kurtzman quit, as he was threatening to do now and then, MAD would not survive that loss. There was some evidence for that.

Because the MAD comic book did so well, other publishers were bringing out imitations of it and Gaines did likewise with a MAD imitation called Panic. It was not put together by Kurtzman. Harvey was just barely able to get MAD to press each month. Panic looked remarkably like MAD. It had the same artists and similar stories and it came from the same company…but it was written (mostly) by Jack Mendelsohn and assembled by Gaines' other editor, Al Feldstein. It sold decently but significantly less than MAD — and the only real difference between them was that MAD had Kurtzman and Panic didn't.

And here's why Kurtzman was making noises like he might quit: He was embarrassed to be in comics. He loved the form but hated the business.

He was embarrassed that all the fine work he and his artists were doing was printed on crummy paper — paper that severely limited what could be done on it.  He was embarrassed that his work sold for a dime and on the same racks as some pretty tacky (to him) and exploitive material. He'd been embarrassed to work for the same company that published The Vault of Horror and other horror/crime comics, though the Code had just put an end to those.

He also wanted to be part of a big company that might get bigger — one with larger budgets, greater possibilities and more stability. Gaines wanted to keep his business small enough that he could basically manage it himself. He hated the whole idea of expansion and, indeed, kept MAD as small a business as he could to his dying day.

In 1955, that was not what Kurtzman wanted. He looked at companies like the one that put out Pageant, then a top-selling slick magazine. Pageant had big offices and a big staff and good printing and a desire to grow. They did a story about Kurtzman and MAD, then offered Harvey a job as their cartoon editor. Kurtzman decided to take that job but when he told Gaines, Gaines decided he couldn't let that happen.  MAD was the only thing he had that wasn't collapsing on him.  He told Harvey, "Stay and we'll turn MAD into a slick magazine!"

Kurtzman stayed…but not for long. Gaines did turn MAD into a slick — and it happened just as MAD would have had to begin having Code approval but that wasn't the reason for the change.  The reason was to keep Kurtzman.

When I interviewed Harvey at a San Diego Con years ago, he said — and I'm not sure if this is true but it might have been — that the Comics Code meant nothing to him.  He didn't like the idea of having to submit his work for outside approval but if he'd been forced at gunpoint to continue doing MAD under the Code, that would not have been a problem.  He merely wanted out of the ghetto.

He also said that the problem he then had with MAD after it became a slick was that Gaines still acted like a comic book publisher — small staff, small budgets, the cheapest-possible printing, etc.  There was also the fact that MAD was taking off and the Gaines family owned 100% of it and still wanted to pay flat fees to its makers with no contractual profit participation.

The collapse of the rest of his line drained Gaines' cash reserves.  So did the fact that Kurtzman was a meticulous, slow worker who had trouble meeting deadlines.  MAD was officially a bi-monthly but four months elapsed between the release of MAD #26 and #27, and three between #27 and #28.  Years later, Wally Wood — who was one of Kurtzman's star artists — told me (approximately), "Harvey won't turn loose of a script until he's redone it seven or eight times.  And the seventh or eighth versions are always worse than the first or second."

Shortly after MAD became a magazine, Gaines told Kurtzman they might have to cut the budget and perhaps suspend publishing for a few months.  Kurtzman urged Gaines not to do that — which turned out to be pretty good advice — and Gaines and his sister tapped into their personal savings to keep MAD going.  That extra investment apparently became an issue when Kurtzman received an offer from Hugh Hefner, whose Playboy magazine was just taking off.

Hef wanted Kurtzman to helm a humor magazine with better printing, a higher budget, a big staff, etc.  Wood thought Kurtzman was also dazzled by Hef's charisma and the lush lifestyle he was carving out for himself.  So Kurtzman, emboldened by this better (he thought) offer, demanded 51% ownership of MAD.  He must have known the chances of Gaines agreeing to that were microscopic.  It was probably a ploy to get fired so as to lessen any guilt that Harvey might feel about abandoning Gaines so soon after getting him to sink more money into MAD.

So, to wrap this up: Kurtzman and most of his crew left and did Trump, the upscale humor magazine of his dreams, and it lasted two issues.  Gaines installed Al Feldstein as the new editor of MAD and soldiered on.  Feldstein didn't have Kurtzman's flair for humor but he knew how to hire funny people.  Perhaps more important was that he knew how to produce a bi-monthly magazine that would come out bi-monthly.  Its sales just went up and up and up.

Yeah, I got way off the topic here but it's a good story and I thought you'd enjoy it.  All I really set out to do was to say that MAD didn't become a magazine to avoid the Comics Code.  Don't get your comic book history from Pawn Stars.  I wouldn't even let them tell me what that old watch my uncle left me is worth.

The original incarnation of the game show What's My Line? was on TV from 1950 'til 1967. Many of those episodes are on YouTube and they get an awful lot of hits, especially (I suspect) from folks who just want to watch the Mystery Guest spots. A lot of the episodes are missing but every now and then, one turns up. The one for July 23, 1967 recently surfaced and I've decided to link you to it.

You have a choice: If you want to watch the entire half-hour, click here. If you just want to see the Mystery Guest spot — a particularly good one with Carl Reiner — then click below. I've set it to start at the point in that episode when he comes on…