I’ve always loved being in New York but in the quite-a-while since I was last here, I’d forgotten what a long hassle it usually is to get to New York. Long wait the airport, long flight to the East Coast, long walk from the Baggage Claim to the limo I’d arranged, long trip from the airport to the hotel in Times Square, etc. I did though get a nice welcome. The second my plane touched down, before they’d even told us we could unfasten our seat belts, I received this cheery e-mail from the folks at Expedia.com —

— which would have been a nice gesture except that my flight landed, as planned, at JFK.

But I’m where I’m supposed to be and in a little while, I hope to be at a street corner on the lower east side, watching an intersection be officially nicknamed for a very great man.  I’ll let you know how it went.

Another great rendition of a popular song — in this case, one by Cole Porter — from my favorite crooner, Matt Forbes.  Gee, I wish I could sing like that…

Here’s our pal Gary Sassaman with another tale from his spinner rack.  It’s about a series of Giant-Size Annuals DC Comics published in the early sixties — a series so successful that they threw caution (and the definition of the word “annual” to the wind and published some of them twice a year.  Gary has more…

It's Mother's Day, 2026. Here's what I posted on this blog on Mother's Day, 2015 — on 5/10/15 to be exact…

I've officially been an orphan since October of 2012 when my mother passed away. As I've detailed here, her death was not a tragedy. The tragedy — if you can call it that with a woman who lived far longer than any doctor would have expected — was how her health deteriorated the last ten years or so. Inability to walk much or see much or eat anything she liked or go three months without being carted off to an emergency room had left her wishing it would end. She just wanted it to end. If there had been a legal, painless way to make that happen, she would have eaten three chili dogs, then pushed the button.

(Actually, in her condition, if she'd eaten the three chili dogs, she might not have lived long enough to push the button.)

On March 3 of that year, one day after I turned 60, I held a big birthday party for my little ol' self and invited 120 of my friends. If you felt you should have been among them, I apologize…but I have way more than 120 friends and that's about all the restaurant could hold. I chose that particular one because of her — because she liked it and it was close to her home. As if all the other problems I mentioned in the first paragraph didn't restrict her ability to enjoy life, there was this: She sometimes and without much warning got incredibly tired and had an urgent need to go to bed and stay there for 8-10 hours. One day, I took her on a day trip to a place she'd always wanted to go that was about a two-hour drive from her bedroom. The fatigue hit her there and it was quite an ordeal to get her home and safely under the covers.

After that, she was unwilling to ever be in a situation where she was more than about twenty minutes from that bed. She wouldn't let me take her to the theater or to a show because, as she put it, "What if we get there and the show is just starting and I suddenly need to be home?" She agreed to come to the party because I assured her that (a) if she suddenly needed to go to sleep, someone would immediately take her home and (b) it would not be me. I convinced her to let me take her to the party since we would be getting there before it started but she made me swear I wouldn't leave my own birthday party in progress to chauffeur her back to her abode.

With all that agreed-upon, she agreed she'd attend my 60th birthday party. She said, "I guess I should since I was there for your last one, fifty years ago." Actually, she was there for all of them but the previous one was, indeed, fifty years before.

I don't recall my first few. My earliest memory would be of one that was around age five or six. I remember a lot of neighborhood children and their mothers, we kids dressed up nicer than we wanted to be. I remember sandwiches and cake and presents and paper hats. That's really all that stayed with me about the next few and about all I recall about going to the birthday parties of friends of mine unless they were cruel enough, as some were, to hire a clown.

Clowns do not belong at kids' birthday parties. They belong at circuses and in cartoons and Red Skelton paintings and nowhere else.

Mostly, I had tiny, family-only parties at ages seven, eight and nine…and then when I turned ten, my mother insisted on throwing a big gala birthday celebration for me. I had not asked for one. She just felt it was something a parent was supposed to do for a child and she seemed way more excited about it than I was. It was only in ostensible adulthood that I began to not hate being the center of attention of anything. Still, I somehow felt obligated to go along with this party thing so at her request, I specified twelve friends I would like to have attend.  She contacted their parents and arranged the kids' presence and the assistance of a few moms.

It was all planned as an afternoon of events. The first was that with the aid of some other parents and their autos, we all caravaned to a miniature golf course on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica and played a round of miniature golf. Then we drove to our house and there was food — hamburgers, hot dogs, lemonade and (of course) cake — and then a Badminton tournament in the backyard. Somewhere in there, I unwrapped a lot of presents.

Fun? Not one bit. I hated the entire day. Could not wait for it to be over.

The miniature golf course part of it just seemed so awkward — getting thirteen kids there and dividing that prime number into smaller groups since thirteen kids cannot all play golf at the same time. The golf course was a ramshackle slum that was torn down a few years later. It might have imploded on its own on my tenth birthday if I'd had a better backswing on my niblick.

There were all these parents around taking pictures of us and…well, there were a lot of things I didn't like about being a kid and one of them was being thought of as "cute" in the same tone of voice you'd use to describe a "cute" trained dog act. It also didn't help my disposition that I finished dead last in the tournament. None of my friends were classy enough to throw a few putts and let the Birthday Boy win.

Then it was back to the house for chow with all these adults taking photos and also now 8mm movies of how cute we all looked wearing our party hats and eating cake. I made a wish and blew out all the candles with one breath but I didn't get my wish: The party continued. Some of my friends embarrassed me with spillage and mess-making and there was my poor mother running around, trying to wait on all these kids and making a special lunch for one girl who didn't want to eat a hot dog or a hamburger.

Not one of the presents was something I wanted or could use. I've rarely enjoyed getting gifts because I'm terribly hard to shop for. I'm larger than people think, I have all those food allergies and I don't drink…so probably a good 70% of all the presents I've received in my lifetime, unless I told the person what to give me, have been items of clothing that didn't fit me, food I couldn't eat or wine I wouldn't drink. I also buy or receive review copies of every DVD or book I want so there's not much chance of giving me one of those I don't have. It's always made me feel bad when someone goes to the trouble and expense to buy (or worse, make) something I can't wear, eat, drink or use. Friends have succeeded in giving me wanted gifts but not often.

That day at my tenth birthday party, I did my best to smile and thank the givers but I was as bad an actor then as I am now and I'm pretty lousy now. Then the Badminton game was chaotic with the net falling down and no one knowing how to keep score or even play…and again, I lost. The whole afternoon just felt so wrong to me in every way.

When all my friends had finally left, my mother came up to me and asked if I had another wish for my birthday. I yelled, "Yes! I would like to never have another birthday party as long as I live!" Then I ran to my room, slammed the door and stayed in there for about five minutes, crying and sulking.

It took the full five minutes for my ten-year-old brain to realize that my parents — my mother, mainly — had gone to a lot of trouble to give me a wonderful day and it wasn't their fault that it hadn't turned out that way. I went out into the living room. My father had gone out somewhere but my mother was sitting in her chair, crying.

It was the worst moment of the day, maybe the worst moment of my admittedly-brief life until then. I had taken a bad situation and made it worse and I had hurt my mother.

"I'm sorry," I said to her. "I'm very, very sorry."

She said she was sorry I hadn't liked my day. I told her I was sorry that she was sorry and that I really liked what she tried to do. She looked at me hard and said, "I should have known. You don't like Halloween either!"

I nodded yes. To me, Halloween was and still is a day when you disfigure yourself, go around and extort candy you probably won't eat and — again — do things adults think are "cute." Never liked it. I've just never been big on holidays. I figure if you can live life so you're reasonably happy on non-holidays, you don't need the holidays. They become less important. A friend of mine later would tell me, "I lived all year for Christmas because it was the only time there was no screaming in our house." There was almost never screaming in the house where I grew up.

That afternoon, my mother and I continued to apologize to each other for about the next ten minutes. I was sorry I hadn't enjoyed my party. She was sorry she hadn't realized I wouldn't enjoy a party…and indeed, I didn't have another one for an entire half a century.

In those fifty years, I don't think I ever had another harsh word or moment of unpleasantness with my mother. She was smart and understanding and she just accepted that her kid was not like other kids. Actually, I'm not sure there are any kids who are like other kids but if there are, I'm not one of them. So after the debacle of my tenth birthday, we had an unspoken pact…

She never did anything just because it was something other parents did. And I, because I knew just how exceptional she was and how everything she did was at least intended to be for my own good, never faulted her for anything. There was really nothing to fault but I had a good imagination. I could have made up something if I'd wanted to. Years later, I stood by as my then-girlfriend — one who was not out of my life rapidly enough — screamed at her mother. What the mother had done was immaterial. It was wrong but not destructive and certainly not malicious. Still, my lady friend yelled, over and over, "Mom, you ruin everything!"

And I just stood there, cringing at the scene and thinking, "Gee…my mother never ruined anything!"

She certainly didn't ruin my 60th birthday party. Quite the opposite. She was the star attraction, getting way more attention than I did — which was fine because I intended it to be less about me and more about her getting to meet a whole lot of my friends she had not met and vice-versa. I knew she wouldn't be in any condition to do that by #61 so I had the party and I planted her at the first table by the door. It didn't matter if guests congratulated me on entering my seventh decade but they all had to talk with my mother. As it turned out, I had a good time because she had a great time.

Biggest thrill of that evening for her? Talking with so many of my friends and especially Stan Freberg. Stan was not only there but though I'd admonished all there were to be no gifts and no performing, he wrote and insisted on reciting a poem about me. And then since he'd broken the rules, someone else insisted they all sing guess-which-song.

She didn't get exhausted. She wound up staying for the entire evening and then Carolyn and I drove her home. After she passed, I realized that party was the last time she left her house for non-medical reasons.

The morning after the party, she called me up to thank me for, as she put it, "wheeling me there." I made like I was annoyed she'd upstaged me at my own party and she laughed, then said, "Well, I'm more important than you are!"

She said, "People kept saying to me, 'Oh, I can see where Mark got his sense of humor.' I told them, 'No, I got my sense of humor from him.'" That's something we both believed. She explained to them, "Mark started picking up all these funny things from comic books and books he read and TV shows he watched. I had to start talking like him so we could communicate. It was like if your child suddenly began speaking Swedish, you'd have to learn Swedish." At one point, Freberg asked her where I got my sense of humor and she said, "I think he stole some of it from you."

Today, as you're probably well aware, is Mother's Day. My mother never wanted to do anything on Mother's Day. The restaurants were always too crowded, she said, and she preferred to get flowers and gifts from me when she didn't expect them and they didn't seem like an obligation. It was pretty much the same attitude I have about all holidays. If you always treat your mother like it's Mother's Day, there's really nothing out of the ordinary you can do for her on the second Sunday in May except wish her a happy Mother's Day. So I'd do that and then I'd take her out to dinner any time she felt like leaving the house.

The last Mother's Day she was around, she didn't want to go out. She didn't want to go out the next day or the next day or any day for weeks after…and then she was in the hospital for a week. Finally in late June, I gave her an ultimatum: Redeem your Mother's Day "coupon" now or forfeit it. She said, "Okay, if you insist, you can bring over some El Pollo Loco this evening and we'll eat together here."

I said, "That's not a Mother's Day dinner. I brought you El Pollo Loco last week…and I think, the week before."

She said, "Yeah, but it wasn't Mother's Day then."

I said, "It's not Mother's Day today."

She said, "Hey, I'm your mother and if I say it's Mother's Day today, it's Mother's Day today. I want four drumsticks and a couple of thighs — enough to have some for tomorrow. I have a feeling it's going to be Mother's Day tomorrow, too."

How could you ever find a reason to get mad at someone like that?  How?

I am told there will be a series of public memorials, open to all, celebrating the life and times of Sid Krofft.  The first will be at the Comic-Con Museum in San Diego on Saturday, May 23, commencing at 6 PM.  It's free but you need to reserve a spot, which you can do on this site.  I'm not sure if I can make it down there but several more of these will soon be announced, including one in Los Angeles.

Back in 2008, Turner Classic Movies ran a featurette called Role Model which I liked a lot. It was a very good interview with Gene Wilder conducted by Alec Baldwin. I wrote about it here and here and here and even here. And now you can watch it here…

The talk shows of Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers will all be in reruns on Monday night because they'll all be over on Stephen Colbert's show as will John Oliver. Jon Stewart probably won't be on The Daily Show that night because he's out here in Los Angeles doing Netflix stuff. Our friend Shelly Goldstein tells me he was a surprise stand-up performer last night at The Hollywood Bowl where John Mulaney was the headliner.

I was wondering earlier today if HBO had made an offer to Mr. Colbert. Several of you reminded me that HBO is or will be going under the same management that wants Colbert off CBS. True…but we haven't heard of them tossing John Oliver out the window yet and he's at least as critical of Trump as anyone.

I wonder if this all comes down to the uninformed whims of Donald. Is it just that he watches some shows and doesn't watch others? And then that addled brain of his just gets pissed at something and he tells his charges to do something about it, regardless of appearances, facts or legalities. Remember the outta-his-mind dictator in the movie Bananas just announcing that from now on, all children under the age of sixteen are now sixteen?

One of the reasons Richard Nixon sometimes said things that were demonstrably false is that he had aides who told him what they thought he wanted to hear. We all know Trump is disconnected from the truth but when he says his poll numbers have never been better, I wonder if staffers who want to keep their jobs are telling him that.

Every time I look at the weather forecast for Monday in New York, it looks less and less like the ceremony honoring Jack Kirby will be rained upon.  But it still might.

I keep seeing video clips of folks who've been nominated by the Trump Administration being interrogated by members of Congress.  They're asked, "Is President Trump eligible to run for president again in 2028?" and they respond like their loved ones are being held hostage and will be killed if they say "No, the 22nd amendment makes it clear that no one can run for a third term."  Scary.

Scrolling through videos online, I see a lot of advertising for shows I might want to see, events I might want to attend, restaurants at which I might want to dine, etc.  And very rarely do they tell me where these things are.  It would be nice if this information was included or if there was some setting where I could specify "Don't show me anything more than 25 or 50 miles away."  There sure are some tempting-looking eateries in places I'll never visit.

I wonder if HBO has offered Stephen Colbert a weekly hour which would run right after John Oliver's show.  In fact, I wonder what kind of offers he has received…probably some pretty interesting ones.

Costco has changed their hot-dog-and-a-soda for $1.50 in their food courts.  You can now have the 20 oz. soda (With Refill) or a bottle of water.  Great.  I wish more places recognized that not everyone drinks soda.  The last time I went to a KFC, which was several years ago, what I wanted to eat was cheaper if I bought a "meal" that came with a soda and threw the soda away than if I just bought the items separately.  The person who filled my order told me I couldn't have the meal deal if I didn't take the soda.

That's all for now.

I said in the previous post that I didn't know of any streets named after comic book creators except for Stan Lee, Bill Finger and — as of this coming Monday — Jack Kirby. Well, I do now. As many of you wrote to tell me, there's a Joe Shuster Way in Toronto.  Joe is most deserving of this honor including the fact that they actually spelled his surname correctly.  Everyone seems to want to stick a "C" in there where it doesn't belong.

You probably already know about this but just in case you don't…

Jack Kirby, when he was around twelve years of age, sold newspapers and, at times, fruit in his neighborhood known as "The lower east side of New York." Often, he plied these trades at the intersection of Essex Street and Delancey.  On Monday morning, a permanent sign will be unveiled nicknaming this intersection "Jack Kirby Way."  We who knew and loved Jack — and to know him was to love him — are very excited about this.

Whoever made up the above graphic put down that the ceremony starts at 11:30 AM.  I was told Noon but even if it's 11:30, you oughta get there early.  Streets will be blocked off and there will be some sort of viewing stand for V.I.P.s.  I will be, for once in my life, a V.I.P.  And you might want to bring an umbrella because it looks like we'll all need umbrellas.

I initially booked on Spirit Airlines but then a day or two later, Spirit Airlines mysteriously canceled my reservations and refunded my money.  Then a day or two after that, Spirit Airlines mysteriously canceled itself. You know that great song, "Spirit in the Sky?" Well, Spirit isn't in the skies any longer. I don't know what they had against me or Jack Kirby but they couldn't stop me from rebooking with another carrier. That one seems to still be solvent, perhaps because they're considerably more expensive.

If you can't get yourself there, don't worry.  I shall attempt to be your on-the-spot reporter reporting on all that happens on-the-spot. I have no idea when I'll have the time or the Internet Access to do this but at some point, there will be a full report on this site.

Contrary to what some have reported, this is not the first time a street has ever been named for a comic book creator.  A street in the Bronx on which Stan Lee once lived has been nicknamed Stan Lee Way.  In fact, it's possible to loiter at the corner of Stan Lee Way and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and while you're there, you can make up a better quip than I can at the moment.

Also in The Bronx, where E. 192nd St. and the Grand Concourse intersect, you can see a sign designating it as Bill Finger Way. It was probably easier to get his name on that sign than it was to get it on anything relating to his co-creation, Batman.

I don't know of any others in comics but here in L.A., the corner of Franklin and Vermont Avenues has a very small sign, easily missed, that designates it as Forrest J Ackerman Square.  It's where the House of Pies restaurant is and Forry loved to eat at the House of Pies restaurant, especially when — as I did once or twice — someone else picked up the check.

Every time I speak with wannabe writers or voice actors, I give them a piece of advice that I suspect everyone in my position tells to wannabes. It's sound advice, the kind they may need to hear over and over. This is a video of Broadway performer David Eggers doing a better job than I ever did of delivering a major part of that advice…

That's part of how it works — a very important part. But there's another thing to keep in mind…

One of the many things that can be maddening about being a freelance actor — or writer for that matter — is how much of your career depends on the whims of strangers. The other day, I was talking with one of the most successful voiceover artists in the business — successful in bank account terms. The guy makes a very handsome amount of money per year but here's the thing: He is constantly rejected.

He books anywhere, on average, four or five good-paying voiceover jobs a week. But he auditions for thirty or forty…and that "on average" means a lot because sometimes, he goes a week or two with naught but turndowns. When it comes time to file his taxes, the annual gross is impressive but there are times there where his income matches someone who's an utter failure in his line of work.

The other day here, I told you a story of how a lady named Bonny Dore first hired me to write for Sid and Marty Krofft. That led to many years of (mostly) happy employment and that led to offers from other producers but it could have gone many other ways. Bonny interviewed twenty or thirty writers for three openings and she could easily have decided to go with the guy before me or the one after or anyone. And if she had, the rest of my life would have been much, much different.  That doesn't necessarily mean worse.  It could even mean much, much better.

We'll never know. There have been times when I didn't get a job — many, many times — and in some instances, I was glad I didn't. Not getting one job usually leaves you open to get another which might be way preferable. A very large part of my life (and income) has involved writing Garfield cartoons for TV. I probably wouldn't have gotten that gig at all if I hadn't walked — make that "moonwalked" — off a project I was doing with Michael Jackson.  As I explained here, I worked for a few weeks as a writer on Macgyver and it was a very good thing for my career and my sanity that I was only there a few weeks.

I have known many performers and writers who couldn't embrace the notion that not getting a job — even a job that looks from afar like the best one you could ever have — wasn't necessarily a bad thing.  Losing one might not be a bad thing either.  It isn't horrible that the above-referenced voiceover guy doesn't get 90% of what he auditions for. It's just the way the business works.

I've been a freelancer for…well, around fifty-seven years. I learned early-on not to pin my hopes on any one possibility and not to take it as a disaster when that possibility stopped being possible. But for a while, I made the mistake of telling my father things like, 'I interviewed today for a job with So-and-So magazine" because, first of all, long after I'd put it outta my mind, he'd still be asking me, "Have you heard anything from So-and-So magazine?" And no matter what I did get, he'd be wrongly fretting that his son's career was in trouble because So-and-So magazine didn't hire him.

I understand why he felt that way. He lived in a world where a job is something you get and then you do it for decades after, collecting that set salary every week, all very predictably. Acting and writing are among many professions that rarely work that way. If you don't understand that, watch the above video again. And if you still don't get it, watch that video again and again until you do. And then understand that an "audition" that doesn't lead to anything else may not be a negative because there can always be one that will make you glad that you didn't get (or keep) the one you didn't get (or keep).

Too swamped today to post much but here's something to watch: Cast members from the Lincoln Center Theater revival of Ragtime — which was just nominated for Tony Awards — perform a Tiny Desk concert with numbers from that show…

Stephen Colbert answers questions from other late night hosts…

The New York Times — for those of you who can pass beyond its paywall — has an interview with David Letterman about the end of The Late Show and this essay by critic Jason Zinoman about what it all means to us.

Personally, I don't think it means as much to me as it would have some years ago. I used to love late night shows a lot more than I have in recent years. I used to TiVo 'em all and watch them more-or-less in full. Now, the only one I do that with — and this is not a late night show in the same sense as Colbert's or Seth Meyers' or any of those — is John Oliver's. With the others, I watch excerpts from those two gents' programs on YouTube a lot, Kimmel's occasionally and Fallon's almost never.

I do not share others' disdain for what Jimmy Fallon does. I think there's room, or there should be room, for a late night show that is mostly apolitical and just kinda about unwinding with something frivolous just before bedtime. What I don't like about Fallon isn't the lack of Trumpbashing. It's something that to me is wrong with most of those shows: How everything is rigidly controlled, often edited within an inch of its life and how every guest and everything they do or have done is deserving of a standing ovation. Too much polish. Too much razzle-dazzle. Not enough spontaneity.

I think I made this point somewhere before. Colbert is a brilliant, talented man and I love it when he and a guest have a conversation that feels unedited and unscripted…but too many don't. When he administers his Colbert Questionnaire, they tape fifteen questions that the guests know in advance and then they edit out what someone thinks are the less-entertaining responses. Carson never cut out Carnak questions because they didn't get big enough laughs.

Bill Maher, to his credit, gives America a show that is live, unedited and "real time." His guests don't know for sure what he's going to ask them. I have other reasons for not watching him much anymore but I'm not sure I can explain them without watching the show enough to cite specific examples.

Talk shows have always been a little bit phony. When Johnny said to a guest, "Someone told me you had a weird experience on a boat recently," that was Carsonspeak for "Here's where you tell that anecdote that you and one of my Talent Coordinators planned to have you tell." The talk of the guest's new series, movie, book or album was always a gentle infomercial. I just feel the late shows — most of 'em — have carried that a bit too far, Fallon's more than most.

Letterman is probably right that the claim that the axing of The Late Show was strictly a "financial decision" is a lie but those programs are not the cash cows they once were. If that was the only reason for the cancelation, they would have tried slashing the budget before they decided to slash the show. I wish they'd tried that and started by letting the rough edges show more.

Hard to believe (I know) but it's a measly 79 days until this year's Comic-Con International convenes in San Diego. It's July 23 throu 26 with a Preview Night on July 22. That means it's about 59 days until someone with a product to promote calls and asks me if I can help them get a panel or presentation on the convention schedule. To which I always reply, "You mean the schedule that was locked and sent to press a couple weeks ago?"

The secret to making the convention work for you is to Plan Ahead. Plan how you'll get there, where you'll park, where you'll stay, where you'll eat and so forth. Of course, that all revolves around having a badge that'll get you in and if you don't, then I have a very important suggestion for you: Don't call or write me. I can't help you with how you'll get there, where you'll park, where you'll stay, etc., either.

The official opening of Convention Season is tonight!!! when my pal Gary Sassaman and I appear on the podcast of The San Diego Comic-Con Unofficial Blog, which is a wonderful resource not run by the convention. It's run by a crew of avid con-goers who do a great job telling you everything you need to know about the convention and then some. Keep your eye on the con's official website but also keep checking the unofficial site. The more you prep, the better time you'll have.

I will be at the con (of course) and I may break my 2025 record of hosting and/or appearing on nineteen panels. That's "19" with a "1" followed by a "9." I'm also looking forward to presenting this year's Bill Finger Awards for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. This year's recipients will be announced soon. But for now, watch this evening's podcast which may appear in the space below. It starts at 6:30 PM West Coast Time which is 9:30 PM East Coast Time and if it's not below at the moment, that's probably because it hasn't happened yet…