Sophia Tesfaye wrote an excellent article on ReflectingPoolGate or whatever you want to call the case of David Hearn being indicted for destroying a national monument he could not possible have damaged.  Go read it and pay special attention to the sheer, stubborn "we're never wrong" aspect of Trumpism.  I really think that's the main reason folks who are loyal to him are loyal to him.  They love the idea of someone who always gets his way, even when his way is impractical or illegal.

Look at all the Trumpers who claim he always does what he says.  Never mind that he didn't build The Wall, let alone make Mexico pay for it.  Never mind that he didn't settle Ukraine at all, let alone in one day.  Never mind that several times a week for months now, he'd been claiming he just overwhelmingly won the Iran War.  To use a phrase I'm sure I've used before here, he's one of those people who confuses never admitting you're wrong with always being right.

Back in a long series of posts which started here, we explored the history of the comic book Blackhawk and the brief time I was involved with that property. Brief mention was made of the 15-chapter Blackhawk serial which debuted — as I did — in 1952. It was made by Columbia Pictures, it starred Kirk Alyn and it's not the easiest thing to sit through.

For the benefit of anyone who wanted to attempt it, I gave you a link to a copy you could stream and perhaps download over at the Internet Archive. Well, Michael Kilgore has clued me in to a couple of better prints of it you can now watch on that site. You have several choices…

1. You can watch each individual chapter the way God and Columbia Pictures intended it — in a better black-and-white print of it here.
2. You can watch each individual chapter they way they didn't intend it — colorized! — here.
3. Or you can watch the entire thing — all fifteen chapters, uncolorized! — here.

I'm going to bet that most of you will select…

4. Either just watch a little of it at any of those links or not watch it at all.

Last November, I was up in San Francisco, signing my latest book at a fine museum/store called The Cartoon Art Museum. I really liked the place so I'm sad to hear that it closed yesterday at its current location and is now looking for a new home. I hope they find one soon. I also hope that me signing books there in no way contributed to their need to vacate.

A North America touring company of Boop! The Musical begins performing October third at Rochester, New York’s West Herr Auditorium — and from there, it works its way across the country. Jasmine Amy Rogers, who was said to be so sensational (and earned a Tony nomination for being so sensational) is off doing other things so they've selected a new Boop. It's Aliya Grace, who was a finalist on American Idol and has some credits in musicals too. Here's a bit of her…

Frankly, if she's good enough for Jerry Mitchell (the show's director-choreographer), she's probably good enough for anyone. But I won't be the judge of that for quite a while. The show doesn't get to Los Angeles until July 6 of next year and, since I'm not going to buy a subscription for the whole season of shows at The Ahmanson, I won't even be able to order a ticket until January.

The whole tour schedule is here and they say other cities will be added. I wonder if they tried to arrange things so they were at a theater in San Diego July 22-25 when Comic-Con was in town. In any case, I'm eager to see this show. A lot of my friends loved it and the video clips I've seen from it make me wanna get a good seat.

I think these are the last of the photos from Comic-Con International in San Diego this year. I'm posting these because I think some of you would like to see them but also because I had a very good time at the convention and I want to be able to read these posts later on and remember. All these photos were taken by my buddy, Phil Geiger…

That's our Walt Kelly and Pogo panel for this year, discussing the work of one of the all-time great cartoonists.  We have Jane Plunkett and Paul Dini in the back row; Maggie Thompson, me and Jeff Smith in the front.  Jane showed slides of some rare items from the Kelly Archives.  Jeff talked about how Kelly was an influence on him and his popular creation, Bone.  The rest of us just talked about how much we liked Pogo.

Okay, now we get to this year's Saturday Cartoon Voices Panel.  Above, we have Michael Scott Action and Stephanie Southerland.

And here, we have Jon Allen and Sean Giambrone.

And here are Shelby Young and Eric Bauza.  Everyone on the panel was pretty wonderful  and I was told we turned a helluva lot of congoers away from this and the Quick Draw! that preceded it.  I feel like I should apologize to those who were turned away, though obviously every room has a finite number of seats and when they're filled to capacity, that's it.  In fact, folks were turned away from most of the panels I hosted at the con and there's not much I can do about that except join the throng of panel moderators who ask for larger rooms.  There aren't enough larger rooms for every panel that deserves one to have one.

Lastly, here's the composition of our Cover Story panel.  Behind Yours Truly and Dan Jurgens, we have Nicole Goux, Steven Butler and Denys Cowan.  We do this panel every year — three or four artists who've drawn memorable comic book covers discussing how they did what they did and how they feel about certain covers in hindsight.  It's a lot of interesting shop talk and a lot of different approaches are discussed…though everyone I've had on it seems to agree that if you submit multiple rough sketches to your editor, your editor will always pick the one you like the least.

And that about wraps things up for Comic-Con 2026.  I hope if you were there, you had even a fraction of the good time I had.  And if you weren't there, I hope you did something you enjoyed as much as I enjoyed my time there.

I'm trying to meet a deadline today so I'm posting this rerun — and unlike the late night talk shows these days, mine are not from last week. This one first ran here in October of 2016 and it was adapted from a column I wrote for the Comics Buyers Guide in 1995. Hoping it's aged like a fine wine and not like the potato salad from Canter's Delicatessen…

A vicious and untrue rumor is making the rounds that I am the worst dancer in the world. This is absolutely false and I am quite prepared to take legal action against those spreading it.

In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, nestled at the foot of the Asir Mountains, not far from the coastal Tahimah plain lies a village comprised of worshippers of the Wahabi sect of Sunnite Islam. One such dweller, a nomadic Bedouin named Kwali Mahal has attained the age of ninety-eight years despite being not only quadriplegic but stone deaf, as well.

Kwali Mahal is the worst dancer in the world. I am a close second.

There are many reasons for my ranking, not the least of which is that I am rather devoid of coordination and deftness of movement. I have feet the size of Chryslers and a Sense of Balance found otherwise only in felled timber. I trip over stray thoughts. And I am about as graceful as a wildebeest in its dying throes.

Set all of the above to music and you have Me Dancing.

Which you will rarely, if ever, see. Long ago, I opted to give the Richter Scale folks a break and refrain from tripping the light — or, in my case — the heavy fantastic.

I won't dance. Don't ask me.

I did once, oddly enough, on TV. Drafted into service as an extra in a sketch on a variety show I was writing, I was fully in costume and make-up on stage when it dawned on me that the sketch ended with all the extras leaping to their feet and dancing. There was no way of getting out of it, graceful or otherwise, and no way of going through with it, graceful or otherwise.

So I danced, ever so briefly on the NBC Television Network for what was surely not one of the peacock's prouder moments. That NBC is still ostensibly in the entertainment biz after airing the sorriest of spectacles (Evanier dancing) is due to the fact that it was a comedy show — so Baryshnikov was not expected — and that I wrote said comedy show. Thus, viewers were few in number and probably didn't believe what they were seeing, anyway.

That was the second time I was ever asked to dance on TV. The first time was when I was nine, That was when my career as a child actor began and ended, quicker than you can say, "Rodney Allen Rippy." Let us begin at the beginning, which in this case was the studio of a Los Angeles photographer.

My parents, being parents, routinely hauled me to this photographer's studio, forcibly combed my hair into an unnatural neatness and had me sit for the kind of photos that most parents want to press in scrapbooks for all posterity. The purpose of these photos was, I suppose, was if some day in the future, I proved to be a colossal disappointment to my folks. Then they could haul out the pictures from when I was a tot, sigh over how cute I was and moan, "Where did we go wrong?"

Unless you count the fact that they raised a comedy writer, my parents never went wrong…except twice. One, which I wrote about here, was the time they enrolled me in Hebrew School. The other time, much earlier than Hebrew School, began one day when that photographer suggested that I might have a career as a child actor.

It was his idea — not theirs and certainly not mine. And it was not a scam, as are most "opportunities" for parents who think their kids are cute and/or talented to pay huge fees for photos and publicity and lessons. (Quick but not unimportant aside: If you ever try to get your child into show business and some "agent" or "manager" suggests any arrangement where you take money out of your pocket, grab the kid and run the other way.)

No one ever asked my parents for a cent…probably because the offer was legit but possibly because I proved to be so inept at acting that even a steel-hearted con artist couldn't bring himself to take money under such false pretenses.

But, more likely, it was all Kosher. The photographer asked if it was okay for him to send a few of the photos he'd shot over to an agent he knew. My parents agreed and for a week or so there, probably pondered the notion that they had given birth to the new Mickey Rooney, except that even at that age I was taller and more mature.

And then they made the big mistake. They signed me up for tap dancing lessons.

Maybe they thought I had some ability for it. Maybe they were just so fearful that I'd wind up doing this for a living that they were willing to try anything. I have no idea and years later, when I asked them why they'd done that, neither could explain why that ever seemed like a good idea; just that it had something to do with that vague possibility that I might have a performing career in my future.

So every Saturday morning for a few months there, they would drop me off at the dance studio and I would squeeze my feet into my little tap shoes and clip-clop across the dance floor in vague approximation to the music.

When you're nine, you don't have to be great. You don't have to be good. You just have to be cute. I wasn't even that.

I have but two semi-vivid memories of that class. One is of a late runthrough of a routine we were going to do for everyone's parents one evening. We had a five minute routine to the tune of "School Days" that had been continually simplified throughout the learning process, the instructor removing step after step, hoping eventually to distill it down to something our class's Lowest Common Denominator (m.e.) could handle. No matter how simple it got, it wasn't simple enough.

And I can still recall that last rehearsal when we did the combination. I tripped over something (a chalk line, I think) and the instructor started sobbing, apparently anticipating a mob of angry parents demanding that twenty-three tuitions be refunded.

The dance studio bore the name of a famous choreographer of the time and he sometimes taught the advanced classes, which there was no chance of my ever reaching. When he came by to see us go through our paces, it was the second time I'd ever seen the man. The first was when he did a local interview show, shortly after I'd been enrolled, in which he extolled the joys of dancing and explained that dance was not a specialized art reserved for the especially lithe or musical. No, he told the interviewer, anyone on the planet could dance or be taught to dance…anyone!

This was said before he saw me dance.

When he came by that day and saw me dance, he was willing to concede there were possible exceptions.

Some folks dance so poorly, it is said they have two left feet. I had about eleven.

In fact, not only was I unable to dance but it was apparently contagious: No one around me could dance, either. I confused rhythms, led them left when we were supposed to go right and made everyone fear I was going to crash into them…which I also did with alarming frequency. "I will take the lad in hand," the famed choreographer said and he took me into another room for a solid hour of one-on-one remedial tap tutoring. (This was one of the world's great dancers also, let's remember. Him teaching me was a little like Arnold Palmer training a tot to putt the ball into the clown's mouth at the miniature golf course.)

At the end of the hour, not only was I as lousy as ever but the famous choreographer was stumbling and tripping and contemplating a career in Motel Management.

Somehow, we got through the recital for parents. It would make a wonderful story to report here that through some miracle and an appeal to the patron saint of Terpsichore, I suddenly, magically became Fred Astaire (or even Fred Flintstone)…but 'twas not to be. The best I can say for my performance is that no one laughed out loud but I did note a few of the parents covering their mouths to snicker…and my own mother and father slinking out of the hall at the close of the festivities.

My other remembrance is of a moment during a class, shortly before I decided to hang up the old tap shoes. I was stumbling over latitude and longitude lines when some official of the dance school ran in, so excited she couldn't contain herself. I thought for a moment that maybe I'd done a step right but no such luck. What it was was that someone had just called from Jerry Lewis's office to see if they could rent some beginning tap dancers for an upcoming Jerry Lewis Special.

Jerry was doing a sketch on said special in which he played a tremulous ten-year-old on his first day of tap class and he wanted some kids like us to people the class. They were sending over a producer (or someone) to watch us tap and to decide if we could play the class around him.

Everyone was excited: "We're going to be on TV," several kids gasped with delight.

Within the hour, the person affiliated with the Lewis show had arrived to take a look at us. I'm under the impression it was Jerry's producer, Ernest D. Glucksman because I had that name stuck in my brain from around that time and where else could I have heard it? Whoever it was, he watched us for three minutes, realized that my attempts to dance were funnier than anything Jerry could possibly do, and departed. No more was said about us doing his show, which I always thought was a shame. Had Jerry seen me dance, he could have started a second telethon.

That was it for me and dancing. To this day, I'm not even allowed to sway in time to the music without a hunting license. (I don't know what that means but doesn't it sound like a joke?)

Speaking of jokes, my career as a child actor finally began and ended with one audition. I'm surprised I made it that far.

My parents got a call one day from a casting director at Twentieth-Century Fox, asking them to haul their son in there at 3:00 sharp to meet with the producers of a forthcoming movie. They were as shocked as I was.

To this day, I don't know what the movie was or even if it was ever made. I don't even know the name of the star but we were told the following…

Someone was needed in the film to play the star as a kid in a scene that flashed-back to his youth. The star decided to personally pick the lad who'd play him and he closeted himself in the casting office for a day and looked at every photo they had of a white male child, approximately nine years of age.

One of the photos taken of me by the photographer had found its way to their office and, when the star saw it, he gasped. Out loud. It looked almost exactly like his mother's favorite photo of him. That's how come I found myself sitting with my mother in the producers' waiting room for what seemed to me like several weeks. Finally, they called me in, deliberately excluding Mom from the proceedings.

What I recall of that session is a lot of questions about my hobbies and my schoolwork until they finally got to the subject at hand…

"Have you ever done any acting, Mark?" asked one of the two producers.

"No, I haven't," I said. (I actually had. The twins next door and I had once put on a stirring, Evanier-adaptation of "Hansel and Gretel" for an audience consisting of their folks, my folks and one neighbor. We charged a nickel apiece and, for a minute there, I thought we were going to get some demands for refunds. I didn't figure the studio guys had that kind of thing in mind when they asked about "acting.")

"Would you like to be an actor?"

I thought for a second and said, "Not really."

The two producers looked at each other. I have a feeling they'd asked this of a hundred kids before me and I was the first one to give this answer.

"You don't want to be an actor when you grow up?"

"No," I said. "I think I want to be a writer. I want to write comic books and cartoons and TV shows." (I actually said that. My current occupation is that I write comic books and cartoons and TV shows.)

"Well, if we want you to act in our movie, would you consider it?"

"I'd consider it."

"Would you do it?"

I considered it for a second and answered, "I'd rather not."

The producers were baffled. One asked, "They why did you come here today?"

I shrugged. "You called and asked me."

They started laughing. Maybe I'm misremembering — it's been a while — but I think they thought this was the nicest, most unspoiled thing they'd heard out of a child's mouth in a long time. Having worked with professional child actors a few times and heard toddlers talk about Mike Ovitz and power lunches at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel and getting a piece of the unadjusted gross, I can guess how they must have felt.

"Okay, Mark," one of them said. "You can go home now."

I slid off the chair, went back to my mother, we went home and I proceeded to grow up the way a relatively-normal kid would grow up.

For that, I have always been grateful. But I was never more grateful than one time years later when I met a former child star. He was about my age and about as admittedly-screwed-up as a person could get.

For about five years there, his world revolved around show business and agents and auditions. He made a lot of money but it was long gone, as was any demand for his services. He got to talking about his glory days. "When I was ten, I had a little electric car," he said. "And a miniature railroad that I could ride around the back yard…and a pet chimpanzee. I could buy anything I wanted…with one exception."

Before I could play straight man, someone else asked him what was the one exception?

"A real childhood," he said. "It's the one thing I've always wanted."

I was lucky enough to have one. And I'm still doing my darnedest not to let it end.

Why can't Trump win the war against Iran?  Our man Fred Kaplan has an idea and here's an excerpt from his explanation…

One major, little-recognized reason for President Donald Trump's failure to push the Iranians into surrender — even after hitting more than 13,000 targets with bombs dropped from planes or with missiles fired from long range — is this plain fact: No nation has ever won a war with air power alone. To the extent bombs and missiles have played a role in victory, they have been in coordination with forces on the ground, an escalation of involvement that Trump wisely wants to avoid.

In other words, even if Trump hadn't overestimated the Iranian regime's fragility, even if he'd devised a clear strategy of what he wanted the war to accomplish, he would almost certainly not have won this war.

And he probably won't even be able to win the war with Jeanine Pirro and the whole Justice Department, either.

Brian Fies to the rescue…

You've probably had a dozen responses to your question of who the mystery audience artist was for your Quick Draw panel, but since you haven't posted it yet. I’ll bite: Jeff Ranjo. Animation artist and character designer who's worked on Frozen, Moana, and other animated films. He wrote a lovely post about the experience on Facebook.

I'm very happy for you, Charlie, Lex, and the Peanuts team that y'all won the Eisner! I didn’t see all the competition but I thought it was the least surprising result of the ceremony. Congratulations.

Thanks. It may not be evident — at least, I hope it isn't — but while we're doing Quick Draw!, I have about eleventy-hundred things to juggle in my mind. There wasn't room in there for the gentleman's name but I was lucky. He did great and I'm going to try and find a spot for him as a full-fledged Quick-Drawer one of these cons.

I appreciate the congrats on the book but I did not win an Eisner Award that evening. The category in which the book won was Best Publication Design and I did not do the design. That was the handiwork of Shawn Dahl and Chip Kidd — which is why I also didn't receive a plaque or a trophy or whatever it is they give out these days. I have awards I have won, deserving or not, and I have learned this about such honors: It's important to not make too much of winning or not winning one. Shawn and Chip deserved it. I didn't.

So…as Michael Popok told us in this video, there was never any legit case against against former Olympian David Hearn.  Trump, Jeanine Pirro and other figures said they had absolute proof of his vandalism and now they're admitting they never did.  Well, Trump hasn't admitted it yet and as is his style, never will.  He'll blame someone else because, you know, that's what underlings are there for.

But this matter isn't over.  There's still the question of how the hell they got a Grand Jury to indict in a case with no evidence,  And I imagine John Oliver and/or Jon Stewart and/or Seth Meyers will have a lot of fun with this in the coming days.  They certainly have enough clips of important people claiming provable vandalism when there was, in fact, none.

I have a lot more photos from the convention, most of them taken by my pal Phil Geiger. First up is this one from Thursday…

This is from a panel, the full name of which was "Good Grief! The Enduring Legacy of Peanuts, Snoopy, and Charles M. Schulz." Basically, this was an hour of four people involved in the recent book, The Essential Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz: The Greatest Comic Strip of All Time, talking about the book and hinting that if you haven't bought it, you should buy it. Seated, we have me in the green checked shirt, then Chip Kidd, the award-winning book designer who — the following evening — took home an Eisner Award for the design of said book. The gent on the right is its editor and my excellent friend, Charlie Kochman and the gentleman standing is Lex Fajardo, the Editorial Director of Publishing & Experiences at Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates.  Lex was the panel moderator and one of several folks in the Schulz organization without whom the book wouldn't have been as good or accurate.

Okay, let's go to Friday…

I'm seen above with my friend Mark Waid — a fine writer of comic books and an expert on their history. Whenever we're at the same con, we do a panel called "Two Marks Explain Everything." People ask us questions about comics. We answer them…and if we can't answer a question, that probably means no one can. I don't think we've been truly stumped yet. I enjoy this panel a lot.

I also enjoy a panel we do every Saturday at Comic-Con, always to a very large and full room. It's Quick Draw!, the game where I challenge fast cartoonists to come up with gags and sketch them out before the eyes of the audience. Our three this year were — above, left to right — Lalo Alcaraz, Scott Shaw! and Tom Richmond. My partner Sergio Aragonés used to be on it every year but he's not attending conventions these days so he participated by phone. We also had three guest cartoonists for one bit — Wendy Pini, Dan Jurgens and a gent who I plucked out of the audience when one cartoonist was a no-show. He was very good but I have forgotten his name. Would he or someone who knows it please let me know what it is? He was part of a pretty funny hour in Room 6BCF.

I said here the other day that I didn't have a photo of the Frank Miller panel because my friend-with-a-camera, Phil Geiger, couldn't get into the event.  Well, I was wrong.  He did get in and he snapped this picture of Frank and moi talking after the panel.  Most of what we talked about on the panel was Frank's newly-issued autobiography, which I highly recommend.

Lastly for now: Every Sunday morning at Comic-Con, I chair The Annual Jack Kirby Tribute Panel and that's a photo from this year's.  The gent in the Captain America t-shirt is Roy Schwartz, who accomplished the seemingly-impossible feat of getting a street corner in Kirby's old neighborhood renamed "Jack Kirby Way."  Next to him, we have Jack's grandkids, Jeremy Kirby and Tracy Kirby, and lurking next to them is attorney Paul S. Levine. who represented the Kirby family and who now represents me.  In fact, he's handling the business end of a very long book I've written about Jack and I expect to be able to announce an actual publication date for it in the next month or three.

And in the front, there's me and Mike Royer, Jack's favorite of all the inkers he had over the years.  How long have I known Mike?  I knew him at least a year before I met Jack and I met Jack in 1969.

That's enough for now.  I have more photos and I'll have them up here shortly.  Thanks, Phil.

I'm at least a little suspicious of anyone — especially someone who's not an expert in communicable diseases — who's certain how and where COVID-19 was created. It's one of those matters where a theory might be correct but the certainty makes it suspect. The interrogation of Dr. Anthony Fauci yesterday seemed loaded with too much unwarranted certainty and way too many political concerns…so no wonder he invoked the Fifth Amendment over and over. If you're fuzzy on the laws about doing that, here's a video in which Michael Popok explains how that works.

Here's an episode of Anyone Can Win, a game show seen on CBS every other week from July 14, 1953 to September 1, 1953. It was hosted by the famed cartoonist-rapist Al Capp who does not exactly scintillate in the emcee's job. Then again, it's a pretty clumsy show and probably wouldn't have lasted with any host. This is the episode for August 11, 1953, so this would make it the third of (I think) six episodes.

A couple of interesting things about it: Four panelists compete and the studio audience wagers on one of them to win. The audience members who pick right split $2,000. Also, one of the panelists is disguised as Mr. Capp's character from the Li'l Abner comic strip, Hairless Joe. There's an ongoing contest as to this panelist's true identity. (A YouTube commenter says it was John Roosevelt, son of President Roosevelt. I have no idea if that's right or not.) I wasn't able to make it all the way through this episode but maybe you'll be more patient than I am. Thanks to "Orange Apple," the reader who sent me this…

The Daily Show is at or around its 30 year anniversary. A lot of specials are happening but I'll right now refer you to a must-read (if you are at all interested in the show) three-part history of it by Bill Carter. Lots of stuff in there I didn't know and you might not have known too.

Puzzled about this nuclear deal that Trump may be making with the Saudis?  Even Fred Kaplan isn't entirely certain what this is all about and neither is Donald.  An excerpt…

There's something else very jolting about Trump's social media post Thursday morning. Some of its language suggests that, despite several briefings, he completely misunderstands the subject of uranium enrichment —- crucial to any negotiation with Iran. Toward the end of the post, he writes: "The United States is not opposed to Civil (Non-Enriched) Nuclear Facilities." He seems to think that, in the context of nuclear facilities, "civil" is synonymous with "non-enriched." In other words, he seems to think that if the facility is enriching uranium at all, it is by definition military -— i.e., its purpose is to build nuclear weapons. This simply isn't true.

Someone should tell Trump that Joe Biden was pushing a plan to stop every man, woman and child in America from being able to afford medical insurance. We'd have Universal Health Coverage within a week.

Not only did Trump's jokes bomb at the White House Correspondents Dinner but he — surprise, surprise! — said a lot of things that just plain weren't true. Daniel Dale of CNN runs down some of them.