25,000 hits since we put this sucker on-line just before Christmas last year! Would that the things I do for profit could attract an audience like that…
I recently stumbled across a terrific website devoted to products and advertising items of the fifties and sixties, particularly those featuring cartoon characters. Wanna see a sample of the Crusader Rabbit newspaper strip? How about a bag of Bell Brand Potato Chips with Bob Clampett's Beany and Cecil on it? There's oodles of stuff like that, like the box of Gro-Pup T-Bone dog biscuits with Hanna-Barbera's beloved Augie Doggie on it, even though Augie wasn't the kind of cartoon dog who ate dog food. The site is called Tick Tock Toys and here's the link that'll take you there — but don't click on it until you have some time, 'cause there's a lot of neat stuff there to take in, especially if you hunt around. (There are menus and sub-menus and sub-menus of the sub-menus and so on…)
I'm one of those folks who is utterly conflicted on the subject of The Death Penalty, being neither wholly for it nor adamantly against it. In a world where few seem to take anything but the extreme positions on any issue, it's nice to see I'm not alone on this one. For some time now, Bob Herbert of The New York Times has been running pieces about people who were proven innocent and freed from Death Row after many years, often only days before they would have been executed. This has happened so often that I think it's blind denial to think that our government has not occasionally put the wrong person to death. And this realization, in turn, seems to be causing a lot of prominent supporters of the Death Penalty to at least rethink the whole matter. Mr. Herbert has a good column on this today, and you can read it by clicking here. (That's if you hurry. Like all N.Y. Times links, it's only free for a limited time. Thereafter, they charge you and don't share the fee with the author.)
I am told that the trade paperback of Fanboy is now on sale, as is the new paperback collection ofJack Kirby's Fourth World, but I've yet to see a copy of either. I have, however, received my contributor's copies of The DC Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O'Neil. It has a different cover than the one I posted here when I was recommending it, but the recommendation still holds.