Monthly Archives: January 2002

A friend who works for The Game Show Network assures me that they are going to rerun the two episodes of Press Your Luck in which an unemployed air conditioning mechanic named Michael Larsen figured out a way to beat the "wheel" for over $110,000. And no, he doesn't know when they're going to do this. Says he, several options are being considered. He's guessing the decision will be made any day now. We can only hope.

Okay, first off, I want to point out how much the Enron logo resembles the Mad Poiuyt, an optical illusion featured many years ago on the cover of MAD Magazine.  You can draw your own connection in terms of both creating the illusion of something where nothing exists…or an impossible puzzle…or something like that.  Secondly, I want to say that I'm still standing behind my prediction that George W. Bush will escape from this, relatively unscathed…but I feel a bit less sure of that prediction than I did when I posted it.  The press and pundits, for whatever reason, suddenly seem to be pouncing on this one in a way that suggests that they won't let it go.  In a sense, it's already hurt Bush in that this and the pretzel incident have declared that it's once again okay to ridicule our current Chief Exec.

(How long before someone floats the question that the pretzel story was a contrived cover story to mask that Bush injured himself because he's drinking or doing heavy drugs?  If and when those jokes start, they'll be like Clinton dick references.  We'll never hear the end of them.)

A couple of articles have made me rethink this thing a bit, most notably those that suggest that Dick Cheney is being hidden (and is still stonewalling about his energy task force) because he's more enmeshed in Enron skullduggery than is currently known.  Naturally, this is just the rumor mill at work but lately, scandal-connected rumors have a way of becoming impervious to disproval.  There are still plenty of folks who are certain that Vince Foster was killed, that Hillary's using FBI files to blackmail her enemies, etc.  When Bush defenders say that no one can prove he or his close associates did anything wrong…well, that may be so.  I suspect it's so.  I also think the Clintons, Gore and others were injured by a lot of allegations that were unproven or were even disproven.

It may also be that the scandal of Enron will be that all the sleazy things that were done weren't illegal; that the company bought the necessary regulatory changes to allow a lot of practices that clearly should have been illegal.  This viewpoint is convincingly discussed in an article Scott Rosenberg wrote for Salon.  Most of it's in their "subscriber only" section but the Smirking Chimp website has reposted the whole thing where you can read it for free.  Here's the link.  This is the piece that has most caused me to think maybe this thing won't go away for a while.

You want to get a big reaction to something you write?  Just mistype the name of the man who did the voice of Jonny Quest's father.  The role was played at various times by John Stephenson and Don Messick but never by Mike Road, as I said in my article in the current issue of The Jack Kirby Collector.  Road provided the voice of Roger "Race" Bannon and I swear my brain knew that, even if my typing fingers didn't.  The error — reported to me by many, some in high dudgeon — mars an otherwise splendid issue of John Morrow's must-have mag for fans of Mr. Kirby.  This is one of those publications that I don't even have to plug since if you have even the slightest interest in J.K., you're already grabbing up every issue.  If you haven't and you want to, here's a link to the website for TwoMorrows Publishing, issuers of a number of terrific publications.

By the way, Roy Thomas's Alter Ego, which I also love, will soon be doing an issue devoted to the late, great John Buscema.  They'll be running the text of at least one of the panels I moderated last San Diego Con in which John participated.  The one we had with John, John Romita, Will Eisner and Mike Royer will probably turn up in The Jack Kirby Collector.

I've received a number of e-mails tonight regarding my position on anonymous posters on Internet forums.  (My apologies if I didn't respond to yours; I'm behind on a deadline.)  It might save us all some time if I clarify one point…

Freedom of Speech does not include any right to have a captive audience.  You can talk all you like but your First Amendment rights are in no way being harmed if I opt not to listen…or even if I announce that the sound of your voice disgusts me so much that I'm taking a hike.

I enjoyed participating in www.comicon.com and may drift back there someday if it seems to have regained an atmosphere more conducive to discussion.  I like the folks there (most of 'em, anyway) but I've decided that I no longer want to be a part of a community where anonymous posters drive the discussions into inane and angry directions.  Put simply, I've reached the stage where it doesn't work for me.

One e-mailer accused me of "taking my ball and bat and going home."  Well, first of all, it's not my ball or bat.  The forum can go on jes' fine without me.  Secondly, if you're not enjoying the game, I think you owe it to everyone — especially, yourself — to go home.  I'm home.  And if I have the sudden urge to get surrounded by angry people, I can always get the voice credits for Jonny Quest wrong again.  Thank you.

I enjoy the good conversation that one usually finds in Newsgroups and on chat boards like the one at www.comicon.com.  I have generally been able to tolerate the occasional clown who posts with the sensibilities of — and often, the same motives as — a 12-year-old making prank phone calls.  One of the problems inherent in public electronic communication is that those who post often think they're going over better than they probably are.  You often see debates where some guy is like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:  He gets his arms and legs whacked off but he's too danged stupid to know it. (Actually, that's not the best analogy because, on discussion boards, such wounds are usually self-inflicted.)  Much of the problem occurs when a forum allows, as most do, its participants to hide behind handles.  Anonymity is a great empowerer of the craven, giving them the opportunity to hurl mud at real people (i.e., those whose identities are known and undisputed) who, in turn, can only return fire at phantoms.

I believe in always being polite and respectful to all who post.  If you do a Google Search on my old messages, I think you'll find that I always have been.  I am, however, beginning to feel that simple rules of courtesy need not extend to those who cower behind monikers; that in the electronic chatting community, they are and ought to be treated like second-class citizens.  The other day, a message on www.comicon.com attacking a friend of mine struck me as so egregiously rude and stupid that I found my breaking point.  I have withdrawn from that forum and decided to do likewise in any venue where such folks run too rampant.

The reaction, at least in my e-mail, has been interesting.  The rude messager is defending himself on two grounds, one being that I am somehow suppressing his free speech by taking umbrage and refusing to participate any longer.  This is, I'm afraid, an altogether typical response.  A lot of folks seem to think that the First Amendment means that they can post something stupid and no one else is allowed to say it's stupid and/or to refuse to listen.

His other defense is that he is functioning in the time-honored role of critic.  He compared himself to Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott — both of whom, as far as I can tell, always wrote what they wrote under real names.  (They could both also spell.)  He accused me of being "thin-skinned," even though — in this case — I was not the one being criticized.  I wrote back to him that I've had my writing trashed by The New York Times and other such publications.  A badly-written slam by an anonymous crank on a computer forum is barely a gnat bite by comparison.  Really, I find his position indefensible and assume he will soon disappear, at least under that name.  Perhaps, when he starts over under another identity, he will be a bit more judicious.

None of this is an immediate call to action on my part.  I just felt I ought to write here about this change in my attitude.  I intend to continue to be civil and helpful to all, even the anonymous guys as long as they behave themselves.  But I've decided that hiding behind a handle does not show much respect for others and that, when such folks get abusive, they forfeit the right to be treated with any respect.  Perhaps if this approach becomes the Internet norm, more forums will be erected wherein the participants have to use their real names, thereby accepting responsibility for what they write.  It could only elevate the level of the discourse.

I don't want to turn this place into Obit Central but I have to say a few words about a charming lady named Bibi Osterwald who passed away a week or so ago at the age of 81.  Bibi had a long, glorious career, the latter part of which was spent playing little old ladies in commercials, TV shows and movies.  The movies included a showy role as the neighbor lady in As Good As It Gets.  Before that, she worked a lot on the stage, including a legendary stint as the stand-by for Carol Channing and others starring in the original Broadway run of Hello, Dolly!  Some of the ladies who played Dolly Levi missed a lot of performances and/or didn't play matinees, so Bibi went on quite often.

The producer — the famously-obstreperous David Merrick — did all he could to keep that  a secret.  If the star is out, patrons can request refunds or exchanges until the moment the overture starts…so Merrick would have someone announce, "At this performance, the role of Mrs. Levi will be played by Bibi Osterwald" and then he'd order the box office closed the second the conductor gave the downbeat.  A lot of folks did not realize that Mrs. Levi was Dolly until it was too late, and some never realized it.  They saw Bibi perform and thought they were seeing Ginger Rogers or Mary Martin.  I never saw the show but I did work with Bibi and I'm sure those people saw a wonderful performance.  She certainly was in league with Carol, Ginger and Mary in talent, if not in renown.

So our president is watching a football game on TV and he chokes on a pretzel and faints for four seconds.  Could have happened to anybody.  My question is: Why do we know this?  Why did the White House — which has not exactly been a gusher of candor regarding, say, who was on Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force, feel that this had to be reported?

I looked through several news stories and all I find were a few remarks that they announced it because, recently, the office was criticized for not promptly reporting when Bush had some skin cancers removed from his face.  This strikes me as someone groping for an explanation.  To the extent there was such criticism, it was minor.  Remember, Bush is still sitting on that awesome approval rating and Americans overwhelmingly don't care about most issues unrelated to terrorism and the economy.  The skin cancer was also something that, since it was on the man's face, would eventually have been noticed…or perhaps the fact that the president had undergone surgery would have leaked, and the rumor mill would have thought it was something more serious.  But in the case of l'affaire pretzel, there was no visit to a hospital and the president only suffered a few scratches and bruises which could have been explained a hundred different, less embarrassing ways.  Would anyone have screamed "Cover up" if they hadn't reported the fainting and it subsequently got out?  My theory is that someone said, "You know, Leno and Letterman have stopped ridiculing Bush since 9/11.  Let's give the boys a break and tell them about this because it'll give them a chance to jab him without looking like they're sabotaging the war effort."  Because, as far as I can see, they're the only ones to benefit.

I have nothing to do with Cool and Strange Music Magazine and don't even think I know anyone who does.  But it covers a lot of the same aberrations that one finds on this website.  So if you've found your way here, you might enjoy this publication as much as I do.  The current issue features a good overview of Mel Blanc's many kids' records, plus features on Gary Owens, Brother Theodore, Thurl "Tony the Tiger" Ravenscroft and many others…and every issue has had something that I found of interest.  They post very little of their content on the web but don't let that stop you.  Spend money for a subscription.  (You can do that on the web.  Here's a link to their website.)

Members of old comedy duos are dropping like flies.  First, Avery Schreiber and now, Frank Shuster — who was one half of the comedy team of Wayne and Shuster.  (In the picture above, Shuster's the one on the right.  Wayne, seen at left, passed away in 1990)  In Canada, they were major stars.  In this country, they were best known for their 67 appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, wherein they performed very silly — and often, very elaborate — comedy sketches.  They also starred in a short-lived 1961 summer situation comedy on CBS called Holiday Lodge, in which they played two guys who botched up the running of a vacation hotel.  Though it failed, they probably could have been very big in America had they opted to work here more.  They didn't, preferring to avoid high pressure situations and to remain in their native Canada.  I never saw an example of it, but rumor is that a couple of American comedy shows took advantage of this to liberally borrow ideas from the boys.

Mr. Shuster's family ties may also be of some interest to those interested in American popular culture.  His daughter Rosie was one of the key writers of the first generation of Saturday Night Live and was briefly married to its producer, Lorne Michaels.  And Frank Shuster also had a cousin named Joe who, with a friend named Jerry Siegel, created a little thing called Superman.

I haven't seen anything on Shuster's passing in the U.S. wire services but here's a link to a story in the Canadian press.

Nick Cardy is about as fine a comic artist as has ever worked in the field and I gush all over him in the foreword to The Art of Nick Cardy, a superb work published a couple of years ago by John Coates.  The print run sold out right away but Vanguard Press has brought it back into print.  It's a loving biography and art book devoted to a lovely man who's done a lot of lovely comic book pages.  Many of them are reproduced within and make the point far better than I can.  As I said in the book, Nick was always topping himself.  We thought his Aquaman was great until we saw his Teen Titans.  Then we thought his Teen Titans was great until we saw his Bat Lash…and so on.

Bat Lash, which was co-written by my amigo, Sergio Aragonés, may have set some record for being the best-remembered comic with the fewest number of issues.  It came and went in an instant — six or seven issues, I forget — due to reportedly low sales.  (I am of the opinion that the comic book industry has often been too quick to cancel something new when it didn't catch on immediately.)  In the case of Bat Lash, it looks like everyone who bought the book loved it, remembered it and — when Nick came out to be a guest of honor at the ComicCon International in San Diego — they all lined up to tell him how much they loved it.  You probably can't find a complete set of Bat Lash — I have one and you don't, nyah nyah — but you can and should buy The Art of Nick Cardy.

On January 22, A&E Biography is airing a program called Laugh Out Loud, which — well, here.  I'll let you read it for yourself…

We polled over 250 comedians, journalists, and academies to find out which TV comedians made them laugh over the years and which had the most influence on television comedy today. The result is their list of the 15 greatest TV comedians of all time. We won't reveal the list until the program airs, but we can tell you it will be full of hilarious clips showing our legendary comedians at their best.

I always think these "best" polls are silly and arbitrary and that folks take them way too seriously.  But one of my spies sent me a list that purports to be the fifteen funny folks that the poll chose and I have to admit, it ain't a bad list for what it is…

Steve Allen, Lucille Ball, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Carol Burnett, Sid Caesar, Johnny Carson, Bill Cosby, Jackie Gleason, Bob Hope, Ernie Kovacs, Steve Martin, Groucho Marx, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams

Assuming this is indeed their list, I can't argue with too many inclusions or omissions, except possibly that I don't think of Mssrs. Pryor or Martin as really having done their strongest work on TV.  Had it just been me deciding, I'd have bumped them for Bob Newhart, Dick Van Dyke, Phil Silvers or one or two other guys.  I might also have argued that Jonathan Winters has been both funnier and more influential than Robin Williams and that Jackie Gleason's greatest contribution to televised humor was hiring Art Carney.  But all in all, it's not a bad list.  I have another list of great comedians that some friends of mine and I compiled once, and I'll post it here in a week or two.

Up over nine million.  This is getting exciting.

This is kinda interesting. On January 3, an eBay seller called "xtci" posted a listing for 92 comics — most of them, #1 issues — with a minimum bid of eight million dollars.  That's right.  I said eight million dollars.  Let me type that one more time, real slow, so we all understand what we're talking about:  Eight.  Million.  Dollars.

Of the 92 comics, three are genuine treasures — Action Comics #1, Detective Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27.  Or, at least, they would be treasures if the issues being offered were genuine.  The evidence suggests they are not.  The listing includes photos of the Action #1 and Detective #27 — both in cheap plastic bags, both looking an awful lot like facsimile editions that have been issued in recent years.  (There is no photo of the Detective Comics #1.  There has also been no facsimile edition that, in a picture, would look even vaguely like the genuine article.)  The other #1 issues being offered are all fairly recent and not at all of the same scarcity.

Over on www.comicon.com, the offering is the subject of much derisive chatter.  A couple of the folks there have done some math.  One figures that, if the three vintage issues were genuine and in excellent condition, the value of the whole magilla would be a little under $600,000.  That's going by the Overstreet Price Guide.  Take away the three classics and the rest of the stash is worth less than twelve grand by any measure, possibly a lot less.

So, you figure, this thing is never going to get any bids, right?  Wrong.  At the moment, as I write this, bidding is up to $8,000,300..  A couple of other bids have been made and retracted.  Folks are bidding just to go along with the joke and perhaps to tweak the nose of "xtci" or something.

What I find intriguing about this is to wonder what was on the seller's mind.  Obviously, he couldn't have thought there was a chance in hell that anyone would bid eight million bucks for this bundle — especially sight-unseen, buying from a person who has no history on eBay.  So it's a joke, right?  (It only cost him $3.30 to list it, plus the time and trouble.)  But why eight million?  How did he come up with that figure?  Why not fifty million?  The joke would have been greater and the chances of selling, the same.  Or if he thought there was a zillion-in-one chance that some addled billionaire would bid, why eight?  Why not seven?  Or five?  There'd be a helluva profit in one million, even if he had to go out and buy real copies of the three Golden Age issues to fill the order.

The auction is set to close January 13 if eBay allows it to go the distance, which they may not.  If you want to check on its status — or maybe even put in a bid — the link is right here.  Frankly, I might pay six million but eight is ridiculous.

And some people just seem to born to draw.  It poured out of John Buscema, a lovely man who passed away this morning following a long, brutal bout with cancer.  John was best known as the man who did it all at Marvel from the mid-sixties right into the nineties: Fantastic Four, The Avengers, Thor, Silver Surfer, Tales of the Zombie, Sub-Mariner…wherever they needed him.  He hated the character but, when they didn't have anyone else who could draw Spider-Man, he drew Spider-Man.  Matter of fact, John hated most super-hero strips…but he was of a time in comics when that didn't matter much.  So he drew an awful lot of them.

He was happiest during his many years drawing Conan the Barbarian…and frustrated, as we all should have been, that the exigencies of production rarely allowed him to do finished art.  When he did, he was wonderful…and even the main body of his work, doing pencils or "breakdowns" (half-finished pencils) for others showed a solid, dependable craftsman at work.  His heroic figures had strength and stock, his beautiful women were truly that, and other artists stood in awe of how naturally it all seemed to flow out of him.

He was a guest of honor at last year's Comic-Con International in San Diego and I got to chat with him on four panels, one of them a lengthy one-on-one.  He struck me as enormously conflicted about his work — proud of all he had done, regretful that so much of it was spent on strips he didn't like, doing half a job that would be finished by someone else.  He belittled most of his work and, in some instances, had the audience booing in disagreement.  I think that's because he knew that The System didn't usually allow him to do his best.  But the fans still loved him because, after all, John Buscema not at his best was still better than most artists at the top of their games.

I'm so embarrassed to be (apparently) the only professional writer in America who has not been plagiarized by Stephen Ambrose.  And on the subject of such crimes, let me relate one quick anecdote…

Years ago, a team of comedy writers caught a show I'd written on TV and realized that it had almost the exact same plot — and even many of the same jokes — as a show they'd written.  Leaping into high dudgeon, they engaged a lawyer who dispatched a highly-outraged letter to the producer of my show.  In grueling detail, it itemized similarities — so many, it concluded, that coincidence was inconceivable.  The only rational explanation was that I had shamelessly and without question seen their show and copied down its every word to palm off as my own.  The letter concluded by noting that theirs had been conceived, written and aired a full eight months before mine and, therefore, I had "more than ample time" to pull off this daring, daylight burglary.

The producer of my show wrote back a terse note, which was basically a cover letter to what he enclosed.  It was a copy of a CBS program log that he'd highlighted to note that the episode of mine they'd seen was a rerun from two years earlier.  Mine had, in fact, aired four times by the date they said they'd written theirs.

From their lawyer thereafter, there was silence.  From the writers eventually came a personal note saying that they'd fired that rotten attorney who had insisted on sending that inexcusable letter.  There was, obviously, no similarity between the shows.

That does not seem to be the case with Mr. Ambrose's lifts.  I think the reasons his have the press so intrigued are that, first of all, they can't seem to figure out how anyone — Ambrose or some ghost-writer, if that was the culprit — thought he could get away with it.  Stealing from an obscure source in the belief that no one will ever see where you got it is, at least, a bit understandable.  Stealing from a book you acknowledge as a reference is like telling everyone where you hid the weapon and hoping they don't notice there's been a murder.  Ambrose's "crime" seemed so illogical that the early theory seems to have been the ghost-writer one; that it was perpetrated by someone who knew his own name would not get tarnished and perhaps wished to embarrass his employer.  As further instances of theft come to light, the Ghost-Writer Explanation seems increasingly less likely.

The second reason it all has reporters so up-in-arms and paying attention is that they can't believe this wasn't exposed long ago.  But then, most of them didn't know before September 11th that the Taliban wasn't a new model of Chevrolet…