Monthly Archives: May 2003

I don't like a lot of the recent attempts to take comic book characters who were designed for stylized line art and turn them into fully-rendered, close-to-realistic paintings. Most strike me as boring and forced, especially when long-established super-heroes suddenly start looking like the artists' friends who posed for reference. That said, there are about three exceptions and the main one is Alex Ross. He has an amazing way of making the characters still look like the characters and to keep the excitement intact. His website is full of examples. As you'll see.

Here's a link to a pretty good interview with comics legend Gene Colan. Gene is another example of how the best artists are sometimes the nicest guys.

Here's a link to the final part of Bob Rozakis's history of Cancelled Comics Cavalcade. Thank you, Michael Kilgore.

In 1978, the then-new management of DC Comics decided to embark on an expansion plan they called "The DC Explosion." New books were created, new back-up features were written and drawn, production was hastily increased…and then suddenly, it all fell apart. In what some (inevitably) dubbed "The DC Implosion," the new projects were cancelled and a lot of completed material was "written off," meaning that they decided never to publish it. But they did publish some of it in two very-limited editions reproduced by Xerox. The two issues of Cancelled Comics Cavalcade contained little in the way of wonderful material but were so rare as to evoke mega-prices and great curiosity.

That's the short version of the story. A longer explanation has been written by my pal Bob Rozakis, who was working for DC at the time. Here's Part One of a series of columns he wrote detailing the history of one of comics' scarcest publications. And since there don't seem to be any links on that site to take you from one installment of Bob's column to the next, here are links to Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, and Part Eight. I think there are other parts beyond those but these are all I could locate.

If you'd like to see these "lost" comics, there are bootleg copies sold from time to time at conventions. Scans also seem to turn up from time to time on the Internet. At the moment, this website is displaying many of the stories, at least until some DC lawyer suggests that ain't a good idea. A few of the stories are pretty good, and the worst are no worse than lots of stuff that made it into print at the time. Interestingly, the comic from that period that seems to hold up better than any others for me is Joe Simon's Prez. The book was quite controversial at the time, inexplicably hated by a number of comic fans who didn't like that DC was wandering into the domain of humor comics. In hindsight, it may have been the cleverest, freshest thing the company published for years. The fifth issue never made it to real publication but was included in Cancelled Comics Cavalcade and demonstrates why Prez is on my list of comics that were considered flops but which I think the publisher just gave up on too soon.

I didn't think it was possible but William F. Buckley Jr. actually makes me feel sorry for Bill Bennett.

I think Buckley is wrong, by the way, about Bennett's public career being through. If all those guys caught lying and covering-up in the first Bush administration can come back in this one, Bennett can come back. He can certainly get more books published and purchased.

I also think Buckley and all the pundits are wrong to even talk about which invasions of privacy are off-limits in politics. Nothing is, these days. It's nice to say that some areas should not be subjected to public scrutiny but that's no longer how it works in the real world. In the age of Drudge and various anti-Drudges, if you have dirt on a political opponent, you make sure it gets out. You may throw it yourself or you may arrange for it to be leaked in a manner that will keep your hands clean. But there is no such thing in politics as someone saying, "Yes, I know this information will wound my opponent but out of respect for his right to privacy, I'm going to withhold it." It should happen but it just doesn't.

No online seller seems to be taking advance orders for it yet, but we are told that Columbia-TriStar will on August 12 release Rocky & Bullwinkle: The Complete First Season on DVD. It's a three-disc set for $39.95 and I have no idea what episodes are in it, or even what they define as the first season, since the first bled rather seamlessly into the second. I'm guessing they're including the other cartoons in addition to the Rocky-Bullwinkle segments. By the way, the first Rocky-Bullwinkle storyline, which was all about a jet fuel formula and a Mooseberry Bush, was nowhere near as wonderful as what was to follow.

The show originally debuted on ABC on November 29, 1959 as Rocky and His Friends. In 1961, it moved to NBC as The Bullwinkle Show and later was marketed under both those names and as The Rocky Show or Rocky & Bullwinkle. In total, there were 326 Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons which formed 28 separate serials. There were also 91 Fractured Fairy Tales, 91 Mr. Peabody cartoons, 39 Aesop and Son, 39 Dudley Do-Right and a whole mess of interstitial shorts (39 of Bullwinkle's Corner, 50 of Mr. Know-It-All, and 10 sessions of The Rocky & Bullwinkle Fan Club). Crunching numbers, I'm figuring that to put all of this out on video would take at least 42 hours of media. I may be wildly off on my math since, after all, I grew up watching cartoons instead of studying.

Anyway, the fact that it's coming out is the good news. The bad news is how much this will eventually cost us but, hey, we all spend money on stuff that isn't half this good. And there may be some bad news in the announcement that the first release will include a booklet and a Bullwinkle hand puppet. This sounds like another of those ungainly packages that won't fit neatly on my DVD shelves.

A couple of "pro-family" groups are currently trying to gin up a crusade against comic book and science-fiction conventions as hotbeds of "pornography."

I put those two terms in quotes since those are their terms, and I don't consider them accurate. "Pro-family" is one of those labels you adopt to put a noble, responsible face on what is generally a reactionary, restrictive view of what families are or should be. An awful lot of soft bigotry is marketed under the brand name of "pro-family," much of it doing more damage to the concept of family than good. At the same time, most of those groups have a definition of "pornography" that is hysterical, utterly out of touch with mainstream America, and often indicative of a pretty ugly attitude towards sex.

The American Family Association is one such crusading organization, and their current campaign against comic conventions (exemplified by this report on a recent con in Pittsburgh) is pretty silly. A lot of it has to do with the fact that Playboy magazine and some of the women who've appeared in it can be seen at cons. You wonder if these people have been out in public lately. Playboy is pretty mild, given some of the forms of titillation that their kids can't help but see in stores, airports, on commercial TV, etc. Recently on some website, I saw someone say — and I'll bet this is true — that in spite of products that claim to restrict access, any kid who's smart enough to navigate the Internet is smart enough to locate hardcore porn and to hide that from their folks.

One gets the feeling that the current attention paid to comic conventions and the Playmates therein is merely a matter of someone looking for an easy target. Like Harold Hill getting the people of River City needlessly worried about the presence of a pool table in their community, the con-man needs his alarmist cause. Certainly, groups like the A.F.A. need to constantly broadcast alerts to keep their name in the newspapers and the donations rolling in. (One of my big complaints about anti-porn crusaders is that they favor the defenseless, easy target. They'll go after the corner newsstand for selling one magazine but not after Time-Warner for distributing it. And when was the last time you saw an anti-violence crusader mention the name of Rupert Murdoch?)

One also gets the feeling that the campaign against comic conventions will not amount to much. If any parents are prompted to keep their kids away from them as a result, the drop in attendance will more than be offset by those who will show up in the hope that the cons are as decadent as advertised. I am reminded of back in the late sixties and the science-fiction convention scene in Southern California. The cons were at hotels where the pool would occasionally be the scene of some very brief skinny-dipping by people you really didn't want to see naked. Nevertheless, reporters sometimes mentioned it so at every con, you could spot a few attendees who'd showed up just to be around when and if that happened.

The one way in which campaigns like the one the A.F.A. is mounting might hurt comic conventions is if they manage to intimidate facilities into not renting to the cons. This will probably not occur with conventions held in private hotels. I mean, the Marriott chain makes a lot of bucks off the hardcore "X" movies people watch in their rooms, so they're not about to go kicking cons out just because there's a Playmate on the premises. But a lot of conventions are held in "civic" or city-owned convention centers. Unless the convention is extremely lucrative for local businesses, as the big one in San Diego is, it's possible that pressure can successfully be brought on such venues to oust the comic conventions — or, more likely, get them to become stricter about what can and cannot be displayed.

It would not be the dumbest thing in the world for convention organizers to become a little more sensitized to this issue. Buried somewhere beneath the hysteria and myopia of the A.F.A., there's probably a legitimate parental concern. Sometimes, the X-rated magazines and starlets at conventions are uncomfortably close to where they're selling the Archie Comics. There are comic book shops that want to have it both ways: To be the family-friendly place where parents feel it's safe to let the kids browse for Scooby Doo funnybooks, but also to have porn stars in to sign their wares. It would not be censorship if these conventions and stores remembered that some patrons might not want to see, or want their children to see the lady with her breasts sticking out of her Vampirella costume. Respecting such feelings might just be a matter of courtesy, but it could also be good business. And a way of not inviting needless trouble.

Les Miserables closed last night on Broadway after an amazing 6,680 performances. That number is even more impressive when you consider how few shows get over the 4,000 mark — let alone all the way to six thousand and change. Les Miz lasted more than twice as long as the original Fiddler on the Roof, which at one time held the record. Here's how the top ten currently breaks down in terms of number of performances…

1. Cats (7485)
2. Les Miserables (6680)
3. The Phantom of the Opera (6382 and still running)
4. A Chorus Line (6137)
5. Oh! Calcutta! – Revival (5959)
6. Miss Saigon (4097)
7. Beauty and the Beast (3704 and still running)
8. 42nd Street – Original Production (3486)
9. Grease – Original production (3388)
10. Fiddler on the Roof (3242)

Some might argue that some of those shows lasted as long as they did because of clever promotional deals — and perhaps they did, but that's part of how the game is played. The revival of Oh! Calcutta! was around for 13 years, at least in part, because they staged it in a small theater, got the running costs down to where they could make a profit when half-full, and offered packages to tour groups that wanted to see something naughty without braving New York's famed porn palaces. (I once heard a lady who was in the show say that it probably also set some sort of record for walk-outs, as well as for playing to charter busloads of Japanese tourists.) In any case, there are theater buffs who argue that it shouldn't be eligible for lists like this.

If it isn't, the next in line would be a non-musical — Life With Father — that hung in there for 3224 outings. Filling out the Top 20 would be Tobacco Road, Rent, Hello, Dolly, My Fair Lady, the current revival of Chicago, Annie, the original Man of La Mancha, Abie's Irish Rose, and The Lion King. Three of those are still running but I don't think anyone thinks that any of the above shows but Phantom has a chance of beating out Cats for the top slot. The Lion King, for instance, would have to run another twelve years and three months to achieve that.

One other thing I noticed as I just looked at a whole list of Broadway shows and how long they ran: I think the funniest musical ever done was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and I think the funniest non-musical was The Odd Couple. And I just noticed that the original productions of these two shows each ran exactly the same number of performances: 964. I'm sure that doesn't prove anything but isn't it kinda interesting? No? Okay, I'm going to bed. Good night.

Once upon a time, Kyle Baker did things like inking super-hero comics for Marvel. What a waste. Oh, he did them okay but when we saw him start to write and draw all by his lonesome, we saw one of the most creative cartooning talents to emerge in many a moon. You can just begin to scratch the surface over at his website. But check out the portfolio there and you'll see what I mean.

For more than sixty years, actor George S. Irving has been appearing in a steady stream of plays and musicals all over the nation, many of them on Broadway. He appeared in the original productions of Oklahoma! and Call Me Madam, won a Tony award for his performance in Irene, and may well have the longest list of credits of anyone currently plying the trade. He recently completed a stint in the Paper Mill Playhouse production of Camelot, in which he played both Merlin and Pellinore…and the man is over eighty. That takes a lot of energy, and he seems to have a bottomless supply of it.

He is about to be saluted by the Musicals Tonight! group in New York, and I wish I could be there, if only to make certain that his extensive career on stage does not completely overshadow another area of work in which he has distinguished himself. For many years, Mr. Irving has been one of the most prominent voiceover artists on that coast, heard in hundreds of commercials and a pretty high percentage of all animated cartoons that have recorded their voice tracks in Manhattan. In the sixties, he was heard on all of those Total Television shows — King Leonardo, Underdog, Tennessee Tuxedo, and so forth. (He was the narrator on Underdog.) He gave an outstanding performance as the Heat Miser in the special, The Year Without a Santa Claus, and was heard on many other Rankin-Bass productions. I never met the man but have admired his work from afar. Here's a link to an interview with him from a few years back. Nice to see he mentioned Underdog…

My friend/employer Jack Kirby created or co-created dozens of classic comic book characters, as well as a whole approach to comic art that has extended well beyond the confines of the super-hero comic book. I don't know if it surprises you that his influence has been so vast, but it didn't surprise Jack. With more modesty than seemed humanly possible, he was quietly certain that what he did in his career — especially in the Marvel Comics of the sixties and his early-seventies work for DC — would bleed into other media, especially film. At the time of his death in 1994, he had seen this happen often enough to know that his prediction was coming true, and that it would only grow and continue.

It wasn't just that Jack knew that major feature films would be made of The Fantastic Four, The X-Men and other comic books he helped launch. He knew that his dynamic style of storytelling would spread beyond the properties on which he'd worked. He would therefore be utterly unamazed to read some of the reviews currently being written of The Matrix Reloaded. I just did a very simple search and found these quotes online, all from folks writing about that film…

…what are these images but elaborate homages to the balletic slugfests, property-damage free-for-alls and urban apocalypses created by Jack Kirby, Gil Kane and other Marvel Comics artists? [Full review]

Comic book fans were quick to notice the influence of "Captain America" illustrator Jack Kirby in several action sequences. [Full review]

Cybernerds, proliferating like the film's men-in-black computer Agents, studied the Wachowskis' host of referents — to the Bible and Buddha, to novelist William Gibson (Neuromancer) and comic-book artist Jack Kirby (Captain America), to cybernetics and higher mathematics… [Full review]

And there are others. In fact, based on my admittedly-inexhaustive search, I'd say Jack's getting mentioned more often in reviews of The Matrix Reloaded than he is in pieces about the new X-Men movie. I'm pleased to see this. But I still hope that Marvel doesn't forget him in the credits and publicity materials for the films based on comics he co-created.

None of the obits I've seen for Robert Stack has detailed the fascinating (to me) way in which he landed his signature role of Eliot Ness on The Untouchables. So here's the story as I always heard it…

The Untouchables started life as a two-part episode/pilot on an anthology series being produced for CBS by Desilu (i.e., Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball). Arnaz cast Van Johnson in the role of Ness, in part because he figured he owed Van a favor. Van had been a co-star in Desi's one and only Broadway show, Too Many Girls. (He was also, oddly, Desi's understudy in the role of a Cuban football player. Was there ever an actor who looked less Cuban than Van Johnson?) Anyway, Johnson had done many favors for Desi, including just teaching him the ropes of performing in a stage musical, and Desi figured he owed him and that Van would make a good Ness.

The first of the two episodes was to start filming Monday morning. Saturday evening, Desi gets a call from Van's wife. Though Van was receiving very good pay for the job, she suddenly announced that she wanted it doubled, claiming that when they'd agreed to the fee they thought it was for one episode, not two. If Van doesn't get twice as much, she says, Van isn't showing up on Monday morning. Desi's Latin temper gets fired up. He knows it's a squeeze based on the assumption that he can't recast in one day, nor can he cancel the filming. Nevertheless, he tells her — in both Spanish and English — what he thinks of her, and sets out to find a new Ness. He flips through the Academy Players Directory, which is like a mug book for everyone in the Screen Actors Guild. He settles on Robert Stack and begins calling around town trying to locate him.

By now, it's well past midnight. Around 1:00 AM, he locates Stack's home number, phones there and gets the maid, who informs him that Stack is at a certain night club. Arnaz phones the night club, has Stack paged and asks him to go home and read some scripts that are being messengered to his doorstep. Stack, who barely knows Desi, is puzzled but he does as he's told. Around 3 AM, he phones Desi and tells him he's read the two scripts and thinks they're terrific. Arnaz offers him the same price Van Johnson was getting for the two episodes. Stack accepts and — 30 hours later — is on the set, shooting his first scene as Eliot Ness.

CBS doesn't much like the two episodes so they decline to order a series based on them. But the day after the first one airs, ABC calls up and buys the show, which runs for four years and makes Robert Stack very wealthy and very famous. And all because the Johnsons tried to squeeze an extra ten grand out of Ricky Ricardo.

Speaking of Carl Reiner — as I was, not long ago — American Movie Classics is running The Thrill of It All on Thursday morning. 'Tis a pretty funny movie, written by Larry Gelbart and Mr. Reiner; starring Doris Day, James Garner, Edward Andrews, Zasu Pitts, an array of other wonderful character actors…and Mr. Reiner. It was directed by Norman Jewison, who helmed an amazing number of successful movies. It was produced by Marty Melcher, who was married to Ms. Day and who embezzled every cent she ever made. It's about as good as any of those fluffy sixties comedies.

A week from today, the American Cinematheque in Hollywood is screening a print of the movie, 1776. This will be followed by a panel discussion with the director and members of the cast. Those of us who really, really like this movie will be in attendance. And if you don't really, really like that movie, there are other fine musicals being shown, many of them followed by discussions with the filmmakers.

The late Basil Wolverton was one of the most imaginative comic artists of all time, creating a style that came out of nowhere but a wonderfully warped imagination. His son Monte inherited the imagination and occasionally even draws in much the same style, though he also has his own wicked way of looking at the world. Over at The Monte Wolverton Website, you can see the work of father and son on display.