Monthly Archives: August 2003

Another obit on comic book and TV writer William Woolfolk, who passed away last month.

Here's yet another in the long list of things that bother me about the California recall…

An awful lot of our political discourse in this country is driven, I am convinced, by folks who fan flames for monetary gain. I don't think there's much chance of Hillary Clinton running for president in 2004 but a number of groups have found that spreading that notion as probable is a dandy way to shake donations loose. Or here's a better example: In my quest to read political views of all stripes, I wound up on some right-wing spam lists. During the latter months of Hillary's husband's presidency, I was bombarded with e-mail that claimed to have uncovered Bill's plan to cancel the 2000 elections, declare some sort of martial law in the country, and remain in the White House indefinitely. He was not only going to not leave, he was going to sit there and pass all sorts of ultra-liberal edicts, and we had to all donate money to this group to save the U.S. from him and all the rules he was going to put in place making abortion and homosexuality mandatory.

Stuff like that. And yes, some on the left do similar things though they've never had boogeymen quite as potent for this purpose as the Clintons. I also get spam urging me to fork over bucks for groups that promise they will sue to reverse evil legislation. I suspect many of these appeals are employing the Springtime for Hitler business model: They find a hot-button issue that will generate donations, collect a few million in the cause of righting that wrong, spend a small amount to lose the case, then keep the rest.

Anyway, I smell a new opportunity here if the recall succeeds. People get very emotional when they lose elections. They're mad, they're frustrated, and they're always vowing "this isn't over" and "we'll be back." I love it when propositions lose 80% to 20% and the TV cameras go to the "victory party" of the 20% side. You see otherwise intelligent individuals treating it as a minor setback and swearing to start gathering signatures the very next day. It's always an amazing view of the human capacity for outright denial of reality.

And with the concept of recalling someone like Gray Davis comes an even greater means of denying it's over when it's over. Losers are emotionally vulnerable and there will be those who will seek to exploit that vulnerability. Every time someone loses an election, we'll see some opportunistic cash-raiser declaring that the so-called winner is, at best, only momentarily legitimate. They'll say this as they pass the hat to fund the recall. It could become very lucrative to treat duly-elected officials as temps.

We're already partway to this mindset. About twenty seconds after Bill Clinton first won the presidency, some of his detractors were talking of impeachment. This was long before Ms. Lewinsky assumed a kneeling position. They just assumed that if they kept at it long enough, they'd find some means of aborting a Clinton presidency. A pretty large percentage of Bush opponents still say he didn't win the election, and some of them are bandying about the "i" word.

That's the new trend in politics: You never really lose an election. You always have some group claiming the voting machines were rigged. Now, you'll have others taking blood oaths to oust the alleged winner before he takes the oath of office. No more will you hear, "Well, I didn't support him but now that he's going to be our senator [or governor or mayor or president or whatever], let's all rally behind him and support him and hope he succeeds because if he does, we all win."

No more of that. Now it'll be, "I didn't support him and I don't recognize his right to govern. The recall drive has already started."

Don't believe me? Wait 'til the evening of October 7. I don't know if Davis will retain his office or if not, who will take over, but I'll bet you there will be those who will be denying it's over…especially if we wind up with a winner who gets 40% or less, which seems likely. Before that vote is even certified, people will be gathering signatures and soliciting donations for a sequel which may or may not happen. And denying that whoever is governor is legitimate. Yeah, that'll help straighten things out in Sacramento.

A few weeks ago on this site, I posted three covers from comic books based on TV shows produced by the Danny Thomas-Sheldon Leonard company. Since then, a number of folks have written to me to ask questions about those comics, including wondering who drew them. Well, the comic based on The Danny Thomas Show was drawn by Alex Toth. The comic based on The Andy Griffith Show was drawn by Henry Scarpelli. The comic book based on Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. had a first issue drawn by Warren Tufts (who was best known for Casey Ruggles, one of the greatest adventure newspaper strips) and then it was subsequently drawn by some artist whose identity is unknown, but all he did was swipe/trace poses from Tufts' issue. And the comic book based on The Dick Van Dyke Show wasn't drawn by anyone since it didn't exist.

Yeah, I'm sorry: It's a phony that I cobbled up using an old still and pieces from other Gold Key covers. I wish they had done such a comic and if they had, it would probably have been drawn by Dan Spiegle. But they never did so I whipped up the cover to one to see if anyone would notice. A few folks (like Scott Shaw!) did. A much larger number of correspondents wrote to say they remembered owning the Dick Van Dyke Show comic long ago and most asked who did it and where they might find a copy. To save these folks from prowling eBay for all eternity, I hereby confess to the hoax, beg your forgiveness and ask the logical question: They did The Danny Thomas Show and Gomer Pyle. They also did, from the same TV production company, The Andy Griffith Show and The Real McCoys in comic book form. Why didn't they do The Dick Van Dyke Show?

A. Whitney Brown is the man who said, "I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants." A. Whitney Brown is the man who said, "The saving grace of doing humor is that if you fail, no one is laughing at you." A. Whitney Brown is the man who said, "A group of white South Africans recently killed a black lawyer because he was black. That was wrong. They should have killed him because he was a lawyer." A. Whitney Brown is the man who said, "The past is what actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down."

A. Whitney Brown is the man who said, "There are a billion people in China. It's not easy to be an individual in a crowd of more than a billion people. Think of it. That means even if you're a one-in-a-million type of guy, there are still a thousand guys exactly like you."

A. Whitney Brown was a writer and occasional cast member on Saturday Night Live during what are still my favorite years of that uneven show. He often did the smartest material on the program some weeks, the smartest material on all of television. But a few years ago, he seemed to completely drop off the map and disappear. Every time I glanced at the shelf with my copy of his book, The Big Picture, I wondered what had become of him and whether we'd ever see him again.

Well, I'm happy to say…he's back. Now, if he'll just come in this direction…

Peter Sanderson is a wise scholar of comic books. Over at IGN FilmForce, he files this report on this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego.

I want to get away from politics and back to things like comics here, so I'm going to link to Bill Sherman's review of the new reprint volume, Jimmy Olsen: Adventures by Jack Kirby. (I'm linking to the version posted at Blogcritics instead of at Bill's own site because there seems to be something wrong with his permalink there.) It's a wise, perceptive review, like all of Bill's are except when he doesn't like something I did.

I am way too close to the trees to have an objective opinion on Kirby's odd run as writer-artist (and sometimes editor) of Superman's Pal. I helped on these stories in tiny ways and was around when Jack did them. I will say here, since there wasn't room to do so in my introduction to this collection, that Jack himself was not entirely satisfied with the material, and not just because DC insisted on heavily retouching his work. The problem was — and Jack had this same problem at DC more than a decade before when he drew Green Arrow — that no one could decide if the mission was to continue the previous, duller version or to plow it all under and start fresh. Jack was not the guy for the former job. He was capable of a great many creative tasks but seamlessly blending into someone else's interpretation was not one of them. So allowing himself to be tossed into a key position in DC's Superman franchise was probably a mistake. He might have been able to do a great Superman but it wouldn't have been the same Superman that everyone else was doing. The moments of joy in what he did are probably all those where he didn't feel pressured to not be Kirby.

Anyway, I recommend this book and the follow-up volume to anyone who wants to read some odd Kirby work. For genuine, unfettered Kirby, buy the collections of New Gods, Forever People, Mister Miracle, and The Fourth World that are still in print (though, alas, still in black-and-white). And to read more about Mr. Kirby, visit The Jack F.A.Q.

Here's the up-to-the-minute list of folks who are running for governor of California. More to come.

Here's a question that I'd like to hear put to prominent Republicans who are backing Arnold S. for governor. This is not intended as a "gotcha" question or an attempt to provoke a slap-fight or anything. I promise you, I'm genuinely interested in hearing a civil, honest answer to this…

We have here a candidate who describes himself as "very liberal" on social issues. He favors gay adoption and certain other gay rights. He favors legalized abortion and some forms of gun control. He opposed the impeachment of Bill Clinton and said he was "ashamed of his party" for its actions in that regard.

He's not only used marijuana, he smoked it on-screen in the documentary, Pumping Iron. There are more than a few reports of him using illegal steroids and of committing sexual harassment against women, even after he got married. He has also obviously been a leading force in the creation of violent movies in recent years and there are full frontal nude photos of him around. (They're probably being scanned and uploaded even as we speak.) Now, I am absolutely not condemning him for all or most of this. I don't know about some of the morals charges and I'm with him on most of the political positions…

…but I'd like to see his Republican backers asked, "If he were exactly the same candidate but a Democrat, would you even think of backing him?"

It seems to me that some of the above facts are not only things that Republicans abhor in a politician but that they cite as indicative of serious moral and character defects. When Clinton was running, we were told that pot-smoking, even way in the past, and messing around on your wife made you such a bad person that you should be disqualified from public office. Often, from people who will probably vote for Arnold, we hear that to not be "pro-life" makes you a baby-killer.

Is it that these things never really mattered? Or that they don't matter if the Republicans have a chance to win the governor's chair? Or that they matter a lot and you're going to vote for Bill Simon, even though he won't win? Or what?

This intrigues me because I think reflex partisanship — especially along the Democrat/Republican divide — is one of the more pernicious elements of our public discourse. Today on MSNBC, I saw Republican Congressman Dana Rohrbacher, who seems to be Arnold's political opposite, enthusiastically endorse the guy as just the kind of man we need in office. Meanwhile, Loretta Sanchez, a Democrat, came out against the Republican. In both cases, they acted like it meant something that they had come to these views of Mr. Schwarzenegger. How often do politicians not endorse and support along party lines? The candidate in question has to be either going to prison or a former Ku Klux Klan leader.

So that's my question to devout Republicans who intend to vote for Arnold or would if they lived in California: Would you even think of supporting him if he had a "D" after his name?

Okay, I was wrong about Arnold running…but so were some of his closest aides, too. Still, I'll wade in here and make another prediction: It doesn't matter who the governor is after all the sturm und drang is over. Whoever it is is going to solve California's most immediate ills by at least trying to engineer a big tax increase.

Let's recall some history here. In 1966, an actor who had never before held public office convinced voters in this state that we had an economic crisis. The budget was technically balanced but Ronald Reagan argued that this had been accomplished by accounting tricks; that things were really much worse and that incumbent Pat Brown had to be ousted to save the state from total financial disaster. Voters agreed. And when Reagan took office, he immediately went for a massive tax increase — the largest ever in the history of any state. Here's Reagan biographer Lou Cannon describing this. (The full text of Cannon's piece can be found here.)

Reagan loathed tax increases and had promised during the campaign to "squeeze, cut and trim" state government. But Reagan realized immediately that no amount of budget cutting could make up for the shortfall in revenues. Two days after he became governor in 1967, he embraced a tax increase, saying that he did not want to wait "until everyone forgets that we did not cause the problem — we only inherited it."

It worked. The state's financial problems were quickly wiped out. In fact, some said, it worked too well since California wound up with a surplus. Reagan took credit for shrewd fiscal management but he really did not "squeeze, cut and trim." He'd just raised taxes more than necessary. It was later charged (and I don't recall much argument on this point) that it would have been much better for the state if Reagan had asked for a smaller tax increase…and then another later, if necessary. He didn't do this, some said, because he figured he could blame one tax increase on his predecessor but not two.

Okay, tell me why whoever winds up being governor — Arnold, Cruz, John, Larry, Angelyne, Gary, whoever — won't do this. If Davis is booted out, it will more or less become accepted fact that he was an inept governor. Why wouldn't any successor solve their most immediate problem by declaring, "Because of the mess that jerk Gray Davis made, I have no choice but to ask for the Gray Davis Memorial Tax Increase"? And if Davis somehow retains the job, he can say, "Because of the expense of that stupid, unwarranted recall, we need a tax increase. Send your complaints to Darrell Issa." That would be so much easier than trying to solve the problem with a hundred smaller measures, battling over each one and whittling away the deficit a dime at a time.

Reagan managed to prove that tax increases don't affect your popularity if you can blame them on someone else. He never got blamed for that one. This will dawn on whoever winds up running the state after the circus leaves town.

I always thought the whole Missile Defense Program was pie-in-the-sky doubletalk. I've been amazed how many otherwise rational people get angry when you say that and accuse you of wanting to have Koreans fire a missile into downtown Seattle or wherever. That it will probably never work is one of those silly technicalities that shouldn't stand in the way of us investing our time and resources in something that we want to believe will protect us from doomsday.

But now, says this article, even the people in charge of it don't believe it will ever work. Bet this doesn't make one bit of difference in how much we spend on it in the next few years.

Here's a helluva good speech by the guy who got the most votes in the last presidential election. And if he'd had speeches this good, he might even have gotten the job.

For whatever it's worth, I think Gray Davis's chances went from slim to just about none yesterday — as much because of Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante entering the race as Arnold Schwarzenegger. This may come down to a horse race between the two people whose last names are the most difficult to spell. If this were a write-in election, neither one of them would stand a chance.

Before yesterday, Davis stood a good chance of making it all about the legitimacy of the recall effort. Even a lot of people who don't like him as governor think the method of removal smells and is a bad precedent. But now instead of discussing that, all anyone's going to be talking about is Arnold, Arnold, Arnold. He lacks experience and is perhaps not prepared to devote 100% of his energy to the job…or so his opponents will say. But he's otherwise a not-unappealing candidate.

Some Democrats will like him because his views are not unlike theirs: He's somewhat pro-choice, somewhat in favor of gun control and gay rights. He even once said he was "ashamed" of his party for the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

Most Republicans will like him because…well, he's a Republican. Republicans like to win. With the Democrats, lately it doesn't seem like that big a deal.

The entry into the fray of Bustamante further erodes Davis's chances. If you're concerned, like many, that the recall process is a farce, you crave stability. You might have wished that Davis — who probably cannot govern, no matter what — would have just resigned and handed command over to the next guy legally in line. The next guy legally in line is Bustamante. (The way some have interpreted the law, there shouldn't even be a second part to the ballot. It should give voters the option of ousting Davis and if they do, the job goes to Bustamante. I'll bet he thinks that too but thinks the court battles to enforce that would have been endless, would have destablized the state government for a long time, and would have convinced a lot of Californians that he was trying to use a loophole to steal the office.) In any event, the argument will be made that he's somehow entitled to the office.

And it's not over yet. There are court challenges to come and more candidates. According to this report, Riordan was blindsided by Arnold's announcement. Already, you can hear Davis's office whipping up the talking points: Arnold stabbed a friend in the back and then lied about it. (They'd dig up dirt on Larry Flynt but he's already published most of it himself — and with great pride.) And I'll bet you any day now, someone official announces that the cost of the recall election will top $100 million.

Like Leno said the other night, "Here's how bad California looks to the rest of the country: People in Florida are laughing at us."

The fine writer-director Vince Waldron writes and directs my attention to this article in which Dave Thomas, who played Bob Hope on all those wonderful episodes of SCTV, talks about getting inside the man. (As Vince notes in his e-mail to me, the article is wrong to call Thomas a "founding member" of Second City but the piece is otherwise very good.)

And since I'm invoking Vince's name, I'll mention that this month's performance by his improv troupe, Totally Looped, takes place this Saturday, August 9, at the Second City Studio, which is on Melrose right next to Budd Friedman's Improv. Starts at 8:00 and the last one I attended made me laugh an awful lot.

So far, in the California governor mess, the big winner looks to be Jay Leno. Last night, with Arnold announcing his candidacy, The Tonight Show got a 6.9 rating. This is more than Late Show with David Letterman (3.1) and Nightline (3.0) combined.

Not only that but we'll probably see Jay and his program exploit the recall election for further numbers. Letterman is on the other side of the country, away from the action, and in reruns next week and the week after. Hell, if Leno can just get everyone who's running for governor to watch him, his ratings will be through the roof.

I'm still getting around to writing that piece here about how both Dave and Jay have really started to bore me, by the way. I think both programs have gotten into a rut and show the effects of hosts who are phoning it in. One of these days, I'll elaborate on this thesis.

Amazing. I was 90% sure he wouldn't. But I guess in politics, there's always that 10%.

What amazes me after a fast sweep of the political boards is that some Republicans think this is good news for them. Arnold staying out would have been good news for them because it would have made Riordan the front-runner. Richard Riordan has pretty much the same politics as Schwarzenegger but can't be accused of being unserious about the job or utterly inexperienced. He's also someone the Republicans could look to as a long-term center of power in the state. Yeah, Arnold's got the name value but he also has all that other baggage.

But some Democrats are also acting as if this is good news for them and I don't think it's that, either. Arnold will turn out the voters, especially some who may just love the idea of electing someone who isn't a career politician. That's one of the main sentiments that got Jesse Ventura his seat.

Seems to me the big loser in this is Riordan. That is, if he is/was going to run. And the other big loser (of course) is Darrell Issa who spent all that money to fund the recall and now may finish behind Gallagher.

You see why I don't write more on this site about comic books? It's because there's so much more hokey fantasy in this stuff.