Monthly Archives: November 2003

The lovely face above is that of actress June Marlowe (1903-1984) who is probably best remembered as the teacher in a number of Hal Roach's "Our Gang" comedies. She had a nice career modelling and in movies and a very interesting life. All of that is captured over on this website devoted to her, including rare photos and a nice, long biography.

I was amazed to see that Miss Crabtree only appeared in six of the "Our Gang" shorts. I've seen all those films and I would have guessed two dozen or so. I guess that's testimony to what a strong impression she made when she appeared. Shortly after she passed away, I got to spend a couple of hours with Hal Roach, who got to talking about her and who said (approximately), "She was the most beautiful woman we ever had on the lot. She could have been the biggest star in the business if she hadn't run off and married that guy."

A bit later, Mr. Roach told me a please-don't-repeat story about a lady who got roles in movies back then by sleeping with various studio execs. I didn't think he meant June Marlowe but he made a point of telling me it was not her; that there was no "hanky-panky" (his term) with June. Then, even though he was 93 years old at the time, he sighed and added, "…unfortunately." Guess that's why Miss Crabtree only appeared in six films.

Just spoke with Marvel artist Marie Severin, who was back from attending the wake for John Tartaglione. She reminded me that John had recently been inking the Spider-Man newspaper strip (the daily, not the Sunday) over the pencil art of Larry Lieber. And she said that despite a recent battle with throat cancer that had robbed Tartag of his ability to speak, he managed to finish a week of strips the day before he died. There's some real devotion to duty there, and it's nice to report that John was a working artist right until the end.

I have no details but I am informed by two separate sources that longtime comic book illustrator John Tartaglione passed away within the last week. "Tartag," as his friends called him, was born in 1921 and he received his art training at Pratt Institute and the Traphagen School of Fashion. Details on his career are sketchy — I don't recall ever seeing an interview with him anywhere — but he seems to have broken into comics around 1941 as an errand boy and production artist for Harvey Comics, followed by several years doing likewise for Bernard Baily, who was then running a studio that produced comic art for various publishers. There is then a gap in his known history but around 1954, solo Tartaglione work began appearing in Atlas Comics like Journey Into Mystery and Spellbound. For the most part, he was a "quiet" artist, generally uncomfortable with the more grisly horror or outrageous superhero features. He illustrated a great many romance comics for Atlas (which later became Marvel) and for DC, and was often called upon for special projects of an educational or religious nature. In the sixties, Tartag work turned up in Treasure Chest, Classics Illustrated and in an array of Dell Comics, including Burke's Law, Ben Casey and the Dell comic book biographies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

In the late sixties, he moved back to Marvel where he was used primarily as an inker for Werner Roth's X-Men art, Gene Colan's Daredevil work and Dick Ayers on Sgt. Fury. He did good, professional work but reportedly lamented the dearth (to him) of more uplifting assignments in comics. Again, he became the "go-to" guy when a project came along that required historical research and/or spiritual themes. He was therefore the perfect artist when in 1982, Marvel issued a comic book biography of Pope John Paul II that through various religious channels, sold well into the millions, leading to a follow-up book on Mother Teresa. During this time, Tartag occasionally worked on staff at Marvel, colored for Harvey Comics and assisted on the newspaper strip, Apartment 3-G. Mostly though, he increased his non-comic work — mostly oil painting and portraiture — and had been concentrating on that area until his recent passing.

And that's really everything I know about John Tartaglione. If anyone reading this can offer additional details, please do. It's a life and career that have gone woefully unchronicled.

Penny Singleton had a pretty long career in show business but for the most part, it came down to two roles. From 1939 until 1960, she was Blondie (from the comic strip of the same name) in a string of radio shows and 28 movies that some cable channel ought to be rerunning. Then in 1962, she provided the voice of Jane Jetson for what was then a one season, unsuccessful cartoon series. But The Jetsons lived on in reruns to the point of eventually making more of them and Ms. Singleton became quite beloved as another cartoon mother. Somewhere between her two signature parts, she also became a mover and shaker in various actors' unions, holding office in some, always fighting for better pay and respect for the bit players, the dancers, the folks without much clout in the hierarchy of show business. I met her a few times and found her to be a delightful, spunky lady who clearly loved what she did, and loved the fact that so many others loved what she did. Here's a more extensive obit.

Libertarian Congressman Ron Paul complains about the way our military men and women are being treated.

There's something I really like about Bob Staake's cartooning. It's simple but not easy, colorful but not garish. See if you don't agree as you wander around his website.

Who is The Mysterious Cartoonist? It couldn't possibly be Mad Magazine's Duck Edwing. could it?

Gore Vidal goes a little too far with his comments in this interview. But then, that's what Gore Vidal is for.

Here we have a news story about the shenanigans we reported on earlier regarding Bill Frist's website. Again, my only point is that online polls are less than worthless.

Michael Kinsley on George W. Bush's unacknowledged change of mind about "nation building."

According to this news story, the world's oldest person has died…again. It seems like every few weeks when I pick up the newspaper, I read that the world's oldest person has died. If fact, just two weeks ago, the world's oldest person died. This is only a few months after the previous world's oldest person died. What is this epidemic and why is no one doing anything about it?

Obviously, being the world's oldest person is a curse. You get the title and within a year or two, you're gone. The latest holder of the title, Mitoyo Kawate, received it and before she'd even had time to enjoy it, she was dead. Is that fair?

You'll never catch me being the world's oldest person. It's way too dangerous.

David Greenberg on why that mini-series on The Reagans wouldn't have affected the former president's popularity one bit.

I think online polls are all frauds. I think they're a sleazy trick to get people to come to websites. What's more, I think everyone knows they're phony; that the sampling that votes is utterly unscientific and that many groups stuff the online ballot box, often because they figure out how to vote repeatedly. This is not usually difficult to do. Amazingly, someone has now figured out how to make an unreliable poll even less reliable than usual. This is done by changing the question that people are voting on.

Yesterday, a poll appeared on the website of Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist. Here's a screenshot of how the results looked after the thing had been up for a few hours. Note not only the totals but the way the question is worded…

Ordinarily, a poll on the website of a politician should wind up overwhemlingly reflecting that politician's position, since folks who agree with him are far more likely to visit that site. In this case, a couple of Democratic websites urged their readers to go over and push up the "no" vote on Senator Frist's poll, and droves apparently did. At the time the above screenshot was taken, it looked like Frist's view might lose on his own home page. Fat chance of that happening. Even as Conservative sites were urging visitors to go drive up the "yes" vote, the operators of the Frist site were changing the wording of the question to slant it more their way. Here's a screenshot of the same poll from later in the day…

I'm not sure if they reset the total to zero and started the count over or if they just changed the question. But either way, the first question disappeared. The new wording plus the Conservative vote-stuffing apparently did the trick because soon, Frist's position had pulled into the lead. That apparently wasn't enough for the operators of the site because later, they changed one more word in the question. Here's a screenshot of the final total…

"Perform" is an even better word to skew the vote than "exercise," since we expect our elected officials to "perform" their duties, whereas "exercise" sounds a lot more optional. In any case, I'm guessing the final result had more to do with how many people managed to vote 200 or 300 times apiece. In no way do any of these questions relate to what any fair sampling of Americans believe. In fact, the questions may not even relate to what the people who voted thought they were voting on. I'd sure be pissed if I took the trouble to rig a poll and vote 600 times and then they changed the wording on me.

P.S. Added a few minutes later: I just did a search and found that other blogs have picked up on this matter, which was called to my attention by an e-mail buddy. The mysterious Atrios claims that at one point, the wording of the poll was inverted to ask, "Should the Senate minority block the body's Constitutional duty to provide the President's judicial nominees with an up or down vote?" so that the old Yes votes now meant No and vice-versa. Here's the Atrios post on the matter, followed by readers reporting even more rephrasing. Sounds like someone's having some fun screwing with the questions to frustrate enemy ballot-stuffers. Either way, it makes my point that online polls are bull. You can vote once and have it cancelled out by someone voting twice…or even by a webmaster who reverses the meaning of the question.

One of the great individual stylists of comic books in the fifties and sixties was a gent named Jerry Grandenetti. His page design concepts reminded many of Will Eisner and with good reason. He had once assisted Eisner on The Spirit, as well as drawing several comics for which the editors consciously wanted an "Eisner look." In the early sixties, he worked primarily on DC's war comics where he did some striking work on covers like the one at left — but only for so long. As the decade wore on, he got away from combat art and conventional page layouts, taking what he'd learned from Eisner and applying it in new, then-revolutionary directions. Like most artists who departed from the conventional, his work was loved by many but disliked by some. (I suspect some who didn't like it then now appreciate it. We call this "The Mike Sekowsky Effect.")

Where Grandenetti really won me over was when he did a series of stories, mostly involving haunted houses, for Creepy and Eerie. Editor-writer Archie Goodwin thought Grandenetti drew the most atmospheric old mansions so he tailored his scripts in that direction and encouraged the artist to forget everything he'd been told by editors about what comics had to be. He did. The result was some of the most visually-arresting and controversial comic art of the period. In fact, by the early seventies, Grandenetti was working so far outside even the relaxed conventions of DC Comics that he no longer quite fit in. I thought he was a marvelous, distinct talent who wasn't precisely suited to the work he was assigned, like The Spectre, Prez and Nightmaster. He may have felt that way, too. After working for a time with his friend Joe Simon, Grandenetti finally got out of comics and into advertising — our loss. I think he was way ahead of the curve on where comics were going.

I'm pleased to say that he's recently surfaced in the comic art community, offering amazing drawings and re-creations at his website, where you can see samples of his recent work. There's also an interview and some biographical data. I just wished they showed more of his approach to designing a page, which is where he really was working without a net.

I've never met Mr. Grandenetti. Over the years, a number of folks have attempted without success to drag him out to a convention. I know he's received lush offers to be flown to the Comic-Con International in San Diego to be interviewed and honored, and he's declined. This is a shame because we have a long history of guys from his generation declining San Diego invites for years and years…and then finally, they accept and have what they admit is the greatest weekend of their lives. If anyone reading this can convince the man, please do. An awful lot of his fans would love to meet him, myself included.

As my Cirque du Soleil piece suggests, I am conflicted on the subject of performing animals, and I guess it comes down to a case-by-case basis. Sometimes, the animals are in a loving, healthy environment and their "act" seems to pay for that and to bring pleasure to many; sometimes, not. My pal Alan Light just sent me a link to this video of a pooch performing at some sort of dog show (you'll need Windows Media Player installed to view it) and it seems like the former. Take a look if you have a few minutes. This dog is at least as good a dancer as John Travolta.