Monthly Archives: May 2007

Here's an odd one. This article in Newsday about newspaper strips is apparently a current article. It makes reference to The Phantom being drawn by Paul Ryan, Graham Nolan and Tony DePaul. That's almost the current crew. Nolan only left it a few months ago, leaving it to Ryan and DePaul. But elsewhere in the same article, we learn…

When [Chic] Young died in 1973, one of his assistants, Alex Raymond, took over the strip. The current artist, Stan Drake, hasn't messed with the success that has given Blondie one of the largest circulations in comic land.

Alex Raymond, of course, never drew Blondie. His brother Jim ghosted it for a decade or two before Young passed away and the name of Jim Raymond began appearing on it. Jim Raymond died in 1981. Stan Drake, who began drawing the strip a few years before that, died in 1997 and was succeeded on Blondie by Mike Gersher, Dennis LeBrun and the current artist, John Marshall. And through most of this, Chic Young's son Dean has been credited as its writer. So the article's wrong about Blondie. Let's see what it has to say about the Archie newspaper strip…

Montana died in 1975, and the Riverdale High gang is kept alive today by chief illustrator Dan DeCarlo.

Not only is Dan DeCarlo not keeping it alive today but sadly, no one's keeping Dan DeCarlo alive today. He stopped drawing that strip in the early nineties and died in 2001. These days, the strip is done by (and clearly signed by) Craig Boldman and Henry Scarpelli. Meanwhile, the article tells us this about the Dick Tracy strip…

Chester Gould retired in 1977, and the strip passed on to Dick Locher, who has kept it going in successful syndication.

That's not exactly wrong except insofar as it implies that Locher followed Gould on the strip. Actually, writer Max Collins and Gould assistant Rick Fletcher took it over for quite some time. The same kind of omission is present in what the article has to say about the Brenda Starr strip…

[Dale] Messick retired and was succeeded by artist Ramona Fradon and writer Mary Schmick.

True…but Ramona stopped drawing it in 1995 and June Brigman is the current artist, working with Mary Schmich, who spells her name that way. Which brings us to what the article has to say about Mary Worth…

Mary continues to dispense advice under the auspices of writer John Saunders and artist Bill Ziegler.

John Saunders died in 2004. Bill Ziegler died in 1990. Karen Moy has been writing it since Saunders died and Joe Giella has been drawing it since the guy who did it briefly after Ziegler left.

So, uh, what happened with this article? This is all very easy information to obtain. Just Googling the name of any of those strips will tell you in three seconds who's currently doing them. So my first assumption was that someone had taken an old article and passed it off as current. But the Phantom information is almost current. Why would someone update that and not update the rest of it?

Anyway, I just phoned Newsday and got hold of Bill McTernan, the author of the piece. He apparently wrote it recently and was unaware there was anything wrong with it. He said he'd gotten the information out of a "three volume comic encyclopedia" in the Newsday library. I told him some of the errors and said, "Well, I think you've got a big correction to write" and said I'd e-mail him a link to the item I was posting. Let's see what happens.

Harold Meyerson notes that it's been fifteen years since the "Rodney King Riots" here in Los Angeles. I guess that's right, though it seems like a far more distant, earlier time.

There are three things that sometimes remind me of those scary days. The rioting didn't get that close to my neighborhood but it wasn't that far away. There were buildings burned and/or looted in areas where I often go. There was one great electronics shop in Culver City where I often bought video equipment. I drove by a few days after the rioting had ended and it was empty: Windows broken out, inventory gone. A friend of mine who also shopped there told me the following story. He said that when the rioting began, someone threw a brick through the store's front window and grabbed a Walkman or something of the sort. The folks who owned the store — an Asian family, I recall — overreacted. When a crowd gathered to see what the commotion was, the owners threw their doors open, said "Take whatever you want…just don't hurt us" and then fled. The store never reopened after that and every time I drive past where it was, or need some connector that I would have bought there, I think of it.

Closer to my home, there are two shops I often see that make me flash back to that week. One is a little convenience store that sells groceries and liquor. I walked by it during the riots and saw that it had been burned out and had its windows boarded up. "How sad," I thought…but then closer inspection revealed it was a sham. No one had damaged the place. Its proprietors had put up the boards and rubbed charcoal on the front…and when the rioting was over, they took it all down and washed off the soot. I'm not sure it was necessary but it sure was clever.

On that same walk, I went by a nearby appliance store — the place I'd bought my refrigerator and several TV sets and other goodies. People were loading some of its wares into trucks and some police arrived, thinking it was being looted. It wasn't. The "looters" were the owners and their crew, and they were taking out the most expensive items and moving them elsewhere for safekeeping…but since they were all minorities, they were having trouble convincing the cops of this. One of the officers was black but he still wasn't quite buying their explanation. Then I — a complete stranger but a Caucasian one — walked up and said, "I'm a customer of this store and these people run it." That probably shouldn't have convinced the policemen but it did. I suspect that was indicative of something that was at the heart of the rioting but I'm not sure I can put it into words.

One night, the rioting ended. I remember watching one of the news broadcasts and hearing a helicopter reporter say, "For the first time in several days, we do not see a single fire and we have no reports of anything burning." The copter did a slow 360° pan around the city from its vantage point and there were no flames, no plumes of smoke. It was over and it did not start again. The article by Meyerson is skeptical that it will stay that way but I prefer to think he's wrong…although the way the L.A.P.D. treated those protesters the other day makes it hard to be optimistic.

Let's take three minutes and learn all about the Komodo Dragon with Bob and Ray…

I think it's silly to have these debates, months before anyone's going to get serious about picking a nominee to run for president, with ten candidates. No one has any time to say anything…which is okay because no one has much to say now.

However, if we're going to have them, there's a question that I think should be asked, and it should be asked at both Democratic and Republican debates. It would go roughly like this: "Is there any other candidate on this stage that you would hesitate to support if he or she secured the nomination of your party? And if so, who and why?"

I'd like to retract/expand upon something I said the other day here about Comicpacs, which were the bagged comics that DC sold back in the sixties. For the reasons stated, I didn't like them and neither did any of my friends. That's still true but I made the leap to saying they never sold well and that's not accurate. My longtime friend Paul Levitz, who's now the President of DC Comics, dropped me an e-mail and wrote, in part…

As a "failure" the DC program lasted well over a decade, with pretty high distribution numbers. The Western program was enormous — even well into the '70s they were taking very large numbers of DC titles for distribution (I recall 50,000+ copies offhand). The unknowable factor on the DC program was that a certain number of distributors and retailers simply split the packs open and returned the loose comics, making an arbitrage profit, and distorting the flow of actual sales data so it looked like the packs sold near 100%. There was no clear pattern of these "arbitraged" copies depressing the sell throughs of the regular releases for most of those years, though, until towards the end of the program.

What Paul's talking about is that regular newsstand comics went out to dealers on a returnable basis. The copies your local newsstand couldn't sell went back to the distributor and so the publisher didn't get paid for them. The comics sold in bags were sold on a non-returnable basis and the dealers who got them were supposed to pay for all they got. Instead, some were opening the bags and sneaking the non-returnable issues back into the returnable channels for credit. Western Publishing, which as Paul mentioned was moving tons of bagged comics for a time, dealt with this by printing two editions of each comic — one for the returnable market and one for the non-returnable distribution. Here are two issues of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories as an example…

As you can see, the one on the left has a Gold Key Comics logo in the upper left hand corner. These books were distributed via the returnable channels. The one at right has a logo for Whitman, which was another imprint of Western Publishing. The Whitman books were the ones put in plastic bags and sent to retailers on a non-returnable basis. This way, the recipient of non-returnable comics couldn't ship them back among returnable books. (Before anyone asks: Apart from the cover symbol, the two editions were identical. In fact, they were printed as part of one press run. World Color Press would print enough covers to go on the returnable issues, then they'd stop the presses, change the black printing plate for one with the Whitman logo, then restart the presses to print enough for the non-returnable issues. As far as I can tell, collectors do not value one over the other.)

While we're at it, take a look at these…

As Paul noted, Western not only distributed its comics in plastic bags in the seventies but some of DC's, as well. They put DC's Superman/Muhammad Ali special through that pipeline…not sealed in plastic but sold on a non-returnable basis. And on the non-returnable copies, they replaced the DC bullet with the Whitman logo.

Around 1978, I had a long conversation with the guy at Western Publishing who managed their program of distributing non-returnable comics to retailers. This was a few years before that program collapsed and he was bragging about how his company was the only one who'd ever been able to make that method work. I guess I took his comments too literally and didn't realize that DC had considerable success with it in the sixties and, as Paul notes above, well into the seventies. I still think it was an unpleasant way to sell comics but it did work in certain venues. I believe they managed to get a lot of them into airports, bus and train stations, as well as other outlets that weren't conducive to conventional comic racks. So I was wrong to suggest they'd never sold.

One other thing: At the top of this item, I have photos of two DC Comicpacs and as you may be able to see, the header card lists the comics in each package, though it doesn't tell you which issue you're getting. The one on the left says that the bag contains issues of Green Lantern, Jimmy Olsen, Brave & Bold and Fox & Crow. That's an odd mix, sticking Fox & Crow in there. I bought every comic that came out and loved Fox & Crow as much as I liked my super-hero comics but few comic buyers I knew felt that way. It sounds to me like another reason some kids wouldn't buy Comicpacs.

Well, I think I've exhausted this topic. My apologies for not getting it right the first time and my thanks to Paul Levitz for setting me straight.

Craig Yoe is interviewed on the history of the Big Boy comic books. I don't know how many of those comics — which are given out as freebees at Big Boy restaurants — are printed these days. But there was a long period in the seventies, back when Manny Stallman did them, when those were the most widely-circulated comic books in the country…and by a wide margin. It's amazing how few of them we see at comic conventions, given the massive numbers in which they were distributed.

Someone was just out on my back porch enjoying the cat food. I believe he's saying, "This isn't that stuff they recalled, is it?" (It isn't.)

This site has repeatedly suggested you go see Chanteuse Extraordinaire™ Shelly Goldstein perform. In fact, we recently plugged her upcoming day-before-Mother's Day show at The Gardenia in Hollywood. To give you some idea what this talented performer does, we offer you an excerpt — it's a little under three minutes — of one of her popular song parodies. Shelly sings a lot of tunes the way their composers meant them to be sung but she also sometimes displaces their lyrics with hers and this is an example of that. This is from a "sixties" show she did, which explains why she's wearing a drapery stolen from the set of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. Ignore the outfit and just enjoy the number…

One other point about this silly John Edwards haircut story. I understand that Republicans, who figure he might be the Democratic nominee in '08, are eager to portray him as womanly, sissy boy, non-masculine, etc. It's an established battle plan in politics, practiced by all sides, that you figure out a caricature of your opponent and try to sell the public on the idea that that's who he is.

My question is what good that caricature of Edwards will do them if he's the candidate and the Republican nominee is Rudy Giuliani. It's hard to portray the enemy as effeminate when there are photos of your guy dressed as Jean Harlow.

Eric Boehlert writes about the silliness of most/all political stories about what candidates pay for their haircuts. He's right.

But I have one comment, not about what candidates pay for their coifs but about Brian Williams. As Boehlert notes, the other night Williams was on Mr. Letterman's show and the discussion turned to this issue…

Asked what was the most he'd ever paid for a trim, Williams responded, "probably $12." Really? I have to pay $16, plus tip, for a trim at a little barbershop on Valley Avenue in the New Jersey 'burbs. But Williams, who lives in a restored farmhouse in Connecticut where he parks his 477-horsepower black Porsche GT2 (that is, when he's not decamping on the Upper East Side), gets his haircut for just $12. And remember, that's probably the most he's ever paid.

Williams enjoys a $10 million salary. He's a celebrity journalist and recent Men's Vogue cover boy, who, up until just a few years ago, was probably known as much for his perfectly coiffed locks as he was his reporting skills. Yet, eager to project himself as one of the guys, Williams insists his trims cost chump change.

Boehlert's correct that it's silly to think Williams pays twelve bucks for his haircuts but it's probably not true that the newsman pays more. He probably pays nothing. NBC has a make-up department. They have people on staff who cut and style hair…and probably some very good ones. (If they didn't keep Williams' "do" looking good, they'd be replaced in a second.) These people not only will cut his hair without him paying a cent, they'll give him a trim every time he sits in the make-up chair if he needs it. And he doesn't even have to tip.

Brian Williams has been on television, usually on a daily basis, since around 1985. It could easily have been that long since he had to pay someone to cut his hair.

Boy, we hate doing this. A lovely man named Tom Poston is dead at the age of 85. You may have known him from his many appearances in Steve Allen's little stock company of great comedians. You may have known him from his many game show appearances, particularly on To Tell the Truth. (GSN has been running episodes of that in memory of his fellow panelist, Kitty Carlisle. They can keep it going for Tom.) You may have known him from his work on The Bob Newhart Show and Newhart. Or you may have known him from the many other things he did in front of a camera or on-stage. He had a helluva career.

Obits like this one will tell you all you need to know about that career. I can only add two things. One is to mention that every time I was around Tom Poston, I found him to be a charming and very funny man, exactly as you'd expect him to be from his TV appearances. He was one of those comedians — too few in number — who seemed genuinely unthreatened by others so when his friends said something funny, he'd laugh…out loud, even. He just gave off an easy-going air of being nice.

And the other thing I'll mention is what I'm sure Tom would have wanted me and everyone to mention. It's that he and his wife Suzanne Pleshette really loved each other…and were not shy about making sure everyone knew it.

I have to run out now but if I think of any good Tom Poston anecdotes, I'll post them here later.

Jerry Beck and Pat O'Neill both wrote to remind me that Dabbs Greer was in several episodes of the old George Reeves Superman show. In fact, in the "origin" episode, he played the first person Superman rescued in Metropolis — an airport worker who was dangling from the tie-line to a dirigible.

Trevor Kimball informs me — I'm not a big enough Dabbs Greer expert to know such things — that he played the priest or Justice of the Peace (or whatever he was) who married Florence Henderson and Robert Reed in the pilot of The Brady Bunch…and then, twenty-one years later, he did the same job when Bobby Brady was wed on The Bradys. A nice touch, Trevor notes.

What's more, Curtis Burga tells me that in the 1958 movie, I Want To Live, Greer played one of the Death Row guards who escorted Susan Hayward to her execution. And then in the 1999 film of The Green Mile, he played Tom Hanks' character as an old man, working as a Death Row guard at a prison.

Boy, that guy got around.

Many years ago, to the amazement of film buffs everywhere, the folks at Castle Films used to take 90 minute (or longer) feature motion pictures and abridge them down to four minutes to be sold as 8mm movies. It was astounding that they even attempted this and even more astounding that, once in a while, the films were reasonably coherent at that length.

Well, let's see if Sony Pictures can cut episodes of Charlie's Angels, T.J. Hooker and Starsky & Hutch down to between three and a half minutes and five. According to this article in The New York Times, that's on its way. Just another point of contention to add to the coming Writers Guild strike talks.

Cutting a Charlie's Angels down to length should be a breeze. Just keep the bikini scenes and throw the rest away. That's all anyone cared about in those shows. But on T.J. Hooker, William Shatner used to take eight minutes just to wonder about the murderer's soul. That may present problems.

You're probably familiar with the 1960 motion picture, Inherit the Wind. Adapted from the play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, it starred Spencer Tracy as maverick lawyer Henry Drummond and Fredric March as his courtroom opponent, Matthew Harrison Brady. It was about the trial of a Tennessee schoolteacher for teaching evolution and everyone knew it was a fictionalized (somewhat) version of the 1925 trial of teacher John Thomas Scopes for daring to do such a thing. The character of Drummond was obviously based to some extent on Scopes' lawyer, Clarence Darrow, and Brady was not unlike William Jennings Bryan.

What you may not have known is that there have been four filmed versions of the play. The 1960 one directed by Stanley Kramer was the first. Then came the 1965 TV Movie version which cast Melvyn Douglas as Drummond and Ed Begley (Senior) as Brady. Begley had originated the role of Brady on Broadway (opposite Paul Muni as Drummond) and this filming, which I've never seen, was hailed for preserving his historic performance. This one also featured Dick York, who played the teacher in the 1960 version, in the same role.

Then came a 1988 TV Movie of Inherit the Wind with Jason Robards in the Drummond role and Kirk Douglas as Brady. This one turns up often on cable and although it won a couple of Emmys, I didn't think much of it. Robards seemed to me to be on auto-pilot and Douglas sounded like the Frank Gorshin impression. I like both actors a lot but didn't care for them in this match-up.

Which brings us to the 1999 TV Movie version which had Jack Lemmon as Drummond and George C. Scott as Brady. I only saw a little of this one a few years ago but I thought what I saw was outstanding. I've just set my TiVo to snare the whole thing. It's on Showtime tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. That's what I wanted to alert you about.

Scott seemed born to play the role…but he also could have played Drummond. In fact, he did — in a 1996 Broadway revival produced at Tony Randall's National Actors Theater, with Charles Durning as Brady. I wanted very much to see that so when I planned a New York trip during its run, I ordered tickets. Before I even went east though, it hit the press that Scott was missing performances and that Mr. Randall (!) had stepped into the role, playing it with script in hand. I couldn't imagine what that would be like…and still can't. The night I went to see it, the performance was cancelled. I'm still not sure if that was a lucky break or not.

Anyway, you might want to see Lemmon and Scott have at it. It's a great play…and sadly, one that remains relevant.

Four years ago today, George W. Bush stood beneath that infamous banner and proclaimed that "Major combat operations have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

Take a look at this chart.