Monthly Archives: August 2007

As you may have heard, Idaho Senator Larry Craig was arrested last June and later pled guilty to questionable conduct in a Minnesota airport. Such a little thing — who among us hasn't been in that position? — and now everyone's calling for his hide.

Democrats are demanding he resign because…well, there are few things in the world more satisfying than seeing someone who has scolded you for your supposed low morals be found to have even lower ones. When such hypocrites are exposed, it's hard not to try and make an example of them and besides, it's fun.

Republicans are dumping on him because he can only embarrass them further and, besides, that's pretty much a "safe" seat for the G.O.P. When David Vitter, the Republican Senator for Louisiana, was caught recently in a prostitution scandal, few in his party called for his ouster. That was because his state has a Democratic governor who probably would have appointed a Democrat to fill the vacancy, and then it's likely a Democrat would have won the seat in the next election. But Idaho rarely elects anything but a Republican so the party can only benefit from Craig's replacement.

Frankly, I don't care if the guy is gay or not. That's his business. I also don't care if he's a colossal moral hypocrite since I've kinda reached the point in my Washington cynicism where I figure that the more you lecture people on their morality, the more likely it is you have big problems with your own. No, I think Craig oughta go because he said this…

At the time of this incident, I complained to the police that they were misconstruing my actions. I should have had the advice of counsel in resolving this matter. In hindsight, I should not have pled guilty. I was trying to handle this matter myself quickly and expeditiously.

If that's true — if he wasn't soliciting gay sex when they caught him — then pleading guilty is one of the great all-fired braindead moves of all time. Even without advice of counsel, you oughta know that. Someone that stupid should not be making our laws.

On the other hand, if it's not true — if he was trolling for men's room sex and he said the above to try and save his image, he oughta be kicked out of public service for sheer idiocy. That's even stupider than pleading guilty to a sex crime you didn't commit because you think it'll end your problems quicker. And what's even stupider is thinking that anyone anywhere will believe it.

With both sides dumping on him, it's only a matter of time before he disappears from public life and gets a job at Radio Shack or something. What none of us should forget though is that this man has been a State Senator, a Congressman and then a Senator for a collective thirty-three years.

Discussions of what's wrong with the comic book industry and how to make things better often strike me as talking all around the pachyderm in the parlor — the fact that fewer and fewer potential customers out there are warm to the idea of buying a thing on paper called a comic book or magazine. In an era of Internet and home video and video gaming, one can get plenty of material that more or less parallels what comics have to offer…and you can get it with sound and with animation, and you can get it in your home without leaving your chair, and you can often get it for free. With that in mind, the news that Disney Adventures magazine is ending after seventeen years oughta throw another scare into lovers of hardcopy comics and other publications.

Every panel I've ever been on about the future of comics has included the wish-dream that our form would reach out to younger readers and find new methods of distribution apart from the traditional funnybook racks. Well, Disney Adventures connected with younger readers and achieved a superior market penetration. The problem was not that you couldn't find it. It was easily available at supermarket checkout stands, right next to the National Enquirer and the Altoids. When TV Guide got away from its old digest format, Disney Adventures picked up a lot of those spots, as well. The problem was that advertisers didn't see it as a dandy place to advertise. Even with a million-plus circulation — numbers that any comic book publisher today would kill for — the people behind Disney Adventures couldn't make the math work.

No one who loves the concept of paper magazines should conclude the form is doomed to extinction but we also shouldn't ignore a very real market trend here. Once upon a time, Playboy sold seven million copies per issue and now it sells three million. This is not because of a declining male interest in beautiful nude women or because the women aren't as beautiful or as nude as they used to be. It's because you can now get those beautiful nude women on the Internet or on DVD and maybe they're even better in that venue. The same thing is true of Spider-Man comic books and the Spider-Man movies. Before about 1985, when a comic book character became a movie or TV show, that promoted the comic book and sales skyrocketed. In the last few decades though, it almost seems to work the other way around. If kids can get a great animated Batman for free on TV, they don't need to go out and buy the comic.

It's worth noting that increasingly, Disney Adventures downplayed its comic strip content and sold by promoting the current hot movie, the current hot TV show, the current hot video game, etc. More than a million copies per issue were purchased but they were sold because consumers were interested in Harry Potter or High School Musical or Justin Timberlake. They didn't care about a paper magazine except as an adjunct to the stuff they really cared about.

Obviously, Disney Adventures was not a comic book. It was a kids' magazine that had comic book content — and less and less of it over the years, it seemed. But it's still worrisome that its publishers are folding it and saying they want to "…better focus resources and maximize long-term growth potential through new magazine and book initiatives." That roughly translates to: "We need to figure out if there's a way to make money publishing paper magazines these days." I sure hope someone finds one.

If you think Liberals are glad to be rid of Alberto Gonzales, read what the Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg has to say about the guy. I don't agree that the Democrat-controlled hearings have been about nothing but Gonzales was a disaster either way: If there was wrongdoing, he was a bad Attorney General because he initiated or endorsed or covered up wrongdoing. If there was no wrongdoing, as Goldberg insists, then Gonzales was a bad Attorney General because he made it look like there was. When someone like Goldberg is agreeing with John Edwards that you're terrible, that says a lot.

Jack Kirby would have been 90 years old today.

I know I write too much about Jack but that's because people are always asking me about him. And as more time passes on this planet without him, more people ask. I don't know how many times I've heard fans of his work regret that they didn't get to meet him. His work enriched their lives in some way and they assume, probably correctly, that a personal encounter would have been even more enriching. At the very least, they could have told him what his unbounded creativity meant to them, professionally and/or personally.

It's easy to see the professional influence. A staggering number of people in the arts — and not just in the field of drawing super-hero comic books — learned from him. It might have been how to draw action or how to stage a love scene or even how to invest characters with emotion and excitement. It could even have been his fierce work ethic. That's all well and good.

But I continue to marvel (no pun intended) at the number of people who were inspired by Kirby in non-artistic ways…people who were motivated to make more of their lives or just to be better human beings because of something Jack wrote, something Jack drew, something Jack said. I was always impressed with his outright decency and honesty, and the fact that he treated everyone around him well until they gave him a good reason not to. Sometimes, he continued to treat them well even after he had plenty of good reasons not to.

You'd think it would be hard to miss Jack. We are not all that far from the day when every single important comic book he produced will have been reprinted in a fancy, deluxe edition. I can only think of a few other people in the comic book field of whom that could be said and none of them produced anywhere near as much work as Kirby. But the work is only part of what he meant to so many of us. We still have the work. What we don't have is the man. That's what we miss.

This time, we bring you ten minutes of The Martha Raye Show featuring a pantomime routine by Martha and her special guest, Buster Keaton. This is a live telecast from 1956 and they're more or less replicating a routine done with Charlie Chaplin in the movie, Limelight. I think that's Paul Douglas doing the introduction with the Bil Baird marionettes…and that's about all I have to add. So click already.

Every time someone in government gets squeezed out of their job or quits to try and avoid prosecution, they say, "I'm resigning so I can spend more time with my family." You notice how you never see them, when they get the job in the first place, say "I'm taking this job so I can spend less time with my family"?

The first issue of Groo in a long time will be coming out on September 5. You can see a preview of it over here. Please note how Sergio is drawing the new, skinnier me.

I have a new reason to never go near a RadioShack store. This is in addition to the old and sufficient-in-itself reason that they rarely employ anyone who knows the first thing about electronics or radios or even shacks. I cannot recall the last time I asked a question in one of those places and got anything resembling a correct answer. I usually get back blank stares and I often have to explain the products to the salespeople. But there's this new reason, which is that I've realized how all-fired stupid I always wind up feeling after I go into one.

Last week, my mother needed something that would be most efficiently purchased at a RadioShack that was adjacent to a store I was patronizing anyway. The transaction would not involve any technical knowledge on the part of the staff so I thought it would be okay. Are you beginning to see the rumblings of my stupidity yet? Wait. You're about to view it in all its glory. I went in, found the item and was handing my Visa card to the guy when he asked, "Do you have a RadioShack discount card?" I said no. He asked if I wanted one. In Pavlovian response, I said yes. I have a zillion discount cards…too many to even carry in my wallet. I have a little case of them in my car and when I go somewhere, I take in the appropriate card. And note please that these are discount cards we're talking about here, not credit cards. I assumed what the RadioShack employee was offering me was a discount card because that is what he called it. More stupidity — on his part for saying it and mine for assuming this guy knew the difference.

Next thing I knew, he handed me a form to sign that began with words like, "I acknowledge that I have read and will abide by the terms of this agreement…" Showing a smidgen of common sense but not much more than that, I turned to the man and asked (a) what agreement? and (b) is this a credit card?

He told me they were all out of the agreement but, "It just says that you will make the payments."

I asked him, "Have you read this agreement?"

He said no, but that's what it says. I told him that I was not going to sign any document that said I'd read and would abide by the terms of an agreement that I hadn't seen, as summarized to me by someone who hadn't seen it either. Furthermore, I said, I did not want a credit card from them. "Okay," he said and he tore up the form he'd asked me to sign, whereupon I left with my purchase, feeling a bit stupid but not as stupid as I did about an hour ago. That's when my new Citibank RadioShack credit card arrived in the mail. I guess he used my Visa card somehow to get all the necessary information because they not only had my home address but my social security number and other personal info, as well.

I phoned the service number on the back of the card. After a very long wait on hold, a polite lady apologized profusely and told me she had just cancelled the account and that I could destroy the card. Fine…but I shouldn't have had to waste twenty minutes of my life to cancel a credit card I never wanted.

For some reason, I decided to waste a bit more and phoned the RadioShack in question. The manager apologized about eighteen times and said, "Yes, it is a credit card and the salesman should have made that clear to you before signing you up." I asked him about the agreements that people have to sign and he admitted that they'd been out of them for some time. People, he said, are still signing up for the cards even though they have to sign that they've read and will honor an agreement they haven't read. I guess you have to be pretty stupid to shop at a RadioShack. Not quite as stupid as you have to be to work in one…but close.

So there's this story about Walt Disney that is often told; that when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Walt wore a little Goldwater button to the ceremony. He was supporting L.B.J.'s opponent and this was his way of tweaking the president or showing lack of support or something. Back in this post, I joined historian Michael Barrier in expressing skepticism that it happened. I think we're all correct to be skeptical about anecdotes that cast Walt Disney in a rude or negative light but this one seems to have actually occurred. In this essay, Barrier delves deep into the matter and decides that the reports are essentially true. It still seems like a childish and silly thing for Walt to have done but I guess he did that childish and silly thing.

P.S. The Snopes website, which is usually one-stop-shopping when it comes to knocking down urban legends and spurious Internet reports, doesn't believe the story. I'll bet they change the listing now that Barrier has come around.

Jamin Raskin explains why the G.O.P. plan to make California's electoral vote system "fairer" (i.e., helpful to their party) is a crock.

Fred Kaplan explains a lot of stuff I didn't know about the hierarchy of our military.

An imagined conversation…

ALBERTO GONZALES: George, it looks like this is it. I'm probably going to be indicted and even a lot of prominent Republicans in Congress are ready to call for my resignation or impeachment. I think I oughta quit.

GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah, sure looks that way, Gonzy. So what do you think would be a good time?

GONZALES: I dunno. I was thinking I'd wait until Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are both in reruns for a couple weeks.

BUSH: Good idea. But what will you do? How will you earn a living?

GONZALES: Oh, don't worry about me. There's a lot of call out there for maniacally distorting the legal process to protect every stupid or crooked thing your boss does. In fact, I hear there's more money than ever to be made from lying in the public sector.

You probably won't want to watch this whole video clip now — it's 55 minutes — but I wanted to mention that the folks behind The Charlie Rose Show are putting whole episodes up on YouTube and Google Video for free viewing. This one is an hour with Stephen Sondheim and some of his collaborators but there are plenty of others, including conversations with Jon Stewart, Bette Midler, Jerry Lewis, Jay Leno, Jack Lemmon, Charles Schulz and many others. Here's the Sondheim show but like I said, you probably won't want to watch all of it now.

Several people have written me since last night to make the case for eliminating the "death tax" — and I have to admit that they lose me right away when they call it that. It's an Inheritance Tax or an Estate Tax. No one is taxed for dying. When you die, you will not pay one cent in tax. Calling it the "death tax" is a way to misrepresent it and load the emotional argument against it. It would be like if I were in Congress and I introduced a bill to exempt 6'3" Jewish cartoon writers from all taxes and called it The Stop Torturing Kittens Law or something like that. If the arguments against the Inheritance Tax are at all valid, they'll still be valid if you call it what it is.

As it happens, I don't believe they're valid. Almost everyone who wrote me in opposition claimed that the tax causes families to lose their farms. No, it doesn't. There have been very few documented cases of that…and even in those cases, the financial problems of those families were complex and troubled and mismanaged. Any form of taxation will cause hardship to someone, especially if they're foolish about handling money. There are folks who've won the lottery and wound up worse off than before because they didn't allow for paying normal income taxes on that income.

I believe the real premise behind the campaign against a Death/Estate/Inheritance Tax (whatever you call it) is as follows. Rich Uncle Charlie buys a home for three million dollars. By the time he dies and his also-wealthy nephew Sam inherits it, it's worth thirteen million. No one has ever paid any form of tax on the ten million of accrued value and Sam doesn't want it taxed like income or lottery winnings. So he and others in similar situations spread a couple of lies. One is that it's a "double-taxation;" that tax was paid on the wealth when it was earned and now the heirs are expected to pay taxes again on it. Not true. The other is that the government is stopping Uncle Charlie from leaving his wealth to Nephew Sam. No, it isn't. But if you suddenly make ten million bucks, you're going to pay some taxes on it. Why shouldn't Sam?

But of course, you can't get the public — especially the lower or middle class public — behind a move to make sure billionaires don't pay taxes on their inheritances, and can pass along accrued wealth without anyone paying taxes on it. So you tell poorer people that when they die, they won't be able to leave their homes to their kids, and how the taxes will wipe out the family farm, and stuff like that which never happens. And you call it the "Death Tax" because it sounds more inevitable in everyone's life that way.

If you'd like to know more about this form of taxation, read this page.

And just so we're clear on this: I am very much in favor of lowering taxes in this country. I think we spend way too much and we spend it in a lot of areas where I think the government should just butt out…or at least, spend a lot more wisely. But I also think we ought to lower taxes for everyone and not just for the wealthy…because one way or the other, lowering them just for the wealthy causes them to increase on the not-wealthy.

I think we also ought to lower taxes and cut spending as a unit…and I'm amazed how many people are so fervent about slashing taxes but don't give a rat's ass about slashing spending, like those things are unrelated. I rarely see anyone who strikes me as genuinely interested in the lowering of taxes. They all just seem to want theirs lowered…and if in order for them to keep getting the same level of services out of their government, it's necessary to raise them on someone else, that's just fine with them. Ultimately, we'll never really lower taxes, instead of just shifting the burden to those who have less clout and cleverness, until someone is willing to limit the role of government.

Tom Spurgeon conducted what he calls a "short interview" with David Glanzer, who's the Director of Marketing and Publication Relations for the Comic-Con International in San Diego. It answers a lot of questions and concerns people have about the con, and further nukes the rumor that the convention is shifting soon to another city or adding additional days.