Monthly Archives: August 2007

The Marvel Super Heroes stamps that we discussed back here (and here and here and here) are now out from the U.S. Post Office. Has anyone seen a sheet of them yet? I'm told they have artist credits on the back and I'm wondering if anyone made all the necessary corrections on the original list they issued.

Barbara Boxer is one of my two senators, which is not to say I've ever had much enthusiasm for her. I do though agree with this article in which she warns of a Republican move to change the way California's electoral votes are distributed. It would shift us to a system which (surprise, surprise) would benefit Republican presidential candidates. I can't believe this won't be defeated and it should be defeated. But it just points up how silly the whole electoral college is — as if the 2000 election didn't prove it by "electing" the candidate who got fewer votes.

Back in 1962, Metal Men was my favorite comic book for about an hour and a half. It was the creation of a prolific writer-editor at DC named Robert Kanigher who was often hailed as the fastest writer of comic books who has ever lived. His speed may have been because of his unique approach to writing, which was to sit down at the typewriter and just start filling the paper with whatever came to mind. That, he often insisted, was how a truly brilliant writer created his work. An inferior writer — like, for example, anyone else who wrote comic books and was not Robert Kanigher — would have to "plot" — i.e., figure out where the story was heading.

Or at least, that's how he explained it to me on two of the four or five separate occasions when we met, and also in some of our letters. We corresponded for a time in the late sixties and in a moment, I'll be excerpting one of his stream-of-conscious epistles for you.

I never knew how seriously to take Mr. Kanigher's diatribes and pontifications. It was especially hard to separate the self-loathing from the genuine arrogance he often seemed to voice towards others. But his writing did have a certain energy that a friend of mine once likened to careening out of control down a hill. It always got you there and there was a certain excitement to the journey, even if it ended with you crashing into a brick wall. It didn't always. Some of the best comics ever done have been created at a breakneck clip with more instinct than careful planning. When Kanigher was on-target with an idea — and maybe even when he had a solid notion of where he was heading, in spite of his claimed abstinence from "plotting" — he wrote some superb stories, mostly for DC's war comics. Then again, when he didn't have an idea, he wrote it, anyway. For around twenty years, he scripted Wonder Woman and it was one of those comics I collected because I collected everything…but I found most of them unreadable. Or sometimes, when he crafted a great creation like his Enemy Ace series, he'd then keep writing the same story over and over until either he or the readers got sick of it. Usually, it was the readers.

In spite of all this, I admired Kanigher's writing greatly, especially when he came up with Metal Men. Over at Comic Book Resources, Brian K. Eason has a brief history of the comic and I wanted to add the following to the historical record. This is an excerpt from a letter Kanigher wrote to me in 1968. He's referring to how the strip made its debut in Showcase, which was a "try-out" comic DC published at the time. I'll add in a few notes so you can understand what the man is saying…

Showcase was supposed to be a place to test new ideas. It turned into a place to test editors in hand to hand combat. Each of us in turn [had to] come up with a new comic to fill it and woe unto you if yours was no hit. In editorial meetings, I.D. [Irwin Donenfeld, the company's editorial director and son of its owner] would proclaim your latest entry as a flop. No numbers were given, just a general thumbs down. This was meat for the others to pounce upon and so would come the lambastes of the other editors with [Superman editor Mort] Weisinger leading the I told you sos. Woe unto you. Your book failed and you failed or so said all the other editors who had never created a success.

One day I.D. comes into my office. Showcase has an emergency. The book for the next issue was unpublishable. The editor had failed before his book had even gone to press and there were legal problems. I.D. says he has to send a Showcase off to press in two weeks and there is nothing drawn. There is no idea. I am the fastest writer in the office so it's up to me. Whatever I want to do will be the next Showcase.

I have many ideas that could be in it and I have a free hand to do whatever I want. How often is a writer in that position? I run through some possibilities and realize I have painted myself into a corner. My ideas are too innovative and too different for Showcase where readers have been trained to expect the predictable. Take an old failure, dress it up in new clothes and call it a new idea. I had done that with Flash and it had rejuvenated the company. I should do it again but cannot bring myself to but I also cannot bring myself to throw away one of the truly innovative ideas into that arena. It might not sell and then [would come] the meeting with everyone celebrating the failure of R.K.

I move to the middle ground. It will be a new idea but not a new idea. I.D. said that readers liked robots on covers so I began to build robots. I became Dr. Will Magnus building robots and soon they got away from me the way Magnus' robots got away from him. I had one night to write the script and did, then I sat back and read it to discover what I had written. The parallels told me I was on to something. The robots had gotten out of my control just as they had gotten out of his control.

I should next have called in my fastest artist, [Joe] Kubert. Instead, I called my slowest, Ross Andru. The robots in my mind looked like they had been drawn by Andru so it had to be him. I told him I needed the book drawn in a week. Andru, a frightened man, told me it could not possibly be done and then proceeded to do it. The robots had taken control of him as well. They took control of I.D. demanding more issues of Showcase. Usually a new book got three issues because by then you knew if readers were taking to it. Metal Men got four. The sales on the first were so strong that I.D. could not believe them and ordered the fourth just to make sure. I already knew and had added a new Metal Men comic to my schedule. The robots were in control as they will some day be in control of us all.

The four Showcase issues of Metal Men were Kanigher at his finest and so were the first ten or so of the ongoing Metal Men bi-monthly that followed. But then the other Kanigher kicked in and he ran out of ideas, writing the same story over and over, turning cliché characters into ever-greater clichés.

DC issued a hardcover collection last year that presented, in color, the four Showcase issues and the first five issues of the Metal Men comic book. They're about to come out with a big black-and-white volume that will contain the four issues of Showcase, the first sixteen issues of Metal Men and one odd issue of The Brave and the Bold in which they teamed up with The Atom. You might want to give one collection or the other a peek. It's pretty good stuff up to a point.

Tom Lehrer favors us with another tune…

This article in the L.A. Times is all about the "slabbing" of comic books…sealing old issues in plastic so that their condition will not go down and their value will go up. Within the hobby, it's a controversial endeavor, though the "con" side seems to not go much past the notion that if something is designed to be read, it's a shame to render it unreadable. Maybe so. But if I owned a pristine Action Comics #1 and I had a sudden yearning to read it, I don't think I'd go pawing through that copy. I think I'd make do with a reprint.

What I think bothers some about slabbing is that it really institutionalizes the idea that rising back issue prices are mostly smoke 'n' mirrors. If you pay a thousand dollars for an old comic — let alone tens or hundreds of thousands — it's already not a reading experience. It's an investment experience predicated on the hope/knowledge that someone else will pay more some day for your copy. Ever since a mint condition Superman #1 topped a hundred bucks and we all marvelled at anyone paying even that much for one, that's what that part of collecting has been all about. Slabbing merely means we have to admit it.

Though why anyone would ever slab a copy of Groo the Wanderer is beyond me.

Ken Levine makes a fuss here and again here about one of my good friends, a lovely writer-person named Treva Silverman.

This coming Saturday would have been the 94th birthday of Walt Kelly, one of the true greats of cartooning and the creator of Pogo Possum and his merry band of swampland goombahs. Would you like to know more about this extraordinary man? Well, this Friday, his extraordinary daughter Carolyn Kelly — also, a fine cartoonist — will be interviewed on Time Travel, a pop culture radio show hosted by Dan Hollis and Jeff O'Boyle and heard on WNRJ, 1510 AM on your dial in Hackettstown, New Jersey. Carolyn will be on the air live with them from 4 PM to 5 PM Eastern Time talking about her father and his work and her work and maybe even the forthcoming reprinting of The Complete Pogo from Fantagraphics Books.

Just on the slight chance that you are not within listening range of Hackettstown, you can hear the show over on the WNRJ website. And if you miss it there, all episodes of Time Travel are archived soon after on this page. There are many fine conversations there to be heard, including one with Yours Truly. But you can hear me all the time, especially on Stu Shostak's station. It will be a rare treat to hear Carolyn interviewed.

There isn't a lot of film footage of the great Tom Lehrer performing his wonderfully satiric songs. But Robert Spina, a loyal reader of this site, informed me of a couple of examples I'll be embedding this week. Here's the first one…

I don't know why this kind of thing amazes me these days but it does. A Journalism professor named Michael Skube wrote this column for the L.A. Times. The content of the column is pretty well summarized by its subtitle: "The hard-line opinions on weblogs are no substitute for the patient fact-finding of reporters."

Fair enough…and more than a little obvious. I don't know anyone who thinks weblogs are a substitute for the patient fact-finding of reporters. Some of us think that they're an important adjunct, and also that not enough reporters are doing that patient fact-finding these days. But a substitute? That sounds like Straw Man territory to me. Anyway, in his piece, Skube mentions several bloggers who don't do any real reporting and one of those names is that of Josh Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo website certainly does a fair amount of reporting and has even broken a number of stories that newspaper and TV reporters later picked up on. (Two examples of many: It was Marshall's site that first flagged Trent Lott's infamous remarks at Strom Thurmond's birthday party…remarks that soon cost Lott his post as Senate Minority Leader. And Marshall's site was reporting on the "outing" of Valerie Plame long before any of the mainstream press.)

So why did Skube cite Marshall as a blogger who didn't do reporting? Answer: He didn't. Skube says he hadn't visited Marshall's site when he wrote the article. Skube's editor, he says, stuck the name in there because he thought the piece needed more examples.

Isn't that kind of shoddy Journalism? The characterization of Marshall is offered as Skube's opinion…but he really didn't have that opinion. He was unfamiliar with Marshall's work and so accepts no responsibility for that opinion the way a blogger must accept reponsibility for what's on his blog. His editor decided the article didn't have sufficient examples (i.e., Skube had not done sufficient research for a piece complaining about others not doing sufficient research) so he added Marshall in as an example of Skube's thesis. And then Mr. Skube did not do the rather simple bit of reporting that it would have taken to log into Josh Marshall's website and see if it really was an example.

You can read Josh Marshall's summary of the whole story here.

It doesn't have Groucho in it but you still might want to set your TiVo (or for you cavepeople, VCR) and snag New Faces of 1937, which runs very early Wednesday morning on Turner Classic Movies. It's a great look at what Broadway was like back in the thirties, with performances by some pretty good comedic performers including Milton Berle, Joe Penner and Harry Parke. Mr. Parke went under the character name of Parkyakarkus and is probably best recalled today as the father of Albert Brooks and Bob Einstein. (Bob Einstein follows in the family tradition by maintaining his own dual identity. You know him better as "Super" Dave Osborne.) Joe Penner was a top radio comedian who is now best known for being oft-parodied in Warner Brothers cartoons. In fact, the early version of Elmer Fudd was something of a Joe Penner burlesque before he evolved into the Fudd we know and love.

New Faces of 1937 is filled with sketches, including Berle doing "A Day at the Brokers," which was a popular comedy routine of the thirties. There are also songs — Ann Miller's in there somewhere — but there's also a plot. What is this plot, you ask? Well, it's basically The Producers but without the Nazis.

While you're setting whatever machine you set, you might also want to get one or more of the movies TCM is running later that day. Following New Faces of 1937, they have Stage Door, which features Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball, Ann Miller, Eve Arden and Franklin Pangborn and is based on the George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber play. Mr. Kaufman reportedly did not like what Hollywood did to his work and suggested they rename it Screen Door but it's not that bad, and Hepburn is wonderful in the role that she didn't get to play on Broadway. (It was written with her in mind but her agent and the producer could not arrive at a workable working arrangement.)

Then comes The Life of the Party, which also stars Joe Penner, Parkyakarkus and Lucille Ball, along with Billy Gilbert and Margaret Dumont. It was written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, who wrote so many wonderful things for Broadway and the Marx Brothers, and directed by William Seiter, who directed maybe my favorite Laurel and Hardy movie, Sons of the Desert. It's not a great film but there are moments that make it worth a viewing.

This is followed — they have sort of a theme going here — by the Marx Brothers version of Room Service, which also has Lucille Ball and Ann Miller in it. Both ladies are also in the next film, Too Many Girls, which is a faithful adaptation of the Rodgers and Hart Broadway hit. Desi Arnaz was the breakout sensation of the show when it played New York, and when RKO bought the movie rights, Desi came out with most of the cast to make the movie. Lucille Ball was added to that cast, the two of them met on the first day of rehearsal and…well, we all know what happened next. It's not a very good movie, by the way — silly plot, generally unmemorable songs and much of the cast — most obviously, Lucy — was badly dubbed.

These are followed by nine more movies that have Ann Miller in them…for those of you who like to see someone doing great, strenuous tap dancing without their hair moving a hundredth of an inch. Then they start on a binge of Jane Fonda flicks.

Last February, you may recall, we had great expectations that the Boomerang cable channel was going to air the 1966 Hanna-Barbera TV special, Alice in Wonderland or What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This? This was the H-B version of the classic story as adapted by Bill Dana, who wrote the script, and Lee Adams and Charles Strouse, who wrote the Broadway-quality songs. Despite rumors that it may happen soon, this show has never been available on home video.

Just to screw with us, Boomerang advertised that version but ran a different, less interesting animated Alice in Wonderland instead. Well today, they apparently decided to even up the score. They advertised that less interesting Alice in Wonderland and, Christopher Cook informs me, ran the '66 Hanna-Barbera version. Somewhere in the vast Time-Warner empire, someone is toying with us. Just because they can.

I just decided we oughta have more Groucho on this site today. Here's a five minute excerpt from an interview with the man. This is from 1961 and the interviewer is newspaper columnist Hy Gardner.

Joe Conason on the legacy of Karl Rove. It's odd how people are reacting to Rove's departure from the Bush White House. Folks who don't like Bush — Conason being a prime example — credit him with deliberately and craftily planning a lot of things that may have been, for the Republicans, happy accidents. Meanwhile, folks on that side are for the most part hailing Rove as if he did a great job of selling a lousy product, that product being George W. Bush. It's like Rove got the guy into office and Cheney's made all the key decisions since then. Isn't it possible that George Bush has had a little something to do with the things he's achieved?

Thirty years ago today, the nation was still busy mourning the death of Elvis Presley and not nearly enough attention was paid to the passing of a man who meant as much if not more to some of us. Groucho Marx may have been born in 1890 — there are still historians willing to argue the point — but there's no argument that he died on August 19, 1977. In body, at least. One could insist that he'd died a few years earlier when his brilliant mind began to fail. One might even have wished that. But the body went on 8/19/77 — and that's all that went. The spirit…the influence…the legacy of immortal TV shows and movies and oft-quoted anecdotes remain intact.

I don't have a lot to add today that isn't in this article but I did want to note here that Groucho quotes and impressions are as ubiquitous as ever. In fact, we have reached the point now where people are imitating people imitating Groucho, which I suppose is also the case with Elvis impersonators copying other Elvis impersonators. I will also note that the once-endless cascade of books on the Marx Brothers seems to have dwindled to a trickle because, I suspect, we actually managed to momentarily exhaust the topic.

We need more on them and about Groucho, especially. Actually, what we really need today is Groucho, himself. Our leaders are doing a decent job of always reminding us that those in charge usually don't know what they're doing and are in constant need of deflation. But it would be nice to have Groucho around to make it funny. Or at least as funny as it can possibly be.

The eminent musician, Dr. Teeth, performs a song written by Stan Freberg….