Monthly Archives: February 2008

I haven't felt like posting here since yesterday afternoon because…well, it may sound silly but I didn't want to bump the Steve Gerber obit out of the featured slot on my "current" page. A phrase I'm hearing a lot from his friends is "I knew this was coming but I didn't think it would hit me so hard." I know how they feel. People ask me why I write so many obituaries and there are really two reasons. One is that with some of these people, if I don't, no one will. The other reason is that it's busy work. Someone calls and says, "A friend of yours just died," and it gives you something to do that's not unrelated and at least feels a little constructive.

As I think I said somewhere else on this site, I think grief is often a very overrated emotion, one we too often fall into because we think it's expected of us. I once attended (spoke at, even) a funeral where the widow seemed to think that she had to keep showing us her pain in order to show us how much she loved him. She also seemed to feel she had to get physically ill and to bring her own life to a screeching halt. When we got to the burial portion of the ceremony, you half-expected her to vault into the pit with the departed and ask the men with the shovels to cover them both over.

But a little grief, a little remembrance…that's okay. We need that.

There are hundreds of tributes to Steve all over the Internet, which is great, just great. Steve loved the Internet. He was one of the first people I knew to embrace it and realize what it could be. Back in the days of the 1200 Baud Hayes Smartmodem, Steve taught me the joys of a service called MCI Mail, which was not unlike the kind of e-mail that Barney Rubble would have used to send something to Fred Flintstone. I remember sitting with him in an office at DC Comics…I was there to support Steve (not that he needed me) in his explanation that some day soon, we'd be delivering most of our scripts via electronic transfer, and that artwork would go by this new thing called "Federal Express" until such time as the technology had advanced to the point where art could be sent via wires, as well. He was explaining this to one of the company's executives and the person looked at him like he was predicting a Martian invasion.

So I love it that everyone's celebrating Gerber on the web. A lot of it's over on his weblog, which I have hijacked and which we're putting to good use as a central clearing house for Gerber remembrances.

As I say over there, no word yet on any formal memorial services or anything. Actually, I think we're having a very fitting memorial service on the World Wide Web. I could tell you how important Steve and his work were to so many people but nothing drives home that point better than all those messages on discussion boards and all those postings on weblogs.

I don't know what my next post here will be about but it won't be about Steve. It's time.

You know, some of these are easy to write and some of them are excruciating. Welcome to the excruciating kind.

Steve Gerber died last night in Las Vegas after a long, painful illness. For the last year or so, he was in and out of hospitals there and had just become a "candidate" for a lung transplant. He had pulmonary fibrosis, a condition that literally turns the lungs to scar tissue and steadily reduces their ability to function. Steve insisted that his affliction had nothing to do with his lifelong, incessant consumption of tobacco — an addiction he only recently quit for reasons of medical necessity. None of his friends believed that but Steve did.

I mention that because in the thirty or so years I knew him, that was the only time I ever saw Steve perhaps divorced from reality. He was a sharp, brilliant human being with a keen understanding of people. In much that he wrote, he chose to depart from reality or (more often) to warp it in those extreme ways that make us understand it better. But he always did so from his underlying premise as a smart, decent guy. I like almost everyone I've ever met in the comic book industry but I really liked Steve.

Stephen Ross Gerber was born in St. Louis on September 20, 1947. A longtime fan of comic books, he was involved in the ditto/mimeo days of fanzine publishing in the sixties, publishing one called Headline at age 14. He had a by-mail friendship with Roy Thomas, who was responsible for the most noteworthy fanzine of that era, Alter Ego. Years later when Roy was the editor at Marvel Comics, he rescued Steve from a crippling career writing advertising copy, bringing him into Marvel as a writer and assistant editor. Steve soon distinguished himself as one of the firm's best writers, handling many of their major titles at one time or another but especially shining on The Defenders, Man-Thing, Omega the Unknown, Morbius the Living Vampire, a special publication about the rock group Kiss…and of course, Howard the Duck.

Howard, born in Steve's amazing mind and obviously autobiographical to a large degree, took the industry by storm. The creation was in many ways a mixed blessing to his creator. It led to an ugly and costly legal battle over ownership, which Steve settled out of court. It led to the occasional pains when he occasionally returned to the character and, due to reasons external and internal, found that he could not go home again. It also led to the sheer annoyance of watching the 1986 motion picture of Howard (produced with minimal involvement on Steve's part) open to withering reviews and dreadful business. Still, the issues he did are widely regarded as classics…and Howard is often cited as a character who only Steve could make work.

After he left Marvel under unpleasant circumstances in the mid-seventies, Steve worked with me for a time at Hanna-Barbera writing comic books, many of which were published by Marvel. An editor at the company had loudly vowed that the work of Steve Gerber would never again appear in anything published by Marvel. Just to be ornery, we immediately had Steve write a story for one of the H-B comics I was editing and it was published by Marvel with a writer credit for "Reg Everbest," which was Steve's name spelled inside-out.

About this time, Steve began to get work in the animation field, starting with a script for the Plastic Man cartoon series produced by Ruby-Spears. This led to a brief but mutually beneficial association with the studio, especially when Steve launched and story-edited one of the best adventure cartoons done for Saturday morning TV, Thundarr the Barbarian. Later, he worked for other houses on other shows, including G.I. Joe and Dungeons & Dragons.

Then there were other comic books, including occasional returns to Marvel and even to Howard. For DC, he did The Phantom Zone and later, A. Bizarro, Nevada and Hard Time. Last week in the hospital, he was working on a new Doctor Fate series for them. His other many credits in comics — which include Foolkiller for Marvel and books for Malibu and Image — are well known to readers of the last few decades.

What I feel the need to tell you is just what a great guy he was. In the seventies, when New York comic professionals were banding together to find ways to elevate the stature of the field and the living standards of its practitioners, Steve was at the nexus of so many of those efforts. When Steve was involved in his lawsuit with Marvel, many fellow professionals rallied around him with loans and gifts of cash and some of us put together a benefit comic book, Destroyer Duck, to raise money. People did that because they knew, first of all, that Steve was fighting not just for his own financial reasons but for matters of principle relating to how the comic book industry treated its creators. That some of the more pernicious business practices soon went away had a lot to do with Steve taking the stand he did. Also, those who knew Steve knew that when you were in need, he would do anything to help. He was, in every sense of the word, a friend.

He was one of my best friends and even though I knew this was coming — and even though part of me thinks it may be for the better, given what he stood to go through just to keep on breathing a few more years — it's a real blow. If you knew Steve Gerber, no further explanation is necessary. If you didn't, no further explanation can ever quite explain why.

Details of memorials and such will be forthcoming. I am now about to attempt a hostile takeover of Steve's weblog. I've been given permission to see if I can get in and take care of it but I won't delete anything, at least not for a long time. You might want to trundle over there and read some of his recent postings and especially some of the love and respect shown by his commenters.

Jonathan Handel analyzes the new WGA/AMPTP contract and tells you what it all means.

If you're interested in the number crunching and fine details of the WGA contract, this weblog post by Cynthia Littleton over at Variety will give you much to chew on. I'm not sure I understand all the deal points but the more I understand, the better the contract seems to me.

And hey, I just noticed. You see that photo that adorns the article? The picture of writers standing outside the Shrine Auditorium before the vote? If you click on it and enlarge it, you can see me over on the right wearing a brown jacket. No big deal, I know…but I thought it was novel to see one photo from a strike meeting that didn't have Marv Wolfman in it.

I hope the real death was as well-choreographed as the movie one.

I'm told that after I left the Writers Guild meeting last night, there was at least one member who got up at a microphone and, in an effort to stop a ship that had long since sailed, argued that the deal was not good enough to accept. That case can always be made, of course, and everyone knew that there were areas in which the offer was flawed. We do not negotiate with philanthropists, after all. Our reps face off with huge conglomerates who send out their emissaries with orders to not yield a single cent more than absolutely necessary. At times, it gets insulting how maniacal they are; how men and women who boast of the billions that their companies gross can be so muleheaded about denying you every possible dime. But it should not be surprising in this day and age.

Those who expect something much, much better than what the WGA achieved are destined to always be at the mike, insisting that the deal should be better. They're not wrong, at least in theory. Where they're often wrong is in that pesky "real world" part of the equation. And really, what's significant and quite unprecedented is that there were so few of them in this strike. I never thought I'd witness such togetherness in the Writers Guild of America.

Long ago, I observed the following: That when an author gets that first copy of his new book (or comic book or any publication) from the printer or publisher, he or she can open it to any random page and find a typo. There may turn out to be only one in the entire volume but there'll be one on the first page you look at. Every time. What's more, your immediate reaction will be to stare stupidly at it and think, wrongly, "There's a way to fix that."

Guess why I bring this up. Yesterday, I received a finished, bound, printed copy of Kirby: King of Comics, a new book from Harry N. Abrams Publishing all about the great Jack Kirby and his artistry. I opened the FedEx box, removed a plastic wrapper, opened to a page in the middle and there it was…a word that should have been italicized but wasn't. If you purchase this book, you may never notice it. But as its author, it was my solemn duty to not only notice it but to spot it the second I opened the thing.

Anyway, the book finally exists and I'll play humble here and not tell you how proud I am of it. I wish I'd had more pages because Jack is such a vast and important subject, and I know I've already angered a few folks by telling them that their favorite Kirby creation got either short shrift or no shrift at all. A much longer, detailed biography of the man will follow in a couple of years and will probably err in the other direction, telling you more than you want to know.

Some of you have been asking me if there's going to be a special edition of some kind with fancier binding or more pages or anything of the sort that might make you want to hold off on purchasing this one. There was talk of that and there may still be, but at the moment, the answer is no. The only current reason you might have for waiting is because the Second Printing will probably fix that italicized word…and then I'll open a copy of that printing and find another typo. That's how it works, people.

Also, many of you have asked me when copies will be available. Amazon sent all pre-orders an e-mail saying it wouldn't be able to ship until mid-March. As far as I know, they'll have copies well before that. The page on which they sell the book currently says it came out February 1 and ships in 2-4 weeks. The February 1 is wrong but the 2-4 weeks is probably accurate and 2-3 would be more accurate. I've been assured there will be copies aplenty at the WonderCon in San Francisco, which commences February 22.

Hope you like it. Hope you buy it. If you haven't ordered yet and wish to, click on the banner above…or here, I'll save you scrolling back. You can also click here. We are nothing if not accommodating.

Several folks have e-mailed to tell me that the offending live-blogger was a gentleman who, along with being a WGA member (and therefore allowed into the meeting) is also an L.A. Times staffer who was posting to the paper's strike-themed weblog. I kinda figured as much. There were a number of reporters outside who were angry that they were not able to get inside and report from inside the event, and I'm sure it didn't seem fair to let one guy have a jump on everyone else. In any case, I apologize again for premature posting.

I keep being wrong about something with regard to the Writers Guild strike. Having lived through far too many of these, I keep expecting vitriol and anger and even loud and honest dissent. The dissent is fine, even healthy, though it has too often been exaggerated in the press and by the folks with whom we negotiate. Twenty outraged members have this odd way of looking to some like a sizeable percentage of a Guild whose membership numbers in the thousands.

Throughout this strike I have constantly expected it to start; for some meeting to devolve into a mud wrestling competition. And I have constantly been wrong…because this strike is just about over and at least as of the time I headed home from this evening's membership meeting, what I'd been expecting hadn't started. The mood in the hall was unified, respectful, grateful and even celebratory. No vote was taken. That will occur shortly. But the sense of the room suggested the deal will be accepted and not, as I hope with all deals of this sort, by a whisker. I must admit the terms sounded better to me there than when I read the summary, which perhaps is an important lesson. Several points needed some explaining and amplification before their value was apparent.

A feeling of victory seemed to be the prevailing mood. I lost count of the well-deserved standing ovations and when they opened the floor microphones for questions or arguments, they began getting only questions and minor suggestions about deal points. As of the moment I left, no one had suggested that the deal not be ratified…and it would have been very easy for someone to say that if they'd genuinely felt it was improvable.

I still can't quite believe it. It goes without saying that no one likes to be on strike and that they're always nasty, messy affairs where too many people — many of them innocent bystanders — are injured. Unfortunately, like some other things in life that we wish never occurred, strikes are sometimes necessary. There are times when those in power (the employers, the Powers That Be) go for the lowball and think they have the clout to maximize profits by bleeding those who work for them. They come up with an either-or proposition, one with only two options: Go on strike or accept a rotten deal. I'm always astonished at the number of folks who leap to blame the union for taking the only viable course of action in that situation.

Not only is a rotten deal unacceptable for us but if we take it, the other unions get rotten deals…rottener, even. And when the next negotiation rolls around, we get the rottenest one of them all. That's how it works. You have to say no and stop that. You want to know why there was a Writers Strike? Because they didn't offer us in November the contract that they offered us at 1:30 AM (or whenever) this morning.

And they could have. It's not that fabulous an offer. It won't hurt the profits at Disney, Paramount, Sony, et al, one bit. What it does mean is that the writers who don't make the Megabucks (and that's the vast majority of the WGA) have a better shot at making a basic living. That's all this has ever been about.

I'm feeling very good about this strike. Like I said, I've lived through several and am usually appalled by something done by "my side." Sometimes, it's been gross mismanagement by the leadership. Other times, the leadership has done the best job possible but has been undercut by the fracturing of our ranks. None of that happened this time. Our president Patric Verrone, our Executive Director David Young, WGA negotiating committee chair John Bowman and everyone on that committee, along with the staff and Board of Directors all handled a regrettable situation about as well as it could have been handled. And the membership was right there with them because the issues were so clear and the need to say "no" was so obvious.

Before I leave this topic, I should apologize for something. As I said in an earlier post, I had not planned to "live-blog" from the meeting but sitting there, taking notes on my BlackBerry of things I wanted to mention here later, I was suddenly struck by that odd obsession I have to blog from odd places and I put up a post. A few minutes after, Patric on the stage asked people not to live-blog and I quickly took it down. Or at least, I thought I did. It's easier to post via BlackBerry than it is to delete. Anyway, that post has been removed. I don't think I disclosed anything privileged…certainly nothing that exiting writers weren't telling reporters outside as I was leaving. But Patric Verrone and his associates have done the most amazing, commendable job I've ever seen of managing a strike…and if he thinks it's wrong, it probably is. So I apologize to him and the Guild and I'll never do it again.

Several folks this morning are writing to tell me that Jack Larson turned 80 yesterday, not 75. They base this on various online sources saying he was born in 1928. Ah, but in the first minute of the video interview of Mr. Larson that the Archive of American Television has now posted, he says he was born in 1933.

Here — go watch it for yourself. I haven't had time yet to view the whole thing but it's almost an hour of Jack Larson (who rarely does interviews and never for this long) talking about his life and his career. And if he says he was born in '33…well, maybe he's fibbing but I'd want a better source than Wikipedia before I said otherwise.

Another correspondent noted that I interviewed his Adventures of Superman co-star, Noel Neill at the Mid-Ohio Con last Thanksgiving and will be doing so again at the WonderCon in two weeks. "You should get the two of them down to San Diego this year for a joint appearance," the e-mailer suggested. Yes, that would be great but Larson seems to be pretty shy or maybe just uninterested in that kind of thing and has always declined such invites. Maybe someday he'll change his mind. For now, you'll have to be content with the online interview.

The Writers Guild has reached a tentative (meaning, the membership still has to vote to accept it) deal with the AMPTP. A summary of the terms may be read at this link.

It's late and I have to get to bed…but it seems to me like an acceptable but not great offer. I think the membership will go for it though, of course, there will be those who will feel that after however-many-days-it's-been, the terms should be better. They are not wrong about that but I suspect it's the best deal we're going to get at this time. It does seem better on several points than the Directors Guild deal and one wonders if the DGA has some kind of "favored nations" provision that will upgrade those deal points to match ours.

As rumored, the deal runs through May 1 of 2011. Wonder how they arrived at that date. If the DGA and SAG both renew for three years, that means that in '11, the three unions will all have their contracts expiring in a three month period…and again, we're stuck going first.

Reserving the right to modify my view after the meeting tonight, I feel both pleased and disappointed by this deal. I am pleased the WGA took the stand it did. I believe that if we hadn't struck in November — if we'd caved and accepted the kind of offers they were positioning us for then — we'd have gone a long way towards destroying our livelihoods and those of many others who work in this industry. I'm sure some clown somewhere is going to crunch the numbers wrong and say, "Well, the strike cost Writers an amount totalling X dollars and the gains in the contract only amount to Y over the next three years." But really, this strike was never about that kind of math. It was about a more long range variety that took into account the entire future of our participation in new ways in which the shows and films we write will be marketed. There's no way to calculate the worth of that, and you certainly can't only look at what we will make in the next three years.

The whole battle was also about the way in which we negotiate…or, in most past cases, don't get to negotiate. It all invokes the old analogy of the schoolyard bully who demands a nickel from you one week, a dime from you the next, then a quarter, then fifty cents, etc. At some point, preferably early on, you have to put an end to that because even if at some point your losses seem trivial, they won't stay that way. The AMPTP has an almost inalterable rule: When you accept a bad deal from them, they come back the next time and try and force you to take an even worse one. I shudder to think how terrible the contract would have been in 2011 if we'd taken the kind of thing they were dangling at us last November.

I'm very pleased and proud of the solidarity that the WGA has shown to date. It may get contentious at the meeting tonight because now we can better afford to be contentious. But before the strike I had a lot of dire expectations of members threatening to split the Guild and of far more vituperative attacks on our leadership. With a few exceptions — and only a few — I think this was a very well-run strike. Admittedly, in some cases, the manuevering of the studios did not leave us with a lot of choices…but where we had choices, I think our leadership made the right ones.

Like I said, I'll write more after the meeting. I gotta get some sleep. Good night, Internet!

I have a lot of comic book conventions to attend this year. Usually, I don't make it to as many but I have this book coming out so it seems like a fine time to make the rounds. My whole schedule, if anyone cares, is over on this page.

Two weeks from today, my companion Carolyn and I will be in San Francisco for the annual WonderCon, where we always have a fine time. I, of course, will be hosting some panels and you can find a list of them on this page. You can find the entire programming schedule for the con on this page but why you'd want to go to any events other than mine is beyond me.

I'm nineteen minutes late with this. Yesterday was the 75th birthday of Jack Larson, who was so perfect in the role of Jimmy Olsen in the Superman TV series of the fifties. Those shows were done for about a buck and a quarter, with scenes shot wildly out of sequence to the point where the cast often wasn't sure which episode a given scene was even for. Still, the sheer personality of several fine actors made it all work, and Larson was a key reason.

I only met Jack Larson once and he seemed shy and a bit embarrassed by my telling him how much I admired his acting. He gave that up long ago and has had a fine, successful career as a writer and producer, which I assume makes him happier, which is all that should matter. Not long ago, he sat for a lengthy video interview for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation's Archive of American Television project. It should be available on Google Video in the next day or so and when it is, I'll link you to it.