Monthly Archives: March 2009

The reason you haven't seen a review here of Watchmen — or for that matter of the recent Spirit movie — is that I haven't seen them.

This afternoon, Carolyn and I took our friends, Alice and Leonard Maltin, down to the La Mirada Theater for the Performing Arts to see Frank Ferrante being very Groucho about things. Frank (and his pianist, Jim Furmston) were in fine form and the audience vaulted to its collective feet at the end to cheer a very fine show.

Frank has notched thousands of performances as Groucho Marx on stages, and one of the many things I like about his show is the sheer beauty of watching a guy who's perfected what he does. Though much of the show is ad-lib, nothing throws him. You could probably waterboard the man and he wouldn't break character. He'd continue to nail Groucho with every move, every gesture, every line. I usually think "impersonators" go on too long. After a minute or so, you start seeing all the ways they don't look or sound like the person they're doing.

Not so with Ferrante. About three minutes in, some part of your brain surrenders. You just think, "Yeah, that's Groucho up there" and from then on, you just accept and enjoy. That may be because it isn't so much an impersonation as a performance by an actor who has made the Groucho style a part of himself. After the show, before we took pictures, I heard Frank tell someone that he's done this so long and immersed himself so totally in Groucho's life and times that he doesn't have to think hard about it. It just comes to him.

Leonard and Alice were impressed. So was Jerry Maren, who appeared with Groucho in At the Circus. (Remember the midget with the tiny dressing room? That was Jerry, fresh from his stint representing the Lollipop Guild in The Wizard of Oz.) And Groucho's daughter Miriam was there, telling people how much she loves how Frank spreads the good name and glory of her father. If you want to see Frank, check this page to see if and when he'll be wandering in your direction. I am not, despite how it may appear on this site, his agent.

Before I close, here's another photo someone took. It's my lovely friend Carolyn with me and Frank…

Carolyn's father was the great cartoonist, Walt Kelly. I got to thinking that if we were to extract some of her DNA and match it against Miriam's, we could do some genetic engineering and grow the wittiest human being who had ever lived. I'll have to try this when I get some time.

It's been more than six months since I posted one of these. I have to pay for a bunch of stuff I just bought off eBay. So if you've been thinking, "Gee, I have to make a donation to that wonderful weblog," now would be a grand time. Thank you.

Among the Conservative writers that I occasionally like (and even sometimes agree with) is a gent named David Frum. It's kind of fascinating to me to watch as, lately, he's being fileted and attacked for advocating some viewpoints which…well, I won't presume they're dead-on accurate but if I were a Republican seeking to rebuild my party's strength, I'd sure afford them the dignity of serious consideration. Instead, they're being treated like blasphemy that must be shouted down at all cost.

A little less than a year ago, I attended a symposium where the panel included Frum and also right-wing radio talker Hugh Hewitt. Mr. Hewitt went on and on about how the Democrats would be committing political suicide to nominate Barack Obama; how there was no chance of him being elected president and it would be like Thelma and Louise driving off the cliff. That was a specific metaphor he invoked…and he made a lot of other predictions which have proven to be about as wrong as wrong can be.

I gather Hewitt does this often — predict exactly what does not then happen — and it impairs his stature as a pundit not one bit. Pundits, left and right, are almost never faulted for their bad predictions, no matter how confident or emphatic they were about them. If a doctor was 50% wrong, you'd never go near him except perhaps to sue for malpractice…but people return again and again to a pundit who tells them what they want to hear, even when it's wrong nine times out of ten. That day at the panel, I didn't (of course) know how incorrect Hewitt would prove to be about Obama but I did get the following sense — that Hewitt was just interested in putting on the show that right-wingers enjoyed, whereas Frum was interested in actually winning elections. Which is not to say everything Mr. Frum said that day was accurate…though he could have predicted Alan Keyes would win thanks to a massive write-in vote by Venusians and he'd have been no less off than Hugh Hewitt. At least though, Frum was trying to be realistic.

Lately, he's been fragged for suggesting that Rush Limbaugh might not be the ideal leader for the G.O.P. if it expects to win back power. Not that I have the best interests of Republicans at heart but I can't help but think so, too — and for the same reason that Hugh Hewitt wouldn't be a good de facto voice for the party. He's more interested in his own glory than in the party's, and his glory may even be greater when the party doesn't win.

Here's David Frum writing about his recent battles with Conservative radio host Mark Levin. There's a link in there to a conversation they had on Levin's show and it demonstrates exactly why I don't like most talk radio these days, and also why you usually can't win any debate with a host who has home court advantage. Levin keeps interrupting, so terrified is he of letting Frum finish a sentence and complete a point…and this isn't even Levin arguing with someone who wants to turn America into something he would find loathesome. This is Levin arguing with a guy who just has a different idea of how to achieve most of the same goals.

I don't know how long Barack Obama has to deliver some tangible improvement in our country before his approval ratings will drop towards any danger level. But it may have a lot to do with how long guys like Levin and Frum are mud-wrestling over Rush.

The FedEx company is making a nice gesture to help folks who are unemployed. On Tuesday, if you take your résumé to one of their offices, they'll print 25 copies for you on "high-quality paper." That's quite commendable…but if they really want to do something to help the employment situation in this country, they might try hiring more than two people to do the work of twelve in the FedEx offices near me.

[UPDATE, made a little later: Ken Quattro writes, "There's a correction to your FedEx post on your blog that should be made. The résumés should be taken to a FedEx Office location, formerly known as Kinko's. Do not take them to the regular FedEx locations where the couriers are and the packages are loaded onto trucks for delivery. Please make that distinction." So noted.]

Bob Sodaro informs me that his friend John Carbonaro passed away on February 25 at the age of 58. John was a devout comic fan who turned publisher in 1981 when he acquired the rights to the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents comic which had been published in the sixties by Tower Comics. Bob wrote the story of this enterprise up for this article but basically, John bought the property and then launched into a series of unsatifactory arrangements, sometimes publishing new T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents comics himself and sometimes licensing the characters out for others to market. He also fought and won several battles to prove he owned the property and that it was not, as some claimed, public domain.

I knew John a little and was involved with some of his plans. He struck me as an enthusiastic lover of comics who was as interested in seeing Dynamo, NoMan, Menthor and others treated right as he was to make money off his investment. His quest to achieve both did not always result in either but he kept at it, always trying to find the right place for the material.

Bob says that while he is unaware of the details, he knows Bob made arrangements for the disposition of the property after his death. I hope whoever winds up with the rights will do right by the franchise. That's what a lot of fans of those characters would like to see and that's what John sure wanted.

As we all know, a man named Harvey Kurtzman and a talented crew of artists created the original MAD comic book which later morphed into a hugely successful humor magazine. Kurtzman and most of those artists left after a little more than two dozen issues and went on to do a slicker humor magazine for Hugh Hefner's company. It was called Trump and it lasted a big two issues. This was in the early days of Playboy and Hef was not yet financially stable enough to endure the cost overruns and disappointing early sales of Trump.

Finding themselves out on the street, Kurtzman and his artists decided to start yet another humor mag, this time financing it out of their own pockets. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time…and it might have been, had they known how to publish. Instead, they designed their new magazine, Humbug, as a cheap package — comic-book sized but without the interior color and with a higher price tag than comic books of the day. The smaller size ensured the magazine would be placed on the comic book racks, not over near magazines of similarly adult appeal…so potential buyers couldn't find it at their newsstands. That is, if it even got to their newsstands. Another grand mistake was to hook up with a particularly weak (and perhaps not totally honest) distributor. The whole thing was a disaster that lasted all of eleven issues.

So did they do anything right? Yes. They filled the pages of Humbug with brilliantly witty stories illustrated by top artists like Bill Elder and Jack Davis. If you could find it, you probably loved it…but not many people had the chance to read Humbug.

This has changed. Fantagraphics Books has just released a superb two-volume boxed set that reprints Humbug in full, plus it also contains proper introductions and interviews with some who worked on the magazine. The material is excellent. It's Kurtzman, Elder, Davis, Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth and a few others working at the peak of their awesome powers. The package is excellent. It's well-designed and well-printed, and I can't think of a way in which it could have been improved. We've seen a lot of fancy comic book reprint projects lately but this may be my favorite.

Buy it. Just buy it.

For many years now, I've enjoyed the late night reruns on GSN of vintage game shows like What's My Line? and To Tell the Truth. Those are the two they've been running lately but it all ends March 30. The network is doing a major schedule revamp and the old shows are nowhere to be seen. We can only enjoy them 'til then and hope they'll be back one of these days. (Thanks to all who let me know about this, especially Jim Newman.)

The N.Y. Times has posted an entire half-hour of The Dick Cavett Show (the PBS one) in which Cavett interviews John Updike and John Cheever. Good stuff.

Almost forgot to tell you about last night. That's not Batman in the above photo at left. That's me, listening as Comic Book Legend Jerry Robinson captivates a sellout crowd at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. People think you're a great moderator when the program is interesting but really, all you have to do is to get someone like Jerry talking about a subject that fascinates people. In this case, it was the early days of comics when he went to work for Bob Kane drawing some of the earliest Batman comics. Jerry told how he came up with the idea for The Joker and discussed the dozens of other things he's done in his career besides drawing great superhero comics.

Many folks who attended our little presentation went first to see the exhibit and loved it. It's there until August Something (the 9th, I think) so you have some time to get up there. Jerry, his wife and son and I had dinner first with the Skirball curators and they're thrilled with the turnout so far. If you'd like to be a part of that turnout, click here.

Anyway, a great time was had by all, as they say. Historians of such things might be interested, by the way, in a panel that I'm hoping to arrange for the Comic-Con International in San Diego this year. Jerry is probably coming and so are Sheldon Moldoff and Lew Sayre Schwartz. If we can arrange it then, I'll be interviewing en masse the last three surviving Bob Kane ghost artists…and darn near the only people alive who drew Batman comics prior to about 1962. (I get the feeling there's someone else but I can't figure out who it might be.)