Monthly Archives: May 2009

This link will allow you to download a PDF file that's a visual guide to the many different sizes and shapes of pasta. Finally, you'll be able to tell your Rigatoni from your Rotini.

Today is Free Comic Book Day, meaning that if you go to a participating comic book shop, you get something for nothing. Not a bad deal by any means.

Most publishers have created a special giveaway comic for the day. There's one from Dark Horse Comics that contains a short but (I hope) sweet Indiana Jones story by me. I usually don't tell you to go out and buy my comics but it doesn't seem unclassy to suggest that you seek out one when they're free.

Barack Obama's first 100 days…Facebook style.

On BBC Radio 4: Salman Rushdie, of all people, hosts a show celebrating the 70th anniversary of the movie, The Wizard of Oz. And if you want to hear it, better hurry. It'll only be up for a few more days.

Comic book and animation artist Ric Estrada died this morning, the result of a long, losing battle with cancer.

Ric was born February 26, 1928 in Havana, Cuba and began selling his work at age 13 to a popular Cuban magazine called Bohemia. He attended University of Havana where, he always claimed, another student was Fidel Castro. Via a relative, he developed a friendship with Ernest Hemingway, who took an interest in the young artist's work and encouraged him to relocate to New York. Ric moved there at age 20 but never stayed in one place for very long, travelling the world and living briefly in dozens of other cities. Whenever he was back in Manhattan, he managed to work in comic books, including two of his proudest jobs…stories for the EC war comics edited and written by Harvey Kurtzman. Other companies that were glad to have his art included Hillman, Western Publishing, St. John and Ziff-Davis.

Ric occasionally dabbled in newspaper strips, including assisting on Flash Gordon and drawing some of the Flash Gordon comic books. Most of his comic book work was done in the sixties and seventies for DC, primarily on romance and war comics. But there was a period where (against his preference, he said), he was assigned to super-hero titles, primarily as a "rough penciller." Ric didn't like super-heroes and didn't feel he had the flair for them, and he also didn't like producing anything less than finished artwork. Still, that was where he was told his services were needed so he pencilled comics like All-Star Comics, Freedom Fighters and Karate Kid.

He did not feel capable of producing the kind of tight pencil art that most other artists did for such assignments so, on mutual agreement with his editors, he did something looser. He was paid less than if he'd done complete pencil art and his understanding was that the other artists who finished the work would be paid extra. Years later, Ric was extremely upset to learn that several of those artists weren't paid the higher rates, and that they resented Ric for not doing his portion of the work. A sensitive man, he apologized to at least one of the "finishers," who accepted Ric's explanation and declined an offer of money right out of Ric's own pocket.

Despite the grief it caused him and his own dissatisfaction with the work, it was often quite wonderful…though not as grand as when Ric was allowed to be Ric. Besides, Ric was never satisfied with his own work. In the seventies, he did several war stories for DC's combat titles that garnered great praise, particularly from his fellow artists. It was hard to tell Ric how good you thought they were without him blushing red and giving you an honest, humble argument.

Though Ric drew several of my scripts for DC in the seventies, we didn't really meet until the eighties when he moved to Los Angeles and worked for the Hanna-Barbera studio as a designer and layout artist. He was much-loved about the building…and repeatedly flattered as younger artists sought him out to praise his comic work. We did one non H-B project together (a super-hero story, despite his preferences) and talked often of doing others which, I'm sad to say, never reached fruition. After leaving H-B, he relocated to Utah but managed to make it several years to the Comic-Con International and to occasionally sit on panels I hosted there.

Ric was married three times and had eight children. One son, Seth, is currently producing a documentary on his father. You can find out more about it at the Ric Estrada website and view some of the raw footage on this page. I hope to add my voice to it because Ric was one of my favorite people and one of my favorite artists. It's amazing how often those two things go together.

Las Vegas is reeling this morn at the news. Headliner Danny Gans — "The Man of Many Voices" — died in his sleep last night. No cause has been given for the passing of the 52-year-old entertainer.

Gans had an amazing career. He'd started as a professional baseball player, mainly with the Durham Bulls. (He had a small role in the movie, Bull Durham.) An injury forced him to find another career and he became an impressionist. Though barely known outside Vegas, he was a phenomenon in that town, his success measured mainly by his ticket prices.

The show featured Gans, a tiny live band and no one else…and you'd figure tickets for something like that would be around $25 or $30 each. But he started selling out each performance so they raised prices a bit…and when he continued to sell out at the higher price, they raised it some more. And some more. And some more. At some point, he passed the level of $100 a seat. There are now a lot of shows in Las Vegas at that level but at the time Gans rose to it, there were very few and they all featured huge, expensive casts and special effects and costumes. The Danny Gans show was just Danny Gans and the musicians…and still he managed to fill a 1,250 seat theater at the Mirage for almost every performance. He recently opened a new showroom at the Encore with a top ticket price of $120.

I saw him once and he was very good, rolling through a staggering roster of impressions in about 75 minutes. Still, the presentation felt to me overpriced…and my ticket had been comped. I suppose what I admired most was that this guy had come out of nowhere and built this huge stardom out of nothing. Vegas is always full of impressionists….and Gans's success had spawned an extra wave of copycat impersonators. He was better than any of them (possible exception: Bob Anderson) but not that much better. Still, if you can't respect hype in Vegas, where can you respect it? Gans was great at it. He could not only sound like the superstars…he could charge like them.