Monthly Archives: June 2010

You know what's missing for me when I go into a gas station to fill up my tank? Show tunes. I always find myself longing to see 30 seconds of some current Broadway musical on a tiny screen right above the little computer readout that tells me I just paid sixty bucks for Super Unleaded.

Well, all that is about to change…

PumpTop TV Showcases The Bright Lights
Of Broadway at The Gas Pump

PumpTop TV and The Broadway Channel® Announce Partnership Showcasing The Biggest Shows On Broadway On Nation's Leading At-The-Pump Network

Irvine, CA — PumpTop TV and The Broadway Channel® announced a partnership today that will give millions of motorists around the country an inside look at some of the hottest shows on Broadway. The partnership will bring high quality 30-second clips of some of the biggest names on Broadway to the PumpTop TV network, which reaches millions of motorists each month at gas stations across the country.

PumpTop TV will feature national and localized content for Broadway and touring Broadway shows, with targeted theatrical content for the New York and Los Angeles markets. The partnership will lead off with an inside look at the Tony Award winning rock opera, American Idiot, which is currently playing on Broadway. American Idiot tells the exhilarating story of a new generation of young Americans as they struggle to find meaning in a post-9/11 world, performed along with Green Day's Grammy winning and electrifying score. The Broadway Channel has provided a 30 second clip showcasing this exciting new musical.

Shows that will be touring nationally will have local show date information in the banners, like Mary Poppins, which will be airing on PumpTop TV later this month. Mary Poppins is the Tony Award winning "family fun" musical that is currently on Broadway and also on tour nationwide.

Matthew Hege, Vice President of The Broadway Channel stated, "We are excited about our partnership and for providing unique and entertaining Broadway content to PumpTV's captivating audience; we are engaging with Broadway audiences in all directions!"

Doug Woo, Executive Vice President of AdtekMedia, the parent company of PumpTop TV, added, "It is extremely important for us to provide our viewers with dynamic and interesting content to make their experience at the pump entertaining, informative and enjoyable. We feel that The Broadway Channel is a perfect fit for PumpTop TV and allows us to demonstrate our unique ability to target specific markets with personalized content relevant to that area, especially in the Los Angeles and New York markets. PumpTop TV is extremely excited about the opportunity to partner with The Broadway Channel."

New York Times obit for Al Williamson. Have all the tributes and memorials sufficiently made the point that in addition to being a great artist, he was also just plain a great guy?

As you may know, the San Diego Padres play at Petco Park, which is right next to the convention center where the Comic-Con is held. They put it there because they thought the traffic and parking weren't quite bad enough when we're in town. (But hey, it would be worse in L.A., next door to the Staples Center.)

The Padres are away from S.D. the week of Comic-Con. They'll be in Atlanta and Pittsburgh, which should be about where the nearest vacant hotel rooms will be available. However, the Friday night before the con — July 16 — the Padres are playing the Arizona Diamondbacks at Petco Park and they're advertising it's Comic-Con Night. Douglass Abramson, a devout reader of this site, told me about it and he doesn't know what it means, either. Maybe all the players on one team will be dressed as Klingons and all the ones on the other will be dressed as The Joker and for the seventh-inning stretch, I'll go down onto the field and host a panel.

If you're going to read the transcript from the Proposition 8 trial, you might like to take a look at the fine work of courtroom sketch artist Norman Quebedeau. I've worked with Norman on animation projects featuring goofy characters and impossible scenarios and I'm glad to see they've prepared him for this job.

Mark is swamped with deadlines the next few days. Expect postings and e-mail responses to be light through about Tuesday evening. And while I'm gone, ponder this: Why is that Time-Warner Cable, from whom I get my Internet and phone service, will allow me to go "paperless" and help the environment by no longer receiving one little bill per month…but they will not allow me to cancel the seventeen paper ads they mail me each week to try to get me to subscribe to Time-Warner Cable services I either already have or have told them I absolutely do not want?

Back to work…

As many of you may have forgotten, and as I did for a while, there's currently a big court challenge going on to California's Proposition 8 which by a narrow margin banned Gay Marriage in this state. I'm all for letting any pair of consenting adults of any sex marry and think it's inevitable that it will become the norm…but as I said here, I'm not sure this is the best route to get there. If someone made enough of an effort (i.e., raised enough cash) to get the question on the ballot again here, I think Same-Sex Wedlock would win and it would be a more decisive and widely-accepted way for it to become a law of the land. My fear is that if a court undoes Prop 8, there will be an anger, not so much at the decision but at the fact that "The Will of the Voters" has been nullified by one guy in a black robe.

Looks like we may soon see if that happens. Closing arguments were argued the other day in the Prop 8 trail and a decision is expected in a month or so. If you'd like to read a very long PDF file of those closing arguments, you can get it from this link. If you don't have the time or inclination, let me summarize…

1. The lawyer saying that we have to ban Gay Marriage said marriage is all about procreation and since gays can't procreate, they have no right to marry. The lawyer saying we have to overturn Proposition 8 pointed out that some straight couples cannot procreate and others choose not to…but we still allow those couples to marry.
2. The lawyer saying that we have to ban Gay Marriage pointed out that there is a long tradition in this country of banning Gay Marriage because it might destroy society. The lawyer saying we have to overturn Proposition 8 pointed out that we once had a long tradition in this country of banning Interracial Marriage because it might destroy society and that was overturned. Somehow, society has survived.
3. The lawyer saying that we have to ban Gay Marriage admitted that he had no real proof that it would destroy society since it's never really been tried. The lawyer saying we have to overturn Proposition 8 reminded the Judge over and over again of this admission and also argued that the right to marry is a human right and that the state has no right to discriminate against a group of individuals and deny them that right.

Now, there was more to it than that but really not a lot more. You can never be sure about these things, and of course I'm the layest of all laymen…but if there's a place I can wager on this, I think I'll go slap a few bucks down saying that the judge will at least partially overturn Proposition 8. His Honor might decide to chicken out and either say no or somehow pass the buck to others…but the "uphold Prop 8" guy almost looks like someone paid him to throw the game. I'd also bet that those who will be furious about this will begin screaming about "activist judges" who put themselves above The People of California, when a more likely explanation is that their side simply put forth a lousy case. I'm not sure there is a strong case against Gay Marriage but I'll bet there's a better one than this.

Hard to believe but the formal opening of Comic-Con 2010 is but 33 days from today, which means 32 days to those of you attending Preview Night. The time between Comic-Cons gets briefer and briefer as I get older. Before long, some of us won't even bother leaving San Diego. When one Comic-Con ends, we'll just hang around in the hotel lobby until the next one starts.

I will be found, as usual, at a mess of panels and events there. At the moment, I'm hosting or co-hosting 11 and I'm on at least two more. The full list will be up in a week or two but it's a lot like previous years. I'll be doing a panel with Sergio and the Groo Crew on Thursday afternoon, running Quick Draw! on Saturday morning, presiding over a Jack Kirby tribute panel on Sunday morning and Cover Story on Sunday afternoon. Earl Kress and I will be moderating a number of panels about cartoon voices. I'll be interviewing Paul Levitz on one panel about his career and on another, Denny O'Neil, Neal Adams and Paul (again) will discuss the revamp of Batman in the early seventies. There'll be a "spotlight" on Stan and Hunter Freberg on Thursday which will pick up where last year's left off covering Stan's amazing career. The con will also have a number of memorial-type panels for friends who've left us in the last year and I'll be emceeing one remembering Dick Giordano.

So is that everything? Well, some of you will notice something missing. Unlike the past nineteen years at the con, there will be no Golden Age Panel. Sad to say, we just won't have enough folks at the convention to have a proper one.

This was my decision as much as anyone's. We've had some great gatherings in this category — and there are still a lot of writers and artists around who worked in the forties and fifties, more than some people think. But most of them have elected not to attend the Comic-Con this year…and yes, many were invited. So it just seems more appropriate to interview those people on individual panels and not try to assemble a group chat when we really don't have the personnel. Perhaps the Golden Age Panel will be back next year. I hope so. In its absence this year though, there'll be plenty of others covering the early days of comics so no one should be too disappointed.

Sean Flynn has an amazing piece on what went wrong out there on the Deepwater Horizon…with emphasis on the oft-forgotten human side of things.

My pal Marc Wielage pointed me to this interview with Bill Carter, the N.Y. Times reporter who covers late night and who authored the book, The Late Shift. He has a new book coming soon on the whole Conan/Jay mess.

One odd moment in the interview. Carter is discussing whether Craig Ferguson might one day take over for Letterman and he says…

We know that Craig has the show that follows Dave, and usually those things happen — a guy steps out, and the 12:30 guy steps in. That is what has happened although never very smoothly in the past.

Uh, when has that ever happened? 12:30 talk shows are a fairly recent development. Only about five guys have ever done them. When Johnny Carson stepped out, the guy who was at 12:30 behind him didn't step in. Leno was replaced by the guy at 12:30 but he didn't step out. He was pushed because the 12:30 guy wanted his job. There's been no succession at ABC or CBS. I'm puzzled as to where Mr. Carter thinks this precedent has played out.

Senator Al Franken recently gave an address at the American Constitution Society's annual convention in Washington, D.C. His thesis was that Conservative forces are manipulating our court system, and the Supreme Court in particular, to enact an agenda that most Americans would reject if it weren't so cunningly disguised. You can see the whole speech at this link but I wanted to yank out this quote…

What conservative legal activists are really interested in is this question: What individual rights are so basic and so important that they should be protected above a corporation's right to profit? And their preferred answer is: None of them. Zero.

I'm not sure the majority of self-identified Conservatives in this country realize this. Most of the folks they think are working in Washington to protect "traditional American values" (and even traditional Conservative viewpoints) have a higher mission. It varies slightly depending on who's paying them and the potential profit points…but it's all about the money.