Monthly Archives: March 2011

A show called The Best of Laugh-In runs this week on various PBS stations. It's on tomorrow night on KOCE in Los Angeles, which is where PBS lives now that KCET is no longer an affiliate.

I was a tremendous fan of Laugh-In when it was first on the air and spent a number of fascinating afternoons poaching on their stage at NBC in, as they say, Beautiful Downtown Burbank. A few weeks ago, I attended an event at the Paley Center to honor the show. The guests were Gary Owens, Arte Johnson, Joanne Worley and Executive Producer George Schlatter, with a number of behind-the-scenes folks in the audience. I didn't report on it here because there was really nothing quotable but it was good to see those folks in person and on the screen. The show is dated in some ways but remarkably fresh in others, and while I haven't seen the special yet, it's always interesting to me to watch those old shows and recall that era.

The most argumentative e-mail I receive of a political nature comes from folks who are (a) anonymous and therefore not to be taken too seriously for that reason alone and (b) of a mindset I can never quite understand. It's the notion that your guy is your guy 100% of the way. Whether it's Barack Obama or George W. Bush, he's always right and everything he does must be spun accordingly. Even when he says or does one thing, then does a one-eighty and says or does the opposite, he was right both times. In the extreme cases where some action is so egregious, so immoral or wrong-headed that it can't possibly be spun to support his flawlessness, then it was somebody else's fault…untrustworthy advisors, faulty intelligence, etc.

Not only did I not think Bush was right most of the time, I never even thought that those who argued that really believed it. If you were a Bush supporter, my heart goes out to you. It must have been rough to have to pretend that invading Iraq was a wise, good faith decision or that waterboarding isn't really torture or that cutting taxes for the rich would help and not hurt the lower and middle-class. I could never bring myself to do that with some of the things Bill Clinton did and now at certain actions of the Obama administration. One such is what's reportedly been happening with Bradley Manning, the soldier who was arrested and charged with passing classified info to Wikileaks.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald has been all over this as have many others placing principle over partisan loyalty. Basically, Manning is being abused in a Marine Corps jail in Virginia, the goal apparently being to beat him down emotionally to the point where he'll confess to everything and anything. The man may well be guilty and he may well be deserving of long-term incarceratation…but as many of us said when the Bush administration was torturing human beings, this is not the kind of thing America is supposed to be doing. This is the kind of thing that when other countries do it, we declare them uncivilized and speak of how much better we are than that. If there is really a mountain of evidence against Manning as we've been told there is, we don't need to physically and mentally brutalize someone to obtain a conviction. And if there isn't a mountain of evidence against him…well, maybe he's, y'know, innocent?

In any case, in the American system of justice, the punishment is supposed to come after the conviction, not before. I'm very disappointed that Obama has allowed this to happen and is making no efforts to stop it.

Since Google's saluting him, I should. The late Will Eisner was a much-loved individual and not just because he wrote and drew such wonderful comics. People just liked Will. They admired his industry and his willingness to go to conventions and not be The Great Will Eisner but just one among many equals. One could argue whether there was more reverence at Comic-Con for Will or for his one-time employee, Jack Kirby. But after Jack passed, Will had the place to himself in that regard and he wore it well. He was, like Jack, accessible and within reason, humble. He was also sharp and productive, right up to his last year. The comics he produced at age 75+ compared favorably to those produced by anyone, himself included, at any age. Even if you can't write or draw, you ought take another look at that guy as a Role Model…because you are pretty likely to get old and Will did that as well as anyone, too.

I always have a book around that I read in small increments when I suddenly have ten minutes with nothing to do. At the moment, it's Will Eisner: A Dreamer's Life in Comics by Michael Schumacher. He could have substituted words like "leader's" or "pioneer's" for "dreamer's" in the title and it would have worked too…but "dreamer's" is also accurate. I'm enjoying the book a lot and have yet to come across anything with which I disagreed. What I have come across are dozens of stories that make me say, "Gee, I wish I'd asked Will about that." As long as we had him around and as much as we got from him, it wasn't enough. Here, by the way, is an Amazon link to order a copy of this fine volume.

In it, Schumacher mentions the 1999 panel I moderated at Comic-Con which brought together, for the only time ever, Eisner and another of his one-time employees, Chuck Cuidera.  It was an interesting panel because the two men did not like each other. Chuck was jealous of Will for obvious reasons, money probably being the biggest. I got the feeling Chuck didn't like anyone very much but since Will represented success in comics and Chuck hadn't had much, Will was a special target. There was a genuine dispute as to which of them (if either) had created Blackhawk, which was a pretty successful comic in its day. Chuck was determined to lay sole claim to that credit. Will wasn't but he wasn't about to let Chuck get away with it, either.

Given that contentiousness, Will might have been forgiven for avoiding any face-to-face with Cuidera altogether…but since they were both going to be at the con, I had to ask if there was any way to get them in the same dais at the same time. I sent him a fax, didn't hear anything for a week or so and figured, "Well, I can't blame him for not wanting to do it." I didn't know he was out of town. When he got home, he immediately faxed me back that he'd love to do it…

After the fax arrived here but before I'd noticed it sitting in my fax machine, Will phoned me to make sure I'd received it and to apologize for not answering sooner. He made me think that I'd been wrong and that there was no tension between them. When we got them in the room together at San Diego, I instantly realized I'd been right the first time. They were not old buddies being reunited and Will knew exactly how much Chuck resented him and the fact that people said Will Eisner had created Blackhawk. Will also realized that the best way to deal with it was to confront Cuidera in this forum and to come at it from a friendly attitude of camaraderie and giving Chuck as much respect as possible, up to but not including the words, "Chuck created Blackhawk." A partial transcript of that panel can be read here.

I was seated between them. My "read" was that Chuck walked into the room wanting to make it clear to the assemblage that he thought Will had taken more credit than he deserved for Blackhawk and some other things. But then he noticed the reverence that the audience had for Will…and Will, as you can see, began to speak well of Chuck and to treat him as an equal and one who warranted more recognition. And because of it all, Chuck's resentments got stuck in Neutral and never did get into gear. I don't know if either Will or Chuck deserves whole or shared credit for creating Blackhawk but I do know Will handled an awkward situation well by meeting it head-on and being a true (if crafty) gentleman about it. Yet another thing to admire him for.

If you are not familiar with the works of Will Eisner — there must be someone reading this who isn't — here's another Amazon link. It's so you can buy a copy of The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue, a collection of stories created about residents in a Jewish tenement section of New York back when Billy Eisner was a wee lad. Will was 60 when he started producing material like this and kept it up, getting better and better at it, for the rest of his life.

One year, not long before he left us, Will won an Eisner Award. The next day, I had him on a panel and I asked him how it felt to finally have done work that measured up to the standard of Will Eisner. He laughed and I forget what he actually said in reply. But he later said to me, "I've spent my whole life trying to do work that lives up to the standard of Will Eisner." I said something like, "We all do," and he said, "Well, then you know it just gets harder and harder."

Lyle Davis is a very smart man.

So has everyone seen that the Google page today celebrates what would have been the 94th birthday of Will Eisner? Go take a look at it while the special logo is still up…and make sure to read the accompanying tribute by Scott McCloud.

I have a posting coming up one of these days — it's about half-finished — about the dilemmas of those of us with food allergies and how we cope with restaurants that don't know how to leave the guacamole off a dish…or won't. But in the meantime, read this article in the N.Y. Times about how some restaurants simply refuse to change dishes or supply condiments. I will have much to say about this.

Over at the hilobrow website, they're running a series of essays where artists or critics analyze a single panel from some Jack Kirby comic. If you browse around there, you'll find many of interest but I'm going to respond here to one by Mark Newgarden about the appearance in Jimmy Olsen #144 of comic actor Jimmy Finlayson. Newgarden is intrigued by Jack's decision to base a character on the long-deceased Finlayson…a face that can't have been well-known to kids then buying comic books. I can supply some background information here.

Jack didn't much like working on Jimmy Olsen. It was someone else's character, someone's else's book…and when you worked on the "Superman family" comics then, you had to coordinate with a half-dozen other editors who also had Superman (and sometimes Jimmy) in their comics. A nice, wise man named Nelson Bridwell who worked for DC in New York acted as coordinator among all the Superman editors. That meant that Nelson would call Jack up and say something like, "Sorry, you can't have Superman eat cream cheese in your book because in Action Comics, we have a storyline going with an alien mad scientist who's made Clark Kent lactose-intolerant." Or some conflict of that variety. Many at DC hated the way Jack drew Superman and Olsen and his renderings of those characters were being redrawn by others…and Kirby was just sick of the assignment.

My friend Steve Sherman and I were then working as assistants to Jack…and I always emphasize that we didn't contribute that much to his books. Jack wrote 'em, Jack drew 'em and there wasn't much we or anyone else could contribute. We wrote letter pages, worked on projects that never materialized, did some art production work, fetched research and did a little writing. He used very little of what we wrote but at one point, he decided he wanted to have us start writing Jimmy Olsen under his supervision. The idea was that he'd draw a few of our scripts, then suggest to DC that we keep writing it but someone else start drawing it. I didn't think they'd go for it and I wasn't all that interested in writing that comic at that time for that company…but we agreed to give it a try. Jack told us to come up with a story, work out a plot and bring it to him the following week. We'd all talk through it, he'd give his input and send us off to write a full script he could illustrate. That was the plan.

I'm pretty sure it was Steve who came up with the idea of doing something around the Loch Ness Monster, just as I'm sure it was my idea to use Jimmy Finlayson as a character. "Fin," of course, was the foil in many a Laurel and Hardy film and I was a huge fan of Stan and Ollie. Steve and I worked out a plot and when we took it to Jack one Saturday, I took along a still from my collection. It was from one of the best Laurel and Hardy silent movies, Big Business, and it was the best shot I had of Finlayson. This is that still…

We talked through our story idea with Jack…and his imagination was, as always, unbounded. For every one idea we had, he had three. He started with our story and proceeded to change it so much that it was like we'd brought him rat droppings and he'd shaped them into filet mignon. I quickly scribbled down notes and we were assigned to go home, write the script and bring it back the following weekend.

On Monday, Jack finished Jimmy Olsen #143 and at the end of it, he wrote in a "coming attraction" blurb about the Loch Ness story. He sent the issue off, then went to work on an issue of New Gods. A day or so later, Nelson Bridwell called him to say they'd received #143 and needed him to stop work on the New Gods and immediately do Jimmy Olsen #144 since the book was dangerously behind schedule. Jack, who was never late or behind on anything, was baffled how that could be until Bridwell explained it to him. Because of strong sales on Jack's first issues, the comic had upped from eight-issues-a-year to monthly — but no one had told Jack nor had anyone thought to readjust some schedules back in New York.

So he immediately started work on the Loch Ness story and I'm not entirely sure why he didn't have New York change that "next issue" blurb so he could instead use our script later. Maybe it didn't occur to him. Maybe it was that he needed an Olsen idea right that minute and the Loch Ness plot was all worked-out in his head. I assume he figured it would get the issue done quicker if he didn't try to deal with rewriting or fixing what we'd hand in…so he sat down and began writing and drawing it. Fortunately, I'd left the photo in his studio and as you can see, he used it as visual reference. He was probably looking at that still when he drew the above shot of the character based on Finlayson.

On Sunday, Steve and I delivered our finished script. We were a little stunned to find out that Jack was almost finished with the issue. I mean, usually editors at least read my work before they start rewriting it. What he came up with was, of course, much better…and it strayed a lot from the story we'd all agreed-upon the week before. I suspect the end product wasn't much different from what would have resulted if Jack had waited until he actually had our script before he started working on the issue.

Jack was very apologetic and he said he'd give us credit as co-authors, which we told him was not necessary. There's a long, irrelevant story of how he tried to put our names on anyway but they wound up not getting on…which was fine with us since the story was about 95% his. About all I contributed was to suggest Finlayson and to give Jack that still. That the idea to include Fin came from me doesn't invalidate anything Newgarden wrote since it was Jack who had the final decision to put Jimmy in there. I don't think he thought readers would recognize or know Finlayson (unlike the guest shot of Don Rickles in Jimmy Olsen). I think Jack just thought it was a great, expressive face and personality that would make for a good story. For Jack, that was all the reason he needed to do anything.

Noel Murray over at the A.V. Club offers an interesting analysis about an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show…the one entitled, "The Return of Happy Spangler." It may or may not have impacted what Murray wrote to note that the big monologue Rob Petrie delivers at the end is a routine that Van Dyke had performed on TV a number of times before that series…and he used it again from time to time after. He did it on that weird 1965 CBS variety special that was a tribute to Stan Laurel after he passed. So the script for "Happy Spangler" was probably written around that routine.