Monthly Archives: November 2011

As I've said here before (here, f'rinstance) I used to have gobs of respect for Professor Alan Dershowitz, the noted legal scholar and Talking Head. An awful lot of it went away not so much because he defended O.J. Simpson but went on a talk show binge defending his defense of O.J. Simpson and of that trial. I didn't expect better from a guy like F. Lee Bailey or Johnnie Cochran but I expected better from Dershowitz, who has been so eloquent and courageous in exposing hate crimes and religious persecution.

So now he's defending Joe Paterno, saying the coach should have been allowed to retire with dignity…as a giant who committed just the one mistake. No, I don't think so. Not unless Paterno did more to stop the abuse of young boys than has been reported thus far. I don't buy Dershowitz's justification that we should cut Paterno some slack because he was of a generation that had been taught it was wrong to "snitch." Wronger than child rape? Paterno received most of the kudos when the school's athletic program won trophies. He deserves a lot of the blame when the school's athletic program is disgraced. He does not deserve dignity.

Here's a nice little piece about Laurel & Hardy fans, some of whom I know, and how they gather for lunch to talk about their favorite comedians. Dick Bann and Randy Skretvedt are especially expert on this topic. If you want to know something about Stan and Ollie and neither Dick nor Randy have the answer, the question is officially and forever unanswerable.

One correction: Our pal Jim MacGeorge often plays Laurel when Chuck McCann plays Hardy in films and commercials but in the 1966 Laurel and Hardy cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera, Larry Harmon played Laurel and Jim played Hardy. Not the other way around.

Hey, what is Pepper Spray after all? I mean, besides something that gets used on old ladies and teenage girls when policemen and security guards are really, really bad at crowd control?

Hey, you know what we haven't done here for a while? The Lambeth Walk!

No, no. I'm kidding. What we really haven't done is look to see if Abe Vigoda is still alive. Oh, I hope so.

I should probably mention that this book is officially out. Advance-ordered copies are arriving. Amazon claims to have it in stock and people there are reviewing it. If the store where you purchase such things does not have it on its shelves, they'll either have it within days…or they had it and have already sold out and are awaiting replenishment.

This book is, of course, the long-awaited Volume One in a series that will reprint (in a dozen books total) the complete run of the syndicated strips that were Walt Kelly's Pogo. If you are familiar with that work, no further recommendations are needed. If you are not familiar with it, I recommend that you get familiar with it.

It's a wonderful book and though I am a Consulting Editor — I think that's my title — I can rave about it because I deserve very little credit for its wonderfulness. Any book that properly presents the work of Mr. Kelly is going to be, by definition, wonderful…and Carolyn Kelly (daughter of Walt, companion of mine) and Fantagraphics Books made sure it was properly presented. Carolyn's design work could not be more perfect for the occasion.

A few folks seem to be griping that it didn't come out when it was originally advertised to come out. Most seem to be hailing it as "well worth the wait" and hoping the next one won't be similarly delayed. It won't be. Believe me: We could have had it out on time if we'd been willing to run inferior copies of these strips. We now have a better idea of how daunting a task this is…and as the series progresses, it'll get easier. There are better copies around of most of the later material. It's just the first couple of years that were a huge problem.

I'm not sure what else to say here. I can give you an Amazon link to order one…or more. This is apparently going to be a great Christmas present for some people. Apart from that, the book speaks for itself. Walt Kelly's work always did and when it spoke, it said very witty, memorable things.

And I should add that when I first posted the previous message, I muddied things up even worse so I rewrote it to make it clearer. And I should thank Jim Amash for coming to my aid on this.

I mucked up the obit for Alvin Schwartz a bit, muddling the issue of who created the Bizarro character in the Superman family of comics.

Bizarro first appeared in print in Superboy #68, which was written by Otto Binder. Bizarro second appeared in print in the Superman newspaper strip, which was written by Alvin. Both were supervised by editor Mort Weisinger. Alvin always said that he created the character. I'm not sure if he wrote the script for the newspaper feature first or merely came up with the concept and sold Weisinger on it but he definitely said it was all his idea.

There is no record of whether Mssrs. Weisinger or Binder concurred with this history and since all three are now deceased, that's probably how the factual recital will remain. It would certainly not have been unusual for the scripts to have been written in a different sequence than their publication dates, and Weisinger was notorious for taking an idea pitched by one of his writers and assigning it to another.

In any case, Alvin says he came up with the idea and, not that this is proof of anything, he sure never struck me as the kind of guy to take credit for someone else's work. In any case, he refined and expanded on the idea in the newspaper strip and the Bizarro that people know and remember is surely more the invention of Schwartz than Binder. I should have been clearer in what I wrote and have amended the posting accordingly. I'm sorry…or as Bizarro #1 or Michele Bachmann would say, "Me am not sorry."