Monthly Archives: May 2012

An interview with John Benson and a brief history (with great illustrations) of Squa Tront, the leading fanzine devoted to EC Comics.

Bhob Stewart has been trying to find examples from Martin Landau's career as a cartoonist.

The Comic Art Professional Society is a Los Angeles-based organization of folks who create comics. It was founded in 1977 by Don Rico, Sergio Aragonés and myself and it's still going strong. At the moment, it's having its annual auction to raise money…and the way it works is that half goes to help defray the organization's operating expenses and half goes to a worthy cause. This year, the worthy cause is to donate in honor of the late Dave Stevens (a CAPS member) and raise bucks for the Hairy Cell Leukemia Foundation. Hairy Cell Leukemia is what took our pal Dave away from us in 2008.

There are many fine pieces up for bid on May 31 — that's this coming Thursday — some of them prints of Dave's work (like the above) and some of them images of Dave's character The Rocketeer rendered by others, and there are some other goodies. Go take a look because there's probably something there you'd love to own and you can get it and give money to a good cause at the same time.  You only have a few days!

Mitt Romney's proposals for how to "repeal and replace Obamacare" are a little vague and surely deliberately so. But Jonathan Cohn has done an analysis of what is known and says that most of them point to millions of people losing coverage. He quotes David Cutler, an economist at Harvard and former consultant to President Obama: "Never before in history has a candidate run for President with the idea that too many people have insurance coverage."

I'm not back. It just looks that way. I'm still battling a deadline and you'll know when I finish because regular posting will resume. Or if you're in Southern California, maybe you'll hear me snoring.

People often ask me — in fact, I think I'm asked a version of it in the video below — how one deals with deadlines. The answer is to just do the work. Do it as quickly as you can without losing your perspective on what you're doing…and if you're a professional of any tenure, you should know how that feels. But you just have to do it and not, for example, spend a lot of time agonizing over how you can't do it or how impossible it will be to do it. If you have twelve hours to complete something, worrying for two hours is just going to leave with you ten hours to do what you feared you couldn't do in twelve.

It's also important to keep the importance in perspective: Don't trivialize it but don't overstate it, especially to yourself. My first agent used to say about almost anything I was writing, "Hey, it ain't the moon shot. Nobody dies if you screw up." That can be real comforting to remember.

But mainly, the most important thing to remember when you have an impossible deadline is that it helps to not spend time writing blog posts about how to meet deadlines. I think I'll try that.

This is the second part of my interview for the Animation Guild and it starts with a rerun of the last minute or two of the first part. I talk about all sorts of things but mostly myself…

A number of Conservative authors have been selling an odd view of the Civil Rights movement in this country, especially the gains made by blacks in the sixties. They give an awful lot of credit to Republicans for liberating minorities and saving them from those danged racist Democrats. It's true there were racist Democrats but I sure remember them as atypical…and angry at what their party did along these lines. Anyway, Jonathan Chait has a pretty scathing rebuttal to what he sees as the new revisionism. And don't miss his last paragraph.

Number two hundred and forty in a series…

Some wonderful person has put my personal e-mail address on a mailing list that is being bought or acquired by folks in the entertainment industry who send out press releases. I do have a special e-mail address for stuff like that. It's press@newsfromme.com and I welcome anything sent to that address. But suddenly, a flurry of e-mailed press releases are coming to my personal address, the one to which human beings send real messages.

A lot of these press releases seem to think I'm a huge website like Slate or Salon and they're offering to set up personal phone interviews for me with TV and movie stars or authors. So far, it's no one I yearn to meet but one of these days, I may just take them up on one of these offers.

The main thing I'm thinking of doing is starting a policy that if anyone sends an unsolicited press release to one of my e-mail addresses other than the one above, I'll write a little sentence about the movie, TV show, product, CD, book (whatever it is) and say it's a piece of dogshit. It'll be interesting to see if that makes the unsolicited press releases stop and if so, how fast. Maybe if I also write that the people responsible for the dogshit are probably sex criminals…

I may be away from this blog for a day or three trying to finish a script that must be finished. I may also try sleeping, which I haven't done so far today. But I leave you with…me.

The Animation Guild is doing a series of interviews with folks in the cartoon field and they finally worked their way down to me. Last Monday, I sat for a few hours and answered questions from the union's Business Rep, Steve Hulett.

(As an aside: Long ago and far away, I had a number of problems with that labor organization to which I then belonged. Or more specifically, the man then running it did things that caused some of us to debate: Incompetent or deliberately working against the interests of those he was supposed to represent? Things got a whole lot better for all when that guy was replaced by Steve.)

But as Bette Midler says, enough about them and more about me: What follows is Part 1 of a two-part interview with Yours Truly. It runs 51 minutes and the second part, which I'll embed mañana, is longer. I won't fault you if you don't make it all the way through. I couldn't without getting sick of me.

I thought we'd talk mostly about my cartoon writing career and some of that's in there but we ended up discussing all sorts of things I've written and how I got this job or that job…

If you like interviews with Stephen Colbert, here's one he did for one of the many websites that follow his work. And it's not about the kind of topics you usually hear him talk about.

The Wall Street Journal, not exactly a fan of President Obama, says that it's a myth that he has been on a reckless spending spree. "There has been no huge increase in spending under the current president, despite what you hear," they say. Great. But I think one of the places I've heard that has been The Wall Street Journal.

Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett has his proof that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii so apparently Obama's name will appear on the presidential ballot there. In this post, I wondered what that was all about since this was how the drama had to play out. Why, I pondered out loud, did Bennett even bring it up at all?

Then I got to thinking and may have answered my own question. I think a lot of the illogical things we hear candidates say are said because one specific donor with a lot of money wanted them said. Yes, they may alienate certain potential voters but it's a long time to Election Day. There's plenty of time for those voters to forget or to be whipped up against the opposition. Right now, the idea is to get the money.

Bennett wants to run for governor. So my guess is he met some wealthy Arizona tycoon who leans heavily to the right on account of that's the side where he carries his wallet. The guy is Birther Loco and he said to Bennett, "I might be inclined to support you with some serious money if you were the kind of guy who'd make an effort to get that Kenyan Socialist's name off the Arizona ballot." (There's talk Obama may be able to carry the state and that must drive some folks there mad.)

Bennett knows there's no way to deny Obama a slot on the ballot but the Rich Birther doesn't want to admit that. So Bennett does what he does and now he can go to that potential donor and say, "Well, I tried. Now, about that campaign contribution…" It's gotta be something like that.