Monthly Archives: October 2013

Comics writer Mark Waid has penned an important "Open Letter to Young Freelancers" which I think is mistitled because almost everything in it that's valid also applies to old freelancers. My esteemed colleague is right that it's key to success to do good work and also to be professional about it, which generally means meeting deadlines. Balancing those two imperatives is not easy and a lot of us err on one side or the other.

It's important, I think, to be aware of the process; to understand what damage, if any, you do to the overall product by being late if (and this is a humongous "if") you're actually late because you're making your contribution better. If you're late because you just plain weren't doing the work, that's a whole 'nother matter. If I take two more weeks than planned to finish a script, that may mean the artist has two weeks less than he planned, which may be two weeks less than he needs to do his best work. I also may screw up his life because it delays work he'd expected at a certain time and/or a paycheck he expected at a certain time.

There's one bit of advice that Mark doesn't give so this one will: If you're being treated badly in comics, maybe you ought to spend some of your time pursuing some other field. I've never met anyone who could write a good comic book who couldn't write a good something-else. I have met a few guys who wanted to be "in comics" so badly that they neglected other opportunities, thereby making themselves virtual prisoners of this field that wasn't treating them too well. One of the keys to being comfortable in any kind of gig as a freelance writer is to remember the "freelance" part and be able to walk out the door if things become intolerable.

I'm going to use the word "employers" here but when you're a freelance writer, "customers" might sometime be the more applicable noun. I've been a professional writer since June of 1969 and in all that time, I've never been without paying work for more than, oh, about six hours. A few times in there, paying work didn't pay but that's another matter. At no point in what I jokingly call my career has more than around 80% of my income come from any one employer and it's been rare that all the employers I did work for were in the same line of work. There have been times when a comic book company offered me all the work I could handle. Even then, I was also writing for TV, also writing for non-comic magazines, also writing for stand-up comedians, etc. The mix has varied over the years but it's always been a mix.

There are many reasons for this and I'm not even sure which is the most important. One is that I think it's helped the quality of the work. I learned things doing one kind of writing that I could apply to another. Another is that it's always nice to have a little insurance because you never know when the flow will suddenly stop from one source. It's financially prudent to have another flow in reserve.

And also I've found that you and your work are just plain treated better by people who don't own you. You shouldn't, except in the most extreme situations, actually threaten to take a hike…but most employers respect a guy who can. (There are employers where the opposite is true: They don't want you around if they can't own you. I don't want to work for or with those people anyway. At least for me, it never ends well.)

There are downsides to juggling multiple employers — days when I have a TV producer on Line 1 saying, "I must have that script today" and a comic book editor on Line 2 telling me the same thing. I have that at the moment which makes me wonder why I'm taking the time to write this. But it's still better than having everything riding on one professional relationship. So I think I'd better stop blogging and go make those two employers happy…

If you're anywhere near my age (61) and you grew up where I grew up (Los Angeles), you either listened to 93 KHJ or prided yourself on being too hip or refined to listen to that particular radio station. KHJ "Boss Radio" played the same hits as every other channel and its "boss jocks" didn't add or subtract much except to hit a high energy level as they back-announced records…but it was "the" radio station for a generation or so in these here parts.

That was late sixties. Around 1975, everyone outgrew that format at once, ratings plunged and KHJ went in search of a new raison d'être. For a year or three there, they tried something called "The Rhythm of Southern California." That didn't work. Then the station went to country-western. That didn't work.

They went back to Boss Radio, selling themselves as an oldies station. That didn't work. Then they went to something they called Car Radio, which was a lot of traffic reports interrupted for the occasional song. That didn't work. Then they changed the station name to KRTH-AM to try and coast on the success of KRTH-FM, an FM station with the same ownership but a more successful easy-listening format. KRTH-AM tried to split the difference between oldies and easy-listening and — you guessed it — that didn't work. Then the fit hit the shan…

For a decade or so, the parent company — RKO General — had been under continuous investigation and indictment for unethical and perhaps illegal business practices and in 1989, the F.C.C. ordered them to sell off their radio stations and their one TV station, KHJ Channel 9. What had once been KHJ radio was snatched up by a company that brought in a Spanish-language format. That worked…and it's continued to work to this day. At some point in there, the call letters even reverted to KHJ.

Let's go back to that brief period when they were trying to sell "The Rhythm of Southern California," whatever that is or was. Our video today is more of an audio. It's 7+ minutes of the jingles that were recorded to give the station its identity…and I think you can understand what went wrong just from them. Someone brought in the late, great Paul Frees to do his kinda-like-Orson-Welles voice and it just sounds creepy…like trying to have a dance party in the Haunted Mansion or something. You won't want to listen to the whole thing but listen to a few of the jingles with Mr. Frees and ask yourself if you'd have any desire to tune to this station…or for that matter, any idea what the hell this "rhythm" business was all about. I listened a bit while they were trying the Rhythm Method and I had no idea other than that the disc jockeys tried to sound more mellow and they played a lot of Simon sans Garfunkel…

They're toying with me! Usually, the Souplantation chain offers my favorite soup, their Classic Creamy Tomato, for all of March and then one week in October…although I think they skipped the October week last year. This year, the Souplantations near me — I haven't checked them nationwide — will be offering it for four days later this month: October 17-20. This is the first time I've ever heard of them putting out a soup for four days but I guess I should be grateful for even that. I shall plan my soup-eating accordingly. Here's where you can check the menu for your area, assuming you're within souping distance of any outlets of the Souplantation or its sister chain, Sweet Tomatoes.

Ezra Klein on what's going on in Washington. This all sounds correct to me, especially this paragraph…

To the White House, the shutdown/debt ceiling fight is quite simple, and quite radical: Republicans are trying to create a new, deeply undemocratic pathway through which a minority party that lost the last election can enact an agenda that would never pass the normal legislative process. It's nothing less than an effort to use the threat of a financial crisis to nullify the results of the last election. And the White House isn't going to let it happen.

Nor should they.

For some reason, I've gotten hooked lately watching the reruns of Dragnet and Adam-12 on MeTV, which may be my favorite channel if only for its name. I've always thought of my life kind of as "me" TV.

The Dragnets are a lot of fun when its star-producer-writer-director Jack Webb wasn't lecturing people about drugs and/or the responsibility of having a badge. I don't think a lot of folks know that those shows were shot as rapidly as possible. They limited exteriors — and when they did venture out, they shot scenes for multiple episodes since Webb and his co-star Harry Morgan always wore the same clothes.

Dialogue scenes were done with heavy reliance on TelePrompters. Mr. Webb had a certain way he wanted the show to "sound" and the way he got his desired delivery out of most actors was to not let them see scripts in advance or memorize lines. They'd show up on the set, find out what they were playing and then they'd read their parts right off the prompter. After each good take, Webb (who directed most of 'em) would tell the TelePrompter operator to speed up the crawl a bit. The actors would read their parts over and over, a bit faster each time…and when they got to the point where they sounded like Alvin, Simon or Theodore, Webb would designate that the next-to-last "take" be the one used. It sounded odd at times but it sure got a lot of story into some of those half-hours.

Mr. Webb also produced Adam-12. I like this show first of all because it was set in Los Angeles so you get a lot of shots of L.A. in the early seventies and I can recognize many of the locations. I like the rapport between Martin Milner and Kent McCord and I like the surprising selection of actors who have small roles in some of them. The other day, they ran an episode where Officers Reed and Malloy stopped Keefe Brasselle for speeding. It was probably the last time he showed his face on TV. I'm surprised no one has done a big book or movie about Mr. Brasselle, one of the more — shall we say "colorful?" — folks in the history of television, a man who mysteriously got his own prime-time variety show on CBS despite no one knowing who the heck he was.

In 1972, I was working for Western Publishing, writing an awful lot of their Gold Key comics line. I worked for the West Coast office which produced about half their comics and there was an East Coast office that handled the other half. The company made a deal to do an Adam-12 comic book, it was assigned to the West Coast office and the senior editor there, Chase Craig, told me he wanted me to write it and Dan Spiegle to draw it. That was fine with Dan and me…but then intra-company politics intervened and the book was shifted to the New York office where it was written by Paul S. Newman and John David Warner, and drawn by Jack Sparling and Mike Roy.

There were no hard feelings — Dan and I had plenty of other work — but when I visited the New York offices shortly after, the editors there apparently thought I was upset and they asked me if I'd read the book they were doing and if I had any criticisms of it. I said the writing and art were fine (which they were) but that it was sure obvious the folks doing the comic didn't know Los Angeles. The scenery looked nothing like my home town and there would be frequent geographic boo-boos — like a police call to the intersection of Pico and Wilshire…or some other two streets that never cross. Or I think in one issue, someone was at the main police station, which is way downtown, and they took a short walk to the beach, which is in reality quite some distance away.

The editors in New York admitted that was a problem and after that, they occasionally called me for L.A. technical advice to ask if these two streets intersected or if this famous location was near that famous location. I guess that was easier than buying a map.

Anyway, as I'm now watching Adam-12 reruns, I'm starting to notice that Reed and Malloy keep getting calls to go to the corner of Lankershim and Santa Monica Boulevard…or some other non-existent intersection. Or you'll see them out in front of the Hot Dog Show on Riverside out in Toluca Lake and they'll get an urgent call to hurry to Beverly and Fairfax, which is a good half-hour away, and they'll say, "We can be there in three minutes!" So maybe the comic book was more accurate than I thought, at least in replicating the TV show.

Let's watch some clips from Johnny Carson's 1955 CBS TV series. This was the series Johnny later called his greatest professional failure and blamed its short run on a mistake he said he made: Deferring to others too much and letting his producers steer him into material that was wrong for him. In the episodes I've seen, I don't see that. It seems to me he was doing the same kinds of jokes and sketches that he later did on The Tonight Show when he was the guy in the charge. I think the problem was that he came off as cold and mechanical, whereas later he developed a little twinkle that made him a more appealing performer.

The person who selected these clips picked ones that feature actors who are best known to us today for their work supplying cartoon voices. First up is June Foray, who did a fair amount of on-camera work in the fifties, much of it with Mr. Carson. Later, we have Sara Berner and then John Stephenson. Ms. Berner was a popular radio actress and she was heard in a lot of Warner Brothers and Walter Lantz cartoons. For instance, that's her doing the Mother Buzzard in Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid, the cartoon that introduced Beaky Buzzard. Mr. Stephenson was heard in hundreds of Hanna-Barbera cartoons, usually as a villain. His most recognizable role was probably as Fred Flintstone's boss, Mr. Slate. And now, herrrrre's Johnny…

Kinda busy today finishing the script for the first issue of a new comic book series I agreed to write. I think the publisher is going to officially announce it next week at the New York Comic Con and once they do, I'll tell you about it here. This is not the secret project that I mentioned back here. That one involves a forthcoming Blu-ray/DVD release that should be divulged shortly. Some of you have already guessed what it is but I am unable at this time to confirm or deny.

I'm more fascinated than I probably oughta be about how this Shutdown Melodrama will play out…and now it seems to be merging with the pending battle over raising the Debt Limit. This whole thing stopped long ago being about what was good for the country and it's now about Winning and Losing. If I had to bet on how it will all end, I'd bet Obama will get 90% of what he wants and Republicans will feverishly try and spin their 10% as a "win." But I also think it's a lose/lose situation for everyone and that The System needs serious reform so that the folks we elect to govern can actually do some of that. I don't expect that to happen.

I like my new iPhone 5S even more this morning than I did last night. I don't know why though the Apple people don't have an easier way to export data from one iPhone and input it into another. It would seem to me that they like the idea of folks upgrading so they could make it simpler and faster. I need to find a good case for my new acquisition and I also want to buy a little stand/charger that will hold it even when it has that case on it.

On with my day. Back to you soon.

• House GOP considers merging Shutdown and Debt Limit fights. Because everything else they've planned has gone exactly as they hoped.

I upgraded to one of these today…the iPhone 5S. I had a 3G and going from that to this is like trading in Fred Flintstone's car for a new Lexus.

This posting would be funnier if I had something to complain about but my visit to the Apple Store was swift and easy. I had a bit of trouble once I got home with making all my apps and settings appear on the new device but a quick call to the Apple Support Team solved the problem. So I've spent some of the evening playing with the thing — and figuring out what I can make Siri do and what I can't make her do. I have the feeling there's some perverted question I can ask her that will evoke the response, "Sorry, I'm not that kind of app."

So far, I like my new phone. I don't like the necessity of buying a new case and new chargers and new cables and such but such is the curse of technology. I'll let you know if I have any problems with it.

• John Boehner's starting to act like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "Your leg's off!" "No, it isn't!"

David Weigel describes the last twelve hours before the Shutdown. Doesn't sound to me like anyone here has ever played Stratego™ and learned to think a move or two ahead.

Jonathan Chait explains the Republican strategy, not just with regard to the current shutdown but with everything, lo these past years.

So here we are: Obamacare is open for business and the United States of America is not. Lovely. Playing Armchair President for a minute, I think Obama oughta hit them hard on the point that if the entire House of Representatives were to vote on a clean spending bill, it would probably pass. And the U.S. government has been shut down, a lot of damage has been and will continue to be done, because John Boehner and/or the forces holding him at knifepoint, won't allow that vote of the entire House.

I do have this mental image (with sound) of Boehner on the phone to Obama or maybe Harry Reid, saying, "Look…you've got to give me some sort of concession we can hold up as a victory so we can back off this position."