Monthly Archives: August 2014

Speaking of Republicans: Harry Shearer recreates Richard Nixon as he preps and delivers his resignation speech…

And here's the real footage. I think Shearer did a better job capturing Nixon…

Back in this post, I talked about the attempts in 1979 to get Animation Writers out of the Animation Union and into the Writers Guild. That attempt failed, as did a later attempt with which I was also involved.

Of the '79 attempt, I wrote, "Craft severance is very difficult to achieve and it's even harder when…the National Labor Relations Board is full of Republican appointees, as it was then so soon after Nixon." Correcting me, Gregory Thompson wrote me to say…

The NLRB was Democrat controlled in '79. Three Democrats and two Republicans, with a Democratic chairman. I suspect you were just doing a little reflexive G.O.P. bashing and assumed Republicans sided with the big studios. But I also doubt either party would have had much stake in a dispute between two labor unions.

He's right about the first part, I am amazed to learn. I was told what I was told at the time and it apparently was not true. But the second attempt in the early eighties was blocked by a Labor Board with Reagan appointees on it…and that was a very anti-labor N.L.R.B. Even one of the lawyers opposing us gloated that he'd win because of it…and he did. We triumphed easily at the local level where Democrats prevailed and it was overturned at the national level where Republican appointees held the power. The overturning made so little sense, it was later overturned but by that point, it didn't do us any good.

I no longer venture near labor law — my Norma Rae days are behind me — in part because it struck me as a rigged game. The guys in power would rule the way they wanted, regardless of the law or the evidence. And in neither case was it really a dispute between two labor unions. The opposition to us in the second case was the employer, a non-union animation company we were attempting to unionize.

In the 1979 matter, we wanted to leave a union that did a bad job of representing us and instead join one that would do a good job. The bad union fought us but their case was funded and directed by the employers. When I testified in that case, the lawyers on "their" side of the courtroom were from Disney, Warner Brothers, etc.

One of the many great things that happened at Comic-Con was the debut of The Sakai Project, a new book celebrating the work of our friend Stan Sakai. That's reason enough to do this book but there was an added purpose. The book is a fund-raiser to help out the Sakai family with bills relating to the illness of Stan's wife. Sharon Sakai, a lovely and wonderful woman, has an inoperable brain tumor. It has left her blind and deaf and while the Sakais do have health insurance, it does not cover every expense related to this horrible, horrible condition.

The book was a hit at the con…so much so that it kept selling out and more copies had to be FedExed in each day. And why shouldn't it be a hit? It's a beautiful book containing 262 artists, including most of the best ones working in comics today. Fred Patten gave it a very nice review and he reminds you that it will sell out soon and become quite a collector's item.

If you live in or around Los Angeles, you have a great opportunity to not only get the book but to get it autographed by quite a few of those artists plus the clown who did the foreword. I haven't seen it announced anywhere but this coming Saturday, August 16, a bevy of us will be appearing at Meltdown Comics up on Sunset to write our names in the copies you purchase. I'm not sure exactly who'll be there but I'll be there and Sergio Aragonés will be there and I bet Scott Shaw! and Bill Morrison and Tone Rodriguez and Stan Sakai himself will be there and I hear quite a few others will be present, as well.

It all happens from 4 PM to 6 PM. If you're in the area, there will never be a better time to buy one of these…and not just to help out the Sakais. You'll be doing yourself a favor at the same time.

Above is a photo from some sort of fancy dinner affair held on March 19, 1955. The people in the photo are, left to right: Joe E. Brown, Ray Bolger, Howard Keel, Connie Russell, President Dwight David Eisenhower, Lena Horne and Liberace. A pretty impressive gathering.

The most impressive person in there who isn't the Leader of the Free World is probably Ms. Horne, who was an amazing talent…and as you can see, she's wearing an impressive and amazing dress. A friend of mine who is related to Lena Horne has that dress and has just put it up for auction on eBay.

Have you ever longed to own a gown that adorned the lovely form of Lena Horne? That was once between President Eisenhower and Liberace? This could be your last chance.

Thirteen scientific terms you might be using wrong.

In 1993, the Kennedy Center honored Stephen Sondheim. Here's the little musical segment they did in salute to the man…

There's scattered talk of the House Republicans impeaching Barack Obama. So far, it looks like just another thing that's said just to fire up the folks in what Jon Stewart calls "Crazy Base World." Claiming they could prove he was born in Kenya has kind of lost its power so they have to come up with something…and who knows? Some of the things that were said to appease that group, like shutting down the government, have gotten out of anyone's control and actually happened. Lately, the threat seems to go something like this: "We absolutely loathe and hate everything about this 'president' and he'd damn well better not do anything to make us hate him more."

Joe Conason reminds us that the drive to impeach Bill Clinton started almost from the moment of his election, long before he'd ever met Monica Lewinsky. It empowered and enriched a lot of people who started the crusade to impeach Clinton before they even had a clue what the High Crime or Misdemeanor might be. A lot of those people are still around, still craving that empowerment and enrichment.

WonderCon Anaheim 2015 will be held April 3-5 at the Anaheim Convention Center. This again is Easter Weekend.

I haven't heard anything about WonderCon returning to San Francisco, other than that if it does, it would be in addition to Anaheim, most likely in the last three months of the year. I believe WonderCon Anaheim is here to stay.

Comic-Con International 2015 will be held July 9-12 (with Preview Night on July 8) at the San Diego Convention Center. If you have a 2014 badge, it may help you register for it so don't throw it away. I don't know why it's so early in the month this time.

From 1984 through 1986, I wrote a comic called Crossfire, which was one of my all-time favorite projects. I co-created the character with my friend Will Meugniot and the book was drawn by another friend, Dan Spiegle. It was published by a small publisher called Eclipse that after a few issues had trouble paying me because it was having trouble getting paid by its dealers and distributor…and there were other problems, like a flood that wiped out the company's office and most of its assets.

If we'd gotten paid in full for every copy sold, I think it might still be going…but that didn't happen. For the last half of its run, I wasn't getting paid much and sometimes nothing but I didn't care. I was having too much fun to stop. When we reached the stage where Dan, the letterer and the colorist might not get paid properly, I shut it down…reluctantly. A lot of people told me they missed it and the little essays I wrote in the back, which were not unlike a lot of things I now write on this blog.

One person who told me he missed the comic was a wonderful gent named Archie Goodwin, who was then the editor of the Epic (creator-owned) line for Marvel. I was already doing Groo for them and one day at a comic convention in Texas, Archie took me to lunch and said he wanted a book like Crossfire in his line. He said, "Come up with something you can do with Dan Spiegle and we'll publish it." That was a nice offer so when I got home, I invented a comic that was more science-fictiony and super-heroic than Crossfire. I figured that was what Marvel would like…and I had a premise that would allow me to do the same kinds of stories that people, or at least Archie, seemed to like about Crossfire.

I wrote a script, Dan drew about eight pages and at the next convention Archie and I both attended, I presented them to him. The next day of the con, we met for lunch and I learned that having a proposal rejected by Archie Goodwin was a more pleasant experience than having one accepted by some editors I've known. He essentially said, "I like this a lot and I'll buy it if this is the book you want to do but I was hoping for something with no super-heroics or s-f or fantasy in it."

He went on to explain that the folks at Marvel in charge of such things were looking for something that might snag young women aged 16-24 who, research told them, were not attracted to the current Marvel line. The company was working out a deal to put a small comics display near the section of many bookstores and newsstands that sold Harlequin Romances and other (allegedly) female-directed publications. The problem, he said, was that Marvel really didn't have the right product to put on it.

"Give me something set in Hollywood with adventure and soap opera overtones," Archie requested. He mentioned the newspaper strip, On Stage, which he loved and which he'd written for a time. "Something like that," he said, and he suggested I try to get the word "Hollywood" into the title.

That afternoon, I took a long walk to mull, then went back to my room and wrote down some notes for a book called Hollywood Superstars. Archie and I talked it out the next day and he said, before I'd written a page of it or Dan even knew of its existence, "You've got a deal."

He made two requests of a creative nature. In Crossfire, the title character drove a light blue 1957 Thunderbird, in part because I was then driving a light blue 1957 Thunderbird. Archie wanted one of the Hollywood Superstars to drive a light blue 1957 Thunderbird. "Fine with me," I said. The other request was that I not yield to the temptation to introduce fantasy or super-heroics into the book. He had a hunch about a potential new audience that could be reached if I didn't drive them off by trying to attract the Wolverine fans. "Now, you've got a deal," I told him.

But as it turned out, neither of us had a deal — a deal on paper, anyway. The terms were fairly simple and quite standard but it somehow took close to a year to work out the minor points. We would literally spend less time writing and drawing Hollywood Superstars than we did waiting for the contract. By the time it arrived and we could begin work, two big things had changed at Marvel. One was that Archie had left. The other was that no one there seemed to have any interest in a rack near where they sold Harlequin Romances or in chasing that elusive female readership. There didn't even seem to be any interest at that moment in publishing anything that wouldn't attract Wolverine fans.

Which was their right. In hindsight, I kinda wish they'd come to me and said, "Look, we know our editor asked you for this comic but our publishing interests have changed and we don't think we can sell it right now. How about if we work with you and Mr. Spiegle to come up with something we do want to publish?" I'm skeptical that Hollywood Superstars would have sold well even if Marvel had been gung-ho excited about publishing it. Not in that marketplace, not without something like Archie's proposed alternative marketing plan. But I knew for sure it wouldn't sell if the folks at Marvel disliked the whole concept as much as some of them seemed to dislike it. Alas, they didn't propose any alternative deal. Instead, they sent me a schedule of when to deliver the first issue of Hollywood Superstars…so Dan and I went to work.

As I recall, they had the right to cancel after #4 and I told Dan that was all we'd probably do. For some reason, we wound up doing five before they pulled the plug. My guess? Someone there just got too busy and forgot to cancel it sooner.

I hope none of this sounds like I'm complaining. At the time, a few things bothered me, most notably a very rude (and wholly unnecessary) phone call I received from one of the Marvel editors up there. He acted like I had somehow tricked Marvel into publishing a comic they didn't want to publish and suggested that if I thought that was what Marvel readers wanted to buy, I really didn't understand the comic book industry. A year or so later, he came up to me at Comic-Con, told me Archie Goodwin had explained the whole thing to him, and he apologized. So that stopped bothering me.

The thing that did for a long time was the color separation work on the book. Back before we had computer coloring, back when this book was done, colorists colored stats of the pages and then a color separator would convert that work to negatives that could be burned onto printing plates. Marvel worked with some firms that did that very well but they had a few that did poor-to-mediocre work. Hollywood Superstars was assigned to one of the latter kind and they did such bad separations that Dan, colorist Tom Luth and I can barely stand to look at the printed books. If you ever do, trust me: Tom did the usual excellent job you see on the other comics he's colored.

But happily, neither you nor I nor anyone has to look at those badly-reproduced comics now to read the stories in Hollywood Superstars. Nat Gertler's About Comics has just issued a collection of all five stories in black-and-white. (No, the essays are not included but most of them are on this site.) I just got mine and I enjoyed it a lot, especially the nice back cover blurb from one of the best writers in comics today, Kurt Busiek.

This is the extent of the Hard Sell you'll get out of me. If you'd like to purchase a copy, here's the link. Hope you use it. Hope you like what you get. If nothing else, the artwork by Dan Spiegle is superb.

I have a bunch of messages asking me to weigh in on the Amazon-Hachette squabble. Well, I would if I felt I understood it well enough to have a firm opinion. I do note that most of my author friends are siding with Hatchette so that might well be where I'd land…but that's only if I really felt I had a grasp of the issues, which I don't. Yet. So far, I like the analogy where you're standing on the street watching King Kong and Godzilla fighting to the death atop some skyscrapers and someone comes up to you and asks, "Which side are you rooting for?"

The correct answer is, "Neither! I'm just hoping neither one crushes me."

I read the latest Amazon statement and taken just by itself, it seems to make a lot of sense except where it tries to invoke and misquote George Orwell. And then I read the latest Hachette statement and taken just by itself, it seems to make a lot of sense. When taken together, you find yourself thinking the truth is somewhere in the middle…and that's not necessarily right, either.

I think it's a natural human trait to seek truth in the center but it's not always there. If Stanley thinks Oliver owes him $300 and Oliver thinks he owes Stanley $100, the truth is not automatically $200. One of those guys may just be totally wrong. People try to settle disputes like that all the time and it's sometimes applicable…but not always. Imagine we were arguing over when Abraham Lincoln was born and I said 1809 and you said 1813. That would not mean Honest Abe was born in 1811.

I'm going to wait and see if (a) I learn enough about what this is all about to have an opinion or (b) I don't have to because it gets settled soon. The latter would be nice for all concerned and it would save me the time 'n' trouble of understanding it all.

There is perhaps someone somewhere on the Internet who is capable of producing musical notes and hasn't uploaded their interpretation of "Bohemian Rhapsody." Here is Surrey Harmony's Barbershop version. Don't miss the part where they smash their guitars. (I'm not kidding. They actually smash their guitars…)

I very much enjoyed the Dick Cavett special on Watergate. It runs many times on PBS channels the next few days and I suggest you grab a viewing while you can.

Reading as much as I have about Nixon and that scandal in particular, I've always been a bit uncomfy with the attempts to psychoanalyze the man. Too often, I see people try to draw direct lines between certain known facts of his childhood and certain actions he took as President of the United States…or on his way to becoming that. The connections simultaneously seem too pat and too strained, and I'm never quite sure of their relevancy. I just think people are too complicated to be completely explained that way.

Nevertheless, it's obvious that so much of the Watergate Horrors, as some called them, were rooted in Nixon's personality and paranoias. Even when he clearly had the '72 election in the proverbial bag, he and his men were still willing to cast ethics aside and even hijack campaign donations that might have gone to elect more Republicans, just to run up the score and extract some vengeance from anyone who'd ever opposed or faulted him. It was the "them or us" mindset that ultimately became self-destructive.

Years after Watergate, I worked on a TV show where the producer/showrunner had a seething hatred for The Network. Every third sentence out of his mouth was about how inept and treacherous The Network was and I found myself not only on staff but within a kind of "bunker mentality" founded on contempt for those outside the bunker.

Within this environment, if you somehow failed at your assignment, it was not acceptable to go to the producer and say, "Sorry, I couldn't do it." What you had to say, as everyone learned, was: "I had it working but then those assholes at The Network sabotaged me." That was not only acceptable but it endeared you to the producer. You were part of the team, having spilled blood in the war that he fought day and night on the show…and sometimes in his mind.

Not that the excuse was always wrong. The Network did have the ability to screw up its programs, usually by incompetence more than deliberate subversion…although there were instances of the latter. But The Network wasn't always at fault. We on the staff could botch things up ourselves quite nicely and did. And when you did, you blamed The Network because that was always believed and, of course, it was a bonding experience with your employer and it make him — the producer/showrunner — loathe The Network all the more.

I watched this for a few weeks with the nagging feeling I knew it from somewhere and then it hit me: The Talent Coordinator blaming The Network for not being able to book Charo was like the Nixon White House Aide blaming The Press for his inability to carry out some presidential order. (The Nixon by Nixon documentary on HBO includes an excerpt from the tapes with Nixon saying over and over, "The press is the enemy! The press is the enemy!") One of the reasons Nixon hated his enemies so was that he was always willing, maybe even eager to believe they were screwing him.

There's a quote from some famous general about how to key to success in battle is to neither overestimate nor underestimate your enemy. You can get killed making either mistake, though underestimating is usually the greater error. In the entire tale of Richard M. Nixon, I've seen only one moment when he seemed to buy into that. It was that moment in his farewell speech where he said goodbye to the White House staff before flying off to exile. He said…

Always remember that others may hate you but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.

That sounds like an admission that he'd done just that but I wonder. With Nixon, you always had to wonder.

I've been watching a number of Watergate history specials and having a wonderful time wallowing. That was a fascinating time in this country and there was much to be learned about human nature, politics, the essence of America and many other topics. Amazingly, information is still coming out about it all and we're learning more about it…and not in the way that, for example, new "information" miraculously emerges about the Kennedy Assassination to bolster new conspiracy theories. John W. Dean has a new book in which he painstakingly transcribed passages of the fabled Nixon Tapes to tell more of the story. Dean and Bob Woodward have an interview running on CSpan2 this weekend that my TiVo is awaiting.

In this interview, Dean goes over some points in his book, one of which is that for all his expertise at politics, Richard Nixon was not very bright when it came to managing scandals. Others have suggested it flowed from an insane paranoia at ever having any failings pointed out, which in turn was why he hated the press so. Nixon doesn't seem to have hated just the portions of the press that had ever been openly hostile to him. He hated the whole idea of anyone writing about him who was out of his control. The whole idea of taping his private conversations seems to have come from that; so if Henry Kissinger somehow got credit for a sound Nixon decision, Nixon could haul out the tapes, edit them judiciously and say, "Here, listen to this!" Ultimately, of course, it was not the existence of those tapes but the fact that he couldn't selectively edit and release them that ruined his reputation and presidency.

The new tapes that are now being played and transcribed make Nixon look petty, childish and at times, very antisemitic. There's a terrific special running on HBO these days that plays excerpts of many of them in understandable context. It's called Nixon by Nixon: In His Own Words. I'm saving that one. Also looking forward to Dick Cavett's Watergate, which debuts tonight on most PBS stations. Will Harris, who often sends in items for this blog, says it's great and he interviewed Cavett about it.

All these shows continue to largely overlook my favorite Watergate figure. Some time here, I wrote…

Nixon's most prominent supporter, at least during the Watergate mess, was a rabbi named Baruch Korff, a man of sterling reputation and sincerity, though he was largely clueless about Washington and the president he backed. Given Nixon's power and '72 landslide, you would have thought his chief public defender would have been some G.O.P. biggie — a senator or governor but no. All those guys dove under their desks when evidence of Nixonian lawlessness began to leak, especially when it was revealed that endless hours of private Nixon conversations might become public. Rabbi Korff rode in and filled the position nobody else wanted. Some nights, when newsmen had to report the latest bad news for Nixon and they looked around for a spokesperson who could defend the then-president, Korff was often the only human being willing to go on camera in that role. That was a big part of what doomed Nixon: Few Republicans wanted to tether their futures to his…and Rabbi Korff, who wound up making the public case for R.M.N. was a thoroughly inept advocate.

Korff had an impossible job. It was bad enough that he had to explain "Nixon's side" of so many revelations without knowing what it was…or would be. (Nixon's strategy seemed to be to let all the bad stuff come out, then try to weave an innocent, self-exonerating explanation.) What made the Rabbi's chore even harder was that as Oval Office conversations leaked or were officially released, so was all that presidential anti-semitism. Korff discounted it, explaining it couldn't be so — never mind what Nixon actually said — because of the president's strong support of Israel. That was a weak defense — the "some of my best friends" gambit. And now we have these new tapes showing how Nixon admired Israeli Jews and distrusted their American counterparts. Exactly what you would have expected of the man. It's amazing how "readable" he was in these regards, just as it's amazing how Rabbi Korff turned out to be wrong about darn near everything.

No one will ever make it but I thought there was a great movie there. Rabbi Korff had some self-promotional reasons for doing what he did but at times, I saw no one else on the TV Watergate coverage who didn't seem primarily concerned with saving his own butt. He genuinely seemed baffled at how Washington and the press corps operated, and distressed that so few of those who'd supported Nixon when it was personally advantageous were willing to stick their necks out for him when he was under attack. The newly-scrutinized tapes make a good case that hiding under one's desk, as so many one-time Nixon allies did, was a sound strategy.

Here's forty minutes of footage of the construction of Disneyland, complete with many shots of Walt himself. It's amazing how fast they built the place…

I am currently on a quest to get the Avast Software company to cancel my subscription to its virus-checking program and to refund my money on an add-on product of theirs that just plain wouldn't install on my computer. This is not easy. You can phone their Tech Support department 24/7 and you can phone their Billing department during certain hours but neither department has the power to do anything about cancellations or refunds. That is handled only by submitting a particular kind of Support Ticket…and they kinda hide the submission link on their website. Then they promise to get back to you in 2-3 working days…and don't.

What do you do when they don't respond to your Support Ticket? Why, you submit another Support Ticket, of course.

There are many websites that test Virus Checkers and tell you which ones perform best. I'd like to see a website that reports on how easy it is to cancel your subscription. This is not the first time I've had this problem.

Today is two weeks since I started trying to cancel Avast and I have received no response from them other than robotic messages telling me they'd received my latest Support Ticket and I'd hear from them in 2-3 working days. Oh — I did get one message from a guy in Tech Support asking me to write out everything I told three different Avast Tech Support people on the phone before they all gave up on helping me get the product installed. It's starting to look like I need a special Virus Checker that will protect me from other Virus Checkers.