Monthly Archives: May 2016

In this message, I asked folks to send in questions for me to answer on this here blog. Here's one from Ira W., who read the question I answered here yesterday…

Thank you for telling us how the staff at DC wanted to get Jack Kirby to draw more like other artists and less like Jack Kirby. I find it amazing but I guess I shouldn't. That kind of thing seems to happen a lot on creative enterprises. My question is why you think this happens. Why do people want to change others' work?

Well, let's be honest: There are times when someone's work isn't very good and it does need to be changed. I've rewritten other writers and other writers have rewritten me and there have even been times when we've rewritten together in the same room. One should not get into a collaborative art form if one is adverse to collaborating.

But what you're talking about mainly are changes that seem arbitrary or gratuitous. In comics, I once heard someone praise an editor by saying, "He isn't the kind of guy who has to change things just to prove he's making a contribution." That is a very good trait because there are guys in charge and gals in charge who do that; who demand or make alterations in the works of others because they're afraid they won't get enough credit if they don't put some fingerprints on it and then it's successful. (By the way and to forestall questions about who the editor was that was said about, it was Archie Goodwin.)

It's kind of a win/win situation for those who'd tamper with your work: If the project is successful and acclaimed, they can take some bows for it and try to steer folks into thinking it was the editorial guidance and alterations that made it fly. If the project flops…oh, of course that's the fault of the guy they rewrote, only they maybe don't mention that they did that. Or it's "I tried but even I couldn't save the disaster he handed in."

But it isn't always Office Politics at work. Sometimes, it's a matter of nerves. A lot of folks can't grasp the concept that if you keep fussing with something and making changes, you are not necessarily making it better. I once had some dealings with a movie studio exec — a guy with the power to green-light projects and to decide which screenplays would get made. Each of those decisions was him deciding his company would spend X million bucks and the "X" was usually not a single digit.

Obviously, if you guess wrong on enough of those decisions, you get fired and your career and huge salary go away so he was scared to be wrong. One way he dealt with that fear was to have scripts rewritten and rewritten and rewritten. He probably had a lot of perfectly-fine scripts rewritten and perhaps ruined as he postponed the moment when he might have to say, "Yes, let's spend 50 million making this one." He was eventually sacked, not so much because he was green-lighting the wrong projects but because he wasn't green-lighting enough projects, period.

This is just something you have to deal with as a writer. Some of the producers and editors you work with are great and wise and sane and when they change things or ask you to change things, they're quite often right. And with some, the impetus to tamper comes from the wrong place.

Many years ago, I worked on a TV series which had a lot of producers listed in its credits — executive producers, supervising producers, senior producers, etc. I think there were eight of them but I only ever saw two of them make actual, real contributions. One of the other six did absolutely nothing. He was secure enough in his position (I guess) that he didn't feel the need to do what the rest of them did. Each of them would pop in once a week for five minutes and Save the Show.

That was the term we in the trenches had for what they did: Saving the Show. It meant that they would stop by and make a contribution just for the sake of being able to say they made a contribution. Some of these contributions were meaningless…like saying "We need to have the dark blue curtain off to stage right instead of the turquoise one" or "Make sure the camera gets a good two-shot of those actors in the scene they have together." Sometimes though, they were big changes that made a lot of work for others and/or harmed the program.

Either way, the changes ordered had this in common: They were done in the spirit of "Thank God I caught this in time or it would have been a disaster."

One time, I came back from a long lunch and asked one of the other writers what, if anything, had transpired in my absence. He said, "Well, Harry came by and he Saved the Show. Then Lyle came by and he Saved the Show. Then Phyllis came by and she really Saved the Show. Then Joey came by he really and truly Saved the Show. Oh — and there was some guy from the network who popped in and she Saved the Show…twice."

Nothing any of them demanded fixed anything or made anything better. The alterations didn't matter except that they allowed the Show-Savers to say they'd Saved the Show. The two producers who were hands-on and fully involved did make changes and decisions that made things better but others gave notes because they could. Once in a while, we could just ignore their Show-Saving advice and they never seemed to notice. I'm not sure any of them were even interested in watching the show. They just wanted to Save It.

Here's our pal "Wacky" Wally Wingert with another dive into the toy box he calls his home…

I confused something the other day when I mentioned that Frank Welker had received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Daytime Emmys…but you couldn't see that moment because the Daytime Emmys for this year are untelevised. Let me try and straighten things out…

The Daytime Emmy Awards are so vast in numbers that they present them in two shows. Some were handed out on Friday at the Daytime Creative Arts Emmy® Awards ceremony and some on Saturday at the Daytime Emmy® Awards ceremony. The Friday one is where Frank's statuette was presented and I don't think this one is ever televised. Also presented at this event were all the other animation-related Emmys.

For the last decade or two, the main ceremony has been televised but not this time. You can however view it on this page. If you do watch, you'll see a lot of folks who work on soap operas getting excited and there's a nice Lifetime Achievement Award presentation to Sonia Manzano of Sesame Street. There's also an "In Memoriam" reel which does not include our friend Joe Alaskey, who won the 2004 Daytime Emmy for Best Performance by an Actor on an Animated Series. The Emmy Awards have never shown much love for people whose faces are not well known.

Jim Rutenberg on the growing pains of Stephen Colbert's Late Night. I still think Colbert is the most talented guy to get one of those slots in years, maybe since Letterman. I was wrong to think that once he'd settled in, the show would get less scripted and would rely more on his well-proven ability to improvise on the fly. If anything, it was getting less spontaneous before the new showrunner arrived and since he's taken over, it sure hasn't gotten more so. If anything, it feels more carefully packaged than ever.

I don't think Colbert's in trouble…and if you read that he is, ignore it. Ignore it at least until you hear a credible name mentioned as a possible replacement. It's unlikely to come to that but if it does, I hope someone at CBS, before they give up on a brilliant guy like that, will at least try letting the show be the kind of show where unplanned things could happen.

The other day, I linked to a piece by Kevin Drum in which he all but accused Bernie Sanders of running a big con job, convincing his many supporters that the "revolution" of which he speak was ever easily attainable. Drum fears that those supporters are in for a cataclysmic letdown that will drive them and their idealism away from politics.

Greg Sargent sees it otherwise…possibly. And he asks the question of whether it was Sanders who convinced them they wanted that revolution or if they already felt that way and he was just the guy who could articulate it and maybe organize that sentiment. Sargent also sees it as possible that Sanders will throw his support to Hillary as someone who can make some of it come true. I sure hope so. I sure don't buy the argument that it's necessary to elect a President Trump so things will get so terrible that everyone will be begging for a Bernie by 2020.

I guess it worries me that so many vocal (i.e., posting on the Internet) Sanders loyalists seem unable to accept the possibility that Clinton might have won the nomination — this is assuming she does — fair and square. One keeps writing me that it was obvious Bernie deserves it more. Well, no. If he'd gotten more votes than Hillary, he would. Sometimes, the person we think is the better candidate doesn't.

I like where Bernie Sanders wants to take this country even if I'm not sure he knows how to get us there and that he's underestimated the length of the trip. I also don't think he's as electable as those polls that show him clobbering Trump or Cruz say. But I sure admire the guy and I'll admire him more if he can redirect most of the enthusiasm he's generated into not just helping elect Hillary Clinton but also a Democratic Senate and maybe — dare I say it? — a Democratic House of Representatives.

The Daytime Emmy Awards were handed out in a ceremony last night. One of the more popular ones (I hear) was the Lifetime Achievement Emmy given to our friend Frank Welker. Frank has done voices and vocal sound effects in more cartoons than any human being who has ever lived and has added his voice to a stunning list of motion pictures. It would not surprise me if he had more credits than every single other person who was up for an Emmy last night…and I don't mean more than any one of them. I mean more than all of them put together, including nominees, winners and maybe even presenters.

Don't believe me? Well, take a look at this guy's list of credits on the IMDB and then consider two things. One is that a single line in that listing might represent more than 100 episodes of a series. The other is that I think the list is woefully incomplete. It omits a number of things that he worked on just with me. That might be a tenth of all this man has done and it doesn't include commercials or radio shows or industrial films or lots of other areas in which he works.

I hear he gave a warm, humble acceptance speech during which he demonstrated many of his cartoon voices, plus did frighteningly-accurate impressions of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Want to hear this speech? Well, I don't think you can. The Daytime Emmys were once broadcast live on network TV. Then they moved to basic cable. Then they switched to being represented on basic cable by an abridged version telecast weeks after the ceremony…and this year, they aren't on TV at all. Unless the Academy sticks some video up on their website or YouTube, we're all outta luck. There are some links up at YouTube that purport to show you the event but they all seem to divert you to websites of dubious integrity where God knows what you'd wind up downloading.

One legit cable channel did live-stream the red carpet arrivals and backstage goings-on. Here's Frank being interviewed on his way in. I'm directing some cartoons week after next with him in the cast and I will compliment him on his award, his humility and his graciousness when interviewed by someone who doesn't seem to have much idea who he is…

The other day in this message, I solicited questions for this blog and got a lot of good ones, thank you very muchly. Keep 'em coming. Today, to distract myself from writing any more about Donald Trump, here's a question I received from Carl Croom…

I always loved the detail Jack drew in his comics. How did the colorists, or others who had to work on his drawings, feel about having to deal with it. Did anyone ever try to get him to change his style?

Well, a few of the inkers who had to turn his penciled art into inked art dealt with it by leaving things out and simplifying. It is quite possible for an inker to improve art that way but that can also be a nice excuse for not spending as much time on a page as you could or maybe should have.

With the colorists…well, if you have to color an intricate machine, you can expend the effort necessary to color each part of that machine separately or you can just color the whole thing light purple in one or two strokes of the brush. Some opted for the former, some opted for the latter and some weren't given the time to do the former so they had to do the latter. In the days before computer coloring of comic books, the colorists were paid quite poorly and were often expected to color entire issues overnight.

There's a whole debate which occasionally pops up in the industry about how much effort one should put into one's work with respect to the page rate. Ideally, a devoted artist will spend as much time on a page as he or she feels is necessary. Alas, that devotion can be exploited. Publishers can and sometimes do think, "Hey, we don't have to pay that guy too much. He'll work his butt off no matter how much we give him." For the most part though, Jack's best inkers — guys like Mike Royer, Joe Sinnott, Frank Giacoia, Chic Stone, Bill Everett and others — loved the work that was entrusted to them and worked real, real hard (regardless of compensation) to do justice to it.

Jack did have at least one inker who urged him to simplify his pencils and Jack responded by getting that inker removed from the assignment. For the most part though, pressure on Kirby to change his style came from editors and especially the folks in DC Production Department when he worked for that company. It was never a matter of how much detail he put into a page. As far as Management in comics was concerned, the artists should spend as much time on every page as possible as long as they met their deadlines. But there were those who didn't like that Jack drew like Jack with all the eccentricities that comprised his style.

At DC back then, they wanted more polish and realism, and they often spoke of a "company look," which meant having all the artists drawing somewhat alike. In 1970, my then-partner Steve Sherman and I paid our first visit to the DC Comics offices in New York. We were Jack's assistants then and almost immediately, the head of the Production Department, Sol Harrison, sat us down and urged us to get Jack to tone it down and draw more like, say, Curt Swan. This was a lot like if I asked you to try and get your cocker spaniel to say, "Polly wants a cracker!"

Mr. Harrison took great pride in what was to him an obvious superiority that the DC books had over Marvel's, especially in terms of art. I'm not sure anyone not on the DC payroll thought that way…but it sure bothered Sol and a few others that with Jack's return to DC, the company was about to begin publishing books that looked like Marvel's. There were some attempts made to drag Jack over to "The DC Look" but for the most part, they were not successful. Fortunately.

I really, really like Larry Wilmore but I don't think he did well last night with his performance at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner. Then again, I don't think anyone has done well in that position for a long time with the exception (sort of) of Seth Meyers back in 2011. It's hard though not to remember one of his big laugh lines that year…

Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican, which is surprising because I just assumed he was running as a joke.

The audience howled and the C-Span camera cut to Trump in the audience, immobile and definitely not laughing. One wonders now if he was thinking, "Oh, yeah? Well, wait four years, you pissant!"

Craig Ferguson did okay in 2008 but he largely avoided roast-style jokes and just talked about America from the viewpoint of a guy from Scotland. Other than them…well, talk about a tough room — and a tough act to follow.

I haven't researched when this happened but at some point, the running order changed. Once upon a time, the comedian performed and then the President closed the event. Now, it's the other way around. Obama has always been pretty funny at these things so following him to the podium doesn't help any comic. Also, even if the President doesn't get a load of laughs, he is the President — the most important guy on the premises — in a hall of people who are obsessed with importance.

Also, political comedy has changed. Bob Hope did jokes about Gerald Ford's golf game and Nancy Reagan replacing the White House china and it was all in fun because Bob never made anyone in the room uncomfortable. As often as not, he had a golf game the next morning with Ford or would be eating the next night off Nancy's new china.

Today — and especially since Stephen Colbert did the dinner in 2006, the entertainer is expected to hold some feet to the fire and he also took some real shots at the incompetence of the press. In Hope's era, the members of the audience sat there praying to be mentioned in his monologue. Now, they sit there hoping they won't be, which is not conducive to laughter. Wilmore did better in his last few remarks because by then, he was shifting from one-liners to sincerity and the folks there were untensing, figuring they no longer had to worry about a joke that insulted them or their professions.

But then there's something about these events that always strikes me as super-phony. I don't believe the President — any President — when he makes the obligatory remarks thanking the press for their indispensable role in the political process and keeping politicians honest, etc. I think deep down, he'd really like to tell them all the stuff they got wrong or missed completely and then list ways in which he thinks they have kept the American public misinformed. For his last one of these, it would have been great if Obama had felt he could have done a little of that but I can sure understand why he didn't.