Monthly Archives: September 2016

That's a photo of my best friend (male division), Sergio Aragonés. Posting his picture on my blog is way cheaper than buying him a birthday present.

People keep asking us, "How did you two meet?" Between around 1966 and 1969, there was a thing called the Los Angeles Comic Book Club that met every Saturday afternoon at Palms Recreation Center, which was (and still is) located not far from where the San Diego Freeway crosses the Santa Monica Freeway. A whole bunch of teenagers would gather there each week to buy comics, sell comics, trade comics but most of all to talk about and argue about comics. I was not the founder but I was its president.

In the group's history, we had one guest speaker. It was Sergio. One of our members saw in a magazine article that Sergio lived in L.A. (in Beverly Hills, actually) and found him listed in the phone book. The member called him up and invited Sergio to come to one of our meetings…and he did. That was the first time we met, though we didn't talk much that day. Later, I ran into Sergio at a number of local events relating to comic books and we got to know each other.

I believe this was in 1968 so year after next, it'll be fifty years I've know this man. We will have been collaborating on comic books for about forty of those and in all that time, we've had exactly one argument that lasted more than thirty seconds. That one lasted about three minutes. That's pretty good.

We get along fine because of mutual respect. I get along with him because I know he is a brilliant humorist and cartoonist and a very smart, very nice man.

And he gets along with me because I know things that could get him arrested, deported and used to drum up support for that stupid wall Donald Trump wants to build. He probably could get Mexico to pay for that wall if he promised to keep Sergio on this side of it.

Happy Sergio Day, my friend. Please take the twenty minutes to draw the next issue of Groo before you go out celebrating.

So many to pick from. I think I'll go with Peter Beinart's article about how Trump, though he gets praised for speaking his mind, really doesn't do that. He tells audiences what he thinks they want to hear and when he addresses different audiences, he says different things…sometimes, very different things.

Back in this posting, I got to musing about what old TV show I would most like to see released on DVD.

So I guess my choice would be The Defenders, no relation to the current program of that name. Aired on CBS from 1961-1965, it was a courtroom drama starring E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed as a father-son lawyer team that handled important, polemic cases. Unlike the concurrent Perry Mason (which also aired on CBS), the accused was not always proven innocent and the stories were not whodunnits. Often, they had to do with the morality of our laws and the legality of our morals. A few years ago, someone sent me a VHS tape of four episodes and I thought they held up quite well…and every one of them gave me a lot to think about. Every bit of controversy in them was still controversial, though often not in the same way as in the sixties. So that's my vote: The Defenders. Will someone get on that, please?

More than half a decade later, someone finally has. The good folks at Shout Factory have issued Season One of The Defenders — 32 episodes plus an episode of Studio One that was kind of like (but not exactly) a pilot for the series. There are also interviews with folks who worked on the show and it's all on eight DVDs for — at this moment — $33.28. That's like a buck an episode for what I think is the best courtroom drama ever made for television.

I should probably also mention that the cast lists for some of these are stunning: Jack Klugman, Ossie Davis, Richard Thomas, Frank Gorshin, Robert Duvall, Robert Loggia, Julie Newmar, Martin Sheen and many others, plus someone in their casting department really, really liked hiring William Shatner. And has there ever been a better actor on a TV series than E.G. Marshall?

I haven't watched them all yet but the video and audio range from excellent to passable. A few of these look like all they could find was old 16mm prints…but there's something about the show that makes it feel more credible and real that way. They're in black-and-white, of course.

You can purchase a copy here. We highly recommend this and really, really want to see the three other seasons get released.

My cousin David recently wrote a very fine book about Woody Allen. Here, he writes about what it was like to write that really fine book about Woody Allen.

Happy Labor Day!

A whole bunch of Broadway actors name their favorite show tunes.

I am a late add to the guest roster for the Long Beach Comic Con, which takes place September 17th and 18th — Saturday and Sunday — at the Long Beach Convention Center in the splendid city of Long Beach, California. I will be around Saturday afternoon only and I think I'm on one panel and I will not (repeat: not) be sitting behind a table in the exhibit hall that has my name on it.

I don't do a lot of cons these days and when I do, I insist that they not give me a table with my name on it. This is because if they give you a table with your name on it, you have to sit behind it most of the time…and since I never sell things at cons and don't like sitting behind a table for very long, I don't want to feel obligated to do that.

But I'll be roaming about that day and maybe even poaching briefly at other folks' tables. If you're there and you see me, say howdy unless you're that rude guy who cornered me in San Diego and tried to convince me that the United States will be utterly destroyed if we don't elect Donald Trump. (Another good reason to not sit behind a table: It makes it easier to get away from people like that.)

Happy Day of Birth to my friend of many years, Scott Shaw!  That's Scott above, discussing his voluminous cartooning career on a panel at this year's Comic-Con.  How long have I known this man?  We met in Jack Kirby's studio back when Jack was drawing New Gods.  You do the math.

At the time, Scott was a fledgling cartoonist, drawing for his school newspaper and other places where fledgling cartoonists find an appreciative, if non-paying audience.  A skip and a jump later, he was drawing quite professionally for Hanna-Barbera and for DC Comics and for Marvel and many other places with did pay and were glad to have him.  We like so many of the same things that we've always gotten along fine, even during the brief time that he lived with me.  (It was kind of like The Odd Couple but with two Oscars and no Felix.)

Not much too add except to wish him a wonderful day.  And heck, I like Scott enough that I'll wish him a good one tomorrow, as well.  And Tuesday.  And, oh hell, give him the rest of the week, too.  Nothing but the best for my friends.

Stephen Colbert is ready to do his show — but his graphics department isn't…

Someone named Sally writes…

Why are there so many producers on a TV show or movie? Sometimes, there are seven or eight or more.

Well, the first thing you need to know about the title "producer" is that it, in its various permutations, is just about the only title of any importance that can be bestowed on anyone. The Writers Guild has strict rules on what someone must contribute in order to get a "Written by" credit. The Directors Guild controls director credits. But if your company is doing a TV show, you can make your three-year-old son a producer on it.

So sometimes people get it for ceremonial reasons…like they were involved in the deal that sold the show. Or they're a biggie in the production company. Since it doesn't cost anything, the title is sometimes given out in negotiations. You ask for $25,000 to write a TV show. They counter by offering you $18,500 and a producer credit.

You can not only negotiate that, you can negotiate to be Executive Producer, Producer, Co-Producer, Supervising Producer, Creative Producer, Associate Producer, etc. There are no fixed definitions of any of those but obviously, some suggest that they're higher ranked than others.

Also, there's this: When I was doing the original Garfield and Friends show, my credit was originally "Written by," which was all I wanted. I didn't even want to be credited as Voice Director. Then one year, we were nominated for an Emmy for Best Animated Series and one of our Executive Producers, Lee Mendelsohn, realized something. According to the Emmy rules then, a Best Show Emmy went only to the producer(s) of an animated series. Lee felt it would be a shame if the show won and I didn't get a statuette so beginning with the following season, he added my name on as Co-Producer.

Nothing else changed. Just that. We never won, by the way. Those Emmy rules have since been changed and I believe now, someone who writes a certain percentage of the episodes qualifies for an Emmy if the cartoon show wins Best Series. But there are other situations where folks fight for producer credits because the way the rules are configured, if the show gets an Emmy, they don't. Unless they have a producer credit.

Lately, a lot of folks who in earlier days might have been credited as Story Editors or Script Consultants now ask for and get producer credits. Some stars want them. A manager who once wanted to represent me as a writer told me that if I signed with him, he would get 15% of everything I was paid but he would also demand an Executive Producer credit on any show or movie I wrote. If they wouldn't give it to him, we wouldn't take the deal. I did not sign with this person.

Long ago on a TV show, you could easily pinpoint which of the names in the credits was the person who had the main creative say. It was the man or woman designated as producer. Now, everyone's a producer so they refer to the person with the main creative say as the "showrunner," a title which I don't think ever appears on-screen.

What I'm getting at is that you shouldn't take producer credits too seriously. One might mean something or it might not. I did a show once with two Executive Producers. One had day-to-day involvement making important decisions…though not as much as the guy credited as Supervising Producer. The other Executive Producer was the agent who made the initial deal with the network to do the show. I wrote on that show for three years, never met that Executive Producer and almost never heard his name mentioned. He may not even have watched the program.

David Cook sent me this question…

Mark, I appreciate everything you post and yesterday's on Chase Craig was really interesting.

I have a question about a certain kind of editor/publisher: Ever have the kind of editor or publisher who'll contact you, sound very interested and excited and invite you to send something (and these usually pay okay), then when they receive it they yell, "This is a piece of trash! Garbage! I hate your style! But I've got a deadline so I'm going to use it anyway"?

And then they do indeed publish it. But it doesn't seem like they really did any editing or anything professional other than receive it, pay and publish — and vent some insulting stuff.

What is going on with that kind of editor/publisher?

I don't think I've ever encountered anyone like that so I'll just take an educated guess and suggest that what's going on with that person is that he or she is an asshole. Thank you for your question, David.

Penn Jillette with a Donald Trump card trick…

Here's a message I posted here eons ago, all the way back on 8/31/10. But it's a message a lot of people have linked to or asked me about. It concerns meeting deadlines as a writer and everything in it still applies except that now I've been writing professionally for six more years…

Jeremy W. writes…

I was impressed with your advice to writers about being late with their work. What advice can you give to those of us who have trouble summoning up the muse on demand? I have trouble creating with a deadline. When I don't have a deadline, I'm usually able to come up with something that I like. When they tell me it has to be in on Tuesday, I freeze up and have trouble concentrating. What can you suggest?

Well, my first piece of advice ties in with all that counsel about not being late. If deadlines inhibit you, try to get started A.S.A.P., which makes the deadline that much less threatening and formidable. If it has to be in on Tuesday, don't wait 'til Sunday night or Monday morning to get started.

My second piece of advice is to search for the spine of what you're doing. If you're having trouble getting started, you may not really know where it is you have to go. Let's say the chore at hand is to write a commercial for cheese-straighteners. Ask yourself what it's really about: Why should anyone buy a cheese-straightener? Why should they buy your cheese-straightener? What is it about cheese-straighteners that people need to hear?

If you can't answer those questions, maybe you don't know enough about this project to write it and you need to turn your attention there. If you have to write a story about a talking gerbil, ask yourself what it is about this particular talking gerbil that interests you and would interest someone else? Again, if you can't answer that question, there's where the problem is located.

Or maybe you don't have enough of an assignment. Stephen Sondheim used to say that the most difficult job was when someone comes to him and says, "Just write a song" or "Just write a song about love." There are simply too many starting places in a task of that sort. On the other hand, if someone approaches him and suggests, "Write a song about a lady sitting at a bar whose boyfriend has just dumped her and she's feeling sorry for herself," then he has something to build on.

If an editor tells you, "Write me a fantasy story" and that's all the direction you have, maybe you need to impose a discipline on yourself. Maybe you need to arbitrarily pick something you care about — you're mad at your sister, you're afraid of grasshoppers, you love ham, whatever — and use that feeling as a foundation on which to build. You may wind up writing about something else but that could get you started. And moving — even in the wrong direction — can often be preferable to not moving at all.

That's especially true if you're the kind of writer that I hope you are, and which I try to be. That's the kind that's prolific but who recognizes that sometimes, you have to throw out everything you wrote yesterday.

You have to like what you write, at least when you write it, but not so much that you can't bring yourself to toss it into the dumpster and rebuild. Fear of spending time and energy writing the wrong thing can be very inhibiting for a writer. Given the choice, I would rather write for three hours and then delete it all than spend those three hours staring at the screen, trying to think of the perfect thing to write. The latter usually doesn't lead me to knowing what I want to write, whereas the former usually does.

Which brings me to the best cure for Writer's Block I've ever come up with. It's so good that I can't believe I'm the first or even the millionth to come up with it. It's to decide to write something you're definitely going to throw away…and to make it childish and utterly self-indulgent.

You're stuck on what to write…where to start or how to pick up on a script or article you started on and have to finish. Instead of spending the next hour or two banging your head against the stucco, try this. Spend that time writing something that wallows in the most adolescent, shameful fantasy you have.

Pick the person in your life, past or present, you most despise. Write a story about how you got total revenge on them and they came to you begging for forgiveness. Or you can go a sexual route with this. Remember that kid who sat across from you in Geometry in High School? The one you lusted after but who treated you like you had smallpox? Write a story about how that person came to you and begged you to have sex with them.

Forget about logic or typos or clever verbiage. Just tell the story in direct, earthy terms. When you're done with it, read it over once, delete it and turn back to the thing you have to write. If that doesn't unjam your writing muscles and get them limber and functioning, then I would consider another line of work.

I'm serious about that. Imagine a dentist who had days when he couldn't bear to fill a cavity or file down some old lady's lower bridge. Maybe he shouldn't be doing that for a living anymore. You don't have to be a writer, you know. It's not compulsory.

There are quotes where famous writers like Dorothy Parker say things like, "I hate writing but I love having written." I never think that attitude makes a writer intriguing or colorful or anything of the sort, just as I never think that suffering for one's art automatically makes the art any better.

Some of us have bad, non-productive periods and that's usually something else, something that (probably) has to do with some aspect of our lives other than the pure writing part. I'm not talking about the times that are the exceptions. I'm talking about if you constantly find that writing gives you headaches and a need for Maalox™ and if you're starting to find it an unpleasant chore to stop playing Spider Solitaire and use your computer for the reason you got it in the first place.

When writers tell me how painful writing can be for them, I respond with something like, "No one's forcing you to be a writer and it's inconceivable that it's the only thing you can do in this world. Go do one of those other things."

Invariably, they say, "Aren't there times when you hate writing?" I tell them no. I may not like certain jobs or certain people I have to work with…but hey, if I were selling porta-potties, I probably wouldn't like every customer that came in to buy a porta-potty. Don't confuse a bad gig with a bad profession.

I've been doing this for 41 years because I enjoy it and can't think of anything attainable I'd enjoy more. I also can't think of too many moves stupider than doing something you don't like for 41 years if you have any choice in the matter. If you're a writer who doesn't love writing, find another profession…something you'd gladly do for the next 41 years without complaining about it all the time. You'll do yourself — and your friends and your family and maybe even your audience — a tremendous favor.

I'm taking the day off from blogging for reasons that you don't need to know. Maybe I'll repost an old piece after I put this up.

Hey, if you want something else to read, the L.A. Times is running a six-part series of articles about a true crime tale involving one truly mad Housewife From Orange County. It's the story of how a married couple (both lawyers) conspired to frame a woman named Kelli Peters to punish her for a minor, imaginary slight against their son. I followed some of this story in real time as it unfolded over a few years and it was bizarre then and it's more bizarre when you read it in this format. Part Six won't be published until Sunday but you can read the first five parts here right now. Or you can just wait for the movie which someone will decide to make of all this. I'm thinking Sarah Paulson's got a job coming.

Harry Enten gives us some good points on following the election, including the advice not to let one "bombshell" poll make you think the election is swinging wildly in a different direction. I would quarrel with his suggestion that you not worry too much about the Electoral College. The Electoral College is what ultimately elects a president, not the popular vote. But it's true that the polls are most accurate when you follow an aggregator who weights and averages them. Back in this message, I pointed you to five of them.

We have a flurry of new articles on the 'net at the moment that explain why many comic book creators of the past were mistreated, exploited and in some cases really screwed over. I endorse the conclusion but not all of the cited examples or all of the facts as presented in the cited examples. I won't link to specific articles because then I'd feel I had to explain what I found questionable in each piece to which I linked and that would take time I ain't got right now. Just remember that if you read it on the Internet, that doesn't mean it's 100% accurate. Unless, of course, it's on my site.

And it's definitely true that I gotta go. Have as good a Friday as you can possibly have.

This is John Oliver performing "Up the Ladder to the Roof"…

No, wait. That was August and it's now September so we're back to regular programming. So here's someone not performing "Up the Ladder to the Roof"…