A lot of people seem shocked that Donald Trump is doing things he said he'd do. At least two of my Trump-backing friends — and a lot of people I see writing on the 'net — say they voted for him because they liked some of the things he said and assumed that the stuff they didn't like was just empty campaign rhetoric…things like building that wall or banning Muslims.
Well, it's nice to know that he's not keeping all his promises. He promised to go up against the pharmacy lobby and to negotiate drug prices way down but today he met with "Big Pharma," and now he's against that. Kevin Drum has more.
I seriously doubt Trump will ever do anything that would prevent a rich person from getting richer, no matter how many poor or middle-class people suffer for it. That seems to be his big problem with doing things that help the environment. It often gets in the way of maximizing profit.
If you were a fan of Dan Spiegle's work and would like to honor his memory, make a contribution in his name to the Carpinteria Valley Historical Society. It was a favorite place of Dan's and you can read all about it and get the address over on this page.
I will be a guest for some (not all) of this year's San Diego Comic Fest. What this is is a low-key convention that recaptures some of the magic of the early days of what we now know as Comic-Con International…back when it was mostly about comic books and nowhere near as crowded. It's run by some of the folks who worked on the early cons in San Diego, though it is in no way affiliated with that huge gathering.
The San Diego Comic Fest has an opening night ceremony on Friday, February 17 and then it's open Saturday through Monday, February 18-20. I should be there most of Saturday and Sunday, primarily hosting or appearing on panels about a man named Jack Kirby. 2017 is the 100th anniversary of Jack's birth and a lot of comic conventions this year will be featuring special events and tributes in his honor. You can find out all about this one at the San Diego Comic Fest website. They have some other terrific guests and themes. I'll tell you more about what I'm doing there once the schedule is firmed-up.
My next convention after that will be WonderCon, which takes place March 31-April 2 in the newly-expanded Anaheim Convention Center. Then I have nothing until Comic-Con International in San Diego, which is July 20-23. Later this year though, I expect to be making a couple of rare (for me) appearances at East Coast conventions. I'll be the guest roaming the floor because he has nothing to sell and refuses to sit behind a table all day.
Matt Yglesias explains why so far, what the Trump Administration has been demonstrating is "Malevolence tempered by incompetence." If you're horrified by its agenda — i.e., Donald actually trying to make good on some of those campaign promises even many of his supporters assumed wouldn't happen — that could be a good thing. Incompetence may subvert many of his goals in a way that Democrats cannot.
Ah, but what happens when there's a real disaster not of Trump's own making? A hurricane or a terrorist attack or an outbreak of disease or a new Adam Sandler movie? How comforting will it be to have incompetents in the White House then?
Today, in your obit for Dan Spiegle, you wrote that, "A strip like that would have been a full-time job for anyone else but Dan was very fast…"
As a fan of comic books, I've always wondered — why is drawing a comic strip considered a full time job, when most comic book artists can draw 22 pages a month? To this reader, strips see like far less work, particularly when some freakish artists ("Hi, Sergio!") can draw much faster than that…
Well, artists are all different…some much faster than others. For many years, Milton Caniff was writing and drawing the Steve Canyon newspaper strip and Frank Robbins was producing a similar strip called Johnny Hazard. The two features had approximately the same amounts of drawing in each installment in much the same style. Caniff put in a 60 hour week and sometimes employed an assistant to do much of the drawing. Robbins wrote and drew an entire week of strips in three days and spent the rest of his week painting or working in comic books.
It was just a matter of how fast each man was and Robbins was faster, the same way my friend Sergio is faster than many other cartoonists. It's also a function of how much time they actually spend drawing. Caniff had to spend a lot of time supervising the business interests of his strip, dealing with the syndicate, talking to editors, etc. Robbins, perhaps because his strip was less popular — and because unlike Caniff, he didn't own his strip — had less of his work week occupied by that stuff.
Once a strip becomes popular, there are many demands on the cartoonist's time. I once spent much of an afternoon with Charles Schulz during which, in addition to talking with me, he was on the phone a lot to licensees about merchandise and to others discussing an upcoming Charlie Brown TV special. A photographer came by to take some pictures to accompany an interview Mr. Schulz had done the previous week. He also had to sign a pile of books for someone.
He did not spend five seconds on thinking about the strips he had to do that week or drawing them while I was there…and that evening, he had to speak at a college so he wouldn't be at the drawing table then, either.
But maybe the main problem is that a newspaper strip is relentless. Unless you run reruns occasionally, which most artists don't like to do, you need to draw almost every day of every week. A comic book guy can usually skip an issue and they'll run a fill-in by someone else. If a strip artist loses a week due to the flu or a personal emergency, he or she have to make it up somewhere. If you want to take a two-week vacation, you have to get ahead, which means doing a lot more than a week of strips per week for a time.
I have occasionally ghost-written for a couple of strips. One time, one of the artists I've assisted called me in a panic. He was something like six months ahead on his strip. Then he got sick for a week, took some days off to attend to family matters, took his wife away for a weekend, etc. He thought it all amounted to about three weeks but when he went to look at his calendar, he discovered his six-month lead was down to two. A day here…three days there…it all added up.
He said, "I still don't understand it…only that I need to draw two or three weeks worth of strips a week for a while until I get that six-month lead back!" He had me bombard him with gags and a few months later, he had his six-month lead back — But he had to work night and day to get it back. It's just the nature of the job.
This is an obituary for a man I think was one of the greatest comic book artists who ever lived and inarguably one of the nicest people I've ever met. As you may glean from what follows, I really, really loved this person: Loved his artwork in comic books I read long before I ever imagined I'd know him and work with him. Loved the guy who did that artwork and not just because he was a joy to collaborate with and he made my scripts look good and my job, when I was an editor, as simple as it could possibly be.
Dan Spiegle left us on Saturday at the age of 96. He had been in poor health for some time…and it was tough for me to think of Dan that way because until about ten years ago, he was a very healthy individual, often out on the tennis court. Until some time in his seventies, he did most of his artwork standing-up as per the above photo. That was taken around 1973 in his studio, the first day we met.
Dan was born in Cosmopolis, Washington on December 12, 1920. He drew a lot in high school and then in the Navy, where among other duties, he painted insignias on airplanes. Following his discharge in 1946, he attended Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, thanks to the G.I. Bill. Funny story how he got his first real job doing comic art. He answered an ad in the L.A. Times from someone looking for an artist to draw a newspaper comic strip. The address was that of Capitol Records and it turned out the strip was Bozo the Clown.
Years later, Dan could have handled that with ease but at the time, he was more of a serious illustrator so he told the man he met with there that the project was not for him. The man looked at Dan's samples anyway, noted some fine drawings of horses and said to him — approximately — "My cousin works for William 'Hopalong Cassidy' Boyd and they're looking for someone to draw a newspaper strip. Why don't you go see him?" The office of the popular cowboy star was only a few blocks away. Dan went directly there and Mr. Boyd, aka "Hopalong" happened to be there and he liked how Dan drew horses, too. Before the day was out, Dan had the job of drawing a Hopalong Cassidy newspaper strip, which he did from 1949 to 1955.
A strip like that would have been a full-time job for anyone else but Dan was very fast so around 1951, he took samples of the strip to the Los Angeles office of Western Printing and Lithography, which produced the Dell Comics line. He walked in, showed his work and walked out with a comic book to draw. He drew for Western for about the next thirty years as the company segued from Dell to Gold Key Comics (explanation here) and only stopped when the firm did. His work there included dozens of different adaptations of TV westerns, including a long and acclaimed stint on Maverick. He drew many of their adaptations of Disney movies and the best-selling comic book, Space Family Robinson, which has recently been reprinted in fancy hardcover volumes. He was also the artist for years on Korak, Son of Tarzan.
His editor for much of this period was a man named Chase Craig, who was also my editor (and mentor) for many years. I once asked Chase, "Of all the hundreds of artists you've employed, who was the most reliable?" Without pausing to think, he replied, "Dan Spiegle." Then he added, "It's always on time and it's always wonderful." (A moment later, he added, "…and Mike Royer.")
Later, when I became Dan's editor, I had the same experience…and until you're an editor of comic books, you don't realize how rare and precious it is to have someone like that available to you. One time, another artist — a good one, not a newcomer — was six weeks late with a job and then handed in a few, unusable pages. I immediately went to Dan who did the entire job in eight days…and it was perfect.
My own association with Dan started one day in '72 when Chase asked me if I would take over writing the Scooby Doo comic book. I wasn't a huge fan of the TV show and started to decline when Chase mentioned that Dan Spiegle was now drawing it. That made all the difference. I had been a fan of Dan's art for years.
At the age of seven, my parents took me to a movie called Don't Give Up the Ship, which starred Jerry Lewis. The next day, they bought me the Dell comic book adaptation of Don't Give Up the Ship to keep me quiet on a visit to my pediatrician and I happened to be holding it when Jerry Lewis walked into that pediatrician's office to pick up one of his sons. That comic book was drawn by Dan Spiegle.
Scooby Doo was not really in Dan's wheelhouse at the time but that comic needed an artist and Chase, because Western was cutting back on adventure-type comics, needed an assignment to keep work on Dan's drawing board. So Dan was attempting to learn a broader, funnier art style and through no help from me, he "got it" about the time I began writing the comic. We became friends and frequent collaborators. We worked together for around a dozen different companies including Scooby Doo for two or three other publishers, Blackhawk for DC and Crossfire for Eclipse. Neither of us made a lot of dough off Crossfire but it was Dan's favorite project and mine, as well.
The way we worked together was very simple. I'd write a script. I'd send it to Dan. He would draw it, usually having his daughter Carrie do the lettering. He would send it to me. I would make the few corrections necessary and send it off to be printed. Couldn't have been more harmonious and easy. And the few corrections usually were that Dan would draw some scene so clearly that I would realize some of my dialogue was unnecessary and I'd remove or change it. At least once, I removed all the word balloons and captions I'd written for one page because Dan's artwork simply didn't need my silly words telling you what you were looking at.
Other companies grabbed him when I couldn't keep him busy. He worked for DC, Marvel, Dark Horse and many other publishers. Editors and writers would tell me how much they envied me being able to work as often as I did with Dan and his artistry was much admired by other artists. Gil Kane would say that Dan was the best comic artist ever when it came to "spatial relationships," meaning that in each panel, the figures and items were placed in perfect proportion to each other, perfectly setting the scene. When I visited Alex Toth, he insisted I always bring him the latest pages I'd receive from Dan so he could study them. Alex clearly envied the organic nature of Dan's work…how natural his staging was and how well he handled light and shadow.
And I want to underscore that Dan was one of the nicest men I've ever met. We never had an argument of any kind. Not one.
I'll tell you two quick stories about how devoted this man was to his artwork. We did a lot of Hanna-Barbera comics for overseas markets — work that has never been published in this country. Occasionally, the page format changed due to the needs of some foreign publisher.
For one six-page story, I told Dan to draw the pages 11" by 15" instead of the 10" by 15" page layout we usually used. Dan accidentally drew it 10" by 15". It was the only mistake he ever made on anything we did together and he was deeply apologetic when I sent the pages back to him and asked him to adjust them.
Anyone else would have just pasted on a half-inch on either side and extended what he'd already drawn. Either that or they'd cut panels out and repaste so they didn't have to draw the whole thing again. Dan redrew the whole thing again on the proper size of paper. I thought that was extraordinary…but then I realized something else.
Anyone else would have traced or copied what he did the first time. Dan had changed every single panel to a new angle. I asked him why he did that and he explained, "Just to keep my interest up. It would have been too boring to draw it the same way twice."
Dan and M.E. at the 2006 CAPS Banquet.
Soon after that, we had to do a batch of comic book stories for a publisher in South America. The publisher had been publishing terrible, badly-drawn comics and Hanna-Barbera had insisted they better their product by paying to have us do some of the material. The pay was low so I told Dan and the others working on these stories to knock them out fast, not to put in a lot of detail. Even rushed, simplified art by my crew would be better than what the South American publisher had been running and better than he was paying for.
When Dan's art came in, it looked just like what he did on the regular, decently-paying art. I thought he'd made a mistake and confused which scripts were supposed to be done with all possible shortcuts so I called him. It turned out he hadn't been confused. He said, "I drew it the way you wanted it but I didn't like it and couldn't hand in something that looked like that. So I redid it so it pleased me."
At my insistence, he sent me the simpler version. It was fine. The publisher would have been happy with it. But the point is it didn't please the guy who did it.
How can you not love an artist like that?
I just spoke with Marie, his wonderful wife of seventy (70!) years. She said a memorial will happen sometime in the future. They'd better get a large room because Dan had an awful lot of friends and admirers…those who knew the man himself and those who just knew the work. And then there were us lucky ones who got to be in both categories. He is survived by Marie, four children who made him very proud (and a Grandpa) and around 55 years of top-notch comic book and strip artwork.
Mark Joseph Stern neatly summarizes why Trump's immigration ban is unconstitutional. I'm always amazed at the number of folks out there who insist the United States Constitution is sacred when it comes to protecting their rights…but not anyone else's.
From (I think) that same Australian production of the stage version of Singin' in the Rain — the one I mentioned here — here's Adam Garcia performing the title number…
Fred Kaplan on why Trump's ill-advised Muslim ban was ill-advised. For one thing, it alienates Muslims who are working with us to make the world safer.
Boy, Trump's executive order banning immigrants from seven Muslim countries (none of which have any history of terrorism on U.S. soil) and various other refugees sure caused a lot of chaos. Kevin Drum thinks it was deliberate; that they could have lessened the pain and discomfort by making clear it did not apply to holders of green cards but they wanted to slap those folks around a bit, too. Sadly, he may be right.
I dunno. I usually hold to the credo, "Never attribute to deviousness that which can be explained by incompetence." In politics especially, I think it's important to separate the two. No matter what your political beliefs are, somewhere out there there's an elected official (or wanna-be-elected official) who shares them exactly but is too inept to enact that agenda. He or she may even be such a bungler that they discredit your beliefs or empower the opposition. I'm wondering how many folks who love what Trump promised them are worried that he'll do just that, the same way the mission of the Affordable Care Act was undermined a great deal by bad website design.
As this country gets more and more polarized, competence seems to play less and less a role in our elections. I get the feeling that most people would vote for Gomer Pyle if he mouthed the right (to them) viewpoints and promised "the right things;" never mind that he lacked the skill and judgment to get those things done. It would be nice if we had leaders who knew what they were doing, not merely what they were supposed to accomplish.
In the meantime, I'm just sore that Dick Cheney said, of Trump's desire to ban Muslims, "It goes against everything we stand for and believe in." I hate it when I'm on the same side of an issue as Dick Cheney. If he ever came out against cole slaw, I'd probably start eating the stuff.
Back in this message, we saw three current Broadway performers re-create the "Good Morning" number from the classic film, Singin' in the Rain. There's also a stage musical version of that movie and here's that number as it was performed in an Australian production. The folks in it are Gretel Scarlett, Adam Garcia and Jack Chambers and they do some pretty fancy hoofin'…
I did not see either of the televised tributes last week to Mary Tyler Moore. What I did see was an awful lot of folks on the 'net complain that they were obviously put together in great haste and without a lot of care. I don't get why that would be. It has been no secret for quite some time that Ms. Moore was in failing health and could leave us at any moment. At least two years ago, it was obvious such tributes would be needed soon. Did they really wait until she'd actually passed to start work on them?
In any case, I thought I'd link to this list by Stephen Bowie of the best performances Mary gave on The Dick Van Dyke Show. I have no quarrel with anything on it.
And here's a list by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong of the twelve best episodes (in her opinion) of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. She does not include "Chuckles Bites the Dust" because it's mentioned too often. I wouldn't have included it because I always thought it was, to use one of Mr. Trump's favorite insults, overrated. I thought lots of episodes of that show were better and funnier.
