Monthly Archives: February 2017

Ken Provost sent me this…

Thank you for the lovely piece about Dan Spiegle. He was one of the best comic artists ever and didn't receive sufficient accolades and attention because he didn't work on Batman or the X-Men. I really like how you seem to have felt privileged to have so many opportunities to work with him.

I hope this question doesn't seem insensitive but as you are well aware, we are losing the comic book makers of his generation. No disrespect is meant to the many fine writers and artists who have come along since that generation's heyday but I can't help feel there was something different about the men and women who made the first thirty years of comic books. I would think you were in a unique position to observe what that was and I wonder if you could write a little about that. Thank you as always for the blog and the fact that yours doesn't keep nagging me to buy things, especially things based on my past browsing history.

Yes, there was definitely something different about the folks of whom you speak. For one thing, most of them got into comics because they loved doing that kind of work. Some got in to make a living while they aspired to something better and then were unable to get out. But no one started writing or drawing comic books because they thought it would make them rich or famous because even as late as the seventies, that did not seem possible. It would have been like getting a job as a guard in a men's prison because you thought it would make you a millionaire, plus it would be a great way to meet cute chicks.

At Comic-Con as you probably know, I've had the opportunity to interview a lot of comic book writers and artists of comics' early days and one recurring theme for me is a certain amazement that they have followers. Nick Cardy was practically moved to tears several times when he first came out to San Diego and had grown, adult professionals lining up to say to him, "I discovered your work when I was ten and I followed it and you were a big influence on me becoming a professional artist." Nick was especially stunned that people were asking for his autograph or offering him money to do commissions. All those years he was drawing Aquaman, he never dreamed it meant so much to so many.

One thing I've come to believe strongly about those writers and artists is that it's a mistake to leap from "I didn't like that guy's work" to "Obviously, that guy was just hacking it out for the paycheck." I would guess that was true of less than 5% of the talent in the generation of which we speak. There were a number of people whose work I didn't like but I came to see that it was not because they weren't trying to do good work. Some of them were trying like hell, spending hours on a page and redoing it and redoing it to make it better. They just weren't very skilled. And some of them were just egregiously miscast or misinstructed by their editors.

When you become aware of how poorly they were paid and how badly they were sometimes treated, it's amazing that so many of them drew and wrote so well and worked so hard at it. Very few guys who were paid the minimum did the minimum. At times, I find myself wondering not "Why was this one artist so bad?" but "Why were so many of the others any good at all?" That is still to me the defining question about the generation we're losing.

I don't usually link to Saturday Night Live sketches from the previous night because I figure (a) if you care about them, you've seen them and (b) most of them aren't that great. And yes, I know (b) means I'm agreeing with Donald J. Trump and that alone makes my opinion highly suspect. But this one with Melissa McCarthy — of all possible castings — as White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer struck me as particularly on-target.

In a way, I feel sorry for Mr. Spicer…though not too sorry since he had to know what the job involved when he accepted it. It involves going out in a nice suit and tie, standing before the nation's cameras and then dodging and spinning what are usually pretty fair questions. All press secretaries have to do some of that but it's got to be super-hard to do in service of the current White House occupant.

If Trump is saying 2+2 equals 19, Spicer has to stand at his podium and insist that, yes, 2+2 is inarguably 19 and only a biased, unprofessional press would even suggest otherwise. He doesn't have the power to say, "Yeah, it's four. I don't know where he got that." If he did, he'd be fired within the hour and Trump would tweet bad things about him.

In the past, we had some White House Press Secretaries who had a little more wiggle room to concede distortions and to walk back falsehoods. Gerald Ford's first press secretary even resigned after Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. They kept sending terHorst out to deny such a thing was under consideration and then when Ford did it, terHorst felt he'd been sent out to lie too many times and got out. Usually though, those guys have the task of defending the indefensible. Spicer is more graceless than most but that's kind of the theme of this administration. Here's the sketch…

• Here is my annual, infallible Super Bowl prediction: I will not be watching. You still have time to get a bet down on this and win big.

This afternoon, I had to return something to a Target store and when I got there, there was a huge mass of people around the entrance. I thought I'd stumbled upon some sort of pre-Super Bowl sale but when I got closer, it turned out to be a mob of people signing petitions for and discussing the impeachment of Donald Trump. I don't think that's going to happen but he sure has set some kind of record for people to be mentioning the "I" word. Here are four things today that have folks rankled…

1. It seems like everyone is outraged when a member of the opposition party spends taxpayer dollars on vacations and living like royalty but they never object when someone in their party does it. Trump may cause some Republicans to break that rule…or at least be very uncomfy when called upon to defend Donald's expenses and what it costs us for Melania to live in New York. See here.
2. William Saletan explains how Trump is trying to convince Christians to act more like a persecuted minority that only he can save. I do not understand why people who always said they vote for the candidate who seems to share their religious values don't see that Trump could not care any less about that kind of thing except as an issue to be exploited for personal gain.
3. Matt Taibbi explains how Trump, who ran on promises to fervently watchdog Wall Street, is now devoted to making sure they get every single thing they want.
4. And Mike Pence is attending the Super Bowl in Houston. Whadda ya wanna bet that something happens with the crowd or some spectators or the half-time show that results in Trump being outraged that the Vice-President wasn't shown the proper respect? No one loves to try and put his opponents on the defensive more than Trump. He's still milking that quickly-retracted story that he had a bust of Martin Luther King removed from the White House as proof that every bad thing the press says about him is a lie. So says the man who says all sorts of things that aren't true and never retracts any of them.

• We don't need "extreme vetting" of immigrants. We already have that. What we need is "extreme vetting" of Trump's cabinet.

David Bianculli recalls The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour which went on the air in 1967, developed a strong following against formidable competition…and soon got yanked off the air, not because nobody was watching but because certain people didn't like what was being said on it.

I remember having strongly-mixed reactions to the show. I liked a lot of the comedy on it, especially segments that featured the supremely deadpan Mr. Pat Paulsen. My politics at the time though could probably be best described as extremely Conservative but with an extremely low opinion of the Conservative leaders of the time. (Though my political views have changed considerably, one constant has been my belief that just because someone says things I agree with doesn't mean that that person is a good person, competent, honest or even sincere about what they say. In fact, I'm kinda suspicious of anyone who doesn't think they have some weasels in their own ranks.)

We had a neighbor lady down the street who thought that show was a bigger threat to America than, say, someone dropping a nuclear bomb on us. She used to get upset at things like if TV Guide said Jack Benny was going to be on that program…well, that meant that Jack Benny was a traitor who had sold out to The Enemy. Her problem essentially was a belief that the show involved young people criticizing older people. If you were in your twenties or thirties, you should always defer to people in their forties or older…and Tom and Dick Smothers were very bad people because they had the nerve to find fault with Congress or the President of the United States.

I never even tried to engage her in a discussion about this. I was much younger than she was and therefore not entitled to a contrary opinion. I did of course notice the major flaw in her argument, which was that there were older people who thought the President and Congress were wrong, and all the Brothers were doing was saying the same thing. But some beliefs are more emotion than logic and you waste your time trying to be logical with those people.

I think time has vindicated most of what the Smothers Brothers said and did. Their various "comeback" attempts at TV didn't soar, possibly because they were nowhere near as good as the original show. One time when I was at a party with Tommy Smothers, I heard someone say to him, "In the long run, you won your battle." And he replied, "Yeah, but we lost our show."

• I'm not afraid of immigrants. I am however afraid of the people who want to protect me from immigrants.

A recent interview with one of my favorite performers, Audra McDonald…

Keith Enright has a question about the Criterion release of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World on DVD and Blu Ray. As you may recall, I am heard on the commentary track. (If you don't have a copy, I highly recommend it. You can order a copy of it here. And now, let's tackle Keith's question…

Maybe my memory is failing and you can just point me to a previous post, but I'm wondering if you have any further stories about working with Criterion on this? I'm a huge Criterion fanatic and have also loved this movie since childhood. I have the previous MGM Laserdisc boxset as well as the Criterion set and consider them both essential to telling the story of the film.

I think the Criterion set is amazing and I love that you're a part of it. Any tidbits on how you got involved, whether they paid you in discs, or if you were involved in anything that didn't make it to the final product?

There were a few hunks of the commentary track that didn't make it in due to time limits. People think that such tracks are recorded in real time while the commenters are watching it once…and some are. This one was done in long chunks in three sessions and we did some sections over and over until everyone was satisfied with them. Then there was a lot of editing to move certain speeches closer to the on-screen action they were describing. I was very impressed with how Criterion sets a high standard and then spends the time and money necessary to achieve it.

They paid me in money and sent me some discs. And how I got involved is not that interesting a story. My friend Mike Schlesinger was at a film screening and he ran into a friend of his — Karen Stetler, who is a producer for Criterion. She told him, "We're doing a restored version of Mad World." He said, "You have to have a commentary track by Mark Evanier and me." She said fine. They called me and I said yes and suggested we also get Paul Scrabo on the track. They said yes.

We recorded the track over several days…in the same recording studio where I voice-direct The Garfield Show and most of the other cartoons I've done. It felt a little odd to be on the wrong side of the glass but I got used to it after an hour or so.

If I didn't make it clear in past posts, let me state clearly that this was one of the great thrills of my life, being involved in the super-deluxe release of a movie that meant so much to me. Don't tell Karen but I would have paid them for the privilege. If you don't like this movie, fine. I probably don't like at least one of your favorite films and you're not going to convince me it's not wonderful just as I'm not going to convince you that yours is not a great movie. I'm just real, real glad that I had the chance to "give back" a little to this film.

I've decided to try something. Let's see if it works. Rather than post on and off all day about things Trump and his crew are doing that I find outrageous, I'm going to try doing one post per day listing four of them.

Maybe then I won't spend all day thinking about The Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight. This will at least benefit those of you who come to this site to read the stuff about comics and late night shows and Frank Ferrante and the evils of cole slaw…and want to just skip over items that remind them who's in the White House and what they're doing. Here are today's four…

1. Trump believes it will help the economy if investment counselors are unburdened by rules that prevent them from screwing over their clients with faulty advice.  Actually, it might be easier to just mail all your money to Goldman Sachs.  Jonathan Chait has more.
2. Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway went on with Chris Matthews and talked about how two Iraqis engineered "The Bowling Green Massacre" and that's why we need to all line up behind Donald Trump, the only man who can prevent you from being massacred like those poor people in Bowling Green.  As Kevin Drum notes, not only was this massacre a fantasy but it's one that some people will refuse to believe did not occur.
3. Daniel Larison notes that Trump's idea of foreign policy is just to act real tough with everyone for no good reason. "Omni-directional belligerence," he calls it and it seems to be based on the premise that acting real tough is the same thing as being real tough…and appearing real tough is better than being real smart.
4. And finally for today: Donald Trump is a lousy cosplayer. His Thor outfit (see above) is just pathetic.

That's Today's Four Bad Things From Your Trump Administration. Tune in tomorrow for four more. Sadly, I don't think I'll have any trouble finding four more each day.

If you don't know what gerrymandering is, here's a real good explanation.

• Trump sending troops to stop people from saying Hillary got more votes; also will invade "Celebrity Apprentice" to shore up bad ratings.

Hey, why do cartoon characters wear gloves? There are a couple of reasons and one of them, believe it or not, is racial. What isn't, these days?

I suspect a lot of folks who voted for Trump are getting increasingly antsy about what they voted for. The ones I know are all decent people who are tolerant of all races and religions. They therefore have to be uncomfy with some of the people who are being added to Team Trump in Washington…for example, Michael Anton, who is now a senior national security official in that administration. As Jonathan Chait notes, Anton is a firm believer that the only "real" Americans are white Republicans and they must do everything possible to fight anyone who isn't one of them. Scary.

Allan Burns was one of the creators of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and here he remembers that experience, including the network's refusal to have Mary be a divorcee.

One of the many groundbreaking things about that series was that it seemed to loosen network control of a series. This was the case with All in the Family, as well. There were so many stories about executives at CBS being dead wrong about those two shows — predicting failure where success was the outcome — that a lot of folks at networks began backing off, letting the producers have more say about what they produced. The trend is recent years has gone in the opposite direction and I've never heard anyone — not even at the networks — who thinks that's a good thing.