Monthly Archives: June 2017

The 1999 Broadway show Fosse re-created many of the acclaimed musical numbers that were staged by the legendary Bob Fosse. Here are Ann Reinking and a line of fine dancers playing the line of dance hall dames in Sweet Charity…

The trial of Bill Cosby, as I'm sure you know by now, ended with a hung jury. I'm not sure we know if it was one vote for acquittal or eleven or somewhere in-between…but the prosecutors are saying they're going to try, try again. One suspects there will be a little attempt at a plea bargain, especially if it comes out the jury was 11-1 or 10-2 either way. The side that got the 1 or 2 might not be so lucky next time and willing to deal but maybe that's not in the cards.

A lot of folks online today are outraged that "the system" didn't work…but this is the way the system is supposed to work — sometimes. Juries deadlock from time to time because "reasonable doubt" is subject to so many interpretations. We understand they're not always unanimous just as they're not always right so we have an appeals process. If 12-0 verdicts can be reversed — and they are — then it's not shocking that we have 11-1 verdicts where the 1 is wrong, and I'm sure there are 11-1 juries where the 1 is right.

Also, I see a lot of folks online who are sure Cosby is guilty (or not) because they knew or heard of someone who said they once had an encounter with him and something happened…or didn't. I know a woman who is very, very attractive and back in 1980 or so, not long after she'd been naked in Playboy, spent an afternoon alone with Mr. Cosby. She said she was aware of his reputation but nothing sordid occurred and he was a perfect gentleman. That doesn't prove the other reported sex crimes did or did not occur. I mean, the Boston Strangler didn't strangleevery woman he could have strangled.

I happen to think Mr. Cosby is — as Doonesbury once said — "Guilty, guilty, guilty" but I was and am ready to hear a good case made that he is not. I haven't yet and it doesn't sound like one was presented in the courtroom in this case; just maybe enough to get one or two jurors to think there was something illogical about Andrea Constand's story about being drugged and raped, then seeking repeated contact with Cosby.

Even if Cosby is not retried and this is the outcome, he's still lost big: Lost his reputation, lost his career, lost millions in legal fees. That's not a proper punishment for what he probably did but it's not nothing.

I played hooky from work 'n' blogging yesterday and had a three-hour lunch at the Magic Castle with my friend, actress — and everybody's favorite Matinee Lady — Teresa Ganzel. We did not spend three hours eating. We spent three hours talking, joined for much of it by another friend of both of us, Trish Alaskey. Trish is the niece of the late, wonderful voice actor Joe Alaskey and she's on the staff of the Castle, which in case you don't know is a private club for magicians up in hills above Hollywood. I love being a member and I especially like lunching there because I don't have to wear the mandatory-in-the-evenings jacket and tie.

Teresa has done hundreds of different roles on television but we spent some time talking about her years as a sketch player and frequent interviewee on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. I've been watching old episodes on Antenna TV and they tend to run a lot of ones with Teresa. There's probably a reason for this apart from the fact that she was really funny and charming on the show. To avoid paying a lot of loot for music clearances, Antenna TV tends to not run many shows with big musical guests. That means they run a disproportionate number of episodes with big comedy sketches; ergo, more Teresa. There was one on just the other night.

As a fierce Carson-watcher, I had an observation recently which I shared with Ms. Ganzel and I'd like to share it with you. Those old Carson shows are a great time capsule and they show you a lot about how the world evolved from around the mid-seventies (the earliest shows they seem to have) to 1992 when Johnny left us. It has to do somewhat with the Tea Time Movie sketches that he did with some regularity, parodying an afternoon TV pitchman long after such personalities had disappeared from most channels. Lovable Art Fern — the man who would sell you anything and everything — was always accompanied by his lovely Matinee Lady co-host.

When Johnny first began doing the sketches, the Matinee Lady was played by a different actress each time. Usually, it was someone booked as a guest on the show and they'd draft her into service in the Mighty Carson Art Players skit. I remember Paula Prentiss doing it on a number of occasions. Around 1971, Carol Wayne became the steady co-star of these bits. Ms. Wayne was very lovely and sweet but I don't know that she ever understood a single line that they gave her to say. If she did, she did a good job of pretending she didn't and a lot of Art Fern's comedic "takes" were at the space cadet nature of her delivery.

I knew a few of Carson's writers and we talked about this a few times. Basically, because the way (and the when) she would say a line was so unpredictable, there were only two kinds of jokes they could write for her. One kind was based on the premise that her breasts were huge; the other kind was based on the premise that her brain was not. I am not saying that the latter was a fair appraisal of Ms. Wayne, though the one time I met her did nothing to disprove it. In any case, that's what she played on the screen…and of course, if you're a writer of jokes, those two premises are real easy to work off of.

They were also completely consistent with an attitude many TV shows had then and it was very much in evidence on Johnny's. If you were a woman and you weren't a superstar like Lucille Ball or Carol Burnett, you were there to be looked at. The comedy was best left to men. My pal Nick Arnold, who wrote for Johnny for a time, once told me that the secret to getting a sketch approved by Carson was "B.I.B." I asked what that stood for and I should have guessed. Nick said it stood for "Babe In Bikini" or maybe "Bimbo in Bikini." Then he told me, "If the sketch was really weak, you might need more than one." If you read any criticism of Carson during that era, it usually included a reference to "airhead starlets" and the show's love of booking them.

Carol Wayne died in 1985 in a mysterious accident. Carson suspended the Tea Time Movie sketches for not all that long before trying them with a couple of different actresses, all of whom were cast mainly for their bustlines and they all tried to do Carol. In the meantime, Teresa had become a recurring occupant of Johnny's guest chair. She had first turned up there in 1983 when she was on to promote a situation comedy on which she was then a regular — Teachers Only, which not coincidentally was produced by Carson Productions. Johnny found her amusing and charming, and had her back several times. She fit the eye candy requirement but was smart-funny as opposed to stupid-funny.

Finally, around late '86, they tried her out as the Matinee Lady and not only kept her in that esteemed position but began using her in other sketches, including a very funny series where she and Johnny played salesfolks on a channel not unlike the Home Shopping Network and another batch where they played TV news co-anchors. The thing that struck me as notable about them is that she was not just there as eye candy. They actually wrote jokes for her and in many, they had equal roles.

I remember thinking at the time that Johnny's sketches had grown up a lot. Before Teresa, a woman in a sketch on the Carson show was either playing gorgeous-but-not-too-bright or she was Betty White. She rarely had lines that presumed the lady — whoever she was if she was not Betty White — had the ability to deliver a line.

It is perhaps worth noting that Johnny Carson did that show from October 1, 1962 until May 22, 1992…a span of 29 years and 7 months. During that time, he went through something like a hundred writers. Not one of them was a woman. During this time, a lot of women were becoming important as writers and even producers on situation comedies…but not on Johnny's show.

Not long before Teresa became Art Fern's sidekick, Johnny had been getting some real bad press. Comediennes — most notably Elayne Boosler — had been complaining that they were not given the same consideration as male stand-ups. In a Rolling Stone interview, Carson had said — and probably regretted saying this — that he did not like "the new breed of female standup comic" because they were too "aggressive." About the only one he had on was Joan Rivers, whose act back then was mostly about how her husband didn't find her attractive. The few female stand-ups like Phyllis Diller and Totie Fields basically came out on stage and talked about how ugly they were.

Johnny didn't like the criticism so his show's lead talent scout, Jim McCawley, was dispatched to find some good, up-and-coming female stand-ups for the show. I knew Jim a little. He was a nice, smart guy with a near-perfect sense of What Johnny Will Like. When people write of how Carson "discovered" comics like Garry Shandling and Jay Leno and David Letterman and — well, you know the list — they're probably robbing Jim and a couple of other Tonight Show staffers of credit. Johnny himself occasionally dropped into the Improv or the Comedy Store but it was guys like McCawley who sat there all night, sitting through thirty bad comics in search of one with possibilities. I'd see him at those places, drinking 7-Up and fending off legions of ass-kissing new guys who knew exactly what a good Tonight Show shot could do for their careers.

He had trouble finding female stand-ups that Johnny would appreciate. The criticism of his show wasn't entirely fair. There weren't all that many of them then and some came off as fiercely hostile to males in almost a militant lesbian way. That, Johnny would not have wanted on his program. In one case that I know of, Jim even tried creating the kind of break-out female comic Johnny wanted to showcase. McCawley found a lady who could deliver jokes well but whose material was rather weak and he tried using his clout — and ability to promise male comics a turn for themselves — to get them to write material for her.

He put her on the show but she failed to click. For a while, his best "find" was Victoria Jackson, who was funny but who did nothing to change the image of The Tonight Show as liking its women cute and clueless. It wasn't until 1986 that a new female comic scored big on Johnny's show without playing or being dumb. That was Ellen DeGeneres and one does wonder if she'd have been booked if they'd known then that she was gay. I don't know.

But all during this time, there was Teresa Ganzel, not doing stand-up but doing panel and appearing in sketches, increasingly as a full partner with the star. I thought she was wonderful and I didn't even know her then. There were also fewer and fewer of the airhead starlets on the show. Johnny was not dumb. Among the many reasons he stayed on the air so long was that he recognized when something wasn't working and changed it.

He had dozens of guests who appeared frequently and then one day, he'd decide they'd worn out their welcome and instead of appearing every 3-6 weeks, they'd suddenly be down to once a year or not at all. Among these were Charles Nelson Reilly, Tony Randall, Jaye P. Morgan, Charles Grodin, Orson Bean and Robert Blake. At one point, he decided that his back-up bandleader Tommy Newsom was dragging the show down and thereafter, Tommy just remained in the band with no lines. Carson also sensed that audiences were not finding "drunk" jokes as funny as they used to and he cut way back on jokes about his announcer Ed McMahon consuming mass quantities of liquor.

And his show became much more open to smart, funny women like Teresa. She was the breakthrough. She took the Matinee Lady from being someone to be ogled and laughed-at because her I.Q. was lower than her bra-size to being a skilled comic actress playing that kind of character. As I watch the sketches with her in them, it's obvious the writers were giving her lines that poor Carol could never have handled…and Carson's performance is better because he was on stage with someone he trusted to come in at just the right moment, not when she suddenly noticed one of her lines creeping up on the TelePrompter.

This all may wind up to a tiny milestone in the evolution of women on TV but I think it's quite real and that Teresa deserves some real credit. I told her this over lunch not just to flatter her but because it's true. I admire her so much that maybe I shouldn't have stuck her with the check.

A couple of you have suggested linking to this article by Eric Levitz that says, "If the President Is Innocent, Then He Is Insane." I'm not sure I completely buy it.

Maybe it's spot-on but I keep thinking about a TV producer for whom I once worked. He was a very successful, wealthy fellow who'd never expected to be anywhere near as successful or wealthy. He had a sudden cluster of hit shows and couldn't explain why. When someone asked him what he'd done right, or even when he asked himself, the answer was "I dunno," which is not an acceptable answer, especially when it's you asking about you.

He finally decided, based on no evidence whatsoever, that it must have been his instincts. In fact, he was sure he was right because, hey, his instincts told him he was right to think his instincts were right to think it was because his instincts were right to think…etc.

So when he made illogical decisions and asked to explain them, he really couldn't. He'd make up some silly reasons or sometimes he'd say, "This is what my gut tells me." And it was on that basis that he operated a production company that did all sorts of odd things no one could understand. Most of them made the mistake of assuming there was some rational, devious explanation for what seemed to most of us working on the show when in fact, what he was doing was playing hunches. Maybe that's what Trump is doing. Then again…

No Trump Dump today but do read this article by Matt Yglesias about the big Trump scandal — bigger than the Russia thing. It's the bait-and-switch over Health Care…how the guy who kept saying he'd never cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security apparently meant, "…unless, of course, those things get in the way of giving rich people like me a yuuuggge tax cut." I really don't understand how people who voted for Trump thinking he was going to do all that are okay with what's happening now. Do they really think you can take $880 billion out of Medicaid and no one will lose coverage?

The wonderful folks who run Comic-Con International today announced…

Bill Messner-Loebs and Jack Kirby to Receive 2017 Bill Finger Award

Bill Messner-Loebs and Jack Kirby have been selected to receive the 2017 Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. The selection, made by a blue-ribbon committee chaired by writer-historian Mark Evanier, was unanimous.

"As always, I asked on my blog for suggestions of worthy recipients," Evanier explains. "Many were nominated and the committee chose Bill as the worthiest of those still alive and working, and Jack because although his artwork has always been justly hailed, his contribution as a writer has been too often minimized or overlooked. In fact, in the years we've been doing this award, Jack Kirby has received many more nominations than anyone else, but we held off honoring him until this year because it seemed appropriate to finally do it in the centennial of his birth, and because members of his family will be at Comic-Con to accept on his behalf."

The Bill Finger Award was created in 2005 at the instigation of comic book legend Jerry Robinson. "The premise of this award is to recognize writers for a body of work that has not received its rightful reward and/or recognition," Evanier explains. "Even though the late Bill Finger now finally receives credit for his role in the creation of Batman, he's still the industry poster boy for writers not receiving proper reward or recognition."

Bill Messner-Loebs has been a cartoonist and writer since the 1970s. He has worked for DC, Marvel, Comico, Power Comics, Texas Comics, Vertigo, Boom!, Image, IDW, and the U.S. State Department (for which he produced a comic about the perils of land mines). He has written Superman, Flash, Aquaman, Mr. Monster, Hawkman, Green Arrow, Wonder Woman, Dr. Fate, Jonny Quest, Spider-Man, Thor, and the Batman newspaper strip. He wrote and drew Journey: The Adventures of Wolverine MacAlistaire and Bliss Alley, and he co-created The Maxx and Epicurus the Sage. He has also delivered pizzas, done custom framing, been a library clerk, sold art supplies, and taught cartooning.

Jack Kirby has been called "The King of the Comics" for both his dazzling, trend-setting artwork and his innovative ideas and stories, as well as the countless popular characters and comics he created or co-created. Among those characters and comics are Captain America, The X-Men, The Fantastic Four, The Boy Commandos, The Newsboy Legion, Young Romance, Sky Masters, The New Gods, The Demon, The Challengers of the Unknown, The Silver Surfer, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, Nick Fury—Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., The Avengers, Iron Man, Thor, The Forever People, Kamandi — The Last Boy on Earth, Captain Victory, The Eternals, The Black Panther, Fighting American, and many, many others. Many readers knew him first as an artist on the Marvel comics of the 1960s, but in prior decades he wrote as much as he drew, and even at Marvel he plotted stories and made other contributions while receiving only an artist credit. His work, with or without other writers, continues to be the most reprinted ever in the history of comic books.

The Bill Finger Award honors the memory of William Finger (1914–1974), who was the first and, some say, most important writer of Batman. Many have called him the "unsung hero" of the character and have hailed his work not only on that iconic figure but on dozens of others, primarily for DC Comics.

In addition to Evanier, the selection committee consists of Charles Kochman (executive editor at Harry N. Abrams, book publisher), comic book writer Kurt Busiek, artist/historian Jim Amash, cartoonist Scott Shaw!, and writer/editor Marv Wolfman.

The major sponsor for the 2017 awards is DC Comics; supporting sponsors are Heritage Auctions and Maggie Thompson.

The Finger Award falls under the auspices of Comic-Con International: San Diego and is administered by Jackie Estrada. The awards will be presented during the Eisner Awards ceremony at this summer's Comic-Con International on Friday, July 21 at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront hotel.

The jury in the Bill Cosby case reported they were deadlocked and unable to reach a verdict.  The judge sent them back to try, try again…which I gather is Standard Operating Procedure in this situation.

People are trying to figure out what this means…but of course, they don't know if it was 11-1 or 10-2 or even 6-6 and if it wasn't even, if the deadlock leans towards acquittal or conviction.  There's been a lot of groundless speculation since the case went to the jury if the amount of time they were out deliberating boded well or ill for Cosby.

This is all the kind of thing we're thinking about when we quote journalist Jack Germond, who once said of his profession, "The trouble is we're not paid to say 'I don't know' when we don't know."  So reporters speculate, often based on nothing, and this takes the place of — and is mistaken for — actual news. When someone says, "Being out this long probably means we're looking at a Not Guilty verdict," they have no reason to think that.

All we can say is that they were deadlocked, they may still be deadlocked and if they continue to be deadlocked, we're probably looking at a mistrial…and a whole new trial or maybe some sort of plea bargain.

This is from a month ago when documentary producer Robert Weide interviewed Woody Allen live on Facebook.  One of the main topics is Mr. Allen's inability to grasp the concept of Facebook, as well as his limited capacity to understand modern technology…

By the way: The annual AFI Life Achievement Award presentation airs tomorrow night on TNT.  The recipient is Diane Keaton and there are only about nine hundred webpages that give away the surprise speaker at the end.  (The show was taped on June 8.)

I won't tell you who it is but he's in the above video and it's not Robert Weide.  I'm told his speech was outstanding so you might want to record the show and watch at least the last part.  As I understand it, TNT is running it twice tomorrow night with commercial interruptions and then Turner Classic Movies runs it sometime next month without commercial interruptions.

Tomorrow (Thursday) night at Los Angeles City Hall, our mayor Eric Garcetti will preside over a tribute to Adam West that will include the lighting of the Bat-Signal!  In the future, when some of the lesser actors to play the Caped Crusader pass away, they're going to have some guy at the Sanitation Department just wave around a Bic lighter.

Well, today's big news seems to be that Trump is being investigated for Obstruction of Justice. Remember back when he wasn't yet and how important it was to him to get James Comey (or someone) to tell the world that? Well, he seems to be now.  Things can't be too jolly in the White House — or wherever he is — tonight.

What's more, journalists like Josh Marshall are theorizing that this investigation wasn't launched by Special Counsel Robert Mueller but by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and that a whole lot of Trump associates are under suspicion for various crimes, some of them financial. So it may not be a matter of "Will Trump fire the Special Counsel to shut down the investigation of him?" but "Will Trump fire a number of people in the Justice Department to shut down a whole series of investigations?" In other news…

• "By a 97-2 vote, the U.S. Senate approved stronger sanctions on Russia Wednesday and took the first step toward limiting President Trump's ability to ease those sanctions." He can't be happy about that, either. Here's the whole story.
• As Ed Kilgore notes, the American Health Care Act is about as popular as projectile vomiting…and this is over a wide political spectrum. This is not something that Trump voters and Republicans love and Democrats hate. Just about everybody dislikes it and they haven't even read the Senate version of it yet! Are our elected officials really going to pass this thing? Or is the idea here that at Trump's insistence, it's going to be vastly improved, and people will think it's better even though it's just a little less terrible…and Donald will claim he saved the day?
• David Margolick has a theory about that strange televised meeting where all the members of Trump's cabinet praised him for his greatness.

Meanwhile, Trump may get a break in the next few days whenever the verdict in the Bill Cosby trial knocks him off the front page for a day or so. I don't know which way it will go but reporting from the courtroom suggest that if Cosby is acquitted, it will be because his lawyers convinced the jury that it was not rape but just a really, really bizarre mutual romance.  Frightening.

An owl taking a bath…

Stuff to do today, stuff to do today. Whatever posting I do here will probably be this evening.

I awoke as you probably did to news of the shooting in Virginia at a baseball practice of congressional Republicans. Then I checked my e-mail and there was already a message from a right-wing reader of this site, calling me a hypocrite for not condemning the attack because (he said) I leap to condemn attacks when non-Republicans get shot at. I guess I'm supposed to post in my sleep.

Actually, I don't leap or even try to condemn most shootings because I figure anyone with a functioning heart and brain condemns murders and attempted murders and the condemnations accomplish nothing. Absolutely nothing. I know some very sane, responsible gun owners — some even with trophies for their marksmanship and skills — who can tell you any number of ways they think the availability of guns could be controlled better (not totally but better) without penalizing folks like them. Even when Democrats were in power in this country, no one who could implement their ideas was about to listen to them.

So I'm not even writing about the issue. Nothing's going to happen…not because of this shooting or the next one or the next one or the next one, no matter who gets shot or how many of them. People will just continue to try and make political capital off them, arguing that the latest shooting proves we need to abolish Obamacare or impose a high Carbon Tax or something. I think shootings prove we need to do a better job preventing shootings but since we're not going to do that, I really don't have anything valuable to offer on the topic.

Hey! How do they make cake sprinkles?

I'm not a big fan of attempts to psychoanalyze public figures from afar…but boy, the video of that meeting where Trump sat there grinning as all his cabinet members declared his greatness and the honor of serving him — that was creepy. And it practically begs us to discuss what's going on inside a "boss" who would demand that…

Now, this…

• Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has been busy backing off on promises.  Mnuchin once said that the Trump administration would not give rich people a tax cut.  Now, he's dying to do it.  He's apparently also rescinding on Trump's behalf the pledge to not cut Social Security.  The way he's going, I expect now to hear him say Trump has dropped plans to Make America Great Again. Jonathan Chait has more.
• Five weeks ago, Trump hailed the passage by the House of its American Health Care Act and called it a "well-crafted bill."  Now, he says it's "mean" and it needs to be "more generous."  Nothing changed in the bill so wha' happened?  Even Sarah Kliff doesn't seem to know.
• Nate Silver says that Trump's antics are making Europe liberal again.  Some of us are waiting for him to do that here. America First! America First!
• Ryan Lizza believes that if Trump isn't currently being investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, it's just a matter of time.  No wonder there's speculation that Trump is thinking of firing the Special Counsel.

Stephen Colbert had Oliver Stone on the other night.  Stone was plugging his new interview with Vladimir Putin and didn't — I thought — do a very good job of answering Colbert's questions about it. It sounds like the conversation just kind of sidesteps the allegations that Putin operates an oppressive regime that jails and maybe even terminates people who challenge him, reporters included. That would be like doing a twenty-hour interview with O.J. Simpson and just talking about football.

I think (maybe I'm wrong) that in the promos for Stone's appearance, he made some statement that a person would have to be stupid to believe Russia had influenced the last presidential election…but nothing like that was heard in the segment as aired. Anyone else hear what I think I heard?

Rumors abound that the magazine known as MAD — an institution that's been around exactly as long as I have — will soon cease publication. I'm pretty sure this is not so, though it is about to undergo some massive changes and no one is saying quite what they'll be. One biggie though is that its office of operations is shifting from New York, New York (across the street from where Stephen Colbert does his show) to Burbank, California (across the street from where Ellen DeGeneres does her show). With this migration will come a brand-new editorial staff consisting of…

Well, if the folks in charge of DC Comics have decided who the folks in charge of MAD will henceforth be, they've kept it a lot more secret than anything in the Trump White House. I don't know and no one currently involved in the production of MAD seems to know.

Some history. MAD started in 1952 and was originally owned by the infamous William M. Gaines. He sold it in 1961 to a conglomerate called Premier Industries that had grown out of a company that made venetian blinds.

Venetian blinds…irreverent humor magazine…you can see the obvious connection there. (By the way, Wikipedia — which of course is otherwise infallible — has this all wrong.)

Gaines stayed on as publisher with a contractual guarantee of absolute independence so everyone else stayed on. A few years later, Premier sold MAD to its distributor, Independent News, which was a division of National Periodical Publications, publishers of DC Comics. Gaines continued to have total control of his magazine.

Then in the late sixties, National Periodical Publications was acquired by Kinney National Services, another conglomerate — this one, built out of a company that dealt in parking lots, limousines and funeral services. Another obvious connection. Kinney eventually got so big, it acquired Warner Brothers and other businesses and was later reorganized into Time-Warner, which one day will acquire you and all of us unless Disney gets us first.

Gaines continued to have control but time has a way of chipping away at things and so does Time-Warner. His death in 1992 didn't help things and DC Comics began assuming more direct control.

Throughout this period, sales of MAD declined, just as sales of almost all magazines in this country have declined, many to tiny fractions of past heights. There is no major, long-running American periodical that is selling anywhere near as well as it used to sell and MAD is no exception. This has extinguished any viewpoint that MAD is first and foremost a print magazine and that other exploitations of its name and reputation are still just adjuncts to that. The view now is that MAD is a valuable property to be "monetized" by the various divisions. Some of those endeavors, like the MAD TV shows, have been rather lucrative.

Harvey Kurtzman was, as we all know, the first editor of MAD. He left in 1956 after a dispute with Gaines, and the editorship was filled from then until 1984 by Al Feldstein. After Feldstein retired, they split the editorial position between Nick Meglin and John Ficarra, and then Meglin retired in 2004.

Ficarra has been at the helm since then. Over the years, the quality of the magazine has varied a lot but in my opinion, it's been high for the last decade or so with some of its sharpest writing ever. John is a friend of mine but I have been telling him for more than a decade that MAD is important to me and if I ever think the magazine sucks, then screw the friendship — I will say so loudly and say it everywhere I can. I have not had to do this.  Unlike a lot of purists, I thought it was okay and even necessary when MAD went to a mostly-color format and began accepting advertising.  It is still, I believe, a fine humor magazine.

Still, you can only make so much money these days publishing a fine humor magazine. Most large comic book companies now make such a high percentage of their incomes via media and merchandising that actually putting out product on paper is relatively unimportant. Most do it out of tradition, because they don't want to admit that the properties aren't so popular in their native format, and as a place to develop new ideas that can become TV shows, movies and videogames. MAD could not have survived this long had it not joined that shift in focus.

A few years ago, DC Comics — accepting this shift — closed down its New York office and relocated to Burbank. MAD stayed behind — a last vestige of its independence — but that's over with. The current editorial staff in Manhattan will edit the magazine through #550, which will go to press at the end of this year and come out in February of 2018. After that, no one there knows what the heck will happen to it but clearly it will happen in Burbank without them. One production artist who has only been there a short time will make the move west. No one else.

One would like to assume Time-Warner has good, new folks lined up to assume command out here, even if things have not yet been finalized. Longtime MAD contributor Tom Richmond has heard that MAD will remain a magazine. It will not move back to the comic book format it had for its first 23 issues as some have speculated. Tom's blog would be a good thing to keep an eye on if you're looking for up-to-the-minute news on the future of Alfred E. Neuman and the magazine he adorns.

Tom notes the uncertainty that he and many other MAD contributors share. Many, perhaps most of them have not been there long and probably regard it as just an occasional assignment. But there are those who have served the magazine well for so long that it has become not only a major part of their incomes but their identities, as well. The work of Al Jaffee has appeared in 495 of its 546 issues, Sergio Aragonés has been in 469, Dick DeBartolo has had articles in 460 MADs and there are others among The Usual Gang of Idiots with lower but still impressive totals. The last few years, Tom Richmond with his terrific, MAD-worthy caricatures has filled more of its pages than anyone else.

They'd kinda like to know what's going to happen. Tom says he's hoping for some sort of announcement next month at Comic-Con International.

As a long-time MAD fan/historian (and contributor of two whole pages to it), I'm eager to know for my own reasons. I do not believe that an institution like MAD has to remain the same forever. The world changes and most things need to change with it. The fear is that in changing, MAD might wind up being MAD in name only, losing what its name stands for…and we have a dandy and true Worst Case Scenario to look at as an example.

Once upon a time, the name and logo of National Lampoon denoted an irreverent and wildly-popular humor magazine. It also represented a pool of brilliant contributors and a style and a standard. Separated from those contributors (or others of equal merit) and that style and that standard, it became just a label to be slapped on some pretty crummy products…and not even a particularly effective label. It no longer identifies something that has a kinship to the material — the magazine and the first few movies to have that name in their titles — that made that name notable. If you want to read a long article about how that happened, here's one.

I"m not saying this will happen to MAD, just that it would be a dreadful shame if it did. I am hardly the only kid of my generation who had his sense of humor shaped to a meaningful degree by MAD and who learned to look at the world with a certain amount of healthy, irreverent skepticism. I sure hope the franchise does that for future generations and isn't just used to sell them a shitload of stuff unworthy of the name.