Monthly Archives: December 2017

I can't think of the last item I got in the mail that made me as happy as what I received yesterday: A printed copy of Volume 4 of Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips.

This book would make anyone happy since it's packed with two years worth of what a lot of us think is the best newspaper strip ever done — Walt Kelly's Pogo. Not only that but the two years are 1955 and 1956 when Mr. Kelly had truly hit his stride and was doing the kind of work that made it and him famous. But I have a special reason to be delighted…

As most of you know, I got involved in this series because I was involved with Walt Kelly's wonderful daughter Carolyn and she was involved in this series. Matter of fact, she was its co-editor and designer and over-all Quality Control Martinet…and I mean that in only a good way. No one else supervising a series of books reprinting a newspaper strip could possibly care about its excellence more than she cared about preserving and presenting her father's magnum opus.

It was not easy to meet the goals she set for the series. Good quality source material was not available for some of the early strips so Carolyn painstakingly restored some medium-quality source material into good source material, retouching and cleaning up the strips by hand and/or Photoshop. You would not believe how many hours she spent doing that. That delayed the books. Then her co-editor Kim Thompson began battling the cancer that took his life in 2013. That delayed the books. Then Carolyn herself began battling the cancer that took her life earlier this year. That really delayed the books.

One of the many ways I knew we were going to lose her was that she began asking me, "If I don't make it, will you make sure the Pogo series is completed, just the way we planned it?" I assured her several times it would be and I have stepped into her role as co-editor to make sure that happens. The long-delayed Volume Four is now printed and Volume Five is on schedule. In fact, Volume Five is about 80% complete — with a foreword by Jake Tapper.

Volume Four contains two years of strips — dailies and Sundays with the Sundays in color — as well as historical material, a little tribute to Carolyn and a foreword by Neil Gaiman. At the moment, Amazon is giving January 9, 2018 as its release date but since I have an actual, real printed-and-bounded copy to my left, it should be out through them before that. It takes a few weeks for all the copies to arrive in this country from the overseas printer and then the crates have to clear Customs…but before Christmas seems highly possible.

"How do I get a copy?" I hear you ask. This link will allow you to pre-order one from Amazon — and since I have my copy, it shouldn't be that long before you have yours.

But, as they say in infomercials, wait! There's more! If you didn't get Volume 3 or maybe even if you did, you can get Volume 3 and Volume 4 in a lovely boxed-set with a slipcase that holds both of them. Amazon says they'll be delivered at the end of March but I don't believe that. Why? Because I didn't just receive my copy of 4 yesterday as a standalone. It came as part of my lovely boxed-set of Volume 3 and 4. I've got one! The boxes were made at the same time as Volume 4 and an additional pressing of Volume 3. Here's a link to order the boxed set — and I should mention that the box looks different from the illustration there.

And I should also tell you that at this moment — and, knowing Amazon, maybe not for long — you can get the boxed set of Volumes 1 and 2 at this link for about the price of one volume. If you're thinking of collecting this series, this would be a great way to start.

I was a fan of Pogo long before I ever met Carolyn, even before I could "get" two-thirds of the jokes in it. Fortunately, there were enough that even a third was more than enough. I loved it and I wished someone would do the series I now find myself co-editing with Eric Reynolds. If you want to say Peanuts was the greatest strip ever or that Krazy Kat was or Li'l Abner or the Elzie Segar Thimble Theater (aka Popeye), I'll admit they're all wonderful too and we won't have much of an argument. But I'll still be right.

I was just discussing the previous post with a friend and I reminded myself of something. Back in the eighties, I was working for a company when one of the top men was fired…and rather unceremoniously, I felt. They put out one of those stories nobody ever believes about how he'd resigned to spend more time with his family — which is certain code for "we canned his sorry ass" — but the announcement seemed even phonier than usual. I wondered why since his job performance, while not grand, didn't seem that inept.

A year or two later, someone in a position to know told me that the guy had been fired because of a couple of "inappropriate" situations with females in the workplace. In this case, as a euphemism, the word "inappropriate" was doing a lot of heavy lifting. It was standing in for something close to rape.

The company had fired the guy. It had also paid significant money to the women to settle a lawsuit or the threat of one. Everyone involved — victims, included — wanted it kept hush-hush so it was kept hush-hush. End of story.

One of the questions I keep hearing about the recent epidemic of sexual impropriety scandals is "Why is this happening so much now?" An obvious reason and probably the main one is that when some women come forward and are believed, that gives confidence to others to come forward. We may have Mr. Cosby to thank for that.

But I'm wondering if maybe the uptick in such cases isn't quite as large as it seems. Maybe there have been a few more of these in the past than we thought and they're just not being kept hush-hush any longer.

I meant to mention this earlier in the item about Sexual Harassment. I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere else but it sure strikes me that a few of these firings — people losing their jobs over something they said or did that was deemed "inappropriate" — are cases where the company was looking for an excuse to terminate or break a contract.

I'm not talking about the ones where someone committed rape or anything approaching it. But there are some involving physical contact that doesn't seem to be so wrong as to warrant ouster and some that are merely imprudent (as opposed to threatening) speech. In those cases, I wonder if the employer isn't seizing on an opportunity to get rid of someone they were already thinking of getting rid of. You could probably get some people to settle out their contracts for a lot less money if you did it that way. Just a thought.

My favorite impressionist Jim Meskimen has a real "hard-to-get" guest on his latest celebrity podcast…

First, from Jim Kosmicki…

It would seem to me that sexual harassment in comics would be much more prevalent at conventions and other such public gatherings. Haven't most of the major cons adopted specific guidelines on appropriate behavior, especially as cosplay has gotten more prevalent?

Yes…and here's the thing that I think about whenever I read such guidelines. The rules they give to follow at their con are all good rules…but they're also rules that you should follow everywhere, not just at a con. Here's part of one convention's statement…

Harassment includes offensive verbal comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion, sexual images in public spaces, deliberate intimidation, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention. Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

Shouldn't everyone be refraining from that behavior when they go to Arby's? When they play softball at the park? When they walk down any public street? What the convention is saying — and I'm not faulting them for this — is "If you're going to do these kinds of things, don't do them where people are going to complain to us about them or where we might be sued." Maybe we need one of those policies for the whole planet.

This next one is from one of those "don't use my name" people…

How do you feel about the people who knew about Louis C.K. or Cosby or any of those people and did nothing? I saw people dumping on Jon Stewart saying "He must have known his friend was doing this."

I don't know what Jon Stewart knew. The trouble is that in a lot of cases, you'd be trying to police unsourced, vague gossip. If you heard about Louis C.K.'s "Hey, Look Me Over!" activities before they became headline news, you probably heard that he did this in some unspecified place at some unspecified time with some unidentified woman. And whoever the woman was, you probably don't know if she was fine with it or if she was so horrified or if she just wants to forget about it and not have anyone mention it ever again.

Moreover, if you asked the person who told you, "How do you know this?," the answer might have been something like, "Oh, this guy I know heard it from his roommate's boy friend. He did something on the crew of some show Louis C.K. did." It's tough to do much with that kind of info, especially when it doesn't involve you directly.

Now maybe if you knew Louis C.K., you could go to him and say, "Hey, I hear these rumors…anything to them?" He'd almost certainly deny them — apparently, he did deny them to a few people — and then what are you going to do? You might have heard it happened but you probably don't know for absolutely sure that it did.

And I keep coming back to this: You don't know if the victim(s) want to make an issue of what happened or if they just want it to go away. I've known a number of women who were subjected to what we now call with great tact, "sexual impropriety." These were mostly actresses pursued by Wanna-Be Weinsteins, though one lady I knew was pursued once by a studio head and on other occasions, by two people everyone would call Comedy Legends. She wanted to make like those incidents never happened. She was horrified when I suggested that the actions of the studio head warranted a call to the police. She was dead certain that just dropping these matters would be less painful and harmful to her and she had a right to have it that way.

The good thing that is happening now is that more women are speaking up about these abuses…but not all women are. Anyone think for a moment that there aren't ladies who've kept quiet about what Cosby did to them? Or Weinstein? Or most of those folks? Most of the women who did come forward did not do so at the time. Some waited years until some scars had healed and/or they thought they might be believed. (I absolutely do not buy "Why didn't she say something at the time?" as a reason to disbelieve any of these accusations.)

So I don't know what Jon Stewart knew. Or what he could have done about it if he had known.

So now we have one of Trump's lawyers claiming, in essence, that the President of the United States can do any damned thing he wants and he won't be breaking the law. We are but days from the assertion that he can indeed grab women by the pussy and shoot someone on 5th Avenue.

Wish we had Republicans in this country who would react to that the same way they'd have reacted if a lawyer for Barack Obama had said that. Remember when Signing Statements were proof that the Chief Exec was power mad and outta control?

The stuff Michael Flynn did was not illegal and he broke no law. But in spite of having top-drawer attorneys, he agreed to plead guilty to a felony and the court accepted his plea. Do I have this right?

Here's a large part of what's wrong with politics in the world today. When you change your position on something, you don't just say "I changed my mind." Instead, you blame the media…

Ezra Klein on how Republicans who once said debt would destroy America have now endorsed taking on more debt than anyone ever imagined. They're rationalizing it with this weird theory that this will supercharge the economy but very few of them seem to actually believe it and as Klein notes, "there is not a single economic analysis that agrees."

And by "not a single economic analysis," he means not a single economic analysis.

And as Jonathan Chait notes, no matter what happens, Republicans (and Trump especially) will declare the results a huge success and insist we should do more of it. Some are still trying to claim that "the great experiment" in Kansas was a smashing success.

Trump's answer to the F.B.I. finding so much wrongdoing in this administration? Fire all the agents and hire new ones!

And at the same time, Trump is now openly confessing to Obstruction of Justice and it looks like no one's going to do much, if anything, about it. Emily Stewart reports.

Matt Taibbi on what Trump is trying to do to the whole concept of the government trying to protect consumers from getting ripped-off by unscrupulous profiteers. This might be a good time for us all to become unscrupulous profiteers.

Daniel Larison thinks that Trump is about to make a bad foreign policy even worse. And Fred Kaplan agrees.

But, as usual, the greatest injustice in the world today is Hillary Clinton's e-mails. Some things never change.

• Let's ask all the Senators who voted for the GOP tax bill if they'd sign a 479-page car rental agreement full of illegible handwritten changes without ample time to read it.

Oh, look! It's a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup, the signal that the owner-operator of this blog is taking the day off to deal with other things, hopefully something that will pay him some money. He will be back tomorrow. Or he'll post another soup can. You never know what this crazy guy will do, including but not limited to writing posts in the third person.

Before he goes, he would like to suggest that if you want to know what's really going on in the Mueller investigation — including info on what laws may or may not have been broken and which ones you think exist but don't — you read a long piece by Jeffrey Toobin, who seems to know of what he writes.

The proprietor of this blog appreciates your patronage and he (and by "he," I mean of course, "I") will be back tomorrow. Or maybe not.

Three musical numbers from the original Broadway version of Wicked — with Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth. Real good stuff…

I think we're going to look back on 12/1/17 as the day everything changed in the Donald Trump presidency. From here on, he's playing defense, not offense, even if he'll pretend otherwise. Also, the reports of contact with Russia can no longer be dismissed as "fake news," though they surely will be. One of the amazing weapons of this administration is its determination to insist that everything is good news for Donald Trump. Every development is a smashing, unprecedented success. Every revelation in this case is total vindication. Every report that goes against this is fake news from the lying media.

You can get away with that for a while…and if Trump was six months from the end of his final term, he might be able to tough it out. Alas for him, we're 315 days into Term #1. I have no idea when this man will be out of office but for each remaining day, he and his cronies will be under investigation with indictments pending. That is unless he does something to halt the investigations, in which case that will be the scandal that will bring him down.

So the most immediate question is what will he do next to make things worse? His Twitter account was oddly quiet today. It usually isn't on Saturday mornings so we may awake to something batshit crazy. Or we may awake to a silent or temperate Trump who's letting the response be controlled by saner heads who've passed the bar. All I know is I'm getting real tired of living in interesting times.

• Get used to this term: "Unindicted co-conspirator." We'll be hearing a lot of it.

You may recall that a few weeks ago, I said I had tickets to see the musical Something Rotten on 11/28 but another event came along and seemed more important so I sold my tickets here and bought new ones to see that show next week instead. The more important event was the annual meeting of the Writers Guild's Animation Writing Caucus. Each year at this ceremony, they present the Lifetime Achievement Award to someone and I didn't want to miss the presentation to my everyone's friend, Len Wein.

Here's a picture from that evening. The gent at left is Craig Miller, the Chair of the A.W.C. The wonderful lady holding the flowers is Christine Valada, the widow of Len. The others are past winners of the award and left to right, they are Christie Marx, Patric Verrone, Mike Reiss, Len Uhley and me. I have no idea what was happening at the moment this photo was taken to make me look so suspicious.

It was a fine evening. The acting troupe that does the Thrilling Adventure Hour shows did a live reading of Len's first Swamp Thing story. There were video messages from Neil Gaiman and Hugh Jackman. DC Entertainment Head Honcho Dan Didio made the formal presentation of the award. Len's beloved Chris accepted it with a witty and touching speech. And the place was packed.

I guess it's inevitable at an event like this but I found myself thinking about past times with Len…mostly silly, little moments that would not constitute an engaging anecdote but which will nonetheless always be there when I think of the guy. A lot of laughing. A lot of talking about comics, the good and the bad. A lot of time waiting in airports, going to or from some convention…

…mostly, the laughing.

This has been a rough year of losing friends and we still have an entire month to go.