Monthly Archives: February 2018

If I were running the Food Network or the Cooking Channel or anything like that, I would give these two people their own show in a minute…

My longtime friend Paul Levitz continues the discussion about freelancers who do or do not get their work in on time.  Paul spent many, many years of his life at DC Comics dealing with that problem and more than once, I was in the office when he had to cope with this age-old problem: A writer or artist had not delivered work when it was due and was running so late that it was creating major problems.

Some were of the human variety. Somebody was sick. Someone was in an accident. Someone's close relative had died. Someone's power was out for two days. There are a thousand excuses, many of them even true.

When comics are done on an assembly line basis, each person has to wait for the person before to complete their assigned function.  If the work is passed from writer to pencil artist to letterer to inker and then to colorist, anyone's tardiness may screw up those who follow.  The pencil artist, for example, can be sitting there waiting for the script, not earning a living because he has nothing to draw.  That not only costs him or her money, it means he or she will have to rush and perhaps work insane hours to get the book back on schedule so the letterer will have something to letter, the inker will have something to ink, etc.

And some of the problems were of the business variety because the book was contracted to be at the printers by a certain date to be printed so it could be in stores by a certain date to be sold.

An editor or other person in Paul's position learns how to budget time, to build pad into the schedule, to know who will probably be late and so forth…to have a Plan B for the inevitable times when the assembly line just plain grinds to an unanticipated halt.  On several occasions, I watched Paul cope with those halts, sometimes even shifting to Plan C or even D. He may not remember telling me this but once, on a book where one member of the team was famously irresponsible, Paul had a Plan E ready to go.

I've seen others deal with them and dealt with them myself.  Paul was very good at that kind of crisis management and he just sent me this e-mail…

Another reoccurring cause of deadline trouble that I've observed over the years: many freelancers tend to time their ability to deliver off their best speed, the occasion when they could turn something around the fastest. Of course, our best speeds are usually a combination of factors that don't always arrive in conjunction: lack of distraction in our personal lives, our sympathy for the material we're working on, the requirements of the project itself, and, oh yeah, our health and mood. But there was the time I wrote a really good full issue script in one day, so of course I can do that again…maybe some day.

On the other hand, there are guys like Jim Aparo, who would do one page a day, pencilled, inked and lettered, so reliably that he'd sign a contract for 214 pages a year, and deliver them like clockwork. (Not even talking about the one man factories like Jack Kirby…)

Editors treasured a guy like Aparo and I had folks I worked with who were also utterly reliable. I doubt any artist ever had a better track record for delivery-on-time than Dan Spiegle and like Aparo, it wasn't just that the work was there when it was supposed to be. It was there and it was very, very good. That matters, too. A topic for another time is how a high percentage of the best writers and artists in the forties through the seventies were also very fast and very reliable.

And I'm not suggesting that writers and artists of the eighties and beyond have not been fast and/or reliable but the job description has changed somewhat. I can't find the actual e-mail right now but I remember it pretty well. A year or two ago, a top artist wrote me and said…

What is it with editors who don't get that I'm not drawing when I'm not home at my drawing board? I agreed to do all the art for this graphic novel in four months and I'd have no trouble meeting the deadline but every week, they call me to ask if I can fly to some other city and do a bookstore signing for my last project for the company. Or he calls and says, "We really need you at this convention in Toronto next month." I told him fine if we change the deadline because I won't be doing the work when I'm at the con and he actually asked me, "Can't you draw pages on the plane? Or in your hotel room?" I turned down the con so I could get the job in on time and now I'm hearing that I'm not a good team player!!!!!

I remember that pretty well including the five exclamation points. There actually are artists who can set up in a hotel room and get work done and I've seen Sergio working in both pencil and ink on airplanes…but some can't and it shouldn't be expected of anyone.

Anyway, Paul's right. A couple times in my career, I've written 20-24 pages in a single day but I can't always do that. Or at least, I can't always do that and also be pleased with what's on those pages. If I expected to be able to produce at that pace every time, I'd have been late with a lot more assignments and the quality of most would have been much lower.

Then again, if I'd been late with a lot more assignments and the quality of most had been much lower, I wouldn't have gotten as many assignments. So maybe some of this problem is self-correcting…

I write a lot of obits on this site. Some are about people I didn't know very well.  Ten years ago today, I had to write one about someone I knew well and liked a lot.  I still miss Steve Gerber and so does the comic book industry even if some who work in the field don't know it…or him.

I don't think I ever told you how I met Steve.  I knew him first through his published stories which I thought were some of the best coming out of Marvel at the time.  From a writer's standpoint, there are two kinds of comics you find yourself writing for a company like DC or Marvel.  One is the kind where you're handling characters created by others, working in a mythology established by others.  Some writers do some wonderful work in this arena but when I think about my favorite comic book writers, I'm more impressed with their work in the other kind of comic book.

That would be the kind that you either create the comic or co-create the comic…or you take over a book about which very little has been established.  Generally speaking, you have to be the only person writing those characters at the time.  That gives you more freedom to shape the environment of that book and to add new characters or reshape existing ones such that you can tell the kinds of stories you have to tell.  You make it your own, at least for the time you do that book, which generally has to be a long period.  It never happens when you're doing an issue or three.  You have to stay on a book for a while before you can form-fit it to your strengths.

Steve did that when he took over a comic called Man-Thing, making it distinctly his own for a while.  He did it of course with Howard the Duck and a few other comics he launched.  He wrote some good stories for ongoing comics handled by many like The Defenders and  Sub-Mariner but he found his voice in the more personal books.  In them, he wrote more about human beings even if those human beings were monsters or ducks.

Anyway, I liked his writing but before I met him, when I mentioned his name to anyone at Marvel, I was told he was crazy…and I don't mean brilliantly, eccentrically crazy.  I mean "crazy" the way Charles Manson was crazy.  Several people, including a writer or two who I guess thought of him as competition, told me that any day, Steve Gerber would be hauled off to the looney bin.

I didn't necessarily believe them.  I've had too many people in my life turn out to be exact opposite of the way they were described.  But I also didn't not believe what I was being told about this Steve Gerber person.

Now then: For several years in a row, my partner Sergio Aragonés would host an annual post-con party right after what we then called the San Diego Comic-Con and now call Comic-Con International.  The con ended on Sunday afternoon and a lot of us would caravan (or drive home) to Los Angeles and by 8 PM, there'd be a big crowd at Sergio's old home in the Hollywood Hills, sitting around the pool and eating pizza.  Just talking and unwinding.

At one of these parties, I found myself talking to a guy with glasses.  We were discussing comics, the world, life, movies, the pizza we were consuming, everything…and the guy was bright, funny, perceptive and I had no idea who the hell he was.  He somehow knew who I was but if I'd been introduced to him, I hadn't caught the name.  And after 40 minutes or so of great, enjoyable conversation, I didn't feel like I could say, "By the way, who are you?"  I was trying to figure it out without doing that.

I forget which comics he mentioned he'd worked on but let's say one of them was Daredevil.  He'd say, "You know, when I was writing Daredevil…" and I'd start thinking, "Okay, who wrote Daredevil besides all the people I know who wrote Daredevil?"  And then I'd think, "Well, I believe Steve Gerber wrote a few issues but this person is way too sane to be Steve Gerber."  He'd mention some other comic that several people had written and I'd think, "Gee, the only person I can think of who wrote that comic and who I don't know is Steve Gerber.  Could this possibly be Steve Gerber?  Naw…"

Finally, he mentioned writing Howard the Duck and I thought, "This is Steve Gerber!"  And I instantly realized that not only was he not demented or insane but he was saner and smarter than any of the people who'd told me Steve Gerber was out of his mind.  He was also a better writer than any of them.

We spent a lot of time together.  When I was running the Hanna-Barbera comic division, I brought Steve in as my assistant and he also wrote a lot of the comics, most of which were published overseas.  Later, I recommended him for animation writing for the Ruby-Spears studio and he quickly became one of their most valuable writers and story editors.  He wrote for many of their shows and developed Thundarr the Barbarian.

Often, you bond with people by charging into battle alongside them.  Steve had his infamous legal battle against Marvel over Howard the Duck and a lot of folks (not just me) joined that battle in whatever way we could.  But Steve also fought a lot of fights to better working conditions and compensation for all writers, not just himself.  If and when an accurate history is ever written of how life in comics got better for creative people in the eighties, Steve's name will be mentioned a lot.  That's what I meant about how the industry misses him.

I do, too.   He was a clever, creative guy and we all out missed out on the wonderful things he might have written if he'd been around the last ten years.   A great, great loss.

When Steve died, I seized control of his blog and it's still up and running at www.stevegerber.com.  Not a lot has been posted since and as I write this, the most recent post and comments are from October of '16.  But every message Steve posted is still there, followed by many posted since we lost him.  You might want to drop by and read and maybe even write something.

Julien Neel — who all by himself is one of my favorite singing groups — favors us with a song from 1927…

This piece I wrote about a freelance artist who fibbed and gave me a huge deadline problem continues to draw mail. This is from Steven Marsh…

I've been a professional magazine editor for nearly 18 years, and your column about Mr. "No Problemo" darn-near gave me an anxiety attack just to read and experience second-hand. So, once again, your writing has provoked an emotional response from me!

My question is: Do you have any insight into WHY an artist (or other creative) would DO something like that? Is it hubris? Delusion? A vain attempt to FORCE the creativity to come? What's the best-possible outcome they can envision?

Yeah, I can explain it because after I forgave the guy and began giving him work again, we discussed it. The artist was a freelancer who worked for many companies and editors. I absolutely sympathize with anyone in that position because that's been my entire career for 49 years now — juggling assignments, working for several places at the same time.

By his own admission, this artist worried incessantly about not having enough work to meet the expenses of life. Even when he had a full dance card and was turning down work, he was fretting, "What if there's nothing more after I hand in my current assignments?" When I asked him to draw the story for me, he should have said no, he didn't have time. He was already committed to too many other jobs but on impulse, he said yes. Remember that I had just become an editor for the Hanna-Barbera comic book division. He wanted to establish himself with me because I was a new source of work for him.

He also wanted to get a lot of work from that division. We paid a little better than others and we paid faster than anyone else. With everyone else he worked for, it took a week or two to get the check. If I received the work before 2 PM, the check would go in the mail that day or if you brought the pages to me before 2, you could hang around for fifteen minutes and I'd get the accounting department to issue the check then and there. Also, the artist liked me and wanted to work with me.

He thought he was doing both of us a favor by taking on the job…and he thought he'd have more time than I said. When most editors say "I need this in two weeks," the freelancer assumes he can fudge it by a week or two; that there's padding built into the schedule. I told him there wasn't but as he explained to me later, "I always assume there's more time than the editor says because there almost always is."

I probably erred by not saying something like, "And I honestly just have to have it in two weeks. Please don't take it on if you can't get it done in two. I'll offer you some other work soon but I truly need this one in two weeks."

So he took it on and then one of his other employers made some threatening noises and he felt he had to do an assignment he had from that guy before he tackled mine and…well, everyone has limits. He simply mismanaged his time and mis-estimated how long everything would take him to do…so he couldn't get everything done when he said he'd get it done. This happens. His real crime was in not being straight with me as to how the work was proceedings. He apologized, I decided he was sincere and we put it behind us.

This reminds me of a story about Betty White that I don't think I've told here. I'll try to write it up in the next few days.

There have been a lot of great dancers in movies but nobody danced better than the Nicholas Brothers…

This news story has my favorite headline of the week…

• 90% of Libertarians and Independents I meet are Democrats or Republicans who are too embarrassed to identify with the party they'd gladly belong to if it did what it was supposed to do.

I have often mentioned my friend Paul Harris on this blog. Paul has been hosting radio programs on a regular basis for four decades, most recently on KTRS in St. Louis. Today, he does his final regular show there. That doesn't mean listeners somewhere won't hear him again. You can take the boy out of radio, etc. He may do fill-ins and guest hostings. But he no longer has his own program and he can now devote all his time to his favorite pastime — losing every cent he ever made in radio at a poker table.

No, actually, he seems to be pretty good at winning at cards, though I think I could take him in a high-stakes game of Old Maid. He is also really, really good at radio. When folks ask me for pointers on interviewing — something I often do at comic book conventions — I tell them to go to Paul's website and listen to how he asks questions. He is well-informed on his guests. He knows what kind of interesting stories and discourses they may have. He asks pointed questions that give the guest a good starting point for a reply. (First sign of a bad interviewer: Too many questions that include the phrase, "What was that like?")

Most of all, he senses how much of any given interview should consist of him talking and how much should be the guest. There are people paid millions of dollars a year to host TV talk shows who could stand to learn this. I am about one-tenth as good at interviewing as Paul but it would be more like one-thirtieth if I hadn't learned from his examples.

His last show today is on KTRS from 3 PM to 6 PM Central Time. You can listen on iTunes or at the KTRS website. I have great confidence though this will not be his last show. It better not be.

Alvin and the Chipmunks sing for Jell-O…

Record producer Quincy Jones is spreading gossip and celebrity secrets all across the 'net. People are writing to ask me, "How much of this should we believe?" My answer is "As much as you want to believe." People have a tendency to try and separate everyone into Truth-Tellers or Liars and I don't think anyone falls wholly into one of those categories. There are also people who sincerely believe things that aren't so…or tell stories that are more speculation than first-hand knowledge. I dunno how much of what Quincy Jones is spilling is true but a pretty safe answer would be that some of it is and some of it isn't. Since most of it is stuff I don't really care about, that answer works for me.

Are you following the Rob Porter Scandal? If you're watching Fox News, probably not since it's gotten almost no mention there. But he is the now-former staff secretary who resigned Wednesday after two ex-wives accused him of abusing and beating them. That's pretty awful but it gets worse when you realize how many people in our government knew about it and did nothing. In fact, a lot of them defended him and praised him and called his accusers "character assassins" or worse, right up until the moment that it became obvious that Porter's guilt could no longer be denied. Then suddenly we got a lot of "I didn't know about this" and faux sympathy for his victims. Dahlia Lithwick has more.

• You know, I worked with Richard Pryor and it somehow never occurred to me to ask him how Marlon Brando was in the sack.

This koala loves to have its tummy rubbed. But then, who doesn't?

Derek Tague, who lives in New Jersey, just sent me this…

It's great that you're alerting your readership about a rare live performance by Dick Van Dyke. Unfortunately, I reside on the wrong coast and, hence, will not be able to entertain attending. However, many of the live vehicles you recommend are prohibitively expensive for the average person to attend. I accessed the "Buy Tickets" link and the ducats range in price from $50.00 to $75.00 (VIP).

There are hidden, inherent implications whenever anybody uses the term "VIP." This is shorthand for "very important persons." In essence, the venue is implying that anybody who cannot afford the higher pricier seats are not "very important." How can you possibly subscribe to such a dehumanizing rubric? Answer me that, Mister Green Lantern.

V.I.P. tickets to events have become a pretty well-established marketing ploy for ticketed events. I dunno what it means in the case of Dick's show but they usually include some kind of "meet-and-greet" opportunity to get an autograph and/or a selfie or something. A lot of house managers and promoters won't book events if they don't get the extra bucks from selling V.I.P. packages. Or if they can't, they'll likely compensate by raising prices for everyone. In a sense, the V.I.P. purchasers make your L.I.P. (Less Important Person) tix more affordable.

Or sometimes V.I.P. just means better seats. Almost any place you go for a live event is going to charge a little more for better seats.

By the laws of nature, they're also going to have better seats and worse seats so someone is going to wind up in the worse seats and I guess you could call being seated in one of them a dehumanizing rubric. I wouldn't feel slighted by it any more than when I get on a plane and have to walk past folks in First Class to get to where my seat is…usually somewhere out on the tail assembly.

Non-V.I.P. tickets are just plain ol' tickets — usually the same seats at the same price as if the deluxe kind wasn't offered. Yeah, many of the live events I recommend are prohibitively expensive for some. I also think they're worth the money if you have it.

But I also recommend cheap shows. I've often pushed Instaplay, a great improv show that a bunch of my friends do from time-to-time. The next one is March 3 and a ticket, including service fee, is $12.89. I also highly recommend another improv show, The Black Version. The next one of those is February 26 and a seat for that will run you $21, also including a service fee. Neither of those is prohibitively expensive unless you add in the cost of air transportation from and to New Jersey.

The only unfair thing there is that I still don't understand why when I book online using the time of no employee of the firm selling me the tickets, I need to pay a service fee. I always feel like I'm the one performing the service.

[UPDATE, a bit later: I am informed that the "V.I.P." tix for Mr. Van Dyke's show at the Catalina merely get you better seats, nothing more. For what it's worth, there are some really bad seats in that club. The room is "L"-shaped with the performers at the corner, usually only playing to one side of the "L". I mention this not to push the more expensive tix — which I did not buy, by the way — but just to alert you that you may not be happy with where they sit you.]