Monthly Archives: July 2019

Someone on one of the comic book forums on Facebook posted a message that read in part…

Tonight, we were talking about how a great many artists' works are highly admired by a certain percentage of fans, yet disliked or even despised by others. This got me to thinking…are there any artists who are universally beloved? Four possibilities who come immediately to mind are [names of four artists]. Is there anyone who doesn't like their styles? Can you think of someone else who art is liked or loved by all?

If you've been on the Internet for more than about an hour in your life, you know what came next: Many, many messages from folks who hate the work of one or more of those four artists this guy believes are universally beloved. There were also a lot of messages like, "Well, everyone loves the work of So-and-So," each followed almost immediately by someone else writing, "I've always hated So-and-So."

I've been around devout comic book readers since I was President of the Los Angeles Comic Book Club, commencing in the mid-sixties. My answer to the question, "Are there any artists who are universally beloved?" is "Don't be ridiculous." Of course not. In fact, if you're in a room with more than about twenty-five comic book fans and you say, "Everyone loves Ernie Shmidlap's drawing," there will be at least three fans present who will tell you of their extreme contempt for the work of Mr. Shmidlap. There may even be one who will deliver a mature, reasoned critique of why his drawing sucks donkey dongs — to use the more intellectual critical terminology.

(This is, of course, assuming the assemblage is not a meeting of The Ernie Shmidlap Fan Club…although even there, you could probably get pushback if you suggested Ernie's best work was on the Manatee Man comics as opposed to some others.)

I guess I'm kind of amazed the fellow asked the question he asked, just as I'm amazed at the vitriol that is sometimes expressed towards someone whose depiction of Batman isn't as pleasing to you as someone else's.

For the record, there are a number of comic book artists (and writers, for that matter) whose work has left me cold. I don't hate them because "hate," I think, is a feeling best saved for those who seriously harm other human beings…but I don't find myself involved by these artists' work and don't enjoy the reading experience. I also think that bad comic book art is often a function of miscasting — the wrong assignment to the wrong story, the wrong match of penciler and inker, etc. — so I'm not that quick to say a given artist is without talent.

And I also remember that just about everyone is someone's favorite. On my little personal list of creators whose work I don't spark to are several that folks in that Facebook thread believe were unanimously beloved. So what? Not every comic has to appeal to me and it's no reason for outrage when one doesn't. Unless it's by that horrible Ernie Shmidlap.

Sweet, charming Russi Taylor has died at the age of 75. She was the voice of dozens of animated characters over the years, most of them cute creatures like herself. Since the mid-eighties, she spoke for Minnie Mouse and, in the kind of story even Disney's publicists couldn't arrange, for much of that time she was married to Wayne Allwine, the voice of Mickey. Isn't that just too perfect?

Russi was just adorable in everything she said and everything she did. The only time I actually worked with her was in 1984 when I wrote and co-produced one of those prime-time Saturday Preview Specials for CBS, showing kids what would be appearing the next morning on that network's Saturday morning schedule. One of the shows was Muppet Babies and we did a segment replicating a voice recording with Frank Welker, Howie Mandel, Laurie O'Brien and Russi, who played — respectively — Kermit, Animal, Miss Piggy and Gonzo. Russi was a delight on the show.

The last time I saw her was in September of 2017 when some of us threw a big salute to the recently-departed June Foray at the Motion Picture Academy in Beverly Hills. In one part of the show, we were discussing how June was a role model for every other female who worked in voiceover and I (I was the host) called eighteen of the best in that profession to the stage to pose around a photo of June and create a great photo-op. Here is that photo and Russi is the second one in from the right. (If you want to identify all the ladies, click here and scroll down.)

I remember how after the event, Russi kept thanking me and everyone for including her in that historic picture. She really loved June and the feeling was mutual. We all loved Russi. You just couldn't help it.

Penn Jillette discusses magic in the movies…

I am oddly interested in the list of the Longest-Running Broadway Shows. The Book of Mormon, which is still running at the Eugene O'Neill Theater back there, just surpassed 42nd Street to become #14 on the list.

The Book of Mormon is currently running at around 100% capacity so it'll almost surely be around to pass #13 (Miss Saigon) and maybe #12 (Jersey Boys). Beyond that, it's a big maybe.

It will definitely not grab the #1 spot from The Phantom of the Opera since The Phantom of the Opera is still running. And not only is it still running but it's playing to 95% capacity, which is way more than is necessary for a show that has already paid off all its opening expenses a hundred-plus times over. In fact, they just put a whole new marquee advertising it on the front of its theater.

If for some not-gonna-happen, science-fictiony reason Phantom of the Opera were to close tomorrow and so did all the other shows still open and competing for the top position (Chicago, The Lion King and Wicked), The Book of Mormon could conceivably grab the Number One spot. All it would have to do is to continue running until around Christmas of the year 2042.

Jordan Orlando of The New Yorker writes the latest in a series of farewell tributes to MAD. I have two things to say about this, one being my ongoing prediction that MAD will be back sooner than might be expected.

The other point is a minor one and I've noted it before here a number of times. MAD started life as one of the comic books published by Bill Gaines' company, which was known as E.C.. Orlando writes about how the Comics Code, a publisher-organized self-censorship authority, came into being and says "No E.C. titles survived the purge except MAD, which escaped the Comics Code by expanding its trim size to become a "magazine" — and this new, adaptable hybrid format was the key to its longevity.

That's a totally logical deduction based on the timing but, to quote one of several earlier posts here on the matter…

[MAD editor-creator Harvey] Kurtzman was generally embarrassed that he worked in comic books. He loved the form but he hated the cheapness of the product and the bad image that dime comic books were getting.

One day, Harvey received an offer to go work at Pageant, a slick magazine of the day. Harvey longed to get out of comics and into the slicks and had, for some time, urged Gaines to turn MAD into a slick. For a long time, Gaines resisted the suggestion but when Kurtzman said he was leaving to go work at Pageant, Gaines relented. He was certain that MAD could not survive the loss of Kurtzman so he made the change not to avoid censorship — though that was a happy bonus — but to keep his indispensable editor on board.

Gaines actually did join the Comics Code and he submitted all his comics — including Panic, his own imitation of MAD — to it for over a year before plunging sales killed his comic book line. MAD would probably have died with the other books had not his desire to appease Kurtzman pushed it into a different format.

Alfred E. Neuman, by the way, is not dead. He's been seen on the streets of Burbank near the DC Comics offices, holding a cardboard sign that says "Will worry for food!"

You probably won't be surprised to read that the American economy is not doing anywhere near as well as Donald Trump claims it is.

If you are interested in working in comic books — or even if you just feel the urge to draw — spend the 26 minutes to listen to the great Joe Kubert, who produced some of the finest comics ever done. He had an other-worldly command of the pages on which he worked. No one ever drew faster. No one ever resorted less to stock poses and repeated imagery. No one ever had the work pour more organically out of them. And I've never met a comic artist who loved drawing comics more than this man…

I'm just about over my fatigue from Comic-Con…thinking back now more clearly about what a good time I had.  I see some grumbling here and there on the 'net from folks who attended and didn't enjoy themselves.  The crowds are an ongoing complaint from some quarters and, well…that's what happens when something is so popular.  I suppose they could admit fewer people than they do but that would just inflame another ongoing complaint: How hard it is for some to get passes to the con.   If you let in fewer guests so the aisles aren't so mobbed and the lines aren't so long, you just increase the vast number of folks who are perturbed because they didn't get to go.

To those of you who hate crowds, I have a simple, can't-miss suggestion: Don't go.  This is not going to change.  And I probably said this last year (and the year before and the year before) but people keep bitching about this…and they bitch about it to me as if I had any ability to thin out the throngs.  In fact, to me part of the fun of Comic-Con is that to be there is to be surrounded by so many people having such a good time.  It's better to be one of them than to cut yourself away from the herd by being a sour presence.

We had a nice panel on Thursday with Sergio Aragonés and myself.  Tom Luth — the missing member of the team that makes comics about Groo the Barbarian — was home coloring something so the three of us talked about our work on that book, and Stan got to talk a bit about his wonderful feature, Usagi Yojimbo. A publication date should be announced shortly for the first issue of the Groo/Tarzan mini-series and another Groo mini-series will be scheduled at about the same time. I think.

Sergio and I talked a lot about our 50+ year friendship and the fact that in all that collaborating, we have had about three arguments. They collectively lasted about four minutes, neither of us raised his voice, and all three were about what Groo would eat in some story. I'm not kidding about that. They were all about what Groo was going to eat in some scene.

I enjoyed that panel. I enjoyed all the panels on the history of Comic-Con. I had a very good time. It's just that after it was over, I felt like I'd spent those hours unloading cinder blocks from a truck in the hot sun…and just writing about the con has made me tired again. More on this tomorrow.

Part of the Tony Awards ceremony you never see at home is what goes on during the commercials. On the most recent telecast, host James Corden got Billy Porter up to perform and here's what transpired…

Comic-Con #50 lasted four days — five if you count the three-hour Preview Night. I shouldn't be spending five days recovering from it.

Still, I loved…well, I won't say I loved every minute of it. I didn't like being knocked down by a cosplayer with the I.Q. of a bran muffin and I didn't like the decibel levels at the Batman party which could have rousted Adam West. But the rest of it, no matter how tiring, was great. As I keep saying, I couldn't live at the pace all year round or even for two consecutive weeks…but it's fun to not be bored for a nanosecond from Wednesday at 6 PM through the following Sunday at 5.

I didn't see much of the hall and there must have been fifty people there I wanted to talk with but never saw, along with thousands of others I'd have enjoyed meeting. Still, Comic-Con days are often the favorite days of my year. If you've never been because the crowd reports scare you, just know that I don't think that's a good reason…and the overpopulation is really not that bad if (a) you're wise enough to stay out of certain aisles, (b) you don't demand entrance the second the hall opens and (c), you don't absolutely, positively, you'll-die-if-you-don't need to see the "hottest" panels with the biggest stars.

I'm not trying to talk you into going. Obviously, a convention that sells out in 38 minutes (or however long it took this year) doesn't need your business and you might not get a pass if you did decide to go. Just don't be afraid of it for that reason. The crowds are there because it's a great place to be. Would a convention that no one wanted to attend tempt you?

This year, I really enjoyed the panels on the history of Comic-Con and I wished I hadn't been scheduled against some of the ones I wasn't on and would like to have seen. I moderated two and appeared on two others and I truly enjoyed hearing about all the volunteerism and hard, hard work that went into making Comic-Con exist. A lot of folks were involved and any article or new story that credits only a few is just plain inaccurate.

Contrary to what some people seem to think, I was not a founder of the con in any sense. I have never been an employee, paid or otherwise, nor have I ever been on a committee. I have nothing but gratitude and respect for those who really did do the work. I'm just a guy who shows up every year and who began doing an increasing number of programming items. I believe I did my first one at the fifth Comic-Con, which was held Aug 16–19, 1973 at the Sheraton Hotel on Harbor Island.

There might have been one the year before at the first of the cons to be held at the legendary El Cortez Hotel. They kept sticking something called The Writers Panel on the schedule without any thought as to what was to be discussed. Was it how to write comics? Why to write comics? How to get a job writing comics? It usually turned out to be a discussion on the business problems of the industry and why we were all writing in such narrow areas, all the time envisioning how much more the field could be.

If I wasn't on a Writers Panel at the El Cortez in '72, then I'm right in remembering my first as a Writers Panel on Harbor Island in '73. That Sheraton didn't have large rooms available for panels so it was just Mike Friedrich and me talking to about twenty people in a space that couldn't have accommodated many more than that.

I did more in succeeding years, including a lot more directionless Writers Panels. But around 1977, I began to find myself getting (gasp!) bored at Comic-Con. I have always hated the idea of sitting behind a table all day and signing my name or, worse, selling something. In 50 years, I've never taken anything to the con to sell because (a) I don't really have anything to sell and (b) I wanted to enjoy the con and not be concerned with how much cash I was taking in. I'm not knocking vendors in the slightest just as I'm not knocking folks who like to sit and sign comics, either for free or dough. I just never had the urge to be one.

So what do you do at the con if you don't do that? I got tired and I got sore feet and for a time there, I was skipping the first day of the con and heading home after lunch on Sunday. Then I began doing more than the two or three panels per con I'd been doing.

If you want to blame anyone, blame the fine comic artist Al Williamson. He was a guest in 1984 and as was and still is the custom, he was expected to do a "spotlight" panel talking about his own work. We'd spent a lot of time talking before its scheduled time and when that time arrived, he said to me, "I don't know how to get up there and talk about what I do. Why don't you come in and interview me?" I did, it went well and soon, the convention was using me as the solution when some guest said, "I don't know how to get up there and talk about what I do."

And voila! I had something to do at the con and places to sit down instead of roaming the hall for three days. I went back to arriving on the first day and staying 'til the end. And then one day, I suggested that I do a panel interviewing actors who do voices for cartoons and someone else suggested this thing we do called Quick Draw! and I took over moderating the Golden Age Panel, which the con featured as long as it still had guests who'd worked on comic books in the forties…

So that's the answer to a question I get asked a lot. I like doing 'em. I liked doing 'em this year for sure. While I still have the con in my head, I'll try to write about a few more of this year's.

The start of one of the panels I appeared on at Comic-Con was delayed so that a Congressional Aide — I'm sorry I didn't get her name — could present a citation to the con. It is here accepted by the excellent Chief Communication and Strategy Officer for Comic-Con, David Glanzer.

The proclamation noting the fiftieth Comic-Con was signed by four of San Diego's five members of Congress. Only one of them is currently under criminal indictment and likely to be in prison by the fifty-first Comic-Con.

The odd posting pattern here and middle-of-the-night time stamps should give you some idea that my life is not back to normal yet.  I'm sleeping odd hours and my body is still telling me, "Please don't do Comic-Con again for a while."  But I still had a great time down there at Comic-Con #50 and I'm still remembering moments I want to tell you about.

One involves my long-time buddy Scott Shaw!, whose name is properly spelled with the exclamation point.  I met Scott in 1970 at, of all places, Jack Kirby's house.  We worked together on any number of comics over the years and when Scott's first marriage broke up, he moved in with me for a brief time.  I describe that brief time as "The Odd Couple with two Oscars and no Felix."

The last few years, Scott has been coping with a series of medical problems involving his right foot. He actually missed one Comic-Con because of them…and if you know Scott and his love for Comic-Con, you know how severe those problems must have been. I suspect his doctor had to physically restrain him from crawling to San Diego. Anyway, that's the only reason Scott wasn't among that select group of us this year who were pointed-out as having never missed any of the fifty gatherings. (I believe, however, that Scott has been to more days of Comic-Con than anyone else. I, for example, went to at least one day of each one but not every day of every one.)

Last December, Scott and his doctors bowed to the inevitable and his right foot was removed. He was wheelchaired about until things healed well enough that he could be fitted with a prosthetic foot. After frustrating delays, that finally happened three weeks before the con. And while learning to walk with one of those can take some folks months to master, Scott got vertical quickly and on several panels we did together — most notably, this year's Quick Draw! — he was able to walk up the stairs and onto the stage. That was more amazing and impressive than even how fast Sergio draws…and he got a big, joyous ovation for it.

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It was great seeing old friends like Tony Isabella (who I've known longer than I've known Scott Shaw!) and Steve Sherman (who I've known longer than I've known Tony Isabella) and Bruce Simon (who I've known longer than I've known Steve Sherman). It was great meeting longtime readers of this blog, especially ones who've e-mailed me about items I could post here for your dining and dancing pleasure.

I also had a couple of very nice conversations about The World Outside Comic-Con, including a mature/reasonable one with a fervent Trump supporter where we did more than agree to disagree. You can do that but also find some areas of common ground…like places where we concur on goals, just not how to reach them. On the other hand, I had this quick exchange with an anti-vaxx protester outside who was yelling at people…

HIM: Mandatory vaccinations infringe on my right to control my own body.

ME: Are you the least bit concerned with the right to send a kid to school without them getting the measles?

HIM: Reported cases of measles have been on the decline for years!

ME: Yeah…because of vaccinations. And now they're on the increase because of people like you.

There was no response. Some of these people should have a mandatory injection of reality. More convention reporting later today…if I'm awake, that is.

me saying stuff about the Comic-Con…

Christina Cauterucci disagrees with much (but not all) of Jane Mayer's article about Al Franken.

Fred Kaplan has much to say about Trump's recent foreign policy decisions and it ain't flattering.

Jonathan Chait explains the legal papers Trump's reps just filed to try and block the release of his tax returns. It pretty much comes down to insisting Democrats have no right to see them because they're Democrats.

Jane Mayer of The New Yorker looks into the story of how and why Al Franken was forced to resign from the Senate and concludes…well, she doesn't exactly say this outright but here's the take-away: Franken did a very small thing wrong that didn't warrant his ouster but a lot of crafty foes of his and cowardly friends railroaded him outta office.