Monthly Archives: October 2019

Here's a video mentioned in the George Conway article below. I'm going to try and write about topics other than Trump this week but I had to get this video up here…

I've decided to reinstate this daily feature and I'll keep it until the day the man leaves office…and maybe even a while after that. I'll post it during the fifteen minutes a day I'm allowing myself to think about the guy in the White House.

Today's installment is this article by George T. Conway, an attorney who was once a stalwart "Everything Republicans Do Is Good, Everything Democrats Do Is Bad" advocate. What changed that? Trump did. Mr. Conway is the hubby of Kellyanne Conway, who is still an advocate of the "E.R.D.I.G.E.D.D.I.B." philosophy. Things must be a lot of fun at their house.

The piece explains George's belief that Donald J. Trump is unfit for public office just because of who he is and how he is incapable of certain things we want in a President like honesty, being in touch with reality, and caring about something other than himself. I am a bit uncomfy with Mr. Conway's belief that "Any intelligent person who watches Trump closely on television, and pays careful attention to his words on Twitter and in the press, should be able to tell you as much about his behavior as a mental-health professional could" but most of what the article says is tough to deny. Which is not to say Trump supporters wouldn't.

Anyway, there's a lot of interesting stuff in there about what the Founding Fathers intended for the Presidency and you'll learn a lot about narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder. Here's that link again.

• The folks complaining about Trump demanding all these investigations of the Bidens are forgetting that if those investigations turned up nothing, Donald would instantly admit that and apologize…you know, like he admitted he was wrong about that birth certificate thing.

The late Alan Rickman was an actor much admired by other actors. Here, he gives some excellent advice to them…

Richard Gagnon writes…

I have a nephew that wants to be a comic book writer/artist. He's a little rough around the edges, but he's at an age where his work is going to improve tremendously in the next few years. He has the potential to be a professional comic book artist. From everything I've read, being a comic book pro is more a labor of love than something that will be financially rewarding. I'd be interested in your insights on pursuing a career in comics. I'd imagine that the pay you get for writing comics is the least lucrative writing that you do (although it must be a sheer pleasure to see what Sergio draws from your scripts).

Well, first of all, most of what I do with Sergio is co-written, not always in the same ratio, so I never think of him drawing my scripts. I think of it all as what we produce together. That said, I often find great joy in writing comics because (a), I grew up loving comic books and (b), because of how few collaborators you have. On a TV show, live or animated, there are contributions by dozens and dozens…sometimes hundreds of others. You don't even meet a large percentage of them and on a cartoon show, many of them may be located in another country and speaking a different language so what you do gets handled by a lot of strangers.

And their sheer number guarantees that some of them will not be very competent or on the same wavelength. On a comic book, three or four people are involved so there's a real good chance that you'll all be in contact, you'll all be in sync and they'll all be good at what they do. I loved it when I was working with Will Meugniot or Dan Spiegle or Scott Shaw! or…well, most of my co-conspirators. And yeah, the money was less than some other jobs but you have to factor in the stress and the time spent in meetings and arguments and such. Compare making $1000 on a job that's fun and easy and quick with one that pays ten times that but has 20+ times the tsuris.

Personally, I've had good and bad experiences in each work area and there have been many non-monetary perks in each. I worked briefly as a story editor on a network adventure series and I probably made less per hour on that job than I made writing Scooby Doo comic books. And I had a lot less fun.

But to get to what you asked about: I tell everyone these days, "Do not under any circumstances become a comic book writer or artist!" Tomorrow night, I'm speaking to a bunch of wanna-be cartoon writers up at U.C.L.A. and I"ll tell the same thing about writing cartoons. What you should do instead is to become a comic book or cartoon writer or artist who does many things, one or two of which are in one or both of those areas.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that we're in the era of merging media. Writing or drawing cartoons and writing or drawing comics and writing or drawing videogames are all overlapping and morphing together. There are jobs where it's hard to tell which you're doing and it will only get harder.

Another thing is that we are no longer in a time where you could do what a lot of my friends did in the seventies when they were breaking into comics or cartoons. They'd say, "Once I get established at DC Comics, I'll work for them the rest of my life" or "I'll get a job at Hanna-Barbera and work there until I retire." That doesn't happen anymore. Companies like DC Comics move across country and go through many changes of management. (I don't know anyone at DC now who is reasonably certain they'll be there in three years. Some of them will be but no one is sure it'll be them.) Companies like Hanna-Barbera go out of business and others get sold and become largely-new companies.

In July of this year, I marked fifty years of being a freelance professional writer. I've never been out of work for more than about six hours and that's because I've never been exclusive to any company nor have I ever gotten 100% of my income (or even close to it) from any one source. I'm not saying that to brag and I'm not claiming I was brilliant to run my life this way because it really wasn't planned. I may have done, as we sometimes do in this world, the right thing by accident. But if your kid is thinking, "All I want to do in life is write and draw Marvel comics" — or do any one thing for any one employer — I think he's in for a lot of grief.

Since I haven't seen anything he's done, I am making zero judgment on his skills. But this applies even if he's the absolute best at what he does and the farther he is from being that, the more it applies.

I would also suggest that he has to love the work. I assume he does now…but will he love it when he hits the inevitable rough periods? When he works on some project where everyone involved winds up hating each other and pointing fingers at one another to escape the blame for what resulted? There will be such projects and what keeps you going is that you love the profession even when one or more assignments are like skinny-dipping in the fire pits of Hell. There's a quote I've heard attributed to many actors but usually Henry Fonda. It goes, "To be an actor, you have to still love acting even after the play that closed during rehearsals directed by the worst human being who ever lived."

I could go on and on about this topic and surely will in subsequent posts, and I've said some of it before here. I'm quite serious about it. I think the reason to become a writer or artist (or actor or anything of a creative nature) is because you don't think you'd be happy doing something else. If your son feels that way, he's off to a good start.

Like all of you, I awoke this morning to news that went roughly like this…

Bernie Sanders had heart surgery Tuesday night after experiencing pain in his chest at a campaign event earlier in the day, senior adviser Jeff Weaver said in a statement Wednesday. The 78-year-old Sanders had a blockage in one artery and had two stents inserted. He is now "conversing and in good spirits," the statement said. All of his events and appearances have been canceled until further notice, and the campaign has reportedly begun canceling ad buys in Iowa, where it was due to begin airing its first TV ads of the campaign.

Aw, shit. Senator Sanders might not have been my first choice for President this time around but if I get a ballot with his name on it, I'll have no trouble voting for him. I fear now I won't get that ballot…and if he stays in the race, there will only be one topic around him: He's not healthy enough. I hope we have him around and in front of microphones for a long, long time. But even people who supported him yesterday are probably quietly thinking they need to support someone else. That's not the way his admirable, exciting campaign oughta end.

Twenty years ago (this week, some claim) on one of the many incarnations of Hollywood Squares, this happened and it's well worth your time to watch it. If you're in a hurry, start at 8:15 when they call on Penn & Teller and watch it from there. But if you can spare 18 and a half minutes, watch it from the start…

Kamden Spies wrote to ask…

Since you're a historian of late night television, I thought you could answer this question. What do you think changed Late Night in terms of politics? Before Trump, it seemed that The Daily Show was the only show that focused heavily on politics. I know that Carson and Letterman would do political humor, but not to the extent that Meyers or Colbert do. While I think they're hilarious (particularly Seth Meyers' Closer Look segments), I'm just curious what changed Late Night.

I'd say audience response did and I'd give some credit to the thing that's changed just about everything everywhere: The Internet.

But The Daily Show wasn't the only late night show that offered it. The Colbert Report did. Bill Maher's two shows did. Saturday Night Live usually has a couple of political bits plus whatever's in their Weekend Update segment. There are a few others…and while Carson and Letterman and those guys didn't do as much of it as some guys do now, they did during the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky matter. During that period, it was very hard to write a joke about anything else.

The Internet has made everything more topical. Once upon a time, newspapers went to press once a day and TV news shows happened at a few specific hours. Now, news reporting is a 24/7 thing and current events are a lot more current. It's why the late night shows no longer pick their reruns from a year back as Johnny and Merv once did. A rerun now is of a show that first aired two weeks ago. If they ran a year-old show, it would feel like they'd dredged something up from the sixties. More topical humor means more politics.

And then there's the fact that when Stephen Colbert replaced Letterman, a guy who did topical humor and who was immersed in politics replaced a guy who seemed uncomfy in that area and often half-joked about not knowing very much about it. It is widely believed in the industry that Colbert's rise to the top of the ratings had a lot to do with getting more political, which has largely meant slamming Trump. In TV, when you want to know where something came from, the answer is usually someone who got real successful doing it so everyone else felt they should do it.

I believe in saving the word "legend" for folks who really, really deserve it. Al Jaffee — who at age 98 has been contributing to MAD magazine for 64 years — really, really deserves it. And he deserves to have a lot of people following his new Instagram page.

And you know who else deserves the title of "legend?" Anyone who starts Instagramming at the age of 98.

A few weeks ago here, we had the tough task of saying goodbye to a great guy and a fine writer-researcher, Bill Schelly. One of the last big things Bill wrote and researched was a long, expertly-crafted history of Comic-Con International in San Diego. It was commissioned for and published in the souvenir book for the 50th Comic-Con last July.

Inevitably, a few folks have carped that they felt they and their contributions should have been mentioned more expansively but if you leave that aside, no one seems to have serious quibbles with Bill's reporting or with his judgment calls on what constituted a major event or deed. I sure don't. If you want to know how that wonderful annual gathering came to be, you'll want to give it a read…and now, you don't need to score a copy of that souvenir book to do so. The convention folks have posted a PDF of Bill's article online and you can get it right here.