Daily Archives: June 9, 2020

We're just now learning — thank you, Anthony Tollin — of the passing of veteran comic book/strip artist Frank Bolle on May 12 at the age of 95. Over the years, Mr. Bolle worked on at least two dozen newspaper strips, sometimes as a ghost artist or assistant and sometimes credited. Among them would be Winnie Winkle, On Stage, Tarzan, Gil Thorp, The Girls of Apartment 3-G, Rip Kirby and The Heart of Juliet Jones. He was equally prolific in comic books.

Born in Brooklyn, he began drawing comics in 1943, assisting other artists at first but working solo within the year. Soon, his work turned up at Timely (now Marvel) Comics, Fawcett, Lev Gleason and Magazine Enterprises. It was for the last of these that he co-created the masked western heroine, The Black Phantom, who was neither black nor a phantom. She was however, like all the women he drew, extremely attractive.

In the fifties and beyond, he worked for DC and Atlas and began a long association with Western Publishing on their Dell and later Gold Key Comics. Among the comics he did for Western were Flash Gordon, The Twilight Zone, Grimm's Ghost Stories and Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom. For Charlton, he drew The Phantom and many, many romance comics. He also popped up at Marvel from time to time, usually inking for comics like The Defenders and their Captain Marvel. All of this was in addition to his long stint drawing a number of features for Boys' Life, the official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America.

More often than most artists, he was anonymous but you could spot his clean, attractive style and often, he would sneak an "FWB" (his initials) somewhere in a panel. From all indications, he worked until just a few years ago, capping off a career that spanned over 70 years.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Mr. Bolle on a panel at Comic-Con International in 2004 when he also received an Inkpot Award for his long, illustrious career. He was a charming gent who seemed genuinely surprised that so many fans knew of his work and had comics of his they wanted him to sign. If they'd brought every comic in which his art appeared, that would have been a very, very large pile.

On Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood, just south of Hollywood Boulevard, there's a big newsstand that has been there as long as I can remember…although it used to be bigger than it is now.  It's the World Book & News and as of the last time I drove by, it was still there despite a decade or more of news stories that it was closing.  Starting in the late sixties, it was a place I sometimes went to buy new comic books and other kinds of magazines.  I actually met a few fellow comic book fans there and made some friends.

It was kind of a landmark and so is the alley to the right of it which has been seen in more movies than Michael Caine…and that's a lot of movies.  Since its on-screen appearances date back to the days of Chaplin and Keaton, some silent movie scholars are crusading to get the alley declared as some sort of historical site.  I'd grant official landmark status to the whole thing but I'll settle for that alley.  Read all about it here.

I just found out one of my favorite comedians has started a video podcast. So far, there have been five installments posted to YouTube (and probably elsewhere) of I Don't Know About That with Jim Jefferies.  Each one is ninety minutes or so of Jim Jefferies talking with someone about something and I admit I haven't watched all of them yet but I probably will.

I'll watch the May 4th edition and then I'll watch the May 5th installment and then I'll watch the one he did on May 12th which I'll probably follow with the one from May 26th and I've already watched a lot of his June 9th show.  One of his co-hosts is Forrest Shaw, a comedian I thought was real good as Mr. Jefferies' opening act the first two times I took Amber to see him.

It may be a while before I catch up on all these so I can't tell you that I think they're all worth your time.  But just about everything I've seen Jefferies do was worth my time so make of that what you will.

I continue to struggle with finding a balance. My life here in mostly-isolation is quite pleasant when I can manage to get something done each day. I have to, for my own health, write something. Occasionally, there's also something constructive like working on my taxes or organizing a jumbled file in my filing cabinet or on my D drive.

But there's just too much news, little of which is good, and it's hard to take your attention away from it. Somewhere on this blog, I have probably quoted at least once a joke that Jackie Mason used to use at a time long ago when Richard Nixon was in the White House and Jackie Mason was funny. He said, "Because of him, I get up every morning and run out to see if my furniture is still there."

(I just did a search. This is my fourth time quoting it.)

Nowadays, I awake and I pick up my cell phone and flip to a news aggregator to see what stupid, baneful thing he's done already today — and you all know who "he" is. I'm not talking about Jackie Mason.

This morning, it was spreading the insane idea that when that 75-year-old unarmed protester who was doing nothing wrong got shoved to the pavement by a "peace officer" and wound up in the hospital…well, that was a set-up. The 75-year-old guy planned that to make the police look bad because he knew one of them would shove him and then that cop and all the rest of those fine officers would just march past, leaving him bleeding on the sidewalk.

Probably by now, someone has asked Trump if he thinks that's what really happened and Trump's hiding behind the excuse that he didn't say it was so. He was just quoting someone on the Internet. If you think Trump hates the press now, imagine what they'd be publishing about him if their criteria was that anyone said it on the Internet.

This then is my problem. It may be yours too but right now, it's mine. I want to…I need to spend my name not looking like the bad guy in a Tex Avery cartoon doing exaggerated "takes" at what's in the news. But boy, is it hard.

Yesterday, trying to get my blog off the topic, I posted a piece I wrote some time ago about errors in the credits of cartoon shows. It's valuable info for someone but just before bed last night, I read a fair amount of news about racial problems and reinventing police work in this country and the spread of COVID-19 — reopening ain't working so well — and other problems. Then I looked at my blog and having an item there about cartoon credits just looked wrong to me. Of all the things in the world, I picked that to post?

This blog will probably be quite schizophrenic for the rest of this year, careening madly between topical thoughts and non-topical. That's because my brain is doing that and the whole point of this page is for me to write what I feel like writing about, as opposed to what someone's paying me money to write. I apologize if any of you get whiplash because of this.

If you love show tunes, you may love this a little less than two hours of them in Kings of Broadway 2020, a video revue of great singers singing from their homes — all or most of them apparently singing live even though few microphones are in evidence. There are a few speeches in there about the George Floyd matter and they reminded me of a term I once heard — "The choir preaching to the choir" — and most of songs chosen are about sadness and heartbreak and getting over them.

But most of the performances are quite splendid though one gent does display the chutzpah of thinking he can improve on Sondheim lyrics. And it's a fund-raiser for Acting For Others, NHS Charities Together and Black Lives Matter Global Charities so if you enjoy it as much as I did, send some bucks to the cause like I did…