Monthly Archives: September 2020

200 days…wow. When I started my little stay here in the Fortress, I had no idea how long it would last and, amazingly, I still don't. None of us know when this thing will be behind us even if some of us think we do.

I'm seeing announcements for in-person comic conventions in the coming months including a supposed-to-be-big one at the L.A. Convention Center shortly before Christmas. At the moment, their website lists no guests. This does not sound like a good idea to me.

Today was an especially difficult day to not read or hear about Donald Trump. Is anyone really surprised that he's a terrible businessman and that everything he touches fails? The only thing that has really brought him revenue in recent years was appearing on The Apprentice and that wasn't his financial acumen at work. He earned that money by pretending to be a successful businessman. Kevin Drum has a chart of Trump's net gains and losses. Wasn't the big argument for this guy that he would run this country like a business?

Early Friday morning, Turner Classic Movies is running Go West, The Big Store, Double Dynamite, A Girl in Every Port, A Day at the Races, At the Circus, A Night at the Opera and The Story of Mankind. That's eight movies that Groucho Marx was in and you can also see Harpo and Chico in six of them. Then next Sunday, they have The Great Buster — a good documentary about Buster Keaton — followed by four of his best silent features. It's also a big weekend on TCM for screenwriter Irving Brecher since he wrote At the Circus and Go West, and also the screenplay for Bye Bye Birdie, which they're running on Sunday just before the Keaton fest.

As you damn well know, MAD magazine has fallen on hard times. Not that long ago, they moved it from New York to Los Angeles, rebooted it, redesigned it, announced it was ceasing publication, then decided to keep publishing but to lower its budget…and here is its current status as of a few days ago: They are still putting it out but it's almost all reprints. There are new covers and a few new pages inside each issue but it's almost all recycled material. And whereas they used to "colorize" a lot of the pieces that had previously run in black-and-white, the mag is moving back towards all black-and-white as it was for so many years.

At the moment, no change to this seems to be in the offing. Nevertheless, I am still predicting — based on no inside info whatsoever — that someone in the corporation will someday say, "We can't let it end like this. The name alone is too valuable for us to allow it to wither and die" and they'll do something. What, I don't know and they don't know. But they'll do something to try and raise MAD from its near-death state.

In the meantime, a lot of veteran MAD contributors have some free time on their hands. The best movie parodies that have appeared in the magazine, lo this past decade or so, were written by Desmond Devlin and drawn by Tom Richmond. They see no reason why, just because their magazine has been driven to near-oblivion, they should stop doing what they do so well. So they are producing Claptrap, a book of all-new parodies of recent films and some that MAD spared in years past.

It's being crowdfunded and perhaps you know my position on crowdfunding. If you don't want to click that link, I'll summarize: Way too often, they take your money and fail to deliver what they promised.

But as I say in that piece, I don't promote or order any crowdfunded item "unless it's the endeavor of someone I know really, really, really well." I know Tom Richmond "really, really, really well." I only know Desmond a little but this is good enough for me. You might be interested to read Tom's views on crowdfunding which you can do over on this page of his blog.

By now, you're probably ready to go order a copy of this book and if so, don't let me stop you. But just in case you need to hear more, here are Desmond and Tom explaining all about their project. I think it's well-worth supporting…

I continue to receive e-mails from folks offering their copy of Fantastic Four #1 for scanning. Thank you all but the folks who need this think they have what they need.

I also am receiving notes from people who thought I'd slighted John Cleese's co-writer on Fawlty Towers, Connie Booth, by not mentioning her by name. No slight was intended. I just kinda think that Mr. Cleese's performance as Mr. Fawlty is what made that series work as well as it did.

I wrote here that I have/had a low opinion of the DC Comics Production Department pre-1980, at least when it came to making art and lettering corrections. Our pal Mark Waid agrees with me in an e-mail…

Yeah, the lettering corrections were almost universally whatever the opposite of seamless is. I've always assumed that part of it was not that they gave them to a monkey but because the correx were being made on a same-size stat rather than a twice-up. There was, however, a monkey no doubt involved.

I think that was part of it but I also think they just weren't that good at it. I also think no one on the premises had a sense of design when it came to typeset lettering and it was often poor when they tried to integrate typography and hand lettering on a cover or ad. The best DC covers, when you took the copy into account, were those for which Ira Schnapp did everything except the date, the issue number and the price.

In a related note, Paul Dushkind wrote to ask me…

Why is it that the reproduction in comic-book reprint editions is blurry? The older the stories are, the worse the reproduction is. But even fairly recent stories from the sixties and seventies have fine lines missing. Everyone knows that DC is supposed to have the film from every story they ever published, so the sharpness should be perfect!

If they had good film of every story they ever published, the sharpness would be perfect. I don't know where that myth got started but it's kind of obvious, when they have to reconstruct old stories and have someone trace or do heavy Photoshopping of scans from printed comics, that they don't. I doubt that they ever did. And Marvel's files were and still are even worse.

Sol Brodsky, who was the Production Manager at times at Marvel, once explained the problem there to me. Sol said he often urged Management there to shoot better copies of current work for the files and to make more back-up copies of it. But that involved spending money now for a need that might arise in the future and a lot of companies (not just Marvel, not just comic book publishers) don't like doing that kind of thing. It makes this month's budgets look bad. It's easier to not spend that money now and let someone else deal with problem years later.

Paul, you've inspired me to do a long post about this topic. I will…in a couple of days. Thanks.

We have three of them for you today. As I'm sure you know, John Cleese starred in and co-wrote the smashingly-successful situation comedy, Fawlty Towers. There were six episodes made for broadcast in 1975 and six more that aired in 1979 and that's all there ever were. Maybe it was inevitable that something that popular would be purchased for an American remake…but three times?

The first was a pilot called Snavely and it starred Harvey Korman as the U.S. version of Basil Fawlty and Betty White as his wife. It was done in 1978 and it did not become a series. Here is that pilot…

The second was a short-lived series that turned Basil into a woman named Amanda who ran an inn with a lovely ocean view. Bea Arthur starred in Amanda's by the Sea which debuted in 1983, Thirteen episodes were made but the show was terminated before the last three were broadcast. Here's the first one…

And then there was Payne which starred John Larroquette, who played hotel owner Royal Payne with JoBeth Williams as his wife. This one came on in 1999 and they shot nine episodes but only eight ever aired. Here's the first episode…

I don't have much to say about any of them except that if there had to be an Americanized version of Fawlty Towers — and there didn't — Harvey Korman was not a bad choice for the lead. And I suppose I'm curious if any of the importers thought that the secret of Fawlty Towers' popularity was what all three versions kept from the original — the concept of someone operating a small hotel. Me, I think John Cleese might have had a little something to do with the triumph of the Brit version.

Quite a few folks who own a copy of Fantastic Four #1 responded to my public appeal. I think we have what we need and when this project gets closer to its publication date, I'll tell you what this was about. Thanks to all of you.

Last night, Turner Classic Movies ran The Hospital, the 1971 movie which starred George C. Scott and Diana Rigg…but really starred a killer script by Paddy Chayefsky. I meant to record it on my TiVo but forgot. I haven't seen it since it came out and I recall liking it a lot…so I wanted to see if I still did and I wanted to check something else out. The late/lovely June Foray told me that she was called in to do a fair amount of dubbing and looping on the film including a couple of lines for Diana Rigg. I wanted to see if I could recognize June at all in the film and especially impersonating Ms. Rigg, who was back in England and unavailable when dialogue replacement was needed. It's not a big thing but did anyone notice June?

My buddy Gerry Conway has written a lot of great comic books over the years and a lot of great other things. He recently penned an essay about what he thinks has to happen for the comic book industry to thrive or at least survive. The attention-grabbing headline says he wants them to "Cancel Every Existing Superhero Comic." Actually, he says he'd cancel 'em and reshape that genre as "a limited new line for a Middle-Grade readership" with simpler characters and storylines and…

Why am I summarizing it? You can read the whole thing in his own words here.

I don't disagree with any part of it unless Gerry thinks that (a) DC and Marvel are likely to try it, (b) that if they did try it, their sales forces would know how to begin reaching that yearned-for New Audience and (c) the companies would give this approach a fair shot at establishing itself before they panicked at the first sales figures, declared the whole thing a failure and went back to the old approach. And then if they behaved as folks running comic book companies have in the past, they'd (d) blame the writers and artists for giving them a non-commercial product, rather than their own inability to sell anything except what they're currently selling (not very well) and their hurry to surrender.

But Gerry's a smart guy. I don't think he believes (a) and he certainly knows how the rest of the story goes.

As long as I've been in comics, which is about the same amount of time as Gerry, I've heard endless discussions and panels and meetings about "reaching a new audience with different kinds of comics." The 2% of the time all that talk has led to an actual attempt, it's been half-assed…and you can kind of sense the sighs of relief when they get in some early numbers that justify saying, "Well, we tried and it didn't work so let's give up on this."

Also, no one is suggesting that if you put out different kinds of comics, the mere fact that they're different will in and of itself attract an audience. They have to be different and good…or at least different and compelling. Sometimes, it's like if you had a pizza business and I suggested you might be able to sell some other kind of food as well. Then you go and put Baked Gopher Guts in Hollandaise Sauce on the menu and when they don't sell, you say, "You were wrong. People only want pizza."

Hey, let's watch and listen as Bernadette Peters sings a show tune I like. Some time ago here, I promised to tell the embarrassing (to me) story of the one time I met Ms. Peters. A few of you have reminded me and I will get to it. In the meantime, here's a song you weren't expecting…

Someone who signs himself "Gary from Buffalo" and who might even be named Gary and hail from Buffalo writes…

I'm back with another super-trivial question about Superman comics during the silver age, when I was a devoted reader.

Every month, each comic's letter page invariably contained letters pointing out mistakes (or boo-boo's) in previous issues. (The only submission of mine that ever made it to print was such a letter.) Later on, when these stories with errors were reprinted in the 80-Page Giants, I'd notice the mistakes had been corrected. If you knew where to look, these tacked-on corrections were usually very obvious.

My question is, how did DC keep track of the story corrections to be made? Was someone in charge of physically writing the correction into an issue? Or did they put the 1960's equivalent of a post-it note onto each page? And were the issues with corrections then kept in a separate file? They must have had a system, because I doubt anyone would be able to commit all the corrections to memory. After 60 years of wondering, I'd love to know the answer!

I don't know of any organized error-tracking procedures in the DC offices but I did know a man named Nelson Bridwell who was an assistant editor — and sometimes an editor — there during this period. Nelson was in charge of most of those 80-page reprint issues and he was also a highly-sophisticated and obsessive proofreading machine.

He assembled and wrote the replies for most of the letter pages for the Superman comics and later when those stories were reprinted, he was in charge. It would not be surprising that when he selected a story for reuse, he then checked the letter pages of subsequent issues for things that needed fixing. It would also not be surprising if he just plain remembered 'em because Nelson had one of "those" memories.

And it's interesting that you could always spot the corrections. Every comic book company has someone around to fix spelling errors and art mistakes, DC had their Production Department, which was headed up by a gent named Sol Harrison who routinely bragged that his crew was the absolute best-ever at that kind of thing. I kept it to myself when I was around him but I thought the opposite.

I thought they were pretty bad at it. Even as a kid, I could spot all kinds of clumsy lettering fixes and often there'd be some drawing on a page — usually a body part — that you could see wasn't drawn by the credited artist…or even by a very good artist at all.

In the forties, all the way up to 1967 or so, they had a letterer named Ira Schnapp who was to lettering what someone like Joe Kubert or Nick Cardy was to everything else on the page. Schnapp designed most of the title logos and lettering on the covers and most of the house ads and such. When he made a fix, it was seamless and unspottable. When anyone else did, it stood out like a rhinoceros in a box of See's Candy — to coin a phrase.

This is the first time I (or I think anyone) has ever said that the DC Production Department before around 1980 was not only not the best anywhere, it was simply not very good, at least when it came to corrections. If I had said this at the time, I would not only have been banned from the company for life, I would have been somehow forbidden from buying their comics ever again. I had to wait forty years to feel safe in speaking my mind on this topic and it feels good to finally do so.

• Lindsey Graham said, "I'm being killed financially. This money is 'cuz they hate my guts." Which is ridiculous because Lindsey Graham has proven time and again that he doesn't have any guts.

Sometimes, they just get by you. When Phil Hahn passed away last November, it was apparently covered in many newspapers and online Hollywood sites but I somehow missed it. It wasn't until I saw him in the "In Memoriam" reel on the Creative Arts Emmys, which I watched on YouTube, that I found out. Phil was one of the best comedy writers it was ever my pleasure to be around.

He hailed from Kansas and got his first real writing job there working for Hallmark Cards. True Story: In 1983, Phil and I were on staff working on a show for Dick Clark Productions. One day, my friend Russell Myers — who was then drawing the newspaper strip Broom-Hilda and still is — was in town so he came by the office to visit and to go out to lunch. We were heading out and we passed Phil's office where Phil was sitting, working.

Russell walked a few steps by Phil's door, then stopped and said, "I recognize that man!" He walked back into Phil's office and said, "Excuse me, sir, but I have the feeling I know you." Phil looked at Russell and said, "I think I know you, too." It took about two minutes before they figured out that they'd both been on staff at the same time at Hallmark back in Kansas City, MO. Phil wrote gags for cards. Russell did the artwork for many of them. But they'd never met or been introduced there; just seen each other in the halls. They didn't actually meet until years later in Dick Clark's building in Burbank.

Phil sold a lot of funny articles to MAD magazine and also recommended one of the best artists he worked with at Hallmark. And that's how Paul Coker Jr. joined the Usual Gang of Idiots at MAD. Together, they did a recurring feature called "Horrifying Clichés."  On a lot of his MAD work, he collaborated with Jack Hanrahan, who became his writing partner when Phil moved to Hollywood.  Together, they wrote for dozens of shows including Get Smart and The Sonny & Cher Show,  and they put in a stint at Hanna-Barbera writing The Banana Splits and about half the episodes of H-B's 1967 Fantastic Four series.  But their biggest credit was several seasons on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In for which they each earned an Emmy.

In the early seventies, the team split up and what became of Jack Hanrahan was not a happy story.  But Phil continued working on popular shows including Donny and Marie and Dolly Parton's 1987 variety series and a whole lot of specials.  He eventually retired to Coos Bay, Oregon where he was happily retired with his family, and where he died of lung cancer last November at the age 0f 87.  A nice man.  A funny man.  I wish I'd known about his passing and was able to note it last year.

I used to love watching Jackie Vernon on The Ed Sullivan Show. Best deadpan delivery in the business…

This is not for me. It's for something I'm working with. They're looking for someone who has an unslabbed copy of Fantastic Four #1 — an original one, not a reprint — who will make it available to them for scanning…and yes, this is all approved by Marvel. It's for a forthcoming fancy book and they will pay a fee and give you credit and some free copies and take very good care of it. In fact, they may even be able to come to you and you can take it out of its Mylar® sleeve or whatever it's in and handle it. They just need to scan it for this big, impressive book.

Someone who is located in the Eastern Tri-State area would be ideal but they may be willing to settle for anywhere. Drop me a note if you've got one and are willing to share it with the world. I will pass you on to folks I trust.

I had a great time last night interviewing my buddy Ron Friedman…though I think I could have saved some time by listing the TV shows he hasn't worked on. You can still watch the whole conversation here and if you crave more of Ron's great stories, there's an awful lot of them in his autobiography. We plugged it during the show but neglected to tell you where you can get a copy. Here's where you can get a copy.

For some reason, a number of folks lately have written to ask me various versions of the question, "Do you believe in psychics?" Here's my simple answer: I believe there are people who claim to be psychics and I believe these people can be divided into two groups: Those who deceive others into thinking they have psychic powers and those who deceive themselves. The latter group includes the many people who say things like, "I'm not saying I have psychic powers but there are times when I just seem to know something before someone tells me or before it happens and I can't explain how I know."

I also have a few messages lately from someone who doesn't have the e-mail address of someone they wish to write to but knows that I do and believes that kind of thing should be open knowledge and I must hand it over. Years ago, someone demanded a certain phone number I had and accused me of interfering with their Freedom of Speech by not furnishing it. They sent me this long, incoherent message about how they had a God-given right to talk to anyone they wanted to talk to. I wrote back that they should ask God to give them the number.

No Trump item today here. If you're dying to read about him, I suspect you can find one or two other websites where he's mentioned. Bye for now.

101. In the previous century, the decisions about who would write, pencil, letter, ink or color a comic book usually had a lot more to do with "Who's available?" and/or "Who needs work at the moment?" than with "Who would be the best person for this job?"
102. And some assignments — not a majority but some — were assigned according to who was kissing up to the assigner or maybe to what he or she could do for that assigner in other areas.
103. If you work in comics for an extended period, look over the books published by the company or companies that buy your work and ask yourself, "What comic am I totally unqualified and ill-suited to work on?" Then prepare for the call where they say, "We discussed it here in the office a lot and decided you're the perfect person for this job!" It will be that comic.
104. The fact that a comic book was canceled does not mean it was not a good comic.
105. The fact that a comic book was canceled does not mean it was given enough time to find an audience.
106. The fact that a comic book didn't sell well does not mean that a better marketing division could not have caused it to sell better.
107. The fact that a comic book was canceled does not mean that it didn't sell well. Companies have been known to cancel books based on incomplete or even misread sales figures.
108. It may even have been a matter of the guy with the power to cancel a comic making a political move against someone else in or around the company.
109. If an inker cannot capture all that the pencil artist put into the faces, it's bad inking no matter what the rest of it looks like.
110. Most tricks involving fancy lettering styles in word balloons have not worked unless they were in a comic strip done by Walt Kelly.
111. Most tricks involving Wally Wood-style lighting have not worked unless they were in a comic book done by Wally Wood.
112. When you eliminate "thought balloons" as a tool for the writer to use, you usually wind up with too much exposition in the captions and a lot of your characters talking aloud to themselves in unnatural ways that are really "thought balloons" disguised as "word balloons."
113. Having to write real short stories (six pages and under) is a very good training ground for comic book writers and many who've never done it could benefit from doing it.
114. Sleeping with someone who works in the same office or on comics that have something to do with yours will almost always lead to problems of some kind.
115. Writing and sending off to press a "next issue" blurb when you really aren't sure what's in the next issue can easily lead to you writing a story of which you are seriously not proud.
116. A one-issue "fill in" story on a comic produced by temp talent will almost always read like a one-issue "fill-in" story produced by temp talent.
117. If the hero in the comic you're writing has a secret identity, you should not do a story in which that secret is threatened or apparently revealed less than twelve years after the previous story in which that hero's secret identity was threatened or apparently revealed. Fifteen is better.
118. If you come up with a story idea for a long-running comic book and you think, "I can't believe no one else has ever thought of this," the odds are that everyone has thought of it…and that's the reason they never did it.
119. If there's an excess of expository dialogue and captions on the last few pages of a story, the writer either didn't pace out the story properly or the plot was too complicated for the confines of the page count. If the comic was done "Marvel method" (dialogue after pencil art), that might mean that the artist didn't pace the story out properly.
120. Never mind that you can put out a real slick black line with your digital or real brush. It's where you put that line that matters.
121. Editors would get more work delivered to them on time if they were more honest with the freelancers as to when it's really needed.
122. You know that trick where you hand in the work deliberately late thinking "They won't have time to screw around with it?" That trick never works the way you hope it will.
123. Some comic book companies used to pay writers more for stories that were supposed to be funny because they recognized that funny is harder to achieve than serious.
124. If you draw Superman or Batman or some other character who's been around for decades, you should not draw that character exactly the way someone else did and you should not draw that character completely unlike the way anyone else did. Somewhere in-between is where you want to be.
125. A professional who seems like a helluva nice guy when you meet him at a convention and tell him you love his work and want his autograph can be an extremely non-nice guy when you deal with him in a work capacity, especially if he rightly or wrongly perceives you as a threat to him.

More of these will follow over the next few weeks.

Yes, I'm interviewing Ron Friedman at 7 PM tonight Pacific Time. You can watch it live or you can watch the endless on-demand replays but if you liked any of the zillion TV shows Ron worked on, you'll want to watch it. I may get him to tell stories about his friend and writing partner, Pat McCormick. I may even get him to tell of his experiences as a "play doctor" trying to fix the original production of Minnie's Boys on Broadway. And remember…this is the man who killed Optimus Prime.

I could interview Ron night and day for a week and not get through all he's done. Let's see how far we get.

No Trump item today. I either read about him or I get work done and I've decided to get work done. Besides, this week's outrage is just this week's outrage. We still have next week's outrage to get to and the one the following week and so on.

An acquaintance who I once thought was sane is now posting messages about how the whole COVID-19 thing is a hoax. No one has gotten sick or died from it. The small number of folks who have actually suffered or left us is the number who ordinarily get that way from the regular, non-pandemic flu. All the doctors and hospitals and nurses and I guess family members of folks falsely reported as dying are part of the conspiracy. It tops one particular conspiracy theory I recall about the Kennedy Assassination that involved — literally — about 25% of the U.S. population being in on it.

Lastly: Didn't see the Emmys. Didn't care about the Emmys. Hell, I didn't even care that much about them when I was nominated. A lot of folks online are complaining that most of the trophies went to shows they'd never heard of…and that's not really a complaint about the awards. If anything, it's a complaint about how so little of the television industry is about CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox. And I'm not sure that's anything to complain about.