Let's cover some loose ends. Folks are writing me with different answers to the question of whether Not Tonight, Henry! is public domain. Don't send me any more notes about this. I've decided it doesn't matter to me. The film is downloadable over at Internet Archive in case you can't live without a copy on your hard drive and you're one of the few folks who doesn't know how to download from YouTube.
I have a number of messages from folks asking what panels I'm hosting at the Comic-Con Special Edition in San Diego on Thanksgiving Weekend…and a few asking me if they can be on one of them. I hope this event will be a grand success but I won't be there to see it. I've decided I won't be comfy enough being around large quantities of human beings by November 26-28 so I'll be Comic-Conning here at Casa Evanier and not hosting panels there.
In the last month or so, three different people have written to me to ask why MAD is no longer being published. But it is. It's bi-monthly and almost all reprints but it's still available at comic book shops, though probably not all the newsstands where it was once available. Some of the reruns are very well chosen — the latest issue reprints a Kurtzman/Davis story from MAD #1! — and reproduced well, which is especially impressive when you consider who's editing MAD these days: No one! No one is listed as editor. I'm told the selections are being made by Suzy Hutchinson but her title is Art Director and she's doing a fine job. Maybe more magazines should have no editors.
Lastly for now: In my obit for Mort Sahl, I wrote, "I hope someone now will put together a big American Masters kind of thing with clips of him at his best." Several of you, including Jeff Abraham and Steve Stoliar, wrote to remind me that one of my favorite producers of this kind of thing, Robert Weide, did indeed do just that and Mr. Weide has put a copy of it up on Vimeo. Here it is if you want to watch it.
I've watched about half and there's some great stuff in there. But I have to say that I lost a lot of respect for Mr. Sahl when he became a salesperson for Jim Garrison's "investigation" of the J.F.K. assassination, which I thought proved its theory about as well as The My Pillow Guy has proven Trump got more votes than Biden. Sahl was about equally willing to admit to being wrong about anything.
And I lost another chunk when Sahl was making the rounds of the talk shows to argue that women were intellectually inferior to men and should all kind of accept their second-class lot in life. I'll be interested to see if that's included in the remainder of the documentary. I still admire so much of what Mort Sahl did there were times when you had to specify you were talking about an earlier time in his career.