Monthly Archives: December 2021

The one song for this holiday I knew as a kid — and I think I learned it during my disastrous period in Hebrew School which you can read about here — was "I Have a Little Dreidel." I don't think I ever had a dreidel and if I did, I sure didn't make it out of clay. I didn't even know how the game was played. But here are the Maccabeats with a modern twist on that tune…

Now playing on Broadway, just in time to mourn its composer/lyricist, is a new production of Company which makes two major changes, both with Mr. Sondheim's blessing. One, which Sondheim said in many interviews would be a big mistake, is to move it from being set in 1970 to being set in Today. The other is to engage in some gender-reversal, making the hero (Bobby) into the heroine (Bobbi) and flipping sexes elsewhere as applicable.

Does it work? Don't ask me. I haven't seen it and it may be a long time before I'm back in Manhattan. But also don't ask me because, as I wrote here, I don't really like Company as a whole. I like (love, really) a lot of its scenes and songs but after seeing umpteen productions, I decided I don't like it much as a whole.

A tiny part of that may be personal. Bobby (male) is/was a 35-year-old who has never been married. The first time I saw this show, I was probably around 35 and I'd never been married. Nothing that Bobby says, does, experiences or sings relates in the slightest to anything in my life. I don't know if I understand his reasons or issues but I'm pretty sure they in no way approximate mine…and now as I am close to twice that age and still don't want to marry, that's still true. But apart from that, I still don't think the tales of Bobby coalesce into the changes he undergoes leading up to "Being Alive." The character just doesn't make sense to me and neither do a lot of the explanations friends have tried to lay on me. I think they're fabricating something that is not there.

When I first heard about the gender-flip, it struck me as — and this is true of a lot of new approaches to old plays — a stunt or gimmick. But after reading some of Sondheim's comments — such as in this interview of him and the new version's director — I'm curious if this version would come together for me more than the original. And that's what I may never find out.

• Chris Cuomo provides another reason I'm glad I'm an only child.

As I explained back here, I've never been a big fan of Little Orphan Annie in her long-running newspaper strip…or most of the other places she's appeared. The Broadway musical and the umpteen movies based on the Broadway musical are okay by me…just okay.

So I guess it's high praise from me that I enjoyed NBC's live telecast the other night of that musical. But what I liked was not the musical itself but a lot of the performances and the clever way it was staged and shot for television.  The kid playing Annie (Celina Smith) was great.  The lady playing Miss Hannigan (Taraji P. Henson) was great. I saw someone online wonder why the show didn't have more scenery and I suspect that was because Ms. Henson devoured it all during rehearsals.

The ensemble of dancers and bit players, young and old, were all great. Even the dog was great. Harry Connick Jr…

Aw, I felt a little sorry for Harry Connick Jr. He's a great performer but I thought he lacked the underlying "wealthy asshole" quality that Daddy Warbucks needs to have. Part of the storyline is that the almighty, all-wealthy Warbucks doesn't "get" what it's like to be poor at first and slowly learns a different side of humanity by having Annie on the premises. Connick seemed so nice from the moment he stepped into his first scene that he didn't seem to need to learn that.

And every review I've seen has mentioned the unconvincing bald cap they had on him. I think it looked phonier because of the glaring microphone they had on him. Its lines made it look like the bottom edges of the bald cap were peeling up. But he sure sang well, especially in the "N.Y.C." song.

All the songs sounded good and some of the choreography was amazing. Dance numbers on Broadway these days always seem to be infused with acrobatics and awesome physical prowess. In the recent revival of My Fair Lady, they more or less turned "Get Me To The Church On Time" imto a Cirque du Soleil finale. I just hadn't expected to see little girls turning hands-free cartwheels. Arguably, there was a little too much of that too early…and I guess what I was thinking was, "What do all those orphans have to turn backflips over?"

But I have to admit I enjoyed watching it all. That was about as good a job as anyone could do with the source material…which can't be said of most of these stage-to-one-night-TV-event musicals. I'd still like to see someone tackle A Funny Thing On The Way To The Forum, maybe with Nathan Lane and James Corden as Pseudolus and Hysterium — and either one could play either part. Wouldn't it have been nice if they'd had any Sondheim musical ready to air this week?

This is a group called Kippalive…

Rand Paul — who, let's remember, is Dr. Rand Paul — has been going around saying that masks don't work. A fact-checker at the Washington Post says Paul is basing his assertion on one study and ignoring many others that say the opposite — and even the one he cites doesn't say what he says it says. What mainly interests me about the fact-check article is its explanation of how masks work.

2022 is almost upon us and I'm looking at three comic conventions in Southern California next year. This is assuming we are past the stage where comic conventions get canceled for medical reasons.

WonderCon is in Anaheim from April 1 through April 3. The San Diego Comic Fest is in you-know-where from April 21 to April 24. And Comic-Con International is in the same city from July 21 to 24 with a Preview Night on July 20.

WonderCon is a big convention that covers comics, animation, gaming, anime, TV, movies and a whole lotta things. The San Diego Comic Fest is a small (by comparison) and intimate gathering that focuses mostly on comics, especially older ones. And Comic-Con International is a huge mother of a blow-out about everything that's fun and imaginative. If you go to one of these events and don't have a great time, it may be because you picked the wrong size one.

Me, I'm hoping to be at all of them but I have made this policy that has (so far) served me well throughout The Pandemic. I don't assume I can predict how things will be in the future. I don't think anyone can and while I have a lot more faith in the Dr. Faucis of the world than I do in myself, I don't gamble my health on anyone's predictions. I especially don't listen to the vast number of Internet Experts who have never attended five minutes of Medical School but are sure they know all about viruses.

And yes, I felt this way even before the news that…

A man who flew from Minnesota to Manhattan to attend an anime convention last month at the Jacob K. Javits Center tested positive for the new omicron variant of the coronavirus, Minnesota Health Officials announced Thursday. The man, who was fully vaccinated, was in attendance at Anime NYC 2021, a convention of all things related to Japanese animation, from Nov. 19-21.

I also don't believe in drawing any conclusions or worries from a report like this. It's a reason for caution, not panic. A few weeks ago, none of us had heard the word "Omicron" and a lot of us still don't know how to pronounce it, let alone how dangerous it is. We know how dangerous it might be but that's not the same thing. I have some real good doctors in my orbit and I'm going to wait until they tell me where between caution and panic this one falls. And where the next one falls and the next one falls…

It's a holiday dance spectacular with Elliot Dvorin and the Key Tov Orchestra…

I didn't think anything could lower my opinion of the man any more than its current subterranean level…but the list of places he went and people he probably infected after he knew he had COVID has done it.

Here's another Sondheim song I like a lot — "Our Time," sung here by Stephanie J. Block and a bunch of other Broadway performers…

The U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to do something to Roe v. Wade. There are a lot of different opinions out there about what this will mean for a woman's right to choose abortion…so many opinions that a couple of them have to be right. But that also means a lot of them won't turn out to be right. I feel I should remind you that lately, every time SCOTUS Watchers predict what the highest court in the land is going to do, some pretty firm opinions turn out to be wrong.

So it may be as bad as some predict but I think I'll wait until the opinion is (a) known and (b) fully understood before I get upset or mad or relieved or whatever the proper response may be.

The same is true of the buzz about the COVID variant, Omicron. There's an awful lot of panic out there and not a whole lot of hard information.

You know, it's nice in a way to be able to get 24/7 news on our TV sets and our computers whenever we want it but it does have its downsides. It's been a while here since I've quoted the late journalist Jack Germond but it helps to remember when he said, "The problem is that we aren't paid to say 'I don't know' so we have to say something even when we don't know."

Here are the nice Jewish (I assume) boys from Six13 who did that West Side Story parody I linked to the other day. In this video, they spoof Hamilton with a pretty impressive person introducing their performance…

Warning: The following story is a mystery with no verifiable ending…just speculation. If you're the kind of person who likes your questions to have solid, inarguable answers, you might want to find something else on the Internet to read instead of the following…

Charlton Press was a comic book company that existed roughly from 1945 to 1986. They published a lot of comic books and back when I was a kid, I kind of rooted for them the way you might root for any underdog. They didn't have a lot of memorable characters and their books were cheaply printed and the stories were often kind of sappy. Real good artwork did appear in them but not often. As I later learned, the company had a reputation for paying its writers and artists poorly and…well, it showed.

Sometimes though they got more than they paid for. A guy named Joe Gill wrote an awful lot of them and he'd just bang out story after story after story, whether he had an idea for one or not. Occasionally, he hit a vein of gold. Sometimes, Steve Ditko drew for them as did a couple other good artists like Dick Giordano and Rocke Mastroserio. I started buying Charltons when I was about ten and with few-and-far-between exceptions, I liked them then more than I did when I got older.

Most of those I bought, I bought at second-hand book stores, most of which charged a nickel each or you could get six comics for a quarter. Needless to say, I only bought comics at such stores in multiples of six. That was how I started buying comics from different companies. For a while, I was only buying DCs but one day at some store, I found some quantity of DCs I wanted like 23 or 35…where one more comic would be free. So I'd take some interesting-looking Marvel home as my free comic and I'd like it so much that I'd find myself collecting DCs and Marvels…

…and then one day at some store, the pile of DCs and Marvels I wanted would be, say, 47 and since one more comic was free, I'd try a comic from some other company. I'm pretty sure that's how I started buying Charltons.

Used book shops were a good place to buy Charltons, not just because they were cheaper but because those stores were a good place to find them. Many of the stores I frequented here in Los Angeles to buy new comics simply didn't carry them. The few that had any Charlton comics didn't have many. Even later when I began to learn some things about comic book distribution back then, I couldn't understand why Charlton's product wasn't as available as comics from DC, Marvel, Archie, Harvey, Dell, Gold Key or one or two others.

I still don't know why but that's not the mystery that this post is about. The mystery that this post is about occurred one day at a used bookseller on Santa Monica Boulevard near Sawtelle. I'd picked out some comics to purchase when the guy who ran the place asked me if I collected Charlton Comics. I said I did and he took me into the back room and showed me five boxes of comics he'd recently acquired. Let me describe what was in them…

Each box had about a hundred Charlton Comics. Every single comic was in perfect condition as if they'd just come from the printer and never been read. And what they represented was one copy of every single comic that Charlton had published in about the last two years.

There were copies of Army Attack, Army War Heroes, Battlefield Action, Billy the Kid, Black Fury, Blue Beetle, Brides in Love, Cheyenne Kid, Fightin' Army, Fightin' Five, Fightin' Marines, Fightin' Navy, First Kiss, Freddy, Frontier Scout Daniel Boone, Gorgo, Gunmaster, Hot Rod Racers, I Love You, Jungle Tales of Tarzan, Just Married, Konga, Li'l Genius, Love Diary, Marine War Heroes, Marines Attack, Montana Kid, My Little Margie, Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds, Navy War Heroes, Outlaws of the West, Romantic Story, Sarge Steel, Secrets of Young Brides, Six Gun Heroes, Strange Suspense Stories, Submarine Attack, Sweethearts, Teen Confessions, Teenage Hotrodders, Teenage Love, Texas Rangers in Action, U.S. Air Force, Unusual Tales, War Heroes, Wyatt Earp and maybe a dozen others.

The storekeeper told me someone had brought them in and swapped them for two cents per comic in store credit, not cash, and had picked out ten bucks worth of old books (not comics). He would let me have the lot of them for twenty dollars. I offered fifteen. He said, "It's a deal if you get them out of here today."

I was about thirteen years old when this happened. I didn't have a lot of money but I had enough for this transaction. During all this, my father had been patiently waiting in his car outside, reading the newspaper. When I think about how good comic books have been to my life, I am grateful for my father's willingness in those years to drive me to second-hand bookstores and sit outside in his car reading the newspaper while I went in.

He was a little startled when I came out carrying crates of comics but by that age, he was used to his son surprising him…and he figured I knew what I was doing even though I didn't always figure that. I had to make five trips to his car.

The comics were not in order and it wasn't until I got them home and did some sorting that I realized what I'd acquired. It was, as I said, one of every comic book Charlton had issued for two years. That wasn't readily apparent to me until I realized that Six Gun Heroes had changed its title to Gunmaster and continued the numbering. Or that Charlton published five issues of Blue Beetle numbered #1-5, then they stopped Unusual Tales after #49 and followed it with Blue Beetle #50. So the numbering of Blue Beetle went #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #50, #51 and so on…

Charlton did things like that all the time and back then, there were no reference books in which I could look this stuff up. I had to figure it out for myself.

But that also is not the Charlton Mystery that this post is about. The mystery is: "Where the heck did this collection come from?"

How or why could or would anyone collect one copy of every Charlton comic for two years straight? They didn't miss one issue, even with Charlton's rotten distribution and its comics changing names as effortlessly as some people change socks. I could understand (maybe) being a lover of Charlton's romance comics or their war comics or every comic they put out with the words "Fightin' or "Attack" in its title…but every Charlton comic? And in perfect condition? How? Why?

Here's the best theory I came up with and if you have a better one, I'd love to hear it…

Someone in Los Angeles had a relative who worked for Charlton…or some business connection. Maybe some artist or writer who worked for the firm lived out here. Charlton for some reason sent them, individually or collectively, one copy of every comic that came off their presses and the recipient just tossed them all in boxes. That would explain the perfect condition. One day, they looked at the accumulation and said, "I'm sick of having this stuff piling up like this. I'm going to take them to a used book shop and I'll take anything they'll give me for them."

That's all I've got. I don't even have all those comics. I traded or sold 'em off long ago but I still sometimes wonder where they came from.