Monthly Archives: September 2022

Dark Horse Comics has announced the release dates for the next Groo mini-series…

The bumbling barbarian Groo has made quite a name for himself, traveling the land and cleaving a path of destruction and cheese dip. He is either so greatly feared or favored wherever he goes, Groo's earthly reputation causes a Groo deity to arise in the heavens! While Earthbound Groo hungers, his Divine Groo alter ego unleashes chaos! Plus, Sergio's legendary back cover Rufferto strips return! Groo: Gods Against Groo #1 (of 4) will be available at comic stores on December 21 2022.

And then you get #2 in January, #3 in February and…well, you can figure out the pattern.

As usual, Sergio Aragonés draws, he and I collaborate on the story and Stan Sakai letters. Groo remains one of the few comic books published today which is lettered the old-fashioned way: A talented calligrapher with pen and ink letters right on the same pieces of illustration board on which the artist draws. No computer involvement. We also have a letters page, which is something you don't see in many comic books these days.

Not so "as usual" is that this mini-series is the first one colored, not by Tom Luth who has been doing that Herculean task since 1983 (!), but by our new colorist, Carrie Strachan. Tom has retired from Groo coloring to pursue other, saner interests and we thank him for his long, superb service. The last Groo story he colored — and I hope it isn't the last ever — is the eight-pager that's appearing in the Comics For Ukraine benefit book. We hate to see Tom depart but we're really happy we found Carrie.

The four-issue Gods Against Groo mini-series is of a piece with two previous Groo mini-serieses — The Fray of the Gods and The Play of the Gods. All three will probably wind up in a big hardcover collection at some point.

Of possible interest is that, while there are a few different ways to count, Gods Against Groo seems to end with the 200th all-Groo comic book. We did eight issues for Pacific Comics, one special for Eclipse, then two graphic novels and 120 regular-sized issues of Groo for Marvel's Epic Line. That's 131 publications that had naught but Groo in them. Then we did twelve issues for Image Comics, which brings us to 143.

We moved to Dark Horse Comics in 1998. Not counting the mini-series which bows in December, we've done ten four-issue minis for them, one twelve-issue series and one anniversary special. If my math is correct, that takes us up to 196 Groo comics. So the last issue of this new four-issue series will be the 200th Groo comic book.

Now, there are other ways to figure this. We're counting the two graphic novels the same as regular-sized comics. We're ignoring the six issues of The Groo Chronicles that Marvel/Epic released since they were mostly reprint and we're ignoring all the paperback and hardcover reprints and reconfigurations of this material. We're also not counting all the short Groo stories that have appeared here and there in other publications and we are counting the Groo/Conan mini-series and the Groo/Tarzan mini-series. But no matter how you figure it, it's a whole mess o' Groo.

Another weird one from The Muppets on The Ed Sullivan Show. This one was from November 24, 1968…

…but not forever. Well, come to think of it, it will be forever in the sense that I, like most non-commercial blogs, always have a link somewhere so people can thank us by helping out with the expenses of maintaining a blog like this one. I'll probably always have a link there but donations are approaching a nice target number that will cover the costs of maintaining newsfromme.com for the next twelve months…I hope.

Once we hit that number, I'll stop posting little reminders like this one. It's not far off…

• For years, the rallying cry for anti-abortionists was "Let the states decide." And now that some states aren't deciding their way, they've decided we suddenly need a federal anti-abortion law.

Before you read this, you might want to read Part 1 and Part 2.

Sales on DC's Blackhawk comic book declined throughout the sixties. In 1967, its editor George Kashdan was told the comic was heading towards cancellation and something had to be done to change that trajectory. He had several meetings about this with Carmine Infantino, who was more and more calling the creative shots at DC. Infantino had been hired as Cover Editor, then upped to Art Director…and even before he formally had the title of Editorial Director, he was directing all the editors.

Also in those meetings was writer Bob Haney, who was among a handful of writers who'd been scripting the book lately. The last few issues had been written by longtime DC (and Blackhawk) writer France "Eddie" Herron and his exclusion from these meetings presumably had something to do with the fact that he passed away around this time. When I reminded Mr. Kashdan of that, he said, "Eddie was spared seeing what we had to do to that comic."

From out of those meetings came the decision to turn Blackhawk into an unabashed super-hero comic. The cover of #228 showed Superman, Batman, Flash and Green Lantern discussing the Blackhawk team and declaring that they were "washed-up" and Batman even called them "Junk-Heap Heroes." That set the stage for those team members to each adopt a new costumed identity two issues later. This was probably a bad idea even if they hadn't come up with some of the silliest costumed identities ever seen in a comic book.

One member of the squad, Chuck, became "The Listener," an expert in eavesdropping clad in a super-hero suit with ears all over it. Olaf, the team muscle-man, became "The Leaper," dressed no better and now able to bounce and leap about like he could fly. Andre, the suave French member of the squadron, became "M'sieu Machine," an expert in technology. The rest looked just as dumb and the stories read like Haney was studying current Marvel Comics and learning all the wrong lessons about what readers liked about them. (Haney showed better understanding of the Marvel dynamic when he'd co-created and wrote Metamorpho for DC but that comic, after initial strong sales, had nosedived and was in no better sales shape than Blackhawk.)

I'm guessing a lot of its readers looked upon the changes as I did: With the facial expression of the opening night audience watching Max Bialystock's new Broadway show, Springtime for Hitler…though we never got as far as the part when we began to find it funny. A few years earlier, I had finally started buying Blackhawk comics and developed a fondness for the property, not so much because of its current issues but because of the older ones I was finding at second-hand bookshops. In fact, the older an issue was, the more I generally liked it. When I finally got my mitts on some from the 1940s, I became a huge fan of the series. Until they donned those ridiculous costumes.

The Blackhawks' new identities did nothing to stop the bleeding in 1967, and Kashdan told me the new look may even have hastened the descent. In early '68, the comic's frequency of publication was cut from monthly to bi-monthly and it stopped being George Kashdan's problem because he was let go as a DC editor. He had worked for the company as a writer and then a writer-editor since 1947.

So what happened next to Blackhawk? Well, the comic did not survive for long but before it went away for a while, an interesting thing happened. Kashdan's replacement got his desk and one day, he opened a drawer and found something odd. I'll tell you about it in the next part.

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• Today was another very good day to not be Alex Jones. Tomorrow is looking like an even better day to not be Alex Jones.

Like you, I didn't watch the Emmy Awards last night. Really, the only thing I've liked in the last few years there is John Oliver's annual win. This time around, it went like this…

And I guess I also liked seeing him make the rounds of the press after he got the statuette. He really is a funny and surprisingly humble man, even when he's being asked the same question again and again and again…

Back in this post, we brought you a 1973 video called either Keep America Beautiful or Keep U.S. Beautiful…either way, a light-hearted variety show telling us it was not a good idea to litter or pollute. I received this message from John R. Hall…

Here's a bit more context on Keep America Beautiful.

In 1953, America's beverage companies — led by Coke and Pepsi — formed a non-profit called "Keep America Beautiful." Its goal was primarily to reduce littering and secondarily to promote recycling — ostensibly — in order to reduce support for "bottle bills" that placed a deposit on beverage containers. The bottle bills were and are designed to create incentives to keep beverage containers out of the waste stream and the litter stream by making it more expensive to avoid small beverage containers that make up most of the non-paper litter.

K.A.B. was controversial from the beginning, because its sponsors made its purpose clear.

A few years before the special you cited, I was part of a University of Pennsylvania research center project for Anheuser Busch to assemble facts related to waste and litter, framed in economics terms. This was about the time that the Council on Environmental Quality, a federal agency that paved the way for the Environmental Protection Agency, was created. I think the timing of the special is what one might expect when the threat of increased regulatory costs seemed to be rising. Anheuser Busch was one of the few beverage companies that thought they needed to offer a serious alternative to bottle bills. More typical was Coors, which led the scorched earth companies that opposed anything that would cost the beverage companies anything at all.

The term "greenwash" (based on whitewash) was developed for projects like Keep America Beautiful. I think your challenge to readers to judge how well that approach has worked is (as usual) the right way to judge how serious the K.A.B. sponsors were about meaningful change.

I'm a big believer in "Follow the money." I think it usually explains more than most people think. I'm not a big believer in crusades that make people feel they're doing more than they have. I'm thinking now of the folks who thought they'd struck a meaningful response to the terrorists of 9/11 by spending 29 cents and putting a made-not-in-the-U.S.A. American flag on their cars. It's not nothing but if it makes you feel you've done your part and now the problem's gone away, it might be worse than nothing.

It's nice to hear that Anheuser Busch thought they needed to do something meaningful and it's disappointing (but hardly shocking) that Coors did not. That might cause me to switch brands but it would be another meaningless gesture since I've never had a beer in my life. Thanks for writing, John.

Just fixed a really stupid typo in the second part of my Blackhawk history…the kind of typo that inverts the whole meaning of a sentence. Thanks to the many, many folks who saw it when I didn't and wrote in.

As anyone in publishing can tell you, you can proofread something fifty times and once it's too late to fix it, a mistake will appear. Years ago, I wrote that when you receive the first printed, published copy of anything you wrote and open it to a random page, you will suddenly spot a large, nude, obvious error and you will foolishly wonder if there's a way to fix it when there obviously isn't.

The readers of this blog are very sharp and usually when I make a mistake, eleven people write me within fifteen minutes and politely let me know. I am grateful for this. Then again, sometimes I have occasion to look back on a post from 2007 or some other long-ago time and I suddenly notice something that causes me to wonder, "How come no one noticed that?"

If you see one anywhere here, please let me know.

There are arguments and outrage across the 'net tonight as a lot of folks, many of whom did not watch the Emmy Awards, complain about who was left out of the "In Memoriam" segment that was aired. I didn't see it and I don't have a lot of attention to give to that inevitable matter.

But I did just look at this video which the Television Academy has up on its website. It's their full list of those we lost in the last year who had some connection to television. Someone will surely note some omissions on this long, long list which even without photos — just scrolling a list of names — runs six minutes and 43 seconds. I'm sure they didn't intend it to be an answer to those who wonder why the on-air video with photos and time for applause can't include everyone…but it is.

I hope this doesn't sound morbid but I watched the whole thing and was amazed how many people I knew, many of whom I worked with, have passed in the period this covers. I run a lot of obits on my blog but there must have been a dozen names on that crawl that caused me to think, "Oh, I didn't know that person had died." Just for that information alone, I'm glad I watched the entire thing.

Before you read this, you might want to read Part 1.

DC Comics acquired the Blackhawk comic book in 1956 and published it until 1968. For most of that time, it was still about a handsome Polish soldier (named Blackhawk) who headed up a troupe (also named Blackhawk) of skilled soldiers who flew neat-looking airplanes and got into incredible adventures around the world battling evil forces. Though other members sometimes popped in for a story or two, the team members were pretty much standardized as Olaf, Chuck, André, Stanislaus, Hendrickson and Chop-Chop.

Chop-Chop started out as a racial stereotype cook/houseboy for the team and he was played mostly for laughs. As that kind of stereotype became increasingly less funny and tolerated, he morphed into a more realistic and full-fledged member of the squad — and one proficient in martial arts. When I worked on the comic in the eighties, we got some letters from folks who were very pleased with how Chop-Chop had evolved — which I'd had very little to do with — and one or two who were furious with me for not putting him back the way he was in 1941.

When I started buying DC comics around 1960, I didn't buy the war or western or romance titles because those kinds of stories didn't appeal to me then. I didn't buy Blackhawk because it seemed to be a war comic…which it kinda was even though it didn't seem to be set in any war in particular. And it sure had a lot of monsters and outer space aliens on its covers.

Many years later, I met a gent named George Kashdan who had been an editor at DC Comics at the time and who had a lot to do with Blackhawk while he was with the company. I told him I wasn't buying it for a while because I really wasn't sure if it was a war comic or a super-hero comic. He said that was the problem with it: It wasn't enough of a super-hero comic to please the super-hero comic fans and it wasn't enough of a war comic to please the war comics fans.

During most of this time, Blackhawk was published monthly, which was a status I thought DC only bestowed on their top-selling books. I asked if Blackhawk was a top-selling book. He said, "Never." I asked why it was monthly then. He said, "Damned if I know." And this man was, for several years, the editor of the comic.

Then he said, "I think it had something to do with the sales overseas. It was a huge seller, just not in this country. All over the world, publishers were paying us to buy the rights to reprint those issues." Indeed, there was so much love for this franchise that there were two separate (I think) lines of Blackhawk comics in Spanish.

I don't know a whole lot about this but one publisher was putting out El Halcón de Oro ("The Hawk of Gold") and the other was putting out El Halcon Negro ("The Black Hawk"), some with translations of the DC issues and some with original, home-grown stories.  Same premise, same characters, sometimes (I'm told) very similar stories.  I have no idea how they could co-exist.  Maybe one publisher bought the rights from DC while the other acquired them from the original publisher of Blackhawk, Quality Comics.

Perhaps the sales from overseas reprints — whichever ones DC was paid for — kept Blackhawk in the black and on the schedule. Since the editor of the comic couldn't explain it, don't expect me to. Anyway, sales in this country weren't great. In 1964, they tried to boost them a bit by giving the comic a new title logo and giving the soldiers more colorful uniforms…but I'm guessing they felt they couldn't tamper much with the content of the comics without endangering those foreign sales.

Mr. Kashdan told me he was ordered to not mess too much with the format but not why. Finally though in 1967, DC Comics was beginning to undergo some upheavals. Marvel was gaining on them in sales and artist Carmine Infantino was added to the editorial staff with the orders to shake things up. Blackhawk was one of the first projects that seemed to require a major facelift and surgery. And boy, did they shake it up…as we'll discuss in our next installment.

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Just before I went to bed last night, a friend e-mailed me with Top Secret, Do-Not-Quote Inside Info on why Donald Trump flew to Washington, D.C. last night. It was scandalous and headline-shattering and amazing and, of course, completely bogus. Yes, he flew there but we have no idea why. Someone just made up a fantasy as to why and sent it out to others, passing it off as coming from a good source. I didn't believe it then and don't believe it now.

In more interesting news, quite a few of you found that special I linked to really was on IMDB under the name, Keep U.S. Beautiful. They say it aired March 27, 1973.

Thanks for all the iPhone suggestions. No, I am not ready to switch to Android.

The Emmy Awards are tonight. I do not think it's a bad thing that the only folks who really care are the nominees and those who stand to profit from their show winning something. I also thought it was a good thing when interest in the Miss America Pageant plunged to zero.

Those of you who are waiting for an official announcement of the next Groo mini-series from Dark Horse do not have long to wait. Those of you who are waiting for the release of Volume 8 of The Complete Pogo from Fantagraphics…well, I don't know when it will be available in stores and online but I do have a finished, printed copy of it here on my desk. They bind and FedEx a couple of copies over from Korea while the rest are being bound and shipped over here via two guys paddling a canoe across the Pacific.

Yesterday, I had a great lunch with Scott Dunbier and his son. Scott's the guy assembling the Comics For Ukraine benefit book that is raising dough for refugees of that ghastly war. The book is going better than anyone expected and Scott came by to pick up a crate of autograph pages I agreed to autograph. Unlike some folks I could mention, I do not love signing my name over and over and over and over (etc.) and I had to keep reminding myself, "It's for a great cause." And of course, it is.

Speaking of benefits…

Here's a strange TV special that ran on NBC in 1973 (it says) and which appears nowhere in the IMDB or almost anywhere else online. It's called Keep America Beautiful and it stars Raymond Burr, Ruth Buzzi, Tim Conway, Don Knotts, Lena Horne, Sandy Duncan, The Muppets and a whole bunch of Boy Scouts. It was produced by a lot of the same folks who were then putting on Flip Wilson's weekly variety series. Flip, Redd Foxx, Carol Burnett and some other stars also make appearances.

Basically, it's comedy sketches and songs urging people not to pollute…certainly a worthy cause. If you actually watch it, you can decide for yourself how well they did it. My feeling is that a light-hearted comedy show may not be the best vehicle to get people to care about a serious problem.

If you just want to watch The Muppets, try this link. They have a pretty nice little spot. If you want to watch the whole thing, click below…

Donald Trump has reportedly flown to Dulles International Airport which serves Washington, D.C., and there is apparently no known event he is supposed to attend in the area.

A lot of folks on Twitter (and elsewhere online, I guess) are speculating that he's there for some sort of arraignment or plea bargain or Grand Jury testimony…or something.  Some of them are acting like they have inside information and that it's not good for our 45th president.  I tend to think that if someone is acting like they have inside information, it probably means they don't.

One thing I do believe is that we don't know as much about the investigations (plural because there are many) as we think we do.  It was not so long ago that none of us had heard about Trump having an improper stash of Top Secret documents at Mar-A-Lago.  And then suddenly one day, we did.  This could be another one of those…or a new development in that matter…

…or it could be nothing.  I'm going to go with nothing because…well, it saves one a lot of disappointment.

Because I ask for them, I get a lot of questions sent to me at askme@newsfromme.com. I get asked about a lot of things but I'm probably asked the most about the Blackhawk comic book that I wrote (and sometimes edited) for DC Comics for what, when you think about it, was a teensy fraction of the history of that property. I probably have fifty e-mails in a folder on my D drive asking me how I got the job, why I left the job, how I felt about it, how it was to work with Dan Spiegle, etc.

The Spiegle question is the easiest answer. Dan was the main artist on the book while I was involved with it and he was a joy. Everything he drew was right and beautiful. Everything he drew was on-time. Matter of fact, much of it was handed in early. As you'll see in some part of this series down the line, one of my biggest problems on this assignment was keeping Dan busy.

The other questions are a little tougher and will require more bytes to explain so I've decided to tackle this as a series of articles that will run I-don't-know-how-many chapters. And I've decided to call it…

Now then: Blackhawk first appeared in Military Comics #1 cover-dated August of 1941. The feature was created by some combination of Will Eisner, Chuck Cuidera and Bob Powell. Cuidera and Powell were artists who were both then working in Eisner's "shop" where he and his staff created comic book material for various buyers.

I never met Bob Powell who died in 1967 but I got to spend some quality time with Will Eisner and a few hours at one convention with Chuck Cuidera. Depending on how you phrased the question and what mood they were in, either Will or Chuck might tell you that any one, two or three of that trio created Blackhawk. Gil Kane once told me that if I'd been able to ask Powell, he'd have told me he created it and would threaten to beat the crap out of anyone who said otherwise.

And to further muddy the waters, that first issue of Military Comics also featured the debut of The Death Patrol, a feature by Jack Cole (best known as the creator of Plastic Man) that had many similarities to Blackhawk, and which Eisner said was written and drawn before the first Blackhawk story. And as if those waters weren't muddy enough, let's thrown in another bit of confusion which is tangentially related…

Chuck Cuidera's full name was Charles Nicholas Cuidera and at times, he claimed that he was the "Charles Nicholas" who created an earlier property for another company, an anemic super-hero called The Blue Beetle. And Cuidera was among the many people who did draw The Blue Beetle but most historian-types think the "Charles Nicholas" whose name appeared on that strip was another of those artists, Charles Nicholas Wojtkoski. And Will Eisner, I've heard, sometimes claimed he wrote the first Blue Beetle story.

So I don't want to say who created Blackhawk — or The Blue Beetle, for that matter — and I regret the few times in the past when I tried to sort it out. What we can say is that Blackhawk (published by a firm called Quality Comics) and Blue Beetle (which started at a company called Fox Features) both had long, long lives…and both wound up being published and owned by DC Comics.

Blackhawk was a hit in Military Comics and soon there was a regular, top-selling Blackhawk comic book.  Many different writers and artists worked on the strip over the years but the outstanding artist was probably Reed Crandall, who came and went from the strip between 1942 and 1953. The most prolific penciler was Dick Dillin. The most prolific inker of both was Chuck Cuidera. Dillin and Cuidera were the artists in 1956, which was when Quality Comics sold Blackhawk and a few other properties to DC Comics. And Dillin and Cuidera did almost all the art from the moment DC took it over until 1968.

In 1968, Carmine Infantino was increasingly running things at DC and he was charged with weeding out the comics that weren't selling or making them sell.  Blackhawk, for reasons we'll get into in the next part, wasn't selling.  And this feels like a good spot to end this first part.

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