Mike Cagle sent me this link to a taste test that the Washington Post did of store-bought marinara sauces. Mike thought I'd like it — and I do — because my favorite brand, Rao's, was the clear winner. I did though notice that Trader Joe's Tomato Basil Marinara Sauce finished a respectable second…and it costs an awful lot less.
Also perhaps worth mentioning here: The cheapest place to buy Rao's Marinara Sauce near me seems to be Ralphs Market (known in other climes as Kroger) which sells a 24 oz. jar for $10.19. Walmart, which is not too near me but does deliver, sells that jar for $6.88. There are markets where you can pay double the Walmart price. I get mine from Costco — again, not near me but they deliver — a twin-pak of two 28 oz. jars of the stuff for $14.92. And they often sell it cheaper than that, which is when I stock up.
We are still fiddling with things on this blog, fixing this and that. Nothing is being deleted. Some things may not be accessible for a week or so. I appreciate your patience.
People keep writing me that It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is on TCM. It's often on TCM and an employee of said channel told me not long ago that it's one of the most popular films they run. I still don't think that's a good place to see it unless you're really familiar with the picture and just want to be reminded of that time you saw it on a big screen with a big, appreciative audience. But please, please — for your sake — don't make a TV showing or even a home video version of it the first or only place you experience it.
I keep getting e-mails asking me what I think of the new revival of the TV series, Night Court. I think I haven't seen it and, not having been a fervent follower of the original, I'm in no rush. Unless something's newsworthy and especially time-sensitive, I'm in no hurry to see anything on TV or streaming. My attitude is that if it pleases anybody, it will always be there to see…somewhere.
I recently tried the new, limited-time-only Italian Mozzarella Chicken Sandwich at Wendy's and I won't make that mistake again. "Limited-time-only" apparently refers to how long you'll think it sounds tempting.
Years ago, there was a department store chain in Southern California called The Akron. It more or less operated on the principle that if all your neighbors had a bird bath, you had to have a bird bath…or if all your neighbors had tiki gods in their yards, you had to have tiki gods in your yard…or if everyone else on your block had a chaise lounge, you had to have a chaise lounge. Operating on that principle, I think I need to have some classified documents lying around my house. You know, for when the F.B.I. drops by for drinks and a search.
Comedian-podcaster Marc Maron wrote the foreword for Maverix and Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comics, a new collection of the fine drawings of Drew Friedman. I love caricatures and Friedman's were terrific when he burst onto the scene and he has just gotten better and better.
One of the many things that will astound you if/when you buy this book — and you should buy this book and not on Kindle — is the level of detail. I don't mean detail just in creating a drawing that really looks like someone but detail in meticulously surrounding them with an environment and backgrounds that say so much about them.
But I'll get back to what Drew drew. Maron writes that underground comix shaped his worldview. He says they "…laid the psychological groundwork for my entire life and how I see the world." I probably read most of the same ones Maron did and they didn't have that impact on me, possibly because I was born eleven years before he was.
The main impact they had on me came from merely being exposed to lot of diverse worldviews — some banal to the extreme, some brilliant — and most of them personal to an extreme that almost never happens in a comic book created by hordes (or even herds) of people and copyrighted by a corporation.
Harvey Pekar
That some undergrounds were amateurish didn't matter. In fact, some of the crudest-looking ones had the most to say…and enjoying a stranger's free expression can be vitalizing even when their worldview connects in no way with your own. Paging through Drew's book, looking at all the pretty portraits, I found myself thinking over and over, "Oh, so that's what the guy who did that story looks like." (I also discovered that one or two underground cartoonists I thought were black weren't.)
Not to slight Drew's drawings in any way but this book is much more than a collection of great drawings. It's a visit to a time so long ago that some of its prime movers have died of natural causes. The text portions of this volume are very important and if you don't know what was so special about underground comics — or think it was all just R. Crumb and the Freak Bros. — this book will clue you in. Buy it for the artwork. Stay for the history.
This year's Oscar nominations are out and I have no reaction to any of them. I didn't see that many movies that came out last year and nothing in the ones I did see cried out to me as so deserving of honor that I want to go picket the Academy building over their omission. There are all these articles appearing on the 'net this morning about "snubs" and the work that was supposedly snubbed strikes me as having been done by folks who were well-compensated and probably getting all sorts of good offers. Some of them will doubtlessly snag one or more of those little statuettes when it's their time.
My favorite actor of all time might just be Jack Lemmon. He made, by some counts, 48 movies. He was nominated for Oscars eight times and won two. So was he "snubbed" forty times or forty-six?
"Snub" has always seemed to me the wrong word for this situation. Makes it sound like all the voters got together and said, "Hey, Tom Cruise is getting a real swelled head. Let's teach him a lesson he'll never forget and not nominate him for Best Actor in Top Gun: Maverick. And everyone else says, "Yeah, that'll show him! He'll have to be content with a producer nomination and only $100 million for his next movie!" The man is probably inconsolable.
Of course, this is what happens when you have categories where you nominate five people. If eight people do superior work, three get "snubbed." And to nominate Cruise, they'd have to not nominate someone else who made the cut and then that person would be "snubbed." (Then again, if only three actors give Oscar-worthy performances in a year, two guys get nominated who didn't. Simple math can be so maddening.)
Some people seem to find it incredulous that the film Elvis scored seven nominations including Best Picture and Actor in a Leading Role…but its director, Baz Luhrmann, wasn't nominated. "Did that picture direct itself?" they ask, forgetting two things…
One is that the Academy nominates ten movies for Best Picture and five for Best Director. So every year, and there's no way around this, at least five people are going to not be nominated for directing a film nominated for Best Picture. Again, simple math.
And the other thing is that while everyone who votes gets to vote on Best Picture, only directors nominate directors, only actors nominate actors, etc. It's a different block of voters. It's like being amazed that one county in a state voted for Joe Biden and another county voted for Donald Trump.
And this is already way more than I really care about these nominations. I don't think most people do these days. Just take a look at the ratings when they do the Oscar Telecast on March 12. Even if they guarantee that some superstar is going to get up and slap someone, a large part of America won't be watching.
Here's Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone explaining the messy bankruptcy maneuvers of Alex Jones. This may be of interest to folks who have no interest in Alex Jones but don't know how bankruptcy, in all its many forms, works…
A museum called The National Comedy Center is located in Jamestown, New York — the town where Lucille Ball was born. I wish she'd been born in a city which is easier to get to. I have friends who've visited this shrine and they all said it was not the easiest of commutes…though well worth the effort. I will have to make that effort one of these days. They keep adding reasons why I have to go and one of the latest ones is a whole wing devoted to the archives of Carl Reiner…
At some point in the next 48 hours, a technician-type person will be installing new software on this blog. I wrote the original template for its design a long, long time ago and it is now outta-date and not compatible with certain technological changes in how a website like this operates. I haven't the time nor the know-how to write a new template so I hired someone who does…with money that many of you graciously donated when I did a little telethon here some months back. You also helped pay my hosting bill for most of this year and I thank you again.
When things change, this blog will look almost like it has for years but with a few modifications. There will be things that will have to be fixed and changed, either by my tech guy or me and it may take a week or two to get everything running properly. No need to write and tell me that this page or that section looks weird or doesn't work right. It will be fixed as soon as we can get to it. Just bear with me until we get the bugs out.
I've appreciated your recent pieces about artists and how they were forced (or wrangled, perhaps) into arrangements or projects they didn't want (or worse, to my sensibility, having the art changed after its completion). Could you discuss the degree to which that sort of thing happened to writers? I am aware of occasional distinctions between creator, plotter, and scripter and I know that initial direction sometimes came from editors, but I am not aware of anything like Kirby's Superman being redrawn.
Being a writer in some situations means being rewritten. It's especially common on projects where you don't hold the copyright and where you're working with a property you in no way own. If I'm writing someone else's characters, I generally don't have the final say.
And just as artwork is sometimes altered, so sometimes are scripts. I once worked for an editor who (I thought) was motivated to rewrite something in every script that he bought…often a gratuitous change. From afar, I've witnessed editors do this to try and prove to their superiors that they're earning their money and/or are indispensable. In the case of this particular editor, I think it was just that he was convinced he could improve any script. Sometimes, I thought he did but not always.
That kind of thing happens a lot in live-action television…less in animation and even less in comic books. There are good and bad things about working in each area and one of the things that I love about writing comic books is how infrequently that happens. But it does happen.
I'm thinking now of one veteran comic book writer I shall not identify. I think he may have had a contract that guaranteed him a certain amount of work or it may have been that because of past service, the company felt an obligation to keep giving him steady assignments. He's passed on but I still don't feel it would be right to give his name.
Whatever the reason, he was assigned to several comics that were probably not "right" for him (or vice-versa) and even when he was working in his area of past expertise, a large percentage of what he handed in was judged unusable. So it was heavily rewritten in the office…
…and I know this because Len Wein and I once rewrote one of his scripts together and Len had rewritten a lot of them on his own. I asked him why we were doing that. Why didn't he tell the writer what was wrong with it and let the guy have another crack at it? Len said, "I've tried that and what I get back is always farther off the mark. Believe me, this is easier for everyone." I would say we redid 75% of that script…and no, the credits did not indicate that. Len said the writer had never complained about such rewrites…if he even noticed.
Changes in artwork in a comic are more obvious. There are a lot of online forums in which folks discuss changes we've spotted — like John Romita (Sr.) redrawing characters in a story drawn by someone else at Marvel — as he often did. At times, there has been a lot of that in some company's output. I keep reminding people that just because something was changed, it doesn't mean the original artist screwed up. It just means some editor, wisely or foolishly, wanted something changed.
I have seen editors make changes and later regret them. Joe Kubert once did a lot of redrawing on a war comic that Dan Spiegle drew for DC. A few years later at Comic-Con, I introduced Dan and Joe to each other and Joe immediately apologized to Dan and told him, "I shouldn't have done that. What you drew was better." I think Joe's judgement was skewed a bit by an attitude at the company then that what the freelancers handed in always needed a bit of in-house improving to make it publishable.
Sometimes, work can be improved. Sometimes, there are valid reasons to change something. It just shouldn't be tampered with because someone's trying to prove who's boss.
I have to deal with a little knee problem. It's nothing major but it may prevent me from posting much today. I'll bet if you look hard, you can find something interesting on the Internet from someone else.
I enjoyed your recent piece on John Buscema, an artist whose work I admired greatly. I was aware he preferred doing historical work or Conan, and near the end, Marvel had him do a long form standalone Arthurian adaptation and noted it was a passion project for the artist.
From what you said, telling him "I really enjoyed your 2nd Avengers run, especially 'Siege' wouldn't necessarily get the response one expected. This got me to wondering. Can you think of other people in comics or film who are less than thrilled to be associated with what they are most known for? I read years ago that Vivian Vance was horrified she'd go through life with people thinking she was actually married to William Frawley and Alec Guinness seemed to be embarrassed by Star Wars.
Was Curt Swan proud of his work on Superman? What about Ditko and Spider-Man? Jack Kirby and anything? (Please don't tell me you're embarrassed by Blackhawk; that'd be heartbreaking.) In a nutshell, is Buscema the exception or was he just more vocal?
If you'd told John Buscema you loved some work he did on The Avengers, he would have thanked you and possibly muttered something about how he hoped you also saw certain of his other projects. Don't mistake being prouder of one piece of work than another for not being proud of the latter.
Everyone with any body of work is happier with certain jobs than others. They can't expect you to rank what they've done in the same order and — speaking for myself here — sometimes, it's nice to hear that someone liked something I didn't think turned out so well. Makes me think, "Well, maybe that wasn't as big a disaster as I thought."
Actually, John told people that the work he least enjoyed at Marvel was in 1969 and 1970 when they had him drawing stories for My Love and Our Love Story. I thought the work was outstanding and I know a lot of artists collect those issues as examples of how to draw beautiful women…but Buscema thought the stories were stupid. And again, he was drawing people in modern day dress and settings which didn't interest him half as much as fantasy material, especially the kind that oozed testosterone.
Generally speaking, creators and performers love compliments but sometimes, you may hit on a sore spot. I don't know anything about how Alec Guinness felt about Star Wars but it wouldn't surprise me if someone who'd done so much fine, respected work had some problem with people who only knew him as Obi-Wan-Kenobi and seemed to not know he'd done anything else of note.
Late in life, Henry Fonda picked up some serious money doing ads like this…
He was amused — or maybe "bemused" is this right word — that so many younger people he met thought of him as a commercial spokesguy. They didn't care, if they even knew, that he'd been in The Grapes of Wrath, The Ox Bow Incident, My Darling Clementine, Mister Roberts, 12 Angry Men and dozens of other great films. (By the way, the little girl in that commercial is Jodie Foster.)
I've seen some actors bothered if someone praises long ago work and says nothing about more recent accomplishments. What they hear is "Gee, you were good a long time ago!" When I met Robert Morse, for example, he was pleased that I didn't act like How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying was the only thing of note he'd ever done. Imagine if you were Jodie Foster and people kept telling you today, "Oh, I loved you in that View Master commercial with Henry Fonda!"
Vivian Vance, I have read, was bothered by people calling her "Ethel" and thinking she was the right age to be married to William Frawley, who was actually 22 years older than she was. They also didn't get along very well. Some actors do resent that people think they are the characters they play…or that one particular role is all they can do.
Swan, Ditko and Kirby were all proud of most of the things they did…and I would venture that they were all proudest of how long they'd been productive and employed. Individual stories or books might not have mattered as much to them as the lifetime batting average.
I remember how Nick Cardy was actually moved to tears on occasion by younger professionals telling him, "Your work was one of the main reasons I became an artist." He was proud of many things he'd done and frustrated that some of them had not lived up to the standard he'd tried to set for himself. But what he was proudest of was that he'd had a long, productive career and that it had meant something to someone.
I love photos and films of old Las Vegas — especially the marquees out front of the hotels. There, you can see some of the amazing entertainment that was being offered there. Take a look at this montage of old marquees. Betcha see a couple of shows there you would have liked to have seen…
If you're going to get involved in discussions about the handling of classified documents, you ought to read what Fred Kaplan has to say about classified documents.
This is my schedule for Comic-Con International 2008, the year I somehow found myself hosting seventeen panels in four days. And, like that's not enough to keep a guy busy, doing three signings and presenting the Bill Finger Award at the Friday night award ceremony.
That was not as difficult as it sounds, especially back when I was fifteen years younger than I am today. By contrast, I hosted or was on ten panels in three days at the 2022 con (plus one signing) and I was about as tired as I've ever been in my life. Part of that was the age difference but part of it was that due to The Pandemic, I was not in as good walking shape and not as accustomed to dealing with crowds. I probably need to train for these things.
