Monthly Archives: January 2023

Continuing where we left off: Here's the schedule of what I did at Comic-Con International in 2004.

Someone wrote to ask me, as many have over the years, "How could you do so many panels?" It sounds silly but I think the answer is that I liked being at Comic-Con, I liked making some sort of contribution to Comic-Con…and I didn't know what else I could do there. I don't like sitting at a table signing books. I couldn't just wander the halls for 4.5 days. When I went to program items, I usually sat there frustrated that the moderators weren't asking the questions I thought they should be asking.

So why not? It gave me a place to sit and a chance to ask questions of…well, just look at some of the people we had on panels back then. I even got to interview Ray Bradbury for an hour in '04 and at several other Comic-Cons.

I'm going to post these, one per day, up to and including the list for 2011.  The listings were already on this blog minus the little graphics I put on them back then but I like looking at them in this format and I hope you do too.  And at some point, I'll post an index to where you can find the years after 2011.

Devin Stone, the "Legal Eagle" of YouTube, explains about copyright and gaming and Dungeons and Dragons…

Steven Replogle wrote to ask…

Last night, Stephen Colbert had Prince Harry on his show, and the interview touched upon some serious subjects while also, of course, including a number of jokes and witticisms. I usually find Colbert to be a good interviewer, able to shift from humor and entertainment to address more complex topics, and then back again. I thought last night's interview was a bit awkward. He and Harry seemed both too eager to establish their humorous bonafides, and just as eager to share the serious stuff — sometimes slightly at cross-purposes.

Which brings me to my question: in your opinion, are there interviews when the late night "entertainment" host did a really good job presenting a serious interview? I know Cavett often featured literary and political discussions, and Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah both would switch gears to interview politicians and authors. You recently posted David Letterman's interview with Zelenskyy. But what about the hosts whose shows aimed for friendly and fun entertainment? Johnny, Jay, Dave (pre-retirement version) — heck, maybe even Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin — have they conducted "serious" interviews worth remembering?

All those shows attempted to get serious at one time or another, especially during tumultuous times in this country. I don't think they often succeeded…although one that comes to mind is that after Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace, he avoided all kinds of interviewers. Then he (or someone under his name) wrote a couple of really awful books trying to make some dough and rehabilitate his image. He avoided tough interviews and probably didn't expect one when he went on with Merv Griffin to promote one of those books.

Merv had consulted with someone, obviously, and was prepared for the encounter. That one comes to mind and not very many others…some of Cavett's…maybe the conversation Colbert had with Joe Biden about losing a son…not very many others. I haven't liked most interviews of politicians because they're not asked tough questions. Everyone's goal seems to be to make them come across as funny and charming as the comedian who was in that guest chair before them. The format of what we now call a talk show doesn't lend itself well to spontaneous conversations because the host feels expected to get a laugh out of the front row every thirty seconds.

I sense a great difference in Mr. Colbert's interviews depending on whether he feels comfortable enough with the guest's ability to ad-lib. Often, he does not…and that's in part because if the guest is on to promote something, there may be an understanding that certain questions will be asked and certain stories will be told. The conversation is not to stray too far from what a great new movie the guest has opening next week.

The best host I've seen for serious conversations would have to be Jon Stewart. He did a lot of them, often with guests who weren't expected to be funny. I think the political bent of The Daily Show made such conversations not seem outta-place like they have on some shows that want everyone in the guest chair to get laughs. Of course, here I'm only talking about shows which have a live studio audience. Tom Snyder could do some great serious interviews because he didn't have one.

If I ponder this topic for a while, I'm sure I'll think of some other good serious interviews. The problem is this "a laugh every thirty seconds" mentality. It causes the hosts to only ask questions where they know the guest has an entertaining answer at the ready.

Here is the schedule of panels with me on them at Comic-Con International in 2003. You'll note that most of these panels are in 90-minute time slots which means the panel itself generally ran 75 minutes to allow for the changeover to the next panel. Since sometimes, the next panel in that room was hosted by me, I could go a bit longer…and in 2003, for example, the Sal Buscema panel didn't really end. It just kind of morphed into the Stan Goldberg panel.

Over the next few years, there were so many people who wanted to do panels — mostly to promote business enterprises but some that didn't — that 90-minute panels became scarcer. I began doing more panels in one-hour slots, which usually meant wrapping things up after 45 or 50 minutes as people began wandering in to claim seats for the next panel in the room.

The exception to this would be any panel in a room with a number that started with a "6." Those panels were and still are spaced on the schedule to allow fifteen minutes for changeover…so the announced end time was or is actually the time we would usually end. Once in a while, I end them a bit earlier if it feels right.

In 2003, they finally gave me big rooms for Quick Draw! and the Cartoon Voices Panel and I did something dumb with the latter: I invited lots of people to be on it…more than twice as many as I should have had up there. It was fun in a way but some panelists didn't get to say very much and there was much scrambling for microphones. I had earlier made that same mistake with the Golden Age Panel so I should have known better…

My favorite Vegas YouTuber, Norma Geli, went to the Consumer Electronics Show in her town last week. I last attended this convention about 25 years ago and saw an awful lot of things that then looked like they belonged in the Jetsons' home and are now outta-date and obsolete…

Brian Fies asks…

John Buscema is one of Marvel's all-time great artists and his "How To" book is a classic on most cartoonists' shelves, but in every interview I've read with him he seemed very ambivalent about drawing superheroes. It was just a job to him, one he didn't particularly enjoy. Yet your Comic-Con schedule for 2001 shows him doing three panels, and I'm curious about your impression of him then. Was he engaged, happy, grumpy? That late in his career (he died in 2002), had he made some peace with superheroes? Or is my impression of him just wrong?

Well, I can't claim to have known John as well as some people so you might want to put this question to one of them. I can just give you my impression from having him on several panels at two Comic-Cons and having one long — I mean like 3+ hours — dinner with him. And I'll tell you two things I learned about comic book artists, especially those from his generation…

One is that every artist has things they prefer to draw and they're happy when they get to draw those things and less happy when they don't. I've worked with some very good artists who hated to draw cars or machinery or horses. John didn't like drawing New York City and people in suits…and a lot of super-hero assignments called for street scenes. Since he was contributing to the plots, he also had to understand the characters and their powers and sometimes how they'd functioned in other comics.

He was happier with Conan or any strip in mythical lands or period pieces. He also told me that he had such great admiration for Jack Kirby — and an awareness that some folks at Marvel wanted him to draw more like Jack — that he sometimes felt uncomfy drawing a Kirby strip, especially when he had to keep looking at Jack's issues for reference.

That's all one thing. The other is that most of his work was done on an assembly-line basis. After it left him, it went to a letterer who would put lettering where John didn't think it should be, then to an inker who might change a lot of what John intended…or simply misunderstand what he had drawn.

As you may have heard, John did not like most of the inkers who finished his pencil art. There were only two he ever really cared for.  One was his brother, Sal Buscema.  The other was Frank Giacoia, who was probably the Marvel inker most Marvel pencilers wanted to have ink their pencils when they couldn't do it themselves.  John's opinion of the rest ranged from "terrible" to "not as bad as some others."

On one of the panels that year, he launched into a short speech about how awful he thought some of them were, horrifying a couple of attendees who thought that John Buscema — plus certain of those inkers he said he hated — produced wonderful work. One fellow in the audience approached me after the panel to ask why John Buscema would have lied and said he didn't love the work of this one inker. The fan thought that combo was so magnificent, John couldn't have not loved it.

John wasn't lying. He was just saying aloud something that some other artists might not have said in public.

But as we've discussed here, most artists of that generation didn't want to be pencilers or inkers. They wanted to create finished art themselves. If you develop the interest/talent for drawing, you grow up doing it as a solitary act of creation. If you were twelve years old and copying the work of Alex Raymond or Hal Foster out of the funny pages, as most comic artists of John's generation did, the fantasy was not to draw it in pencil and then let someone else hand it to a person of their choosing to finish in ink.

One guy penciling and then another inking was largely invented for the publisher's convenience. It was not something that most artists liked and even the ones who preferred to only do one often felt they were matched with the wrong person. There were a couple of inkers who declined to ink Gene Colan's work because, as one put it, "I think he's an incredible artist but I don't understand his drawing well enough to touch it."

Most artists like control of their work to some extent. John had very little control — not of the inking or the coloring or the printing. It bothered a lot of them even though most were afraid to say so. And in John's case, I think he was often assigned to strips at Marvel not because anyone thought his style was right for them but because the book was behind schedule and he was so fast and dependable, he could get it on schedule.

He was a great crisis-solver for editors. As anyone who has that rep can tell you, the downside of that is that you keep getting brought in when there's a crisis.

Don't get me wrong: John was very pleased with his career in comics. He'd worked intermittently in advertising and when he did, he spent a lot of time commuting to far-away offices and a lot of time in meetings with people who couldn't draw and had bad ideas as to what should be drawn. Working for Marvel, John got to stay at home all day and draw…and that makes some artists very happy.

He just might have been happier on some other strips at times…and a lot happier if he could have penciled and inked more.  As I think I said here, if he (or Curt Swan or Gil Kane or many others of those generation who mostly penciled-only), had been able to ink a lot more, I think amazing work would have resulted. But they were pressed to do pencils-only and their page rates were often adjusted to discourage inking.

John Buscema always did excellent work and he did a lot of it, sometimes thrice as fast as your average penciler. The quality in the published books varied a lot and some of that was the inkers. He was right that some of them weren't very good or didn't understand his drawing. But the quality also varied depending on how much he liked the assignment. He was never bad but I think you can tell sometimes that he really, really liked a certain assignment.

The lovely Bernadette Peters sings a lovely song by the lovely Stephen Sondheim…

And here, we flashback to show you my schedule of panels at the 2002 Comic-Con International.

It answers the question of when we started doing the Quick Draw! game there.  We did it first at WonderCon earlier that year with the cartoonists drawing on easels with no projectors.  At this Comic-Con, we first did it in a huge room with projectors.  You'll notice there's still but one Cartoon Voices panel and it's in Room 8 which, at most, holds 340 people.  They told me they'd turned hundreds away.

This is also the year when I somehow managed to host the Ray Bradbury/Julius Schwartz panel and the Cartoon Voices panel even though they overlapped.  Don't ask me how I did that but it helped that they were in rooms across the hall from each other.

Also, this schedule shows something that couldn't help but sadden many of us.  The previous year in 2001, we had the fine artist and gentleman John Buscema on three panels.  Here in 2002 as you can see, we had a tribute/memorial to him.

CLICK HERE TO JUMP TO THE FOLLOWING YEAR

Will Carter wrote to ask this question and believe it or not, I didn't know the answer to part of it…

You are famous for hosting so many panels per year at Comic-Con. What is your personal record for most panels in one convention? How many did you host this past year?

The second part of this was easy. I hosted ten because I skipped Wednesday night and Thursday all day, not so much because of COVID fears but because after so many months of isolation, I wanted to ease back in to being around a lot of people. So we got there Thursday evening late and then on Friday, I was on one panel and hosted another. Then on Saturday, I hosted four and on Sunday, I hosted four.

I had to go research the first part of this question. My average seems to be around 13 per convention but in 2018, I hosted 16 panels and appeared on one other over the four days. I have no idea if anyone has topped that number but I think that's my max.

It was fun to look this up and melancholy to see all the names of folks who are no longer with us. I've decided to post some of those old schedules so you can share the experience. Here's my panel schedule for 2001. We had not yet started doing Quick Draw! then. There was but one Cartoon Voices panel and it was in Room 8, which seats 340 maximum. I now host two per con in rooms that seat a heckuva lot more and we always seem to fill them.

Not long ago, I put up this post about the penciler/inker divide in American comic books and received this message from J.C. Lebourdais…

Longtime French follower of your writing here, both from comics and from the blog. I just read your reply about George Roussos and inkers in general and I have a follow-up question that's been in the back of my mind since I started reading American comics.

Here in Europe, the artists retain the rights to their own work and are able to decide whether they want to ink themselves, hire an assistant or have their own studio.

In U.S. comics, clearly, the publishers used to be in charge in the Silver Age, as you demonstrated, but I've always wondered why such powerhouses as Steve Ditko or Jack Kirby wouldn't simply ask the publisher to be paid for the full art, then hire their own inkers, pick some that would fit their style, their methods of working, etc. in order to be more in control of the finished product. I can't imagine that either of those comics legends just wouldn't care about artistic integrity, or just how it all looks once on the printed page.

Especially in light of some unfortunate pairings (I remember the stories you told about how Jack was notoriously unsatisfied with the inking on Thor, for example, or the touching up of Superman's face on the Fourth World books, I'm sure there are plenty more of those). Someone like Will Eisner seemed to have his own studio and deliver the publisher the whole package. Why wouldn't everyone else do the same?

Well, Will Eisner didn't work for DC or Marvel on properties they controlled. An "employer" — and I'm not using that word in a legal sense — wields considerable power because they're the ones who write checks and freelancers need to receive checks. That power was particularly potent in comics before 1970 because most of the Talent Pool consisted of men who'd grown up, often in poor families, during the Great Depression. Some of them were uncommonly terrified of unemployment and willing to tolerate bad deals and even a certain amount of personal abuse to not be outta work.

And they felt they had to work the way their editors wanted them to. A lot of artists who didn't want to be inkers were turned into inkers. A lot of pencilers saw their work consistently inked by inkers they felt ruined the pages. A lot of them didn't like the books to which they were assigned or the scripts they had to work on. But at times, the alternative was not having steady work and therefore not receiving steady checks.

I don't think writers and artists today are as timid about such matters. They also have a lot more comic book companies that might hire them and it's easier to move into other fields like videogames or animation.

No matter how valuable your services might be to your employer, that only translates into clout if they're afraid to lose you…and that means you need a viable alternative — somewhere else you could go and get equal or better pay and security. Too often, even the best writers and artists in comics didn't believe they had alternatives.

Kirby certainly didn't. In 1968, just to pick a year at random, he didn't see any other place he could work but Marvel. The other publishers of comic books then either didn't want him or paid much, much less…and he had a family to support. Jack actually didn't want to ink his own work and he didn't really care that much who did. He thought almost all his inkers were fine and that the product was not being harmed by an inker who you or I might have thought was not the best choice.

He did care about artistic integrity…as much as anyone and more than most. He just didn't think inking mattered that much and he also recognized that whoever was inking his work had a family to support, groceries to purchase, etc. About halfway through the Fourth World books, his view on this changed and for only the second time in his career — as far as I know — he asked to have an inker replaced. In this case, it was for one he wanted…and one who was more loyal to Jack than he was to DC Comics.

Steve Ditko actually did get the inker he wanted: Himself. For a long time, Stan tried to get Ditko to pencil-only…and he did do a few stories that way. It would have been better for Stan and Marvel, Stan thought, if instead of penciling and inking Spider-Man and Dr. Strange — a book and a half a month — Ditko had penciled (only) three books a month, thereby lending his plotting skills to more books. But Ditko refused.

As a reader, I'm kinda happy he did. I don't think anyone came close to inking Steve Ditko work as well as Steve Ditko. I feel that way about a lot of artists of the past. I wish more of them had been able to ink their own work without taking a financial hit. And I think there was and is a value to having writers and artists be happy in their assignments.

I hope it's okay to tell this story now. Around the turn of the century, I did a comic for DC called Fanboy, which was one of my favorite projects ever. It was six issues with Sergio Aragonés as the main artist and we had guest artists who included Neal Adams, Brent Anderson, Jordi Bernet, Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Joe Giella, Mike Grell, Russ Heath, Phil Jiminez, Bob Kane (posthumously), Gil Kane, Joe Kubert, Kevin Maguire, Frank Miller, Jim Mooney, Kevin Nowlan, Jerry Ordway, Wendy Pini, Steve Rude, Marie Severin, Bill Sienkiewicz, Tom Simmons, Dan Spiegle, Dick Sprang, Bruce Timm and Bernie Wrightson.

With a lineup like that, you'd think the comic should have sold like crazy. Yeah, you'd think that.

But the response from the marketplace — and I hope this doesn't sound bitter because I honestly don't get bitter about things like this — was close to non-existent. Nobody bought it. Nobody even knew it existed. To this day, people at conventions come up to me with copies to get signed and they say, "I was reading comics when this came out. How come I didn't know about it?"

One day back then, I was up at the DC offices and one of the fellows in the marketing division stopped me in the hall and asked me if I was working on something for the company. I told him about Fanboy and mentioned the names of some of the "hotter" artists I'd been able to lasso for the project. He said, "That sounds great. When is it coming out?"

And I had to tell him that #5 of six had just been published. Talk about a tree falling in the forest and not making a noise.

But I enjoyed doing it because I enjoyed working with all these people and connecting with my passions as a reader of comics all my life. Jim Mooney was one of the artists in the very first super-hero comic I ever read when I was about eight — Action Comics #250.

We did an issue that had a long sequence involving Green Lantern and, of course, I wanted to have it drawn by the team that had drawn my favorite Green Lantern stories when I was young — Gil Kane inked by Murphy Anderson. I chanced to talk to Murphy first and told him what I had in mind. He said yes so I then called up Gil…

…and Gil said yes. That is, until I told him I was going to have Murphy Anderson do the inking. Then Gil said no.

Gil had never liked what Murphy did to his pencils. He was fond of Murphy personally and he thought Murphy was an excellent artist. In fact, he thought Murphy was one of those artists who should have always done both jobs. Gil just "saw" his own work differently. Gil Kane artwork inked by Murphy might have been pleasing to you or to me but it did not come out looking the way Gil thought his work should look. There were things he put in that were not there in the printed pages.

He said, approximately, "Back in the day, I didn't have any choice. Now that I have a choice, I want to choose." I asked him who he'd choose. He said he wanted to ink the cover himself and he wanted the interior pages he drew to be inked by Kevin Nowlan. I said, "If he'll do it, we'll have him do it." As I was saying that, I was cringing at the thought of the call I'd have to make to Murphy. This was a creative decision. If I had to pick between Kane and Anderson, I was going to go with Kane.

And then Gil said something that struck a chord with me and again, these words are roughly what he said…

He said, "I lived through the era when editors and publishers didn't care how unhappy I was on any assignment. If I said something, it was like, 'Gil, just draw the pages and shut up. Don't care so much about the work.' I wasn't supposed to utter a peep about bad lettering or bad inking or bad coloring or bad printing or if they had the worst artist in the Production Department retouching what I'd done. And the thing that got to me was that they didn't think that attitude — 'Just draw the pages and shut up' — would affect the quality of my work…

"But how could it not?"

Over the years, I was always fascinated with how all the talented writers and artists who made comic books were deployed…and why I might love what they did on one comic and then on another, maybe not so much. I learned that there's such a thing as miscasting artists. I also learned that an editor needs to create an environment that will allow others to do their best work. This is done in large part by treating others with respect and understanding. Gil probably did better work on those Fanboy pages once he knew they'd be finished by Kevin Nowlan — who happily agreed to participate.

And yes, I called Murphy. To my surprise and relief, when I told him what was going on, he said, "I don't blame him one bit. I didn't like inking his work back then. I never thought our styles were compatible. I never liked inking Carmine Infantino's pencils either and I knew he didn't care for what I did on them."

I got Murphy to instead agree to pencil and ink a Wonder Woman sequence I had planned for a later issue of Fanboy. As things turned out, he was unable to do it…and apologized way more than was necessary when he told me. Murphy Anderson personified the word "gentleman." He was one of the nicest, politest men I met in comics…and a great artist when he was allowed to be as good as he could be. Even when he felt misused, he was pretty good but that's no reason to misuse a guy like that.

Most of the editors in comics back then would not have wanted to sacrifice the power they wielded to put any inker with any penciler if it worked for their schedules. Like you, I would have liked for them to not have that power…or to care more about the freelancers being happy with how they were assigned. As I said in the earlier piece, I do think better comics would have resulted.

This is Albert Brooks guesting on The Tonight Show on 2/24/1983. I linked to a shorter version of this about ten years ago but this is the complete segment which includes more jokes, including one for which Standards and Practices futzed up a few words they didn't want heard.

The great thing about this clip is to watch Johnny Carson's reactions…and to remember that Mr. Brooks had probably not tested this routine before. He was always fearless, going onto national TV shows with material he'd never tried-out in front of an audience. There was one night on The Tonight Show when Rob Reiner was guest-hosting and Brooks came on with a bit that absolutely died. But that was rare for him and this time, things couldn't have gone much better…

I'm going to stop answering questions from folks who don't sign something that at least resembles a real name — but "Bobo" writes to ask…

I live in Kentucky and the only dream I have in life is to do cartoon voices. I don't want to do anything else but voices for cartoons. In the past, you said on your blog that to do that, you had to live in Los Angeles but since COVID, a lot of the business has converted to people recording in their home studios and working on ZOOM. I have a great studio here in my basement in Kentucky. Can I now have a real career in cartoon voice work from here? I know there are a number of very successful voice actors now who live in other cities and work on shows that were formerly recorded with local talent in L.A.

First off, "Bobo," I don't think there's anyone who makes a decent living doing cartoon voices. The folks you think do are folks who do cartoon voices and narration and dubbing and looping and audiobooks and commercials and announcing and a dozen other jobs where one's voice is heard. Mel Blanc…Daws Butler…Paul Frees…June Foray…none of those folks were ever only cartoon voice actors. Some of them, at times, didn't even make most of their income that way.

Also: There are probably a couple I don't know about but every currently-working-a-lot cartoon voice actor I know who doesn't live in or around Los Angeles did when they got established in the field. Then they moved back to Wherever and worked remotely.

To your real question: Yes, it is much easier now than it used to be for voice actors to "phone it in" but you are putting yourself at a disadvantage. It's not as big a disadvantage as it used to be but it's still a disadvantage. With time, it will probably become less of one but I can't say for sure how much. There will still be shows that want you present in their studio on their microphones. There will still be video game producers that want you to come in and put on motion-capture devices so they can record your lip and body movements.

That said, I need to add this: I have never and will never encourage anyone to uproot their life and move to Los Angeles (or anywhere) to pursue any career in any corner of show business. The vast majority of those stories end in failure…and I don't mean 60% or 70%. It's more like 90% and up. I also don't encourage anyone to invest in the time and expense of building a great home recording studio. It may pay off and it may not. It's like a lot of things in life: Only you can decide whether or not to take the gamble. Because it's always a gamble.

A little more about The Groundlings…

Something else you should know about this fine organization: It isn't just sketch comedians who come out of it. There are actors of all kinds (including the cartoon voice kind) and also writers and directors like my friends Cheri and Bill Steinkellner. And like any acting troupe/school, not everyone who goes in comes out a success.

There was a period when a lot of folks who wanted to be movie stars thought that the stepping stone to that coveted profession was getting on Saturday Night Live…and the stepping stone to that coveted profession was joining The Groundlings. So the group had a lot of applications from students who had limited interest in improv comedy were signing up for classes…there and at other improv troupes around the country.

If you think that way, you probably miss the point and value of learning improvisation. It can be very valuable, not just for learning to act but for learning how to listen to and relate to other human beings. If that holds any interest for you…

My father, as anyone who reads my blog is well aware, worked for the Internal Revenue Service and hated his job. Hated it, hated it, hated it. The only good thing about it, he said, was that it gave him a stable, dependable paycheck. It was not a large one but it was large enough to pay the mortgage on the house, buy us insurance, groceries, clothes and other necessities of life and allow him to take occasional vacations and every once in a great while, splurge for a modest luxury.

We didn't want for anything but that was largely because we didn't want anything that expensive. And he used to play the stock market, ostensibly to try and up his income but for him, I think it was more like a sport.

We had a family friend who took an imaginary ten thousand dollars and made imaginary investments in about twenty stocks. He would dutifully track how they went up or down…but there was no actual money gambled or won. He seemed very pleased when he could report that his "investment portfolio" had made a thousand imaginary dollars in one year. My father was skeptical of these claims because his friend never tried it with actual money…only the pretend kind.

I thought my father's investments, even though they did involve real money, weren't all that different from his friend's. It was a sport more than an actual attempt to up his income. The amounts weren't huge. Sometimes, he was up a hundred and he was happy. Sometimes, he was down a hundred and he wasn't that unhappy. After all, it was just a hundred and he still had those dependable I.R.S. paychecks followed later by a pretty nice pension.

If I read the paperwork I have of his correctly, he basically broke even over his lifetime. At no point did I see any evidence that anything changed in our lives because of his investments. There were dividend checks once or twice a year but they were all for ten or fifteen dollars..or less.

But he sure enjoyed watching the stock market. His broker worked in a big office in Westwood Village and my father liked to go there on those rare mornings when he had a day off from his job. They'd treat him like an important investor, greeting him by name. Someone would offer him a free cup of coffee and a sweet roll. Someone would give him bits of "insider" financial news. His broker would make time to tell him how well his stocks were doing, how he'd been so wise with his selections.

The broker used the word "solid" a lot. The stocks my father had chosen (with this broker's advice) were solid. The companies were solid. The companies' plans for growth were solid. My father liked hearing that and he also liked sitting in what they called "the gallery" there. It was a cluster of about twelve chairs that faced the east wall of the office. That wall was covered, floor to ceiling, with little stock ticker widgets that would display the names of stocks and their current selling price. You could watch hundreds of transactions on it with both the stocks and the amounts changing every few seconds.

He liked to sit there with his coffee and his sweet roll and watch for the latest numbers on his stocks. He might be there for a half-hour before he spotted one on that big wall for a brief moment but it excited him when he did. And he was positively ecstatic if that stock had gone up two cents a share.

The morning of Thursday, July 26, 1962 — or maybe a day later — he took me with him to the brokers' office. I know that date because after he parked the car, we stopped in at a drug store that was then on the corner of Westwood Boulevard and Weyburn so I could buy some comic books. I am absolutely positive that my purchases that morning included Action Comics #292 and Adventure Comics #300 and those comics went on sale on 7/26/62. It is inconceivable that I would not have acquired them with 24 hours of them going on sale. Adventure #300 was the first issue to contain an ongoing strip about The Legion of Super-Heroes.

On that day, I was just shy of ten years and five months of age. I cannot remember one blessed thing I learned in school at the age of ten but I can remember where I bought certain comic books back then. The mind retains essential information.

I got my comics, then we walked down about five doors to the brokerage. My father was greeted by name. Someone offered him coffee and two sweet rolls, one for me. Someone came by to give him bits of "insider" financial news. His broker came over to tell him his stocks were solid and to flatter him for having such a fine-looking son.

The man went on for about five minutes on both topics: Your stocks are solid. My, you have a fine-looking son. Your stocks are solid. My, you have a fine-looking son. Your stocks are solid. My, you have a fine-looking son…and oh, did I mention that your stocks are solid?

Before long, my father and I were sitting in the gallery area. His eyes were on the big board where any minute, he might learn that he was a whopping six cents wealthier. I was reading my comic books and chewing on my sweet roll when suddenly, there was a loud tire screech outside, followed by the sound of metal hitting metal, followed by the sound of glass shattering…

…followed by a bright red 1960 Buick LeSabre crashing through the front floor-to-ceiling window of the brokerage office.

Instantly, there was no front floor-to-ceiling window of the brokerage office. There were pieces of glass everywhere and a lot of panic and the Buick destroyed a couple of desks before it came to a halt.

It came nowhere near us but we still reacted as if it might. My father threw his arms over me and we kind of tumbled off our chairs onto the floor. I remember thinking that if the car did get as far as us, we were no safer on the floor than we would have been on those chairs. But it was a nice bit of heroism, nonetheless. I also remember a lot of panic and everyone in the brokers' office asking everyone else, "Are you okay? Are you okay?" Everyone seemed to be okay…shaken-up but okay.

The LeSabre just sat there, about two-thirds of the way into the office with its rear third on the sidewalk outside and pedestrians looking amazed as they cautiously detoured around it. The driver of the Buick did not get out and no one approached the car until two police cars arrived, sirens blaring. Seconds later, a third siren announced the arrival of an ambulance which someone said was from U.C.L.A. Medical Center, about two whole blocks away.

The police hauled the driver, apparently unhurt, out of the Buick. They put handcuffs on him and stuffed him in the back seat of one of their black-and-white units. Officials of the brokers' office talked with two of the officers for about ten minutes — or as long as it took the other two to walk around the office asking everyone if they were okay. Everyone still seemed to be okay. The ambulance was sent away as unnecessary.

One of the brokers who spoke to the officers was my father's broker. As the police departed, the broker came over to us to ask if we were okay and he told my father, "Former client. Very unhappy his investments didn't go well. They weren't solid like yours"…

…whereupon he launched into a replay, darn near verbatim, of what he'd said fifteen minutes earlier: Your stocks are solid. My, you have a fine-looking son. Your stocks are solid. My, you have a fine-looking son. Your stocks are solid. My, you have a fine-looking son…and oh, did I mention that your stocks are solid?

He concluded his summation by saying, of the angry former customer, "His stocks weren't solid like yours."

My father said, "Apparently, they were solid enough that he was able to afford a Buick LeSabre."

The broker laughed. In fact, he laughed at everything my father said and again told him his stocks were solid and he had a fine-looking son. Then he left us and my father turned to me and said, "What you just heard from that man…that's called 'Stroking the client.' Never confuse it with people actually talking to you."

It was some of the best advice my father ever gave me. What a lot of people say to you in this world is no more or no less than what they believe you want to hear. I remember this every time I see the cover of Action Comics #292 or Adventure Comics #300…and hopefully also when I don't.

March 28, 1985. Johnny Carson has on five members of the L.A.-based improv troupe, The Groundlings. I believe someone — I dunno who — told me this was an experiment. Mr. Carson and/or his staff were thinking it might attract some of the Saturday Night Live audience to his program if he had on a group like this on a regular basis. I guess he ultimately decided against it.

The Groundlings started in 1974 as sort of a local answer to the Second City group in Chicago. It soon evolved into a local fixture with shows and classes…and you can still attend either or both in their theater over on Melrose Avenue. The list of performers who passed through that group and went onto some amount of stardom includes Laraine Newman, Will Ferrell, Ana Gasteyer, Kathy Griffin, Lisa Kudrow, Julia Sweeney, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Pat Morita, Cheri Oteri, Chris Kattan, Edie McClurg, Chris Parnell, Tress MacNeille, Paul Reubens, Cassandra Peterson, Kristen Wiig and on and on and on.

This video features five then-current members: Jon Lovitz (doing the bit and character that would soon land him on SNL), Tim Stack, Mindy Sterling, Don Woodward and Kate Benton. I saw (and sometimes worked with) an awful lot of talented performers in that theater over the years. I would hate to have been the person who had to decide which five of the then-current troupe got to appear on The Tonight Show…