Monthly Archives: February 2024

Another demonstration of sleight-o'-hand wizardry from Daniel Roy. I hate to think how long it took Mr. Roy to get this good at this…

Sorry I've been too busy today to post anything…and that I'm too busy this evening to post much more than this and maybe a video link if I have one formatted. Hope it was a much better day for you than it was for Donald Trump. Actually, the $350 million in fines he was ordered to pay was less than a lot of legal forecasters were forecasting so maybe he got off lightly.

I am kinda hooked on the (relatively) new game show called The Floor. It's not the kind of show you can fully appreciate if you tune in on Week 5. You need to watch from Show 1 and follow along in sequence. If your source of television will allow you to do this, give it a try. It's an interesting mix of trivia and strategy.

And that's all I have time to write tonight. I'll make it up to you but maybe not right away.

Richard Kiley sings the big hit song from the musical, Man of La Mancha on The Ed Sullivan Show for February 20, 1966. The show opened off-Broadway on November 22, 1965 to, legend has it, great reviews but not the greatest business. After this appearance on Ed's show, the box office picked way up allowing the show to move to Broadway the following May. It ran there for a staggering 2,328 performances…

What I wrote here yesterday about how you shouldn't infer anything if I don't write an obit about someone who has passed prompted a couple of messages like this one from Jeff Wasserman…

You had mentioned that you'd get around to commenting on Steve Ditko when he passed but I don't recall you doing so. You and I were kids no doubt highly influenced by Steve's forceful story telling and would always have much to say about him.

Yes, I said I'd write about Mr. Ditko here. No, I never did. A few of you figured out that that was because I'd been asked (and agreed) to sit for a deposition on behalf of the Ditko family in their legal action — since settled — against Disney/Marvel.

What I would have written (and may yet some day) would have included my opinion that Steve Ditko was one of the ten-or-so great creative talents in the kind of comics he did. His work was usually quite brilliant and quite popular and I doubt I'll hear from anyone who wants to argue the point.

I have somewhat less respect for Ditko the Philosopher and many of his stated principles. And I really don't understand how someone takes a vow of silence about his career, refuses all interviews, finally writes a little many years later, then expresses shock and outrage that the history of his collaborations with Stan Lee has been written Stan's way. Gee, I wonder how that happened.

I corresponded with Ditko for a few years…until he didn't like something I wrote. In 1970, my then-partner Steve Sherman and I spent a day and a half with him hearing his versions of Marvel History and I cannot stop wishing he'd let us record and publish — or let anyone ever record and publish what he told us then when his memories were fresh. It would have helped constituents like Jack Kirby, Wally Wood, Don Heck and others who never got their due.

People have a right to not stand up for themselves but I don't respect not standing up for others. One of the places I learned that was from the first Spider-Man story…the one drawn by Steve Ditko.

I'm kinda busy with something I'll tell you about in a few days. I will soon be posting at my normal rate again.

Reportedly, the judge in the civil fraud trial of the Trump family is going to announce a decision this Friday — how much money Donald and Sons will have to shell out. Pundits are estimating it'll be over half a billion dollars — that's Billion with a "B" — so the tirades oughta get even less rational. I'd feel sorry for the guy if I thought that (a) the amount was unwarranted and (b) Trump has at some time in his life, even when he was under ten, ever felt sorry for anyone but himself.

I need to remind readers of this blog that when someone in the field of comic books or strips dies and I don't write an obituary about them, that doesn't mean I hated them or thought their work was insignificant or anything of the sort. It might mean that I never met them and/or don't have anything to say about them that others aren't saying with more knowledge or eloquence.

Thank you.

Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone explains why the Highest Court in the land (not counting Judge Judy's) is unlikely to rule that Donald Trump has immunity from anything more serious than being voted off Survivor — and maybe not even that…

I really enjoyed Jon Stewart's return to The Daily Show and was unbothered by his main thesis, which was that Joe Biden is too old to hold The Most Important Job In The World for four more years. I don't disagree.

But I just think Biden would be a too-old president doing his best for America whereas Donald Trump would be a too-old, too-psychotic president doing his best for Donald Trump and no one else. Between the two men, it's an easy choice but wouldn't almost all of us rather have two other real options?

It's not impossible, I tell myself, that one or both of those men won't be on our November ballots…but don't ask me who'd tag in for either or how the substitution(s) could come about.

The lovely Laraine Newman is Hanging With Doctor Z, who sounds suspiciously like Dana Gould. Thanks to longtime pal Marc Wielage for recommending the link on which you are about to click…

From The Ed Sullivan Show for March 1, 1970, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme sing a Beatles song the way a Beatles song oughta be sung…

Going to be a very busy day where I am. Please forgive the paucity of posting.

From Stephen Colbert's special post-Super Bowl episode this evening…

Here are seven clips of John Mullaney stand-up. They're all pretty good but the first one — the one in the diner — really made me laugh…

My longtime pal Jeff Wasserman writes…

Reference was made in that Bill Scott documentary that he wrote comic books after being blacklisted in the 1950s. Did he work on Dell Comics edited by Craig Chase out of the Western Publishing office in LA?

Yes, though Bill had only vague memories of what he worked on and who he worked for. He recalled what he did was for "Bugs Bunny and other Warner characters" and that he worked for Chase but also for other editors there. He could not recall any specific stories or dates.

I suspect there were very few artists or storymen who worked in the animation field in Hollywood in the forties or fifties who didn't at least attempt to get work from Western, if not on the Dell Comics they were producing then on their activity books, kids' books, coloring books, etc. It was a great way to moonlight for some extra bucks or even make a living when your studio laid you off and you couldn't immediately land work elsewhere. Some folks, like Carl Barks or Phil DeLara, came to prefer working for Western over working for Disney, Warner Brothers or wherever they'd been making cartoons.

(Just had a thought: I should probably link you to this piece I wrote for anyone unfamiliar with the unique relationship between Western Publishing and Dell Publishing.)

Western Publishing was a huge operation, a fact which many folks at other comic book companies tried to not believe. There was a longtime gent at DC Comics who steadfastly refused to admit any company ever sold better than the firm from which he got his paycheck.

But Western did. In a few weeks, I'll be resuming my series of articles about the company. Right now though, I think I‘ll tell a story that will make certain of you weep…

Western transitioned over the years from a very large company to a small one before becoming a just-about-nonexistent one.  One constant though at their L.A. office was a lovely, grandmotherly lady named Zetta Devoe. I'm not sure when she started with the company or what her official job title was but when I worked for them in the early seventies, she'd been there a lonnng time and was responsible for all sorts of paperwork and scheduling.

Among her many duties was maintaining records on every story, every cover, every feature page that was prepared for the comic books produced out of that office. She had them in a series of loose leaf binders on a shelf over her desk. A few times, she let me page through them.

Each page listed the elements that went into one issue. It showed who'd written each item, who'd penciled it, who'd inked it and who'd lettered it and how much everyone had been paid and when. The earlier volumes showed who'd done the coloring but at some point in the sixties — I was never able to pinpoint exactly when — the Los Angeles office stopped handling the coloring of their comics and it was all supervised by the New York office.

Comic book historians reading this are probably wondering what became of those notebooks. Well, here's what became of them and you're not going to like it…

After Western closed that office, Zetta called me one day to say hello and to ask me a question that is of no relevance to this story. She told me she was enjoying her retirement but missed all the people she'd worked with. I finally got around to asking her about the notebooks and here, approximately, is what she told me…

"Oh, they sold or threw out everything in that office or shipped it back to some warehouse the company had back east. Everything except those notebooks. Nobody seemed to care about them so I called The Disney Archives department over on the studio lot. They didn't want them so I called the division of Warner Brothers we dealt with on the Bugs Bunny comics and they said, ‘Why in the world would we want that?' I think I called a few other licensors and they weren't interested…

"…so I threw the notebooks out a couple weeks ago."

I think she heard me gasp because she then said, "Maybe I should have called to see if you wanted them."

See? Told you you wouldn't like the way this story ended.

I have nothing to add except this observation: Looking through those books the few times I did, I saw a lot of familiar names…even my own. But I also saw an awful of names I did not recognize.

Those of us who try to identify uncredited writers and artists from back when most comics did not have credits tend to work under the following assumption: That the work under scrutiny was done by someone whose name we know from credited comics or other sources. That is often so.

But I think that over the years, Western bought scripts or art (probably mostly scripts) from folks who were never known to work for Western…or in some cases, for any comic books published anywhere. We cannot put a name to certain pieces of work because the correct name exists nowhere in the Grand Comics Database or other repositories of comic book history.

And it probably never will. I can't imagine how we could ever find out for sure which comics Bill Scott wrote.

Okay, okay…I probably have seen scenes from other football games. Harold Lloyd's The Freshman.. The movie of M*A*S*H. One Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon.

Then there was the Three Stooges short, Three Little Pigskins with Lucille Ball. Moe used to tell this story about a scene and I cribbed the following off of Wikipedia…

[Director Raymond] McCarey assured the Stooges that it was safe, saying "Listen, fellows, you know how to take falls. You've done enough of them. It'll take hours to find doubles for you. Besides, we can't afford them. Don't worry, you won't get hurt." Moe Howard dryly agreed with McCarey, saying, "You're darn right we won't get hurt. We're not doing the scene."

Less than an hour after the exchange, the studio found three stunt doubles made up to look like the Stooges. McCarey yelled "Action" and chaos ensued. Two of the doubles were seriously injured with broken limbs, as were both photographers. The only stuntman not hurt was the one doubling for Curly Howard because of the padding that he wore to resemble the rotund Stooge. Moe Howard later said in his autobiography that "McCarey was speechless and sat in his director's chair with his head in his hands."

There are probably a few other movies I've seen with football scenes…so let's just say I have zero interest in the game except when it's fictional and funny.

Here's the Stooges short we're talking about. The football scenes were filmed at Gilmore Stadium which was torn down in 1951 to build CBS Television City which is now being torn down to build a huge multi-use studio/mall complex…

Some moments from Rocky and His Friends, which was the name of the show that first introduced Rocky and Bullwinkle. The cartoons on this show and other Jay Ward productions were later repackaged under other show names…