Monthly Archives: November 2005

Fred Kaplan reports on the new Bush plan for victory in Iraq and says it's a couple years late and way too ambiguous to make much difference.

My longtime friend Scott Shaw! has been performing his acclaimed Oddball Comics slide show at comic conventions for many a decade. He also posts covers and commentary over on his page over at Comic Book Resources.

What's an "Oddball Comic?" It's a comic book that causes you to scratch your dandruff and wonder what, if anything, was on the minds of the folks who conceived and created it. I've posted two examples above and Scott has thousands more in his collection. Over the years, he's performed his slide show to packed halls of folks who laugh themselves sick at what he shows and what he has to say about them. It's too good a show to only be seen at comic conventions so in January and February of '06, he'll be doing it at the Acme Theater in Hollywood…but you don't have to wait 'til then.

This Sunday, December 4, Scott's doing a preview/test performance at 2 PM at Lake Balboa Studios, which is located at 7412 Balboa Blvd. in Lake Balboa, California. The theater, they tell me, is located north of Sherman Way on the east side of Balboa. By the way: Scott cautions that portions of his presentation — though certainly not obscene — may be inappropriate for young kids. And he adds, "Don't worry if you can't make it; you'll have plenty of opportunities, starting in January. But this advance 'taste' is for free!"

I can't make it on Sunday but I'll be there for the Acme run…and probably more than once. It's a great show and not just for those of us who've read way too many comic books.

Fred Kaplan, whose Iraq articles and predictions have been pretty much on-the-money, says that Bush is about to announce the kind of withdrawals that his administration denounces as surrender when proposed by Democrats.

Yes, it's time for a great new game which we just invented. It's called There's No Such Website! and your mission, should you choose to accept, is to spot the fib. Below are links and descriptions for five websites. Four of them actually exist on the Internet. One is a phony that we made up. Study all five and see if you can guess which link won't lead you to the website in question. There is no prize for this except that you get to visit four weird websites and to feel smug if it doesn't take you five clicks to find the phony. Enjoy.

• Project: Denny's – A group of enterprising folks attempt to visit every Denny's Restaurant in the world and to collect souvenirs from each. To be followed probably by Project: Forest Lawn.
• Hats of Meat – An entire website devoted to the fashion of wearing steaks, chops and other cuts of beef on your head. For those who like a little cholesterol in their headgear.
• McDonald's Employee Simulator – Now, from the comfort of your own computer chair, you can experience what it would be like to work for McDonald's making burgers. And just think: You'll be making approximately the same salary.
• The Helium Tabernacle Choir – A choral group of twenty professional singers performs great hymns ranging from "Amazing Grace" to "Shall We Gather at the River?", all after inhaling large quantities of helium. The soprano hits notes only a dog can hear. [Requires RealPlayer]
• Cats in Sinks – A collection of thousands of photos people have taken of their pussycats sitting in their sinks. Very useful.

Here's an article on some of what we'll be seeing in the way of TV Christmas specials the next month. And there are a few paragraphs about A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Go read Leonard Maltin on the business of putting out (and putting together) DVDs.

Seymour Hersh on what's happening with Iraq and what's going to happen. I think there's something in there to worry everyone.

In the eighties and early nineties, the comic book business went through major upheavals with new companies and new distributors coming and going like lawyers for Saddam Hussein. Some very large operations went from zero to sixty and back again so rapidly that once, when I attended a distributor's national sales meeting, three publishers who'd been expected to exhibit had gone under between the time they bought display space and the date of the event…and less than a year later, that distributor had gone under. When the smoke and acquisitions and bankruptcies cleared, a lot of publishers were history and one outfit — Diamond — controlled distribution. There are other means of getting your product into comic book shops but no known success stories that prove that. If I were publishing and Diamond wouldn't carry my wares, I'd stop publishing and go do something more promising than distributing to comic shops without Diamond. Like opening a CompUSA in Amish country.

One of the unexpected survivors of all that publishing turmoil was a small line called Claypool Comics, which may be the best-kept secret in the industry. Since 1993, they've quietly been releasing 2-3 black-and-white comics per month for a small but loyal following. At a time when few new comics make it past a dozen issues, the bi-monthly Soulsearchers and Deadbeats are each approaching #76 while the monthly Elvira is nearing #153. This track record has not always been appreciated by comic book shops. Ask dealers what they want out of the publishers and the first thing you'll usually hear is "A consistent product that comes out on time every month." Great…but they will often cut back on orders for books that meet that standard so they can order more of the "hot" one-shots and heavily-promoted limited runs.

Recently, Diamond decided to lop off some of the weaker-selling books from their roster. These are probably titles that do make a small profit and for all we know, may be a reason some customers come into comic shops at all. But right now, Deadbeats and Soulsearchers aren't making the cut, meaning that unless they suddenly show a jump in sales, Diamond will decide they aren't worth distributing. That would be a shame. In those books, my pals Richard Howell and Peter David are crafting consistent, well-written tales without gimmicks or "special events." Deadbeats describes itself as a "punk vampire soap opera" and Soulsearchers is a solid super-hero spoof with supernatural themes. If you haven't tried either, it may be now or never. And if you have tried them and drifted away, now would be a good time to jump back on the bandwagon.

Diamond, of course, is well within its rights to not distribute anything it considers not worth its time. I wonder though if certain long-running projects shouldn't be grandfathered in because they do have steady followings. That's something a lot of current top-selling titles haven't been able to manage. I spoke to a friend of mine the other night who's drawing a new book for DC and the hope is that it'll do well enough to stick around for two or three years. Beyond that, no one dares dream. While the marketplace does need the top-selling books, it also needs the long-selling books…the ones that do not postulate a complete turnover of readership every year or two. I sure hope Claypool keeps all three of its titles afloat, if only to remind others that it can be done.

Here, too late to be of any use to you on Thanksgiving, are lessons in how to carve a turkey.

I should have mentioned it some time ago but my pal Steve Thompson has set up a weblog of goodies from his "pop culture" library. Everything there is of interest but he just put up this item, which is an ad for the short-lived Lorenzo and Henrietta Music Show from 1976. This was a folksy talk show with Lorenzo, his wife and some friends and it went on the air and off in record time. (Steve has the chronology slightly wrong, by the way. Lorenzo started voicing Carlton the Doorman on the Rhoda show in 1974.)

Lorenzo didn't talk about it much when I knew him. It represented a very bad episode in his life due to some personal tragedies that occurred around that time. They made it very difficult for him to do the show…and the fact that he knew he wasn't at his best on-air made him even more depressed. One time when someone asked him why the show had been cancelled so quickly, he replied, "Bad ratings, plus I was in no shape to do it."

Anyway, browse around Steve's site. Plenty of fun stuff there to look at.

Here's a link to this weekend's Frank Rich column. You may be shocked to see that it's about how the Bush-Cheney defense of the Iraq war is collapsing. Who'd have imagined Frank Rich would write of such a thing?

I was disappointed in Ed McMahon's new book on Johnny Carson. I hadn't expected anything but a love letter to his former employer but I had expected more behind-the-scenes and off-camera info than we get in Here's Johnny! An awful lot of it is "Ed" (or whoever actually wrote it) recounting funny things Johnny said and did on the air. That's nice but anyone could have written those chapters without working side-by-side with J. Carson for three or four decades. The press release says, "Now, with Johnny's blessing before he died, McMahon can finally share all the stories that only he knows." Actually, you know a lot of them if you read Ed's two previous books, Here's Ed and For Laughing Out Loud: My Life and Good Times. I'll give you an Amazon link in case you are, like me, a Carson completist. But did we really need Ed to tell us what happened on The Tonight Show when Ed Ames tried to demonstrate tomahawk-throwing? Bill Zehme is working on an exhaustive bio of Johnny and I'll bet it tells us more about his relationship with Ed than Ed did.

On the other hand, I did enjoy Alan Alda's autobiography, which is called — for reasons you don't necessarily want to know — Never Have Your Dog Stuffed. Alda grew up in an amazing family. His father was a burlesque straight man who later became a leading actor on Broadway and in films. Young Alan spent much of his early life watching strippers from the wings and later, hanging out as his dad played Sky Masterson in the original Guys and Dolls. In the meantime, his mother was going steadily out of her mind. It's amazing that the lad born Alphonso D'Abruzzo grew up into most folks' idea of a sane, well-adjusted human being.

There isn't as much about M*A*S*H as I'd expected or might have wanted. Then again, I'm glad Alda did not skip over all the non-M*A*S*H portions of his life. Unlike Ed's, this book actually feels like it was written by the guy it says wrote it, and you learn an awful lot you didn't know about someone you already felt like you knew. Here's an Amazon link and a much higher recommendation. And you can read an excerpt and listen to some interviews with Mr. Alda here.