Monthly Archives: July 2016

When Michael Jackson recorded "Thriller," you just know he had this in mind: The song being performed by the U.S. Navy Band, complete with sailors staggering around the stage pretending to be zombies. Just perfect…

Josh Marshall thinks there's a good chance that Trump will try to get out of debating Hillary Clinton and that one of the excuses he'll use is to refuse if the debates don't include Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, both of whom will probably be excluded by existing rules. My guess is that Trump will begin insisting on that and all sorts of conditions, ostensibly out of fairness: He won't accept this moderator or that venue or those time restrictions or the composition of the audience, etc. The idea here is to show he's in command…and that Hillary is going to have to show up and participate in a format dictated by him, rather than the two of them entering an arena neither controls.

That seems to be a dominant trait in Trump: He never plays your game. You have to play his. In interviews, he answers the questions he wants to answer, not the ones you want to ask him. I'll bet when he engages in business negotiations, he won't go to your office. You have to come to his and sit on his furniture, surrounded by his photos and his loyal staffers and you eat and drink what he wants to serve you.

If he gets every rule change and concession he wants for the debates, he'll participate because he'll figure he's already won by getting those concessions. If he doesn't "win" that scuffle, whether he'll debate or not will depend a lot on the polls and public pressure. He can't afford to have "he's afraid of Hillary" become too popular a chant.

I'm not going to run a lot of messages that readers of this site send me about the election because…well, if I ran all of them or even a tenth, this blog would be about nothing else. But I've decided to reply here to this one from Christopher Green…

Like you, I was a Bernie supporter. Unlike you, I don't find Hillary an acceptable second choice, but I won't bother you with my reasons. I've tried to put a finger on why I'm so sullen about the situation, and the reality that I must choose between two candidates I don't like doesn't quite fully explain away my mood.

So, in terms you can appreciate, here's my best take at how I feel: The Comic-Con has decided to offer only one food item in and around the Comic-Con venue, and they are going to choose from three options: Jennie-O Turkey Pot Roast, Candy Corn, and Cole Slaw. They allow attendees to narrow it down to two choices: Candy Corn (unhealthy) and Cole Slaw (awful tasting). Not only is it upsetting that you highly dislike the final two choices, but you were so close to having a choice that was both healthy and delicious.

That's how I feel. I'll bet others do as well.

Yeah, but it was always going to come down to two choices. I'd be happier to have a wider menu in every election but it always winds up being two choices and in a democracy, they might not be the two out of the three you'd pick. The final choice of two is often someone you really don't like over someone you think was both "healthy and delicious." I wish some of the Bernie supporters would stop acting like they're the first people ever to feel that their candidate would have been a lot better than the person who won.

I don't know how old you are, Christopher, but I'm 64 so I've voted in a fair number of elections. I'm not sure I've ever had my pick of a candidate I thought was ideal; just a few who I thought were way, way better than the alternative. The folks I thought were way, way better have not always won, as has been known to happen in the United States of America.

I voted for Bernie and still admire the hell out of the guy…but I thought his agenda was a little light on realism about how some of his proposals were ever going to happen. Confronted with questions about that, he always seemed to resort to the notion that a "political revolution" was going to suddenly appear — one which would overcome Republican opposition and the fact that even some Democrats were uneasy about some of his goals. That "revolution" was not quite big enough to win him the Democratic nomination so I'm skeptical it would have materialized when necessary to get us Single Payer Healthcare.

There's a happy consolation prize in that Hillary has been shoved to the left and has taken up many items from Senator Sanders' wishlist. If she's elected, as I hope she will be, we might find that she can make more things happen from that list than he could have accomplished. Maybe that's unrealistic but I choose to be optimistic in that regard. At the very least, a Hillary victory will save us from having Trump dismantle regulation of Wall Street, bust the budget with tax cuts for guys like him, empower a lot of racists and immigrant-haters, and appoint Scott Baio to the Supreme Court for life.

Not that I would wish this on anyone but I think you need to listen to a few more Donald J. Trump speeches…and pay particular attention to the reaction he brings out in his crowds. That could make you a lot happier with…well, I started to write "Hillary Clinton in the White House" but of course, she's already been in the White House. I'm just going to do whatever I can to get her the right chair there and that's not just because I think Trump would be such a disaster. I think she'd be a good president. But to me, stopping Trump is reason enough to vote for her…or just about anyone.

Walt Hickey attempts to draw some conclusions about how people feel about taking risks from how they want their steaks cooked. From what I can tell, he doesn't quite make it.

It seems to me that he's missing a couple of reasons why people ask for their steaks to be cooked a certain way. One is past experience involving what you ask for versus what you get. I ideally would like my steak cooked medium. I find that asking for "medium rare" usually results in me getting what I consider medium…and if it doesn't, I can send that steak back and ask for another minute or two on the fire. If I ask for medium and it's cooked too long, I can't send it back to be uncooked and it's awkward (and takes forever) to get them to cook me a whole new steak to my standard.

So I'm not sure where I fall in that survey that shows that 38% want Medium Rare and 31% prefer Medium. I ask for the former but want the latter.

I also have two answers to a question Mr. Hickey poses…

Anyone have a solid hypothesis for why some people like their steaks scorched and desiccated (besides, you know, taste)? I'm out of ideas. Let me know in the comments.

I haven't looked in the comments yet but I'll bet someone in there offers both of my answers. A lot of people get in the habit of ordering steaks a certain way. Maybe their mother cooked them that way. Maybe they first ate steak with someone who made a big impression on them as a gourmet or generally classy person…and they now order them super-overdone because that's the way that person ordered theirs.

And I had two different lady friends who ordered "very well done" steaks because at heart they were against the eating of animals and they were uncomfy with steaks that looked even slightly like bloody flesh. One even told me she preferred hamburger to steak for that reason.

During the two political conventions, Bill Maher did four extra episodes of Real Time — on July 20, 21, 27 and 28. Like the usual episodes, they were done live but there was one problem with that: They kinda had to begin after the convention had ended each night and the conventions ran long every evening. So Maher didn't start when he was supposed to start.

Each of those four evenings, he appeared at his scheduled start time of 11 PM Eastern with a pre-taped announcement announcing the delay and this would lead into an "encore" (i.e., rerun) edition of Real Time. At some point during that hour, they'd bail on the rerun and start the new show. This is terrible scheduling for many reasons, one being that you're putting in filler as your lead-in. Presumably, most viewers turned back to the convention on some other channel, so Maher and his producers were counting on viewers turning back to HBO after the final gavel each night, then sitting through more of the filler until the new show started. A lot probably did not.

This probably also disrupted one or more shows following the new Real Time episode. Since a lot of the HBO schedule involves airing movies in full, it's not easy to suddenly cut twenty-three minutes from something on the fly. I don't know what they did but it was probably messy.

The other big problem of course is that those of us who set TiVos and DVRs to record Maher's show didn't get most or any of some of those new episodes. Even though I padded my TiVo recording times, I still missed a lot and wound up watching them all on YouTube. The two Republican Convention specials seem to have scrolled off but here are the two from the Democratic Convention…

• July 27 episode of Real Time.
• July 28 episode of Real Time.

Hurry because they'll probably disappear to subscriber-only status soon, too. I thought they were good discussions and I hope the messiness of getting to see them didn't cause the tune-in to be so low that this kind of thing won't be attempted again.

Are you worried that Donald Trump is reportedly about to receive Top Secret briefings on U.S. intelligence? Fred Kaplan says you have nothing to worry about. These briefings aren't that secret.

Everyone thinks of Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner and Howie Morris as appearing on Your Show of Shows in the fifties — and they did. But after that, they were on Caesar's Hour for a few years. Caesar's Hour was an hour, whereas Your Show of Shows was ninety minutes. It had fewer musical numbers and guest acts and instead of Imogene Coca as the female co-star, it had Nanette Fabray. Here's a sketch from the May 2, 1956 episode of Caesar's Hour…

The noted writer Marv Wolfman notably writes about this…

Mark, I'm not a lawyer nor do I play one in the comic books, but this doesn't sound truthful. Both CBS and Comedy Central are owned by Viacom. So are they saying if Colbert doesn't stop playing Colbert, Viacom will sue itself? Huh?

Well, different divisions of the same company do sometimes sue each other — or at least threaten to — and they often fight over which of them controls and/or is credited with the revenue derived from certain assets. You, Marv, have witnessed the comic book division of Time-Warner (DC Comics) fighting with the animation or movie divisions of that same conglomerate over who gets to make certain decisions about Superman, Batman and other properties and which division will receive what portion of the revenues from a given Superman or Batman TV or movie project. If you head up a division, it's in your interest to see that your division looks profitable on paper. You don't just think, "That doesn't matter. It all goes to the same corporation."

However, in this case, CBS and Viacom are (somewhat) two separate companies. They weren't but now they are because in 2006, Sumner Redstone — who owns like 80% of them together or apart — decided they should be apart. In the 20% of CBS that Redstone and his family don't own, there are stockholders who own none of Viacom and in the 20% of Viacom that the Redstones don't own, there are stockholders who own 0% of CBS. Ergo, they are run as two separate companies and it is vital to clarify which assets go with which company. Everyone expects at some point, Redstone will decide it's in his best interests to have them be one again but he could sell one or the other. (See this article for more on that.)

Also, I would imagine the cease/desist warning to Colbert was a matter of the corporation wanting to remind him that they own something in the way of intellectual property relating to The Colbert Report. Say he decided some day to make a movie as "that" character. They want him to be on notice they have a claim on it and would expect financial involvement at least and maybe some form of ownership. It gets murky because they are laying claim to his real name and likeness in that role (the way Paramount owns the likeness of Mr. Spock, which happens to involve Leonard Nimoy's face) and to an attitude Colbert could well invest in a new character not named Stephen Colbert. So it's kind of a bargaining position. It's easier to claim you own 100% of something and then to back that claim down to a lesser percentage than it is to do it from the other end.

People sometimes think this matter of the network asserting it owns intellectual property is piggish but I.P. does have a value, often a considerable one. NBC has made a lot of loot from movies like Wayne's World and The Coneheads because they retained rights to intellectual property created on their dime for Saturday Night Live. If I were Viacom, I wouldn't be so quick to give up all claims to The Colbert Report. At the very least, I'd think that if Stephen Colbert wanted to use that character again and say it's the exact same guy, we could get something valuable from him — a contractual concession, some guest appearances, something — in exchange.

I did a bunch of interviews yesterday talking about the late/great Jack Davis, including one for BBC Radio which also ran on NPR here. I'll post a link when I get one.

A point I made in one of them is worth expanding upon here. I always thought there was something neat about the origin of MAD in terms of its original art crew. As you may be aware, MAD started because Harvey Kurtzman was writing and editing — as well as occasionally doing some of the drawing — for two EC war/adventure comics, Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales. Kurtzman was a slow, meticulous worker who carefully researched the stories he wrote, insisting on a degree of historical accuracy that few in comics have ever matched or cared about.

He would also do rough layouts for every panel and he was known to spend days drawing these over and over until he was satisfied they were as good as they could be. That usually turned out to be about three days after when the artist expected the work. Among those who worked with Harvey, there was some disagreement as to whether this was an example of Harvey being a perfectionist or Harvey being one of those neurotic artists who is afraid to ever declare his work "done." Wally Wood, who worked over a lot of those layouts, thought the latter.

In any case, Kurtzman's snail-like pace hurt his income. He was working in a business that paid its talent by the page. More time spent on a page meant fewer pages produced and fewer pages produced meant less income for the creator. Harvey often complained to EC publisher William M. Gaines that this was not fair. Al Feldstein, who wrote and edited EC's horror, crime and science-fiction comics was making three or four times as much money by virtue of producing three or four times as much work.

Gaines reportedly suggested that Kurtzman come up with another comic he could do for the firm — something that wouldn't require a lot of research and that perhaps could be written quicker. There was some disagreement between the two men as to which of them suggested it be a humor comic but somehow, MAD emerged — first in conventional comic book format, then later as a slick magazine. Almost needless to say is that Kurtzman's income did not go up because he spent just as long on a MAD page as he did on Frontline Combat page.

What I always thought was wonderful was this: The art for Kurtzman's war comics was being done by Wally Wood, Will Elder, John Severin and Jack Davis. When it came time to do the funny comic, you'd think he'd have to go out and find different artists…but he didn't. The early issues of MAD were drawn primarily by Wally Wood, Will Elder, John Severin and Jack Davis — and if he had scoured the entire industry and considered everyone who could hold a pen or pencil, he couldn't have done any better.

When I interviewed Davis for my now-outta-print book Mad Art, I suggested to him that that moment was a turning point in his career as an artist. He not only agreed but said, "Well, of course!" It was the first time his "funny" style had been in print — and as good as his more serious illustration was, the humorous Davis style was what made him famous and beloved. In fact, if you now look at his more serious work, he almost looks miscast; like a funny artist got stuck with the wrong material. He did great work in that "wrong" style but you can kinda see his funny side peeking through now and then, here and there, straining to bust out.

In a very real sense, Jack was happy to escape working exclusively in his less cartoony mode. He was never comfy doing the horror comic stories for EC…and wouldn't you know it? They often gave him the most gruesome scripts, figuring that his lighter touch would make things more comedic and therefore more acceptable. One of his most famous horror stories for them — "Foul Play" — involved a baseball game with the parts of a dismembered corpse used for bases, baselines, etc. Its writer-editor Al Feldstein told me, "We crossed the line on that one. We caught hell for it and I can only imagine how bad it would have been if someone other than Jack had drawn it."

That first issue of MAD sixty-four years ago was a real turning point for comics in many ways. One of them was the artistic liberation of Jack Davis.

Jack was, by the way, the last surviving contributor to that issue but for Marie Severin, who did the coloring. A lot of obits about Jack say he was the last surviving EC artist. If you don't count Marie, he was the last of the folks who drew regularly for that line but a few occasional contributors like Russ Heath and Angelo Torres are still with us. Still, it's not inaccurate to say that the passing of Jack Davis represents the passing of an era, as well as the passing of a great artist and a great gentleman.

As we all know, there is nothing cuter on this planet than a baby panda. But baby toucans are a close second…

Stephen Colbert has had to drop his old character of Stephen Colbert and replace him with his new character, Stephen Colbert.

The current election presents two problems for me on a personal level.  One is that it's a big roller coaster ride with Trump up one day, Hillary up the next and so on.  This contest was always destined to be like that if only because of the sheer number of people who would never in a zillion years consider voting for "the other" party.  Trump was kinda right: He could murder someone in broad daylight and not lose many (if any) of his supporters.

I still think Hillary will win it by somewhere between the margin Obama had over McCain and the margin Obama had over Romney…but in the next 102 days, there will certainly be points when the momentum if not the actual poll results seem to be shifting one candidate's way before they shift back again.  This means a lot of calls and e-mails from friends who are on a window ledge with worry, terrified that "that man" might win.

Worry is rarely a good thing.  I have suffered the pains of many disasters that occurred nowhere but in my mind.  It's also kinda silly, given how volatile this election is with so many new revelations and accusations yet to emerge.  This thing about Trump's financial involvement with Russia and him urging them (sarcastically, he now says) to hack Hillary's e-mail is a good example.  It came utterly outta nowhere and no one knows where it'll land.   Good for him?  Bad for him?  Who knows?

In a normal election, it would be very damaging to Trump  but so would a lot of things he's said or done that haven't hurt him much.  (The Melania plagiarism thing — which on a list of Trump-related outrages probably shouldn't even make my Top 100 — probably harmed him more than will the suggestion that he's kissing Putin's heinie and becoming financially dependent on Russian dough.)

So I tell all this to my friends on their various window ledges and I calm them a bit for a time.  There was a point, I remind them, when McCain's selection of Sarah Palin temporarily catapulted him into the lead.  I think that choice is now regarded as a very bad decision but it set the numbers spinning for a week or three there.  There will be similar hills 'n' valleys and who the heck knows what the debates will do?  Or future ad campaigns?  I'm imagining the Democrats trotting out a spot that will look a lot like the Swift Boat Veterans ads against John Kerry but these will feature former Trump business associates saying things like, "I trusted Donald but I lost my home and he stiffed everyone else in a deal where he made twenty million."

The people on window ledges comprise one personal-type problem I have.  Another is how to deal with friends — and people I'd like to keep as friends — who are for Trump.

I have a number and some of them are fine.  I think they're wrong but, you know, I also think some of my friends are wrong about what's the best Marx Brothers movie or what software you should use for writing scripts or is cole slaw actually a food?  (The correct answers, of course, are Horse Feathers, Movie Magic Screenwriter and no.)  If I'm not going to let important topics like that ruin a friendship, I sure don't want something trivial like the future of the United States to divide us.

With some of my Trump-backing friends, there's not much friction.  These would generally be the ones who favor the actual legislation and policies they believe he'd enact.  I think they're wrong about whether he will do those things or that anyone should…but grown, intelligent human beings can discuss those things and so can my friends and I.

But there are some folks who just carry it too far, demonizing not only the candidate they despise but anyone who doesn't join them in their loathing.  Sorry…you probably can't demonize me and remain my friend.  It's not that I think you're politically wrong.  It's that I think you're rude…and rude can go a long way to rupturing friendships.  Wrong, I can overlook and anyway, some of that's a matter of opinion or different interpretations of the facts.  (There's "wrong" when you tell me Barack Obama has presided over a bad economy and wrong when you tell me, as one correspondent persists in doing, that Obama's Kenyan birth certificate has been found.)

I can think of at least five friends who I'm fairly sure support Trump, though I haven't discussed it with them.  I'd rather not because I doubt I'd change their mind and I doubt it would be a civil discussion.  I don't want to lose them as friends and I also don't want to stand there and adopt one of those fake Flight Attendant smiles and say nothing when they start in about how anyone who'd support Hillary is stupid, doesn't love America, has some ulterior motive, "And you know she murdered Vince Foster,:" etc.  I'll see if I can make it to November without talking to them.  It's safer that way.

One of America's all-time great cartoonists has left us at the age of 91. Jack Davis made his initial fame in EC Comics like Tales from the Crypt and MAD but went on to become one of the most visible (and imitated) creators of advertising, movie posters and record album covers ever. His ability to make anything funnier when he drew it and his keen eye for caricatures could be seen darn near everywhere in this country for well more than half a century.

Jack Davis was born in Atlanta, Georgia on December 2, 1924. His first drawing in print was a small sketch that ran in Tip Top Comics in the thirties. It was on a page that printed reader contributions and he was not the only soon-to-be-famous cartoonist who first saw a drawing of his published there. So did Mort (Beetle Bailey) Walker and Davis's soon-to-be collaborator/employer, Harvey Kurtzman.

Davis attended the University of Georgia and his work on the campus newspaper (and an independent humor publication) got him an intern job at the Atlanta Journal which in turn led to assistant work on the newspaper strip, Mark Trail and later on The Saint.

In 1950, he hooked up with EC Comics and became one of the firm's most popular artists on its popular line of horror, crime, war and humor comics. Davis could do any of those but it was the funny stuff he did for MAD that really set him apart from the pack. When MAD's first editor Harvey Kurtzman left, Davis followed him to other humor periodicals (all short-lived) but returned to MAD in the mid-sixties. By then, he also had a steady flow of work for movie posters, record album covers, magazine covers (including Time) and other commercial venues.

His poster for the 1963 movie It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World wasn't his first film job but it was the one that everyone noticed. Thereafter, a hefty percentage of folks marketing comedy films — especially those with large casts of well-known comedians — turned to Davis for their key art. Just as there are performers who have made good careers impersonating Elvis Presley or The Beatles, there are artists whose livelihoods have involved outputting commercial art more or less in the Jack Davis style.

I loved everything he drew but Jack was not fond of some of them. He was great at horror comics but uncomfortable with the subject matter. He turned up occasionally in Playboy, often assisting on his friend Harvey Kurtzman's "Little Annie Fanny," but didn't much like the magazine or its hedonist philosophy. He eventually stopped drawing for MAD partly because of his advanced age but partly because he didn't like its politics or a subtle trend he perceived towards raunchiness. He also just plain wanted to take it easy, drawing when and what he felt like drawing. (One job he was very glad to do was for the U.S. government in 1989: A postage stamp he drew to honor postal carriers.)

Mr. Davis won every award he could possibly win for cartooning and was widely-loved and respected among his peers. The photo above was taken at a 2006 dinner held in his honor in Los Angeles by the Comic Art Professional Society. That's Jack on the left, me in the middle and the guy at right is Jack's friend and fellow MAD artist, Sergio Aragonés. I always found Jack to be a delightful man — cheery and gentle with what is generally described as old-school Southern Manners. He loved talking about the Civil War and old monster movies and his fellow cartoonists, all of whom he loved. He was truly as adored as his cartooning was, and that's a lot of adoration.

There was something about his art that just plain made you smile, starting with the fact that there was no meanness whatsoever in his caricatures. He didn't like all the politicians he drew for magazine covers but you wouldn't know it from his renderings. He made every movie he drew look a little funnier and livelier. I have the original to one of his movie posters on a wall in my home and everyone who sees it — artists, writers, my plumber, my electrician, etc. — knows that style and grins when they see it. That's a great legacy to leave behind.

You can see a lot of Jack's work on this page and this page and this page and this page. See if there's one drawing there that doesn't make you smile.

Around this blog, we think Barack Obama has been a pretty good president and we're impressed that he's achieved as much as he has, given a powerful opposition whose credo is "If he's for it, we're against it." Jonathan Chait reminds us of three pretty good accomplishments of the Obama administration.

David Letterman's 2015 Peabody Award Acceptance Speech, with Steve Martin as presenter…