Monthly Archives: August 2017

Barbershop Week on this site continues with another selection from the Kentucky Vocal Union. Betcha this is exactly what Michael Jackson wished he'd done for his video of this song…

In the last few days, I've seen a number of articles on the web (like this one) where someone says, "This is not the time to discuss whether Climate Change was responsible for what happened in Houston." This, of course, comes from people who think there's never a good time to discuss Climate Change and especially not when there's so much evidence on all our screens of what could happen more and more if most of the folks they call "alarmists" are right.

In the linked article, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said the "left-wing media" is trying "to make this seem like it's climate change, that climate change is responsible, it's actually America's fossil fuel consumption that's caused this tropical storm." It's a shame he feels that way. Before he was brought in to gut the E.P.A., Mr. Pruitt's income came from coordinating with the oil and gas industry to roll back consumer protections. If only he'd come out for taking Climate Change seriously, he could have lost both his careers at the same time.

It seems like every time I see Marco Rubio talking about Climate Change, he says that obviously something is happening there but it will cost so much to start fighting it that it's not cost-effective. Will someone ask that man how cost-effective it is to have to rebuild Houston every few years? Even if you set aside the costs of human lives and misery and people losing everything including their livelihoods…leave all that aside and just focus on what it costs to repair the damage, how is that any sort of bargain?

I seem to be really bad at promoting my own writing. Last week, DC Comics released the Darkseid Special I wrote for them. It's one of six specials this month — Jack's centennial month — featuring characters done by him and now interpreted by current writers and artists. The story I did was illustrated by the extremely popular (justifiably so) Scott Kolins and there's a back-up tale of Omac by Paul Levitz and Phil Hester. All six of these books also carry short articles by me about Mr. Kirby. Since it's extremely unclassy for a writer to tell you his work is good, I won't. I'll just link to two reviews — this one and this one — where others say that and I'm a little embarrassed to even find myself doing that.

Also, the second issue of the Grumpy Cat/Garfield crossover mini-series will hit stores on September 7. The second issue? Didn't you promise to tell us when the first one came out? Yes, I did. But remember: I'm really bad at promoting my own writing and besides, no one told me. I haven't seen #1 either.

Anyway, you might want to check them out if only to consider how different the two stories are. One is about a sinister presence that enslaves those around them and forces them to be subservient and to live in fear. And the other one is about Darkseid.

I've decided to declare this Barbershop Quartet (or Mob) Week here on newsfromme.com. Here's the Kentucky Vocal Union…

Donald Trump says the media is dishonest in their reporting on him. Matt Taibbi says the media has rolled over for Trump because he's good for business and it's making America stupider.

And speaking of stupid, a lot of people sure seem to think Barack Obama was the president who screwed up on Hurricane Katrina. I get the feeling that some of them, once informed of their error, don't care if their stated reasons are true of not.

Jonathan Chait says we should brace ourselves for an avalanche of lies, the main one being that the economy is in desperate need of lower taxes on really, really rich people.

Matt Yglesias on how all this talk of "simplifying" your taxes is smoke and mirrors. No matter what else they may say about their goals, the point of every Republican-backed tax plan or proposal is to lower taxes on really, really rich people. Ain't we got fun?

The last few days, I've been occupied by (a) planning for the June Foray Celebration Event, (b) finishing an actual writing assignment and (c) a lot of concern for the people in Houston and surrounding areas. I'm not thinking of anyone specific there. It's just a feeling of, "Oh, those poor people" — "poor" not in the monetary sense but in the sense of "that should not happen to human beings." I would imagine though that a lot of them who weren't already poor in the financial sense will be that way from now on.

No one can say with absolute certainty how much Global Warming may have contributed to the unprecedented strength of Hurricane Harvey but it sure looks likely, doesn't it? The saner folks who argue against doing what can be done to arrest climate change have arguments that it's not cost-efficient; that it will cost America too much cash (and cost businesses too much of their profits) to justify the expenses of fighting it. When the final bill for Harvey is tallied, I hope they'll reconsider the cost/benefit factor and also give some consideration to the human misery factor.

I fear though that the opposition to Doing Anything About It is largely driven by people incapable of admitting they were wrong and that people they hate like Al Gore were right. And that that's about as far as their thought process extends on this topic.

The Masters of Harmony with a weather report for Los Angeles. Not that I'm complaining…

I've been watching The Daily Show with Trevor Noah lately. You know, if Jon Stewart had never hosted this show, and if we didn't have Jon Oliver, Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Bill Maher and Saturday Night Live mining the same veins, this would be a must-watch show.

Never forget that when Donald Trump treats Alex Jones like he's important, he's giving credibility to a guy who thinks the Sandy Hook Massacre didn't happen, the government is using juice boxes to make children gay, and Michelle Obama has a penis.

If God had wanted people to eat cole slaw, He wouldn't have made it the most repulsive, disgusting thing on the planet.

Why do people say they have a strong feeling in their guts? How do they know that isn't their pancreas? And how much weight would you give a thought that came from someone's pancreas?

Is there any fast food restaurant or manufacturer of frozen food that offers a breakfast item that doesn't have cheese on it?

A few years ago, Republicans were more outraged about Obama wearing a tan suit than Democrats are that Trump has all sorts of Russian ties that he repeatedly denied he had.

More to come.

The evening of September 19, there will be a very special event in Beverly Hills, California — a tribute to the late, great June Foray who left us a month ago, just a few weeks shy of what would have been her one-hundredth birthday. September 19 is, by the way, one day after she would have hit that milestone date. It will be a fun evening with cartoons, guest speakers, surprise film clips and (we expect) a packed house.

E-mailed invitations have just gone out to June's family and to a list of what the organizers hope are all her closest friends. They doubtlessly missed a few but if you received one, répondez s'il vous plaît or don't whine if it fills up before you R.S.V.P. and you wind up not getting a seat. Very shortly, I will post instructions on how others — folks who somehow didn't get on the master list of invitees — can attend. If you were a friend of June's or have ever been a fan — and how could you not be a fan of that woman? — do yourself a favor and keep checking this space for details.

Oh — and please do me a favor and do not call or write to ask if you can speak at the event. The hardest part of arranging this is turning out to be saying no to so many who ask. If we let everyone speak who wants to speak, we'll be there until one day after June's two-hundredth birthday.

Jeet Heer, who writes for the New Republic (and has been a linkee here in the past for his political articles) has a real good overview of Jack Kirby's career.

There are oodles of Jack Kirby celebrations on the Internet today. I'm swamped at the moment and too busy to start linking to them now but I'll point you to one…

This year's Comic-Con International paid special note to Jack's 100th birthday and its souvenir book included a wonderful 60-page section of articles, artwork and photo. For anyone interested in Jack, it's a must-get and they've put it online as a PDF for your downloading pleasure. Get it now and read it at your leisure.

If he were still with us, Jack Kirby would have been one hundred years old today…but of course, an awful lot of Jack is still with us. Hundreds of characters he created or co-created are still appearing, many of them in hit movies that have made them more famous than ever. Back in the sixties, Jack predicted that there would someday be highly-successful, big budget motion pictures of Thor, Captain America, et al. He told me that when I first met him in 1969.

One of the reasons he never got his financial due out of Marvel was that the folks who ran Marvel back then never believed that. They had a limited idea of how much anything in Marvel Comics could ever be worth and didn't want to share those meager amounts with anyone. It was pretty simple math: The less they paid Jack and all the other folks who created their comics, the more they got to keep for themselves. When he told them what he saw as the potential value of the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and the rest, they nodded politely, refused him five-dollar raises and joked behind his back that he was out of his friggin' mind. And later, they sold the company for beads 'n' trinkets because they lacked the one thing Jack had by the tonweight: Imagination.

Jack's spirit and influence are also evident in 2017 in projects featuring characters and properties he never touched directly — and not just comic books. I see Kirby in movies and TV shows and advertising and videogames and animations and toy design and even in fine art. Anywhere someone makes a visual statement, you're likely to find at least some talent influenced — directly or indirectly — by Jack Kirby.

It is important to understand that when we, his fans and admirers, speak of the talent of Jack Kirby, we are not just speaking of the drawing. The drawing was great. The drawing was wonderful. We would be celebrating this man today just for the drawing. But the drawing was a function and a means of expression for Jack Kirby the Visionary — a man who dealt in concepts and creations and stories, and who always thought in bigger pictures than anything he could put down on a comic book page.

Jack was all about the story and the idea…and more importantly, the next story and the next idea. That was a key reason that so much of what appeared in Marvel comics of the sixties could later spin-off or be expanded upon. Someone else working on Fantastic Four might have come up with a new villain good for one issue and maybe a few repeat appearances down the line. With Jack, you got characters who could be brought back again and again and even stand on their own. That's why there is now an Inhumans TV series. That's why there have been Silver Surfer films and comics. Even his weakest ideas were worth building upon.

It was that way with the comics Jack wrote on his own. It was that way with the comics where Jack had a collaborator, even a collaborator who got sole writer credit. Kirby almost never drew what someone else told him to draw, nor did most of them even want him to. He almost always controlled how the story was told — what happened in each panel and on each page. That, some people do not seem to grasp, is writing. Devising or even just contributing to the plot is also writing.

He almost always added in new characters, new supporting players, new ideas. Two or three times when my then-partner Steve Sherman and I worked with him, he'd assign us to plot out some sequence in one of his comics. We'd sweat over the material and hand it in, and Jack would always tell us we'd done a great, fantastic, fine job…

…and then he'd use almost none of it — and by "almost none," I'm probably overstating how much he did use.

I felt at first like we'd failed but I came to understand that was just the way Jack worked and he could no more stop doing that than he could have started drawing left-handed. He didn't follow others' scripts and plots slavishly or sometimes at all. He didn't even follow his own stories. He'd tell me and/or Steve the plot of the next New Gods or Forever People he was slated to write and draw. It would be a brilliant tale and we would make our major contribution by saying something like, "That sounds terrific, Jack" and then we'd go home, which was our second most-important contribution.

Then the next week, we'd go back out to his home and read, right off the original art, what he'd written and drawn. On those pages might well be very little of the plot he'd told us not seven days before, the plot he'd started drawing as soon as we left. I'd say, "Uh, Jack, what happened to that story you told us last week?" and he'd be absolutely unaware of any shift.

As a professional writer of 48 years now — to some extent, due to this man — I understand that sometimes you sit down to write one thing and for good or ill, wind up writing something else…and sometimes, you really don't know how you got from there to here. With Jack, he always knew where he was going but he had the kind of brain that could find a dozen ways to get there. And of course, sometimes if you take alternate routes, they lead you to alternate destinations.

In the last year or two, as a result of a legal action — and also, I'm told, some folks at Disney who felt it was right — the credits on most of the properties Kirby launched with Stan Lee began to read "Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby." During his lifetime, this was something Jack only saw when someone at Marvel wasn't paying attention and the truth accidentally got through. Now, it is contractually guaranteed and everything Disney has put out to honor Jack has made it clear that this is not merely a way of saying Jack drew up Stan's ideas. Those comics were co-creations in every sense.

Fans can and will probably forever argue that a given comic was 70% one guy and 30% the other, or insist one particular character was mostly Stan or mostly Jack. Having worked myself in collaborations where the participants could sometimes not honestly separate who'd contributed what, I have a limited enthusiasm for those debates. I also have my own theories on what each contributed and I expound on them in the big, exhaustive bio of Jack that I hope to finish soon. (Hint: I believe that when Stan says "I wrote that comic" and Jack said, "I wrote that comic," those two men are not using the same definition of the word "write" but they both made significant contributions.)

The important thing is that Jack has been fully recognized as co-creator in time for his Centennial. I can't tell you how happy that makes me. He was a dear man…kind and generous. They may have called him "The King" but if you approached him, he was just a guy named Jack who was glad to talk to you about almost anything, including your work and your projects and your career. Just being around him made you feel smarter and more creative.

He inspired those he met and those he didn't. It was better if you did meet him but from afar and even since he passed in '94, many, many people have been motivated to write and/or draw, not necessarily in the same style and not necessarily in the same media. There are prose authors who've told me they were inspired by Jack, sculptors who've told me they were inspired by Jack, musicians who've told me they were inspired by Jack…I once even had a spot welder tell me he was inspired by Jack. I'm not sure I fully understood that last one but it had something to do with the maximum effort on every Kirby page motivating the spot welder to put maximum effort into every weld. Or something.

The photo above is of me sitting next to Jack at, I believe, a 1971 comic convention at the Disneyland Hotel. If it wasn't shot there, it was at some other con close to that date. I was 19 that year and well aware of the singular honor and boon of Jack Kirby — a man who needed no assistants — taking me on as one. With each passing year since, I increase my estimate of what that opportunity was worth. To just be around that man and his mind was/is a still-expanding privilege.

But I'll tell you: Though you can't sit with the man and hear his stories and his insights, you can get a helluva lot of them in the work he left us, particularly the stories he wrote, drew and edited in the seventies. Most of them are in print…and for the ones that aren't, just wait a year or two and they'll be back. They have an amazing staying power and a unique relevance to the world today. They're so rich that every time I read them, I see things that weren't there on previous readings. I get things that weren't there on previous readings.

And I pause and think, "Wow. He died in 1994 and I'm still learning from that man." Happy Jack Kirby Day, everyone. We were sure lucky to have him.

Back in the previous century, the popular performer of kids' records Raffi recorded a tune called "Banana Phone" that made a bit of a splash, especially after someone — I have no idea who — decided to play the record at an accelerated speed. Disc jockeys played it that way back when there were disc jockeys. This video of it, which I featured on this blog ten years ago, got five million hits and it was only one of about twenty online.

Here we have a new interpretation of the song — barbershop style. These guys call themselves The Newfangled Four…

Too much news this weekend. These are by no means in order of importance…

Didn't watch the fight. I've never had much interest in any event that is basically two people hitting each other. Put Trump and Paul Ryan in the ring and maybe I'll tune in…but I couldn't gin up the slightest interest in whether McGregor beat Mayweather or Mayweather beat McGregor. The only thing I ever find intriguing about this kind of thing is that, for example in this case, McGregor is a guy who could probably beat the crap out of better than 99% of the people on this planet. On a different day or in a match-up, there's a good chance he would have even beaten Mayweather. But he's going home a "loser"…with only $75 million.

The pardon of Joe Arpaio is Trump pandering to the Alex Jones wing of his base, the ones who love it when laws are broken when they're broken in the name of white supremacy. While those guys love the officials who do everything they can within the law to smack down minorities, their super-heroes are the ones who are macho enough to break the laws and say, "Come and get me, punk." The pardon tells us a lot about how the Trump administration is going to roll for the rest of its existence and maybe it's for the good that it's now out in the open like that.

Former White House counterterrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka is making the rounds to insist he resigned and was not fired. This probably means he was ordered to resign or he would be fired, which is about as vast a difference as the difference between brown onions and yellow onions. The White House has announced he will be replaced just as soon as someone there figures out what he did except to go on interview shows and lie a lot. If it turns out that's all he did, they have dozens of people who can take his place.

And then there's Hurricane Harvey…and oh, that's sad. It's not enough to say, "Those poor people" and you should remember that you can do something about this. As I just suggested in a Tweet, praying for them and keeping them in your thoughts are sweet notions but they don't rebuild a single building. There are some problems in this world about which we have to say, "I hope someone does something to help" because there's absolutely nothing we can do. And then there are those where we can do something. A donation of money — even if you can't afford much — will help someone in some way. In those matters, praying and "sending good thoughts their way" are kind of the dictionary definition of The Least You Can Do.

I just send some dough to Operation USA, which is a charity I know to do very good work. Only a tiny fraction of what you give them goes to administrative costs and staff salaries…and I'm not suggesting there aren't other charities where most of your donation dollars don't make it to the needy. But when I give to Operation USA, I know I'm not paying for its CEO's shag carpeting. Even the best government response to a tragedy like this doesn't repair everything and given who's running the government these days, I don't have a lot of confidence that private contributions won't be needed. If you were thinking of making a donation to thank me for this blog, please send it there instead.

• Trump's new plan: Every week 60% or more of America disapproves of him, he's going to say "I'll show you!" and pardon Joe Arpaio again.