Hey, you got two hours to watch one of my favorite movies? From 1966, it's The Fortune Cookie starring Jack Lemmon and Water Matthau in their first film together. Directed and co-written by Billy Wilder, the film won Matthau an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor and I can't imagine anyone else in the part. If you've never seen it, try to make the time…
Mitch McConnell is stepping down as Republican leader of the Senate in November. Kevin Drum itemizes some of the damage the man has done. It's not just changing the rules to deny Merrick Garland a seat on the Supreme Court.
My parents were married on March 3, 1951 at the Desert Inn — which was then a motel, not a hotel — in Las Vegas. We have no idea precisely when I was conceived but at some point during her pregnancy with me, my mother was told that I would be born on February 29, 1952…a Leap Year Day like today. If I had been, today would be my eighteen birthday…sort of.
But I wasn't born on 2/29/52 when her body told her it was time and she reported to the hospital. I wasn't born 3/1/52 either. My mother, who was as nice as any woman you ever met, was kind enough to only rarely tell me about the pain and agony she went through trying to get me to make my debut. Finally, the afternoon of 3/2/52, they went in and got me. My father was told, "Congratulations, Mr. Evanier. Your wife just gave birth to a seven-pound, six-ounce comic book writer." Or at least he was told something like that. The weight is exact though I have managed to pack on a few pounds since then.
The doctor who delivered me was Dr. Mietus. If you don't like me, complain to him…and I say that knowing darn well he's almost certainly deceased by now. I suppose you could also complain to the Pet Milk company which from the above evidence seems to have in some way sponsored my birth. They're still around.
Dr. Mietus not only brought me into this world, he advised my parents not to try again. My mother's insides, he said, were not properly configured for unobstructed childbirth. It was a miracle that she was able to have me and that experience had left so much scar tissue and other damage that she should try to never/ever get pregnant again. Mother and baby would never make it.
I did not hear this conversation or if I did, I don't recall it…and I have a good excuse, having been about thirty minutes old at the time. But my parents took it to heart and abandoned any fantasies about having a large family. It's why I was an Only Child and I have to admit, having seen so many of my friends fighting non-stop with siblings, I've always been pretty happy not to have had any.
The warning given my parents has led to a number of interesting discussions relating to the abortion issue. I have met so-called "Pro-Life" people and so-called "Pro-Choice" people and a key difference has been that some of the former claim to think all life is sacred but when my parents' situation was explained to them, felt that my mother should have risked her life to maybe bring more children into the world. I will leave this discussion at that for now.
Anyway, today is not my birthday but it was supposed to be. Being born two days later gave me (a) an annual, reliable birthday and (b) a good joke. As a kid, when people asked me when my birthday was, I could say, "I was born on March second and my parents were married on March third." It always got a laugh and even though I didn't understand why, a laugh is a laugh. I just kept on giving that answer despite my parents suggesting other, non-funny ways to respond.
Over the years, Donald Trump has thrown around some awesome numbers as to his personal wealth…this many billions, that many billions…
But he seems to be having trouble paying what for him should be an easy amount to pay if he's worth anywhere near what he's claimed he has. How much does he currently owe? I'm not sure. Let's consult The Trump Debt Tracker.
While I was in Rehab, I did a lot more TV watching and YouTube prowling than usual. I kept reminding myself how much I like Seth Meyers' show, especially his "A Closer Look" segments. Here's the one from this evening. Very clever stuff…
How nice to awake to many well-wishers and sympathizers and I really don't write these posts for that. If/when you ever commit to writing a near-daily blog for a couple decades, you'll find yourself writing about almost everything that happens to you. If I spill ketchup on my pants at dinner, almost my first thought is "Can I get a blog post out of this?"
Someone felt I was a little too harsh towards folks who offer unsolicited medical advice and perhaps I was. I've just gotten a lot of terrible, terrible "Here's what you should be doing…" counsel from people who think watching a few online videos put them on an equal (or even higher) footing as men and women who study and practice medicine for years. Yes, I have gotten some good advice at times — but only from close friends and in particular from one who asked me not to mention their name here.
Another someone asked about my pain killers. I'm not going to give the names of the ones that worked for me because they might not (probably won't) work for anyone else. But I will mention that I only took them for a day or three after the surgery. I like to get off that stuff a.s.a.p. and I did this time. The last day I took pain-killers, this happened: One of my doctors recommended I try a drug I'd never taken before, though he cautioned that it gave some people hallucinations.
I took it — once — and when a nurse came in to check on how I was doing, we had the following exchange…
NURSE: Are you experiencing any hallucinations?
ME: Well, that depends.
NURSE: Depends on what?
ME: Depends on whether or not you're wearing a gorilla costume.
Turned out she wasn't but, you know, she might have been. I could have been in a Bob Hope movie and not known it.
A few of you already know about this but I've decided to let you all in on the secret. On Sunday evening, January 21, I broke my left ankle. I'm home now but I spent five days in a hospital and the rest of the time since then in a rehab center. The ankle is far from fully-healed. That will take months. But it's healed enough that I'm writing this on the computer in my home office, whereas everything else here since 1/22/24 was written on my iPad or even sometimes my iPhone and usually from a hospital-style bed via two-finger typing…or sometimes one.
I'll tell you the whole story but first, I need to tell you why I kept this (mostly) a secret. Put bluntly, I didn't want and still do not want everyone's medical advice or their stories about their busted ankles. I have really good doctors and while I don't believe they're infallible, I think they're a lot less fallible about this stuff than anyone who hasn't graduated from an Honest-to-Hippocrates medical school.
When I underwent Gastric Bypass Surgery in 2006, I received — and I'm going to be blunt about this — some of the stupidest fucking "medical advice" from non-doctors. Much of it was well-intended and full of first-hand testimony. None of it was of any use to me and some of it cluttered my thinking when I had to make important decisions.
The worst and most unnecessary "advice" may have come from a comic book writer who stopped me at my first post-op Comic-Con and told me that he was an expert — i.e., he'd read some articles online — and that I'd made a horrible mistake and would certainly die with a few years because of that surgery. What a lovely, helpful thing to say to someone.
Just for the record: I am still here. This writer died in 2019.
As I said, a lot of the unsolicited help was well-meant and I don't mean to insult anyone who earnestly wanted to be of aid. I just have learned that when I have to deal with doctor-type issues, I'm better off confining the input to medical professionals I have reason to trust. None of what follows here is meant to instruct you. If you need to learn how to deal with this kind of thing, you shouldn't learn from me either. I sure wouldn't. That said, and with the hope you will find what follows interesting and maybe even amusing, here's the story…
It started around 9 PM that Sunday evening, maybe a bit later. A Lovely Lady Friend would be arriving at my home shortly so that we might enjoy each other's company. I was upstairs in my home — in the Master Bathroom of which I am the Master, getting ready when…
I don't know how, I don't know why, I'm not even entirely sure about when…but I was suddenly on the tile floor. No part of me was injured except for my left ankle but it was really injured…as in "broken."
And boy, did it hurt. I can't remember anything more painful in my just-shy-of-72-years-long life. Throughout the next few paragraphs, I shall spare you descriptions of how much it hurt. Just keep it in the back of your mind and I'll let you know the point in this story when I stopped being in absolute agony. Lying there, seeing my foot bent at an impossible angle, I instantly decided I had two options…
There did not seem to be a third option so I decided to go for #1.
But I didn't exactly crawl. I couldn't get any traction with either leg, especially the left. What I could do was more of a slither, using my arms to grab onto chair legs and other pieces of furniture and drag the rest of me towards the nightstand. I don't know how long it took but I got there —
— and fortunately, my cellphone was right where I hoped it would be. I was able to reach it, call 911 and talk with a nice lady who said she'd send Batman. Or maybe she didn't say she'd send Batman. The point is that she said she'd send someone. At that moment, I would have settled for a couple of Girl Scouts selling Thin Mints.
Then I unlocked the front door. Boy, am I glad I have that app on my phone. Then I called the L.L.F., thinking I might catch her before she left her house. I was too late for that. Here, verbatim, is how that conversation went:
HER: Oh, Mark! I'm about ten blocks from your house. We're going to have such a good time tonight!
ME: No…we…aren't!
I explained to her what had happened and she gasped and said she'd be to me in two minutes. Two minutes later, I heard her opening the door, calling out my name and sprinting up the stairs. She found me sprawled naked on the floor by my bed and asked, "What can I do?"
Just then, we heard the wonderful sound of an approaching siren and I told her, "Go downstairs and lead them to me." She was back in one minute with two Girl Scouts selling Thin Mints two burly firemen. They were joined a few minutes later by two more burly firemen. Carrying me down the stairs, as they'd have to do, was not a two-man job. It might even require the entire brigade.
Between shrieks of pain and as the L.L.F. slipped some clothes on me very carefully, I explained to the four men what had happened and where I wanted to be taken. They ran a few tests on me, decided the ankle was all that was wrong and then helped me into what I think is called a Carry Chair. The four of them lugged me down the stairs and out onto my front porch where I was transferred to a gurney. Every bit of this hurt but I told myself, "At least it's leading to a moment when the hurting will stop."
The L.L.F. wanted to come along. I told her no; just to lock up my house and go on home, which she reluctantly did. There were two rescue-type fire trucks outside and the gurney full of me was loaded into one of them. Two of the firemen headed off in the other truck to another call which from what I overheard sounded a lot more desperate than mine. One of the others drove the truck I was in.
The fourth one got in the back with me. As we headed for the hospital, he said, "I can see by what's in your house that you're into comic books. Did you ever hear of an artist named Jack Kirby?"
It probably took about ten minutes to reach the hospital. You tend to lose track of time in a situation like this. Mostly, I was trying to figure out who I had to call, what plans I had to reschedule, how to not mess up the schedule on Groo…stuff like that.
I had been to the Emergency Room at this hospital before with others and for myself. I recalled long waits for treatment and once, after it was decided to admit me, I waited in a hallway on a tiny bed for several hours before they had a room for me.
Happily, none of that happened this Sunday night. The two firemen transferred me from their gurney to a narrow hospital bed and then rushed off to another call. I was wheeled into a tiny cubicle and doctors, nurses and x-ray technicians were on me within minutes.
With almost every one, I had the same conversation about pain killers. When I'd been in the hospital in 2015 for my knee replacement, my doctors and I discovered that none of the usual drugs had much effect on me. Fortunately, I took notes then and still had them on my iPhone.
"I seem to be impervious to Norco, Dilaudid, Tramadol, Percocet, Celebrex, Morphine, OxyContin and Robaxin," I told one member of the medical profession after another. We finally tried a cocktail of three drugs that had worked in 2015 and it worked, sort of, this time.
But I'll tell you what really worked: A nice lady doctor began gently massaging my ankle, aligning the pieces the way they were supposed to be. When she got everything the way she wanted it, she slapped a splint on it to hold everything in place. Remember how I told you I'd tell you when the agony stopped? We have reached the moment in this narrative when that happened. Thereafter, instead of hurting constantly, it only hurt when someone touched it. Or when I banged it against something, which I artfully managed to do several excruciating times.
By Midnight, I was in a hospital room. A doctor who'd examined the many x-rays that had been taken came in and told me I would require surgery. I asked how long it would be before that could be scheduled, expecting an answer of some time in February or March. Instead, he told me, "We're going to try to squeeze you in tomorrow and I'll be the lead surgeon." He explained what would be necessary, told me to get a good night's sleep and not to worry. Then he left and I decided to not worry…
…but I did type out an e-mail on my iPhone and sent it to my personal physician, a man I trust greatly. I explained to him what had happened and what I'd been told, then I set to work on that "good night's sleep" assignment. When I awoke the next morning, there was a reply from my physician: He was able to access the x-rays online and he wrote, "You absolutely need surgery and the doctor who told you that is one of the best in his field. I would trust him." I decided I would.
Monday morning, they had me scheduled for surgery at 10 AM. Then they had me scheduled for surgery at Noon. Then at 1:30 PM. At 3 PM, someone came and rolled me in my tiny hospital bed — I think they made it out of an old tongue depressor — down to the room where they prep you for surgery.
They prepped me for surgery then the surgeon — the one from the night before, the one my physician said was one of the best in his field — came by and explained to me in greater detail what they were going to do. Basically, they were going to insert a metal rod through the bottom of my foot, insert screws into my ankle and lock everything into place forever. My physician had blessed this plan and I remember thinking I was in very good hands.
A few minutes later, another surgeon came in and apologized. "Someone was just brought in," he said. "Someone in much, much worse shape than you. If we're going to save his leg, we have to bump you until tomorrow and work on him." That sounded oddly reasonable to me and I was wheeled back to my room.
I resumed what I'd been doing most of that day, rearranging my life and phoning people who had to know what had happened. I apologize if you weren't one of them and feel you should have been. It was in no way personal.
Tuesday morning, they had me scheduled for surgery at 10 AM. Then they had me scheduled for surgery at Noon. Then at 1:30 PM. At 3 PM, someone came and rolled me in my tiny hospital bed down to the room where they prep you for surgery. I was prepped, I signed papers, I was anesthetized and I woke up 2.5 hours later with my lower left leg encased in a big boot with what seemed like 97 Velcro® straps on it.
They told me all went well and that I could begin learning to walk again once the swelling went down and the various entry points into my ankle healed over somewhat. For a few days, that meant just lying in bed. Fortunately, my assistant Jane brought me my iPad and a few other necessities of life…like edible food, which they rarely served at this hospital. Good medicine, bad meals.
On Friday, I was shipped off to a rehabilitation facility. It was like a hospital with fewer doctors, slightly better meals and a staff of physical trainers who'd try to get me up on my feet and walking again…once the swelling went down more, that is. Six days a week, I received Physical Therapy and Occupational Therapy. I wasn't entirely clear on the difference and at times, the Physical Therapists and Occupational Therapists didn't seem all that clear on it. I think it's something like Physical Therapists taught me how to walk again whereas Occupational Therapists taught me how to do everything else and worked on upper body strength.
I was assigned to a double room, the other bed being occupied by an older gent — older than me, that is — who was recovering from several physical problems, the major one being a broken hip. By day, he was a charming roommate and we had some nice conversations. By night…well, "by night," it was a different story. He would suddenly have no idea where he was and would begin screaming for his wife who, of course, was nowhere on the premises and unlikely to just casually drop by at 4 AM.
He was not alone when it came to screaming into the night. At any hour but especially in the early hours of the morning, one could hear some patient somewhere screaming "HELLLLP!!!" as if they were being murdered. It would invariably turn out that either they were in mid-delusion like my roomie or that they had some simple non-emergency need…like a diaper change or a spoon. I found myself wondering what yell would come out of them if they were really being murdered. Maybe that lady across the hall would be yelling out, "I NEED A SPOON!!!"?
The place was, of course, filled with sick people…although not with COVID. I was tested for it every few days and 100% of the staff wore masks. One of the managers told me they'd discovered only one case of that dread condition on the premises in the last six months and that the infected person had been swiftly moved to a different facility without passing it on to anyone.
But of course there's a sadness to a place like this full of elderly folks, most of them older and worse off than me…and it was not all depressing, especially when compared to some of the nursing homes and facilities I'd toured when seeking places to house my mother and my friend Carolyn when they were failing. I'd stayed twice at the one I've been in for the last 33 days before — in 2015 when I had my knee replacement and again soon after when the surgery had to be redone. I'd forgotten how a large percentage of the nurses there were very skilled and very dedicated to their profession.
One of them this time turned out to be a devout comic book fan who included Groo the Wanderer among his passions. At one point, he came by to take my blood pressure while I was talking with Sergio Aragonés and he was thrilled when I let him chat with my collaborator. Another time, I let him say hello to Marv Wolfman.
I'd say of this Certified Nursing Assistant, "He took real good care of me" but that would be misleading. From what I could see, he took really good care of everyone. He just checked in on me a tad more often because he liked to talk about comics.
The meals were…sort of okay. Sometimes. As you might know, I have a great many food allergies and it took a while for the kitchen staff — which is insanely busy three times a day — to grasp that I simply could not eat certain things. Some of the meals I could eat but just plain didn't want to.
But I learned workarounds. A nurse tipped me off: The scrambled eggs at breakfast were from some mix and seemed to contain no ingredient that had ever been inside a chicken. But if you asked for your eggs to be fried, they cracked real ones for you.
It helped that my assistant Jane Plunkett brought me peanut butter and food items upon which to slather it. And it helped a lot that someone had invented DoorDash and that one of my favorite restaurants was literally five blocks away. When lunch or dinner simply weren't edible, I'd order two meals delivered — one to eat then, one to have a nurse stash in the refrigerator and then warm in the microwave the next time I was served Braised Odor-Eaters or whatever the hell they were passing off as meat loaf.
Eventually, the swelling in my lower left extremity abated to the point where the Physical Therapy folks could get me sorta/kinda on my feet and we could do a little more each session. It was a slow process and sometimes, I could do less one day than I could the day before. But overall, my walking improved which is why I'm home now instead of still back there. I like here a lot better. I was able to use all ten fingers to type this.
One last thing I should mention: I have withdrawn as a special guest for WonderCon this year. I dunno if they ever even announced me but I was going to be there hosting panels all three days…and now I'm not. I might drop in for a day or two to see friends but I think it's better to not lock myself into attending just in case my ankle ain't up to it that weekend. I should however be fine for Comic-Con in July unless, klutz that I can be, I break the other one. I'm going to try not to do this.
For reasons that shall be divulged in this space tomorrow, I won't be posting much here today. I'll more than make up for it tomorrow.
I very much liked the Broadway musical version of the Disney Beauty and the Beast. Liked it way more than The Lion King, which was way more successful. The Lion King felt more to me like something that belonged at a Disney theme park whereas Beauty and the Beast felt more like a Broadway show and had what was for me a more captivating storyline. I felt more emotionally involved with it.
Yes, I know this is probably a minority opinion but I think we're still allowed to have those in this country. (And before anyone asks: I haven't seen any of the other Disney Broadway offerings.)
This video is from the rehearsal period for Beauty and the Beast when they invited some of the press to come in and see a few of the numbers performed without sets, costumes, a full orchestra or context. I'm not sure why this is supposed to help sell tickets but most shows do it so I guess it does…
Brian Dreger has another Brian Dreger question…
I don't know much about magic/magicians except, as a kid, I was fascinated by magic & ventriloquism…but everything I knew pretty much came from adverts in comic books.
I'm curious about how someone becomes a magician. Do you have to apprentice with someone? Can you just study a bunch of books in a very good library? I've heard Penn Jillette — and I think even you — talk about being fascinated by a great magician because, although you know how the trick works technically, you don't know how they accomplished their specific variation.
How does one learn all that? It seems impossible that you can learn it from books. I mean, it can't be like learning to tap dance.
Well, in a way it is. Being a great tap dancer requires years of practice, practice and more practice…and so does being a great or even a good magician. I mean, I could teach you a dozen card tricks that each take about ten minutes to master but about all they're good for is impressing the easily-impressed.
And you can learn a lot from books. Every good magician I know has a serious library. Actually, these days, it's books and videos. You can learn a lot that way. In fact, if you see a terrific magician do a unique trick on TV — not the cups and balls, not the linking rings, not the torn-and-restored newspaper, something that looks newly-invented — there's a good chance you can purchase a tutorial by that magician via some online magic dealer.
Then, you have to practice, practice, practice before you perform it for your friends and relatives. Come to think of it, one of my early heroes of magic, the late Don Alan, advised, "When you believe you've practiced enough and are ready to do the trick for friends, practice six more months before you do." Remember you can only perform it for them once.
Don Alan became a hero of magic to me in 1961 (I was nine) with a syndicated TV show he did called Magic Ranch. Another was Mark Wilson who, beginning a year earlier, starred in The Magic Land of Allakazam on CBS Saturday morn and later on ABC. Yet another was Chuck Jones the Magic Man, not to be confused with Chuck Jones the Cartoon Director. The Magic Man had a local show on Channel 13 where he showed Felix the Cat cartoons and, in-between, performed difficult magic tricks and taught simple ones.
I got to know all three men but never thought of pursuing their careers. I loved magic but I loved comic books and cartoons and writing-in-general more. I had to pick at least one to not pursue, lest I devote insufficient practice to all. So the magic had to go. I still love it but not enough to practice, practice, practice to the exclusion of my other interests.
You don't have to apprentice with anyone to become a magician, though that wouldn't hurt. Heck, once you can perform one trick, you're a magician, kind of. To be a real one, you just have to have some talent, have some skill, have some sense of showmanship…and want to do it badly enough to put in a zillion-and-a-half hours.
MAD magazine debuted as a comic book, the first issue of which went on sale on July 10, 1952. It turned into a magazine as of #24 and the numbering continued until #550, whereupon the numbering started over again with a new #1. The current issue is #36 so there have been 586 regular issues of MAD.
For the purposes of this discussion, we are not counting annuals, specials, paperbacks, hardcovers or any other form even though some of them contained material published nowhere else.
Of all the writers and artists who contributed to those 586 issues, the most prolific was (note the past-tense) the late Al Jaffee who had new material in 509 issues. But with the last issue of MAD, my friend and collaborator Sergio Aragonés tied Al's record and with the current issue, Sergio has taken the lead with work in 510 issues.
Sergio's work first appeared in issue #76 and he has been in every issue since with the exception of #111.
In case anyone's interested, the next most prolific contributor is writer Dick DeBartolo. For a complete list, check out Mike Slaubaugh's website.. Since Sergio will probably be contributing to further issues, it is doubtful that anyone will ever wrest the title away from him.
Here from various sources, we have seventeen minutes of Charles Schulz doing what he did so well. I got to spend a few hours with him in his studio one day and for much of our conversation, he was doing this. He almost didn't seem to be thinking much about what he was drawing but (of course) he was…
From Derek Teague comes a message with a few questions…
Were you working for Welcome Back, Kotter when DC Comics issued its comic book adaptation during the summer of 1976? What might have the reaction to it from the cast and crew? Did DC send free comic books to be used as on-air props?
Yes, I was a story editor on the TV show when DC put out the comic and I wrote two issues of it. I posted a bit about that experience back here.
As far as I know, DC never sent them anything and the cast members probably never saw most of the t-shirts, games, coloring books and other Kotter merchandise unless they went looking for that stuff in stores. We did hear occasional grumbling from some about how their likenesses were being exploited without them receiving any compensation.
Actually, if what I heard was correct, the "kids" on the show weren't paid all that much. One of the producers told me I was getting more dough per show than John Travolta and I wasn't taking home a very large paycheck.
If I was getting more than on that show than John, me was more than making up for it with outside gigs. While we were shooting the last few episodes of the only season I worked on, he was commuting to New York on the weekends for prep on Saturday Night Fever.
But that's what happens when you're low on or devoid of credits and you get hired in show business: You kinda have to accept the lowest-possible offer or something close to it. Once you're part of a success, you can demand and get way more. The first time I ran into him post-Kotter, Travolta told me about the airplane he'd just bought.
So I don't recall the cast — The Sweathogs, at least — having any awareness of the comic with one exception. Bobby Hegyes, who played Juan Epstein on the show, once saw some black-and-white Xeroxes of the first of the two issues I wrote of the comic book. I don't recall why I had them in my office or how he happened to see them but he flipped through the packet and said, "A little light on Epstein," which was the same thing he said about every single script we taped that season.
Back to Derek's message…
At the time, I was entering high school and the bloom seemed to be off the rose. My fellow ninth graders didn't think WBK was cool anymore – especially since ABC mistakenly shifted the program to lead off its Thursday night line-up.
I'm curious why you think that was a mistake since I believe the show won its time slot every single week that season.
I've noticed that, in the second season of Kotter that the writers were painstakingly shoving a new catchphrase down the viewers' throats, particularly "I'm so confused," which Vinnie Barbarino would utter when he was flustered. It seemed to have been used in a handful of consecutive episodes until it was abruptly and ultimately dropped.
What's it like when a second-generation catchphrase (or any catchphrase for that matter) just fizzles out just doesn't catch on?
For the most part, the writers on the show only wrote any of those lines once…the first time each line appeared in a script. Thereafter, they reappeared for a simple reason: They'd gotten huge laughs. The actor insisted on saying it and if it got a laugh during the dress rehearsal, it stayed in. It was kind of like, "Well, if he's going to say his catchphrase, I'm gonna say my catchphrase." I think we did put Horshack's "Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!" into scripts few times because he was going to say it, no matter what and we could pick a more appropriate spot for it. Our live audience wasn't going to leave until they heard it.
The main problem for me with the catchphrases is that Kotter was a half-hour show and while I don't recall the exact numbers, I think after you subtracted time for the opening teaser and credits, the closing credits and all those dangled commercials, we had something like 21 minutes. Each catchphrase got laughter and applause totaling about 30 seconds so if Barbarino, Horshack, Epstein and Washington each uttered two catchphrases in an episode, that was another four minutes we lost.
It's kinda rough to do a story featuring 6-7 people in 17 minutes and when we ran long, as we usually did, the decree from our Exec Producer was, "Cut story, not laughs." A frequently-heard phrase from his office was "Funny is money, funny is money."
With occasional exceptions — a show like M*A*S*H for instance — comedy on TV is best done in front of a properly-warmed-up live audience. But there's an easy trap there to fall into: Live audiences love the familiar. Imagine if Tony Bennett hosted a nightly program like The Tonight Show. If every single night he sang "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," the live audiences would always have been thrilled. And the same kind of folks sitting at home would have grabbed for their remotes and said, "Let's see what else is on!"
I think a lot of shows, especially those on every night like David Letterman's or Conan O'Brien's, lost audience share by catering too much to the few hundred people in the studio instead of the few million at home. And I think Welcome Back, Kotter was among a whole lotta shows that hastened their own demises by giving their live audiences the catchphrases and other elements they'd come to see and hear in person…and my, this was a long reply. Thanks for setting me off on this topic, Derek.
…or maybe three depending on how you count.
One day back when I was working with Jack Kirby, we were for some reason talking about Marie Severin. Jack was a great fan of many other artists and Marie was one of them. He thought she was the best caricaturist in the business and said it was a shame that she was drawing superhero comics for Marvel instead of movie and TV parodies for MAD. She should also, he said, be doing the kind of lucrative commercial art (movie posters, advertising, etc.) that Mort Drucker and Jack Davis were doing thanks to their MAD connections.
(Quick Aside: Marie worked for Bill Gaines back in the days of EC Comics as a colorist and production artist, and when Gaines pared his empire down to just MAD, she did occasional coloring jobs for them…but the number of times a female drew for MAD in the Gaines/Feldstein era is the same as the number of times you and I have done the polka on Saturn.)
I may have mentioned that to Jack that day. He definitely said it wasn't right that she was the only lady drawing for DC or Marvel. I said, "Well, except for Ramona Fradon."
Jack then asked me, "Who's Ramona Fradon?" Jack was not a big reader of comics and very little of the work Ramona had done by that time had had credits on it.
I told him about Ramona. I also rummaged through a pile Jack had of recent DC books he'd been sent until I found a couple of reprintings of Aquaman stories by Ramona. Jack looked at them and exclaimed, "She's great!" And he started pointing out interesting ways Ramona had staged what, in the hands of some other artists, would have been fairly placid drawings.
That was one of the things Jack felt was of paramount importance in drawing comics: Clear but imaginative staging. He felt a lot of artists could do one but not the other.
In the weeks that followed, we occasionally talked about having other artists perhaps take over some of the comics Jack had started for DC or wanted to start. Jack always mentioned Marie, Steve Ditko, Wally Wood, Don Heck, John Romita, Dan Spiegle, one or two others and "that lady whose work Mark showed me." He never remembered her name but he never forgot her drawing.
Okay, that's the first story about Ramona. You can count this next one as #2 or as an extension of #1…
It was at a Comic-Con International in the mid-nineties. Might have been 1995, which is when the last of these Ramona Fradon stories took place. Back in those days, I often moderated a Golden Age and/or Silver Age Panel. This is back when we had guests at the con who'd worked on comics in the so-called Golden or Silver Ages.
Ramona was at one of those panels and so was the great Al Williamson. I don't recall if they were both on the panel or if one of them was in the audience. I do recall that after the panel, Al took me aside and started asking me what comics Ramona had drawn.
I spotted nearby a pal of mine who was holding some issues of Metamorpho he'd brought to the panel to get Ramona to sign. He graciously allowed me to show them to Al…and Al did what so many artists in the business had always done: He imitated Jack Kirby — though in this case, without realized he was doing that. He said all the same things.
Then he had me introduce him to Ramona and he said all the same things again, only to her face. She was very flattered and more so later when she asked me who Al Williamson was and had me show her some of his work.
If I were a comic artist, I think I'd be pretty damn happy if either Jack Kirby or Al Williamson loved my work as much as they loved Ramona's. Even if every single other person who ever looked at one of my comics thought I stunk, I'd feel proud to impress just one of those men, let alone both.
Third story and I'm switching to the present-tense. It's the 1995 con and Ramona is an honored guest. She's still drawing the Brenda Starr newspaper strip and is not shy about telling everyone that she can't wait to be done with it. See earlier comments about how she came to prefer doing commissions rather than stories. Her contract is up soon…but not soon enough as far as she's concerned.
To clear time to attend the con, she'd rushed and handed in a large batch of strips ahead of time…and she brought her pencil roughs for them to the con to sell at her table. But there's this crisis: The finished strips she mailed off to the syndicate never arrived. Lost in the mail or something.
Whatever the reason, Ramona has to redraw them all that day. Re-creating the pencil art and the lettering is the easy part because she has those roughs. She stayed up much of the night doing that. But inking all those dailies will mean staying in her room all day. She won't be able appear on one panel. She won't be able to sit at her table making money doing sketches for her many fans.
Ramona tells me all this at the breakfast buffet at the Manchester Grand Hyatt. "After I eat, I have to back up to my room and spend the day inking," she tells me.
That does not seem right to me. I tell Ramona an idea I have and…well, let's just jump to a half-hour later at the con in the Artists' Alley section. I'm running around with the strips in pencil asking artists if they'd like to ink a panel of Ramona Fradon art.
Every single one of them says yes. Every single one.
I wish I could give you a full list. I just found an old article I wrote about this on Facebook and it mentions Paul Smith, Bob Smith, Jeff Parker, Rick Parker, George Freeman, Jim Amash, Scott Shaw!, Karl Kesel, Steve Leialoha, Colleen Doran, Trina Robbins and Al Gordon.
Others on Facebook mentioned Mark Schultz and I remember that I inked a background or two myself. In some cases, two artists sat very close together so one could ink the first panel of a strip while the other worked on the last panel on the same piece of illustration board.
I don't remember how many strips there were or how many artists inked a panel or part of a panel. I just remember we got the whole batch finished in about an hour. Ramona spent a little time retouching some odd variations on her style and thanking all who'd bailed her out.
I do remember the incredible feeling of camaraderie. Steve Leialoha just posted this on Facebook…
There was quite a crush of artists wanting to help out so Ramona could actually attend the con and not be stuck in her room. We were all long time fans and this was a great opportunity to repay her.
I also remember that among the artists who worked in the same area, an awful lot of "shop talk" about the craft of inking and how skillful Ramona's work was. If you were a beginning artist, you could have learned a lot eavesdropping on those conversations.
Lastly, I remember the one downside of the whole effort. We had more volunteers than we did panels that needed to be inked. A couple of fine artists heard what we were doing, rushed over and I had to tell them it was all taken. I believe that among the disappointed were Stan Sakai, Don Simpson and Mike Royer…
…and there was one artist who was really disappointed because he really, really wanted to ink some of Ramona's work and I hadn't thought to save him a panel. That artist was Al Williamson.
Early in January, the wonderful comic book illustrator Ramona Fradon announced her retirement. Today, we have the sad news that she has left us altogether. She was 97.
Ramona was an absolute delight both in person and on the page. She was born Ramona Dom and the Fradon came from her years married to New Yorker cartoonist Dana Fradon. Her father was a famous designer of logos and advertising materials and when she displayed some talent for drawing, he steered her towards art school. Her husband encouraged her too as did a friend, George Ward, who worked as an assistant to Walt Kelly on Pogo.
She eventually found her way to DC Comics around 1950 where among other assignments, she became the regular artist on the Aquaman feature. It was never a full-time job for her. Marriage and raising a family took precedence but for years, she supplemented the family income drawing comic books — one of the few women in the field.
She left comics briefly in the early sixties and then returned a few years later to co-create the super-hero Metamorpho with writer Bob Haney, then left again after drawing six issues. Her unique style seemed so much a part of the feature that her replacements slavishly imitated (and sometimes traced) what she'd done in those six issues. It was a decent imitation but readers must have sensed something was missing: Sales reportedly plunged the minute Ramona Fradon was replaced by a draw-alike.
Ramona found her way back into comics in 1972 and DC gladly put her to work on Plastic Man, Freedom Fighters, Super Friends and a little more Metamorpho. She also worked for other companies and became popular on the convention circuit, drawing for fans and taking orders for commissions, mainly of Aquaman and Metamorpho. Eventually, she came to prefer the commissions to regular comic book work — more freedom, fewer deadlines. She also for a time drew the Brenda Starr newspaper strip.
Like so many of her fans — and she had a lot o' them — I loved meeting Ramona and talking with Ramona. We had her on many a panel and today, I can't help but think that yet another giant of comics' earlier days is gone. We have so few of them remaining and she was one of the nicest and one of the best.