Here's Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone explaining the messy bankruptcy maneuvers of Alex Jones. This may be of interest to folks who have no interest in Alex Jones but don't know how bankruptcy, in all its many forms, works…

A museum called The National Comedy Center is located in Jamestown, New York — the town where Lucille Ball was born. I wish she'd been born in a city which is easier to get to. I have friends who've visited this shrine and they all said it was not the easiest of commutes…though well worth the effort. I will have to make that effort one of these days. They keep adding reasons why I have to go and one of the latest ones is a whole wing devoted to the archives of Carl Reiner…

After a long hiatus, Randy Rainbow is back with, of course, a song about Kevin McCarthy. Mr. Rainbow is not nice to this man…

At some point in the next 48 hours, a technician-type person will be installing new software on this blog. I wrote the original template for its design a long, long time ago and it is now outta-date and not compatible with certain technological changes in how a website like this operates. I haven't the time nor the know-how to write a new template so I hired someone who does…with money that many of you graciously donated when I did a little telethon here some months back. You also helped pay my hosting bill for most of this year and I thank you again.

When things change, this blog will look almost like it has for years but with a few modifications. There will be things that will have to be fixed and changed, either by my tech guy or me and it may take a week or two to get everything running properly. No need to write and tell me that this page or that section looks weird or doesn't work right. It will be fixed as soon as we can get to it. Just bear with me until we get the bugs out.

Here we have more stills and video clips from old Las Vegas. Look who was playing at some of the casinos then…

Hollie Buchanan sent me this question…

I've appreciated your recent pieces about artists and how they were forced (or wrangled, perhaps) into arrangements or projects they didn't want (or worse, to my sensibility, having the art changed after its completion). Could you discuss the degree to which that sort of thing happened to writers? I am aware of occasional distinctions between creator, plotter, and scripter and I know that initial direction sometimes came from editors, but I am not aware of anything like Kirby's Superman being redrawn.

Being a writer in some situations means being rewritten. It's especially common on projects where you don't hold the copyright and where you're working with a property you in no way own. If I'm writing someone else's characters, I generally don't have the final say.

And just as artwork is sometimes altered, so sometimes are scripts. I once worked for an editor who (I thought) was motivated to rewrite something in every script that he bought…often a gratuitous change. From afar, I've witnessed editors do this to try and prove to their superiors that they're earning their money and/or are indispensable. In the case of this particular editor, I think it was just that he was convinced he could improve any script. Sometimes, I thought he did but not always.

That kind of thing happens a lot in live-action television…less in animation and even less in comic books. There are good and bad things about working in each area and one of the things that I love about writing comic books is how infrequently that happens. But it does happen.

I'm thinking now of one veteran comic book writer I shall not identify. I think he may have had a contract that guaranteed him a certain amount of work or it may have been that because of past service, the company felt an obligation to keep giving him steady assignments. He's passed on but I still don't feel it would be right to give his name.

Whatever the reason, he was assigned to several comics that were probably not "right" for him (or vice-versa) and even when he was working in his area of past expertise, a large percentage of what he handed in was judged unusable. So it was heavily rewritten in the office…

…and I know this because Len Wein and I once rewrote one of his scripts together and Len had rewritten a lot of them on his own. I asked him why we were doing that. Why didn't he tell the writer what was wrong with it and let the guy have another crack at it? Len said, "I've tried that and what I get back is always farther off the mark. Believe me, this is easier for everyone." I would say we redid 75% of that script…and no, the credits did not indicate that. Len said the writer had never complained about such rewrites…if he even noticed.

Changes in artwork in a comic are more obvious. There are a lot of online forums in which folks discuss changes we've spotted — like John Romita (Sr.) redrawing characters in a story drawn by someone else at Marvel — as he often did. At times, there has been a lot of that in some company's output. I keep reminding people that just because something was changed, it doesn't mean the original artist screwed up. It just means some editor, wisely or foolishly, wanted something changed.

I have seen editors make changes and later regret them. Joe Kubert once did a lot of redrawing on a war comic that Dan Spiegle drew for DC. A few years later at Comic-Con, I introduced Dan and Joe to each other and Joe immediately apologized to Dan and told him, "I shouldn't have done that. What you drew was better." I think Joe's judgement was skewed a bit by an attitude at the company then that what the freelancers handed in always needed a bit of in-house improving to make it publishable.

Sometimes, work can be improved. Sometimes, there are valid reasons to change something. It just shouldn't be tampered with because someone's trying to prove who's boss.

I have to deal with a little knee problem. It's nothing major but it may prevent me from posting much today. I'll bet if you look hard, you can find something interesting on the Internet from someone else.

Mike Masters sent me this…

I enjoyed your recent piece on John Buscema, an artist whose work I admired greatly. I was aware he preferred doing historical work or Conan, and near the end, Marvel had him do a long form standalone Arthurian adaptation and noted it was a passion project for the artist.

From what you said, telling him "I really enjoyed your 2nd Avengers run, especially 'Siege' wouldn't necessarily get the response one expected. This got me to wondering. Can you think of other people in comics or film who are less than thrilled to be associated with what they are most known for? I read years ago that Vivian Vance was horrified she'd go through life with people thinking she was actually married to William Frawley and Alec Guinness seemed to be embarrassed by Star Wars.

Was Curt Swan proud of his work on Superman? What about Ditko and Spider-Man? Jack Kirby and anything? (Please don't tell me you're embarrassed by Blackhawk; that'd be heartbreaking.) In a nutshell, is Buscema the exception or was he just more vocal?

If you'd told John Buscema you loved some work he did on The Avengers, he would have thanked you and possibly muttered something about how he hoped you also saw certain of his other projects. Don't mistake being prouder of one piece of work than another for not being proud of the latter.

Everyone with any body of work is happier with certain jobs than others. They can't expect you to rank what they've done in the same order and — speaking for myself here — sometimes, it's nice to hear that someone liked something I didn't think turned out so well.  Makes me think, "Well, maybe that wasn't as big a disaster as I thought."

Actually, John told people that the work he least enjoyed at Marvel was in 1969 and 1970 when they had him drawing stories for My Love and Our Love Story. I thought the work was outstanding and I know a lot of artists collect those issues as examples of how to draw beautiful women…but Buscema thought the stories were stupid.  And again, he was drawing people in modern day dress and settings which didn't interest him half as much as fantasy material, especially the kind that oozed testosterone.

Generally speaking, creators and performers love compliments but sometimes, you may hit on a sore spot. I don't know anything about how Alec Guinness felt about Star Wars but it wouldn't surprise me if someone who'd done so much fine, respected work had some problem with people who only knew him as Obi-Wan-Kenobi and seemed to not know he'd done anything else of note.

Late in life, Henry Fonda picked up some serious money doing ads like this…

He was amused — or maybe "bemused" is this right word — that so many younger people he met thought of him as a commercial spokesguy. They didn't care, if they even knew, that he'd been in The Grapes of Wrath, The Ox Bow Incident, My Darling Clementine, Mister Roberts, 12 Angry Men and dozens of other great films. (By the way, the little girl in that commercial is Jodie Foster.)

I've seen some actors bothered if someone praises long ago work and says nothing about more recent accomplishments.  What they hear is "Gee, you were good a long time ago!" When I met Robert Morse, for example, he was pleased that I didn't act like How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying was the only thing of note he'd ever done. Imagine if you were Jodie Foster and people kept telling you today, "Oh, I loved you in that View Master commercial with Henry Fonda!"

Vivian Vance, I have read, was bothered by people calling her "Ethel" and thinking she was the right age to be married to William Frawley, who was actually 22 years older than she was. They also didn't get along very well. Some actors do resent that people think they are the characters they play…or that one particular role is all they can do.

Swan, Ditko and Kirby were all proud of most of the things they did…and I would venture that they were all proudest of how long they'd been productive and employed.  Individual stories or books might not have mattered as much to them as the lifetime batting average.

I remember how Nick Cardy was actually moved to tears on occasion by younger professionals telling him, "Your work was one of the main reasons I became an artist." He was proud of many things he'd done and frustrated that some of them had not lived up to the standard he'd tried to set for himself. But what he was proudest of was that he'd had a long, productive career and that it had meant something to someone.

I love photos and films of old Las Vegas — especially the marquees out front of the hotels. There, you can see some of the amazing entertainment that was being offered there. Take a look at this montage of old marquees. Betcha see a couple of shows there you would have liked to have seen…

If you're going to get involved in discussions about the handling of classified documents, you ought to read what Fred Kaplan has to say about classified documents.

This is my schedule for Comic-Con International 2008, the year I somehow found myself hosting seventeen panels in four days. And, like that's not enough to keep a guy busy, doing three signings and presenting the Bill Finger Award at the Friday night award ceremony.

That was not as difficult as it sounds, especially back when I was fifteen years younger than I am today. By contrast, I hosted or was on ten panels in three days at the 2022 con (plus one signing) and I was about as tired as I've ever been in my life. Part of that was the age difference but part of it was that due to The Pandemic, I was not in as good walking shape and not as accustomed to dealing with crowds. I probably need to train for these things.

Earlier today, I did something I should have known better than to do. I posted a message saying that I didn't think Alec Baldwin should be charged in the matter of the shooting on the set of his movie, Rust. And I still think there's a massive hole in the case if even after a year-long investigation, no one can explain how live ammo got into the gun or even onto the set.

But I got a number of calm, well-reasoned messages that, while they didn't convince me he should be charged, did convince me I should know more about the case before I decide he should. And that reminded me of all the times in the past that I've felt that "armchair juries" — people watching from afar who haven't heard all the facts and both sides — have made their minds up too quickly about legal cases. So I decided to withdraw my opinion and have removed the message.

My position is now that I need to know more about the case if I'm going to form an opinion. And that's a big "IF" because, as I often do with trials that people watch as distant spectators, I may decide I don't need to form an opinion at all.

George Santos denies report that he was a drag queen — despite his ex-friend releasing photos

The latest issue of that fine publication, Back Issue magazine (#141 with Nick Fury on the cover) has an article I wrote for them. It's about my experiences writing the Crossfire comic that Eclipse published some time in the late twentieth century and in it, I said the following…

Crossfire was, as you may know, a spinoff from The DNAgents, a comic I co-created with my friend Will Meugniot. Several places on the Internet, I get listed as sole creator, and that's just plain wrong. The DNAgents comic was created by Evanier and Meugniot. Crossfire was created by Evanier, Meugniot and Spiegle. If you come across someone saying otherwise, please help me out here and let them (or me) know.

I put that in because I am super-sensitive about misattribution of credits, especially creator credits. Even if future money is not at stake — and often it is — I think it is a very bad thing to do to someone. It's bad when it's done accidentally. It's worse when it's done intentionally. And it's also bad when it's done accidentally and no one corrects it. I may be too militant about this but I have seen how it has wronged people I care about and not just Jack Kirby.

I have, as most people know, very mixed feelings about Stan Lee and among the negatives are the many times he took sole credit for what were inarguably collaborative works. But — and Stan and I once had a slightly-heated argument about this — I also fault him for the many times that reporters or other folks gave him sole credit and he enjoyed the mistakes instead of correcting them. I wouldn't have expected him to catch every instance but I thought he should have done it way more often than he did. Never correcting it leads to the miscredit being repeated again and again and again.

So I said what I said in the piece for Back Issue and then I got to the end of it and found that the editor (or someone) had written a line explaining who I was…

Former Jack Kirby associate and biographer MARK EVANIER is a writer of comic books, television, and television animation. He is the co-creator of Groo the Wanderer, with Sergio Aragonés.

No, I am not the co-creator of Groo the Wanderer, with Sergio Aragonés. I am the guy who works with the creator of Groo the Wanderer, Sergio Aragonés. The difference may not matter to you but it matters to me.

And now we bring you my schedule of panels from Comic-Con International 2007…