I love seeing American musicals in other languages. Here's a little bit of the Disney Beauty and the Beast musical as performed onstage in Kyoto, Japan…

• Uh-oh. Trump finally hired a smart attorney. You can tell he's smart because this one demanded to be paid in advance.

Before you read this, you might want to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4…

This chapter is about Chuck Cuidera. As mentioned back in Part 1, Cuidera was there at the beginning of Blackhawk, sometimes as an artist and sometimes as the inker who inked the work of another artist. He was involved in the feature's creation but I'm not prepared to say exactly how.  Will Eisner, best known as the creator of The Spirit, was the boss then and he too was involved, as was artist Bob Powell.  All three men have been cited as the strip's creator.

As mentioned in Part 3, Blackhawk underwent a major overhaul in 1967 as Carmine Infantino, newly installed in the editorial division of DC Comics, began making changes — some sweeping — in almost every comic they published. One of the major alterations he made was to break down the old system where each DC editor had a small group of freelancers who worked almost exclusively for that editor. He began moving freelancers around like chess pieces, discarding a few and moving others to different books with different editors. Ross Andru, for example, had drawn almost exclusively for comics edited by Robert Kanigher. Under the new system, Andru was routinely assigned to comics edited by Mort Weisinger or Julius Schwartz or anyone in the office.

Comics he penciled had almost always been inked by Mike Esposito. Comics penciled by Dick Dillin (like Blackhawk) were usually inked by Chuck Cuidera. Carmine decided to experiment by having inkers ink pencilers they had not inked in the past. Dillin soon proved to be quite valuable penciling super-hero comics, especially when not inked by Cuidera. So what to do with Chuck?

He inked a few other comics here and there and they weren't happy with him here or there. Then he penciled and inked a four-page war story that was published in Our Army at War #198.  It looked like the art had been heavily retouched by Joe Kubert, who had taken over as editor of the war titles from Kanigher.  Then Mr. Cuidera disappeared from comics…or at least any comics that I purchased.

I've always been interested in the men and women who create comic books. Honestly, I'm more interested in them than in the characters they write and/or draw…and I think some of them are more remarkable than the super-heroes they bring us. I was curious why a guy like Chuck Cuidera, who'd been working in comic books since 1940, suddenly vanished from the industry around 1969. I'd never met Chuck and really knew nothing about him except which books he'd worked on.

But I wondered: If a man specializes in one career for almost three decades, where does he then go to start a new career?  Cuidera, I later learned, broke into comics around 1939 and was primarily an inker for most of those decades.  Where did he go when he broke out (or was shoved out) of the business at the age of 53?

Visiting the DC offices in June of 1970, I got to talking with Nelson Bridwell, who was an assistant editor up there and the office's foremost Guy Who Knew Everything. We were discussing all the changes and hirings and firings that had occurred there in the previous year or three. When I asked about Cuidera, Nelson told me the following story. I am here reporting what he said then. I am not saying this is what actually happened.

He said Chuck was given a few assignments inking other artists and Carmine didn't like the results. (One of those he inked was Carmine.)  So they gave Chuck some short war stories to draw and he did them and Carmine didn't like those results, either. He directed Kubert to do serious art corrections on at least one (the one that was published) and Nelson thought the others were discarded.  Then they tried to figure out what else to try him on.

Before anyone came up with a thought, Chuck visited the office and happened to see the "corrected" pages. He blew up, stormed into Kubert's office and yelled at him and said he never wanted to work for that #@&*%@!!! company again. Fill in the curse words of your choice. Then he stormed out…out of the office and out of DC Comics forever.

This is what Nelson told me had happened, not long before…but Nelson had not witnessed any of this. It's what he'd been told so, he said, "That may not be exactly what happened." But it is true that Cuidera never worked for DC (or any publisher of comic books again) and only one of those war stories he'd drawn was ever printed.

Ten, maybe fifteen years later, I got to know Joe Kubert pretty well and we spent an evening or two at a comic book convention dining and hanging out. Joe loved to talk about comics and the people he'd worked with and when I asked him about Cuidera, he said something like, "We gave Chuck some war stories to draw and it didn't work out. Maybe he was rusty, all those years of inking and not penciling. He was unhappy having his work corrected. So were a lot of guys."

Joe went on to say that during the period in question, he thought the DC editorial division was too "handsy" with the artwork by freelancers, too eager to look at a page and say, "Oh, we need to fix this." He thought it was the proper move at times but it was done too often and sometimes too gratuitously as a kind of Power Move. As we all know, Jack Kirby's work during this period for DC was often heavily revised by folks in the office.

Kubert felt that was wrong and that he himself had done too much retouching on artists' work. Some of that was on the orders of his superiors but some of it was on his own volition. He recalled Cuidera being furious but perhaps not quite as furious as Nelson described.  But remember Nelson did not witness the blow-up…if indeed there was one.

I asked Joe if he knew what had become of Chuck. Many of the guys who were fired or who quit when Infantino took over at DC quickly surfaced at Marvel or elsewhere…but Chuck had truly disappeared from the industry. Joe said that comics were a part-time profession for Chuck. He was very much involved with scuba diving, both as a trainer and as someone who sold and even designed equipment.  That one published war story over which they almost came to blows was about scuba divers.  It's a good bet it was assigned to Chuck for that reason, perhaps even written with him in mind.

Joe recalled hearing something about Chuck getting involved in city planning.  "Someone told me he was on the city council or some sort of office in Essex, New Jersey.  If you ever find out anything about him, please let me know."

That conversation was around 1985 or so. I heard nothing about Chuck Cuidera but around April or May of 1999, I was having a phone conversation with my friend Dave Siegel. Dave was then a cab driver in Las Vegas with a great interest in old comic books and in the folks who made them. He loved to track down guys who'd worked in comics, especially in the forties, and who had long since disappeared from the field. Dave had been instrumental in getting some of them invited to San Diego Comic-Cons (the annual event now known as Comic-Con International) and he was the main mover behind the annual Golden Age Panel that I moderated until we ran out of folks who qualified to be on it.

That day in '99, he asked me if I had any idea what had become of Chuck Cuidera, the Blackhawk guy. I told him what Kubert had told me and Dave began working the phone. Before the day was out, he called me back and said, "I found Chuck Cuidera! He's alive and well! Do you think we could get him invited as a Guest of Honor at San Diego this year?" It turned out we could. The convention has always been very good about that kind of thing.

In those years, Will Eisner was a regular at the con so naturally, the thought arose of doing a panel with Will and Chuck discussing their work together on Blackhawk and other comics. I called a friend who had dealt recently with Eisner to get Will's current contact info. He gave it to me but cautioned that he sensed there might be some sort of bad blood between Eisner and Cuidera. "You could be opening old wounds," he said. Maybe so but I didn't think it could hurt to ask.

He'd given me Will's fax number so I wrote a note and faxed it his way, mentioning that I'd heard a rumor he didn't get along with Chuck but I was hoping that was not the case. And if it was not the case, would he appear on a panel with Chuck at the con? Then I waited. And waited. Two weeks passed and I was thinking maybe I'd touched some nerve or something and upset the great Will Eisner. That was until I received a fax from Will. I'll let you read it in his own handwriting…

The panel was arranged at a time convenient for all and it went very well and there's a partial transcript of it on this blog. You can read the first part of it here and the second part of it here.

You will notice that when we got to the part about Chuck getting out of comics, I asked him, "Was there a specific event? Were you not getting enough work? Were you tired of it?" I was thinking about the fabled altercation with Joe Kubert and wondering what he'd say. And as you can also notice, he just said he got out because he wasn't making enough money, which in and of itself was almost certainly true.  He wasn't getting a lot of work and the work he was getting didn't pay enough to keep your head above water.  Which is important in this world even if you aren't a scuba diver.

When we were alone after the panel, I asked him about the Kubert incident and he said it absolutely did not happen. Everything about his exit from DC was cordial and he left just because he wanted to go do something that would pay better.  He said that getting out of comics when he did and getting into his new profession was one of the best things that ever happened to him

You can believe that or not.  I can certainly believe he was happy with his new profession and income.  But given what Nelson Bridwell and Joe Kubert told me, I wonder how voluntary it was.

But hey, maybe that's the way Chuck honestly remembered it.  It's a good example of a problem some of us run into trying to record comic book history. In fact, it probably applies to most kinds of history that is preserved only in some memories, not on paper. Often, differing accounts all fit together fairly neatly but sometimes, they don't…as with the question of who created Blackhawk in the first place.

Chuck Cuidera passed away in 2001. I remain grateful to Dave Siegel for locating him and getting him to the 1999 convention so that we could meet Chuck and he could get some applause and an Inkpot Award. I suspect that appearance led to DC Comics sending him some very nice amounts of money for reprints or other services and I believe he was invited to a few other cons.

And I agree with something Will Eisner said on that panel. He said, "Chuck Cuidera made Blackhawk what it was…and he should get the credit." For that, those of us who loved the comic — especially if we worked on it — should all be grateful to both Will Eisner and Chuck Cuidera.  And I like that Chuck's story seems to have had a happy ending.

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David Grudt did some more research on that Keep U.S. Beautiful special we've been talking about. Sez he, it did indeed air on 3/27/73. On the West Coast, it followed the Academy Awards — this was back when they aired on NBC — which started at 7 PM and were supposed to conclude in time for a Bob Hope Special at 9 PM and Keep U.S. Beautiful at 10. The Oscars, of course, ran over…by 38 minutes so the two specials (and the 11 PM news and The Tonight Show) were delayed accordingly. On the East Coast, Keep U.S. Beautiful was on at 8 PM and Hope at 9 PM and the Oscars started at 10:00.

Some years later, the Academy and whichever network was then airing them decided it wasn't a good idea for the most important awards to be presented when for so much of the country, it was after 12:30 in the morning so adjustments were made. Thanks, Dave.

I was going to run this thing for the whole month of September but I've decided to stop hectoring you for loot this weekend. Oh, you'll still be able to send money any time you want, as is the custom with most non-commercial blogs (and even some commercial ones) but I don't like this blog as much when every few messages, I have my hand out. We're near the number that will cover running and recoding this blog until next Labor Day so I'm only going to post one more of these tomorrow and that's it.

My gratitude is great and my enthusiasm for posting here has been renewed. Here's the next-to-the-last one of these you'll see here until I get next year's bill from my hosting company…

Contrary to recent rumors, we're now hearing that the ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood (which includes my fave place to see a movie — the Cinerama Dome) will not be reopening this year. They're now saying "the latter part of 2023." Drat.

I've been watching old stand-up routines by comedians I like. Here's Jeff Ross from 1998…

The longest-running Broadway musical ever, The Phantom of the Opera, has announced its final performance will be February 18, 2023. It would not surprise me if this announcement sparks a surge of folks who want to see it again or even for the first time. And it would not surprise me if that surge caused the closing date to be delayed. But the end is probably in sight.

As we noted here, the next longest-running musical — the revival of Chicago — is 3,643 performances behind Phantom. At eight performances a week, that means it would take a little more than 455 weeks (or close to nine years) after Phantom closes for Chicago to tie that record.

Very busy today. The next installment of the Blackhawk history will be along tonight or maybe tomorrow.

This week, I lunched with former blogger Ken Levine. He's shut down his fine and fun long-running blog but (a) he's still doing his weekly podcasts and (b) the blog is still online and you can still browse it and enjoy that which you read before and that which you missed. Also: I've long resisted requests from people — usually strangers looking to plug something — to do "guest posts" on my blog. I still resist that but if Ken has something he needs or even just wants to say, I'll make an exception for him. And I've added a link to his podcasts in my right-hand margin.

Thanks to all of you who sent in suggestions for my iPhone problems. Some good ideas there and maybe some of them will even work. A few of you reminded me of a guy who used to write me every time I posted a computer problem here. I'd say the "v" key on my keyboard was sticking and ask what to do. This guy would write — and this was his solution to everything — "Throw out that crappy P.C. and buy a MAC, the only decent computer that has ever been made." Sometimes, he predicted that all the makers of P.C.s would be outta business within three years…and he started saying that in 2003. And today, that man is Mike Lindell…

Lastly for now: A few folks overseas have written to ask how they can donate to this blog since they somehow can't do it via PayPal. Well, you could send a check to me at the address over on this page. And again, I thank everyone who gave any amount via any means.

You've probably all seen this clip of Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show interviewing a Trump supporter a few years back. The gentleman thought it was very suspicious that Barack Obama wasn't at his desk in the Oval Office on 9/11. If you haven't seen it, it's in here…and maybe a dozen other places on YouTube. It gets rerun a lot. It was all over social media on the recent anniversary of that awful day.

I think Mr. Klepper owes it to us and to that guy to track him down for a follow-up interview. It shouldn't be hard if he signed a release which contained contact info. Give the fellow a chance to admit he was wrong or to present some hard evidence that Obama was too president when 9/11 happened. Or at least, give this clueless interviewee a nice thank-you present for all the use you've gotten out of that footage.

I like TV theme songs, especially from kids' shows and I like a cappella barbershop-style singing so I like this video by the Ashatones…

• The nice thing about Lindsey Graham is that if you don't like some political position he takes, just wait a while. Sooner or later, he'll say the exact opposite.

Before you read this, you might want to read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3…

George Kashdan left his job as a DC editor in early 1968, just as Editorial Director Irwin Donenfeld was hiring a new editor — Dick Giordano, who had previously been the executive editor at Charlton Comics. Giordano took over some of the comics Kashdan had been editing including Blackhawk. One of his many immediate problems was what the heck to do with that comic. The story arc that turned the combat team into a super-hero team had clearly not worked.

The first day in his new job, Dick was sitting at the desk he'd inherited from Kashdan and…well, wait. I'll let my friend Marv Wolfman tell you what happened. Marv was not yet a professional comic book writer but he soon would be…

I was a huge Blackhawk fan and was livid when they changed the characters into what they called, and we all agreed, were "the Junk-Heap Heroes." I was still a fan producing only fanzines but decided to show them "how it should be done." Julie Schwartz had sent me several comic scripts because I wrote letters to his books. Thanks to them, I knew what a script looked like so I wrote up a story. Yes, I was a part of the MBGA movement — Make Blackhawk Great Again.

I sent it to the comic's editor, knowing for sure it was great. And I never heard back. Weeks went by. No letter back. Continents rose and sank. No letter back.

A year or so passed by and still no response. Eventually, the editor on Blackhawk was replaced with a new editor, Dick Giordano, and on day one, he found a never-opened manila envelope in the back of his desk drawer.

Dick opened it and it was my script. He had met me at a comic con and I had sent him my fanzines so to some extent, he knew me. He called and asked if I still wanted him to read it and I said yes. Dick liked it and bought the story but he assigned the dialog job to Bob Haney, who if memory serves was the current writer on Blackhawk. Still, it was my first sale and I was thrilled.

To this day, I have no clue why the previous editor kept the still-sealed envelope with my script in his desk but never opened it. If he wasn't interested in reading it, why didn't he throw it out?

Marv's script was a really impressive first sale. It was Blackhawk done the way folks like me who loved the old Blackhawk wanted to see the new Blackhawk done.

But Giordano had a problem getting it drawn. The comic's regular artists, Dick Dillin and Chuck Cuidera, were no longer available to him. Dillin, for reasons I'll explain in the next chapter, was now being assigned to super-hero books at DC. I'll also tell you in the next part what became of Chuck Cuidera. A new artist was needed.

Giordano had a thought: The best Blackhawk comics of the forties and early fifties had been drawn by Reed Crandall, who was now living in Wichita, Kansas and doing the occasional art job for Warren's Creepy and Eerie magazines and for a Flash Gordon comic book published by a small firm called King Comics. King had recently shut down so, Dick thought, Mr. Crandall might be in need of work. Dick called Crandall to see if he was available and interested.

Mr. Crandall was both so they agreed on what he would be paid and on the deadline by which he would deliver the finished art, and Giordano mailed the script to Kansas. He was very pleased with how things were working out…and confident that the book, one of the first he was assembling for his new employer, would be very impressive.

And then like Marv Wolfman, he waited. And waited. The deadline came and went with no artwork arriving from Reed Crandall.

With the printer deadline growing near, Dick kept phoning, trying to reach Crandall to find out when he'd be getting the pages. After several days, Crandall finally answered the phone and when Dick told me this story — still trembling a bit from the memory — he said, "I really didn't understand why but he hadn't started on it and was not going to. So I was in deep trouble." Dick was in deeper trouble when he realized that he didn't have a copy of the script — or if he did, couldn't find it…and Bob Haney didn't have a carbon copy either. This was way before computers or even cheap copiers.

First things first, he needed an artist. This was also before FedEx and Dropbox so it would help if the artist lived somewhere near Kansas. That is, assuming Reed Crandall could be persuaded to mail the script to that artist. Dick remembered that while he was in charge at Charlton, there was an artist who lived in Texas who had done some amazing deadline-saving jobs. That artist was Pat Boyette and he lived in San Antonio, a little over 600 miles from Wichita.

The fastest mail at the time was Special Delivery which would take a lot less time to get the script to San Antonio than it would to get it back to New York where the DC offices were located. Dick called Pat, who immediately agreed to drop everything else in his life and to pencil, letter and ink the story as fast as humanly possible. Fortunately, he was a fan of the old Blackhawk comics and had some around so he had reference on the characters.

Also fortunately: When Dick called Reed Crandall, Crandall agreed to send the script via Special Delivery to Pat. While he waited for it to arrive, Pat drew a cover for the book based on Dick's over-the-phone description of the villain and what kind of scene he had in mind. Pat even designed a new title logo for the comic, though the lettering at the bottom was done in New York by Gaspar Saladino.

How long did it take Pat Boyette to draw Blackhawk #242? Marv remembers it as a weekend. Dick thought it was about four days. When I asked Pat about it once, he said, "I have no idea. I just knew I didn't eat or sleep much. It might have been three or four days." To give you some measure of how fast that was, there was another fine artist who worked for Charlton and later worked for DC. His name was Jim Aparo and he would pencil, letter and ink one page a day. He was not considered slow. That was about average.

For that issue of Blackhawk, Pat had to do the cover and a 23 page story. There were two half-page ads in the story and one third-page ad so it was really 21 and two-thirds pages…but even that seems humanly-impossible. And remember: This was a comic about seven heroes plus Lady Blackhawk and a whole lotta villains and airplanes. It wasn't about one guy wandering through the desert.

And yeah, you could see in places it was rushed…but I remember buying this comic and thinking it was terrific. The next issue, which Haney wrote and which Pat had some time to draw, looked even better. That was #243 and it was the last issue of Blackhawk at the time. Marv Wolfman wasn't involved with that issue but having "broken in" with the previous one, he was now positioned to do more for DC Comics…which he did, for Giordano and other editors there. He's had a fabulous career since and it all started because George Kashdan didn't fully clean out his desk.

Axing Blackhawk when they did meant that DC management did not even wait for sales figures on the new "old look" before terminating the book. They just looked at the numbers of the last few super-hero issues and said, "It's done."

Dick did not recall those last two selling well enough to reverse that decision. I have a belief that during this period, DC Management was way too quick to give up on a new comic or even a new version of an old one. One tepid sales report and they'd cancel a book like Anthro or Bat Lash or Secret Six without giving readers a chance to discover all that new wonderment. The return of Blackhawk to its roots might well have been another example of that.

It was, of course, not the end of Blackhawk. It was just the end of Blackhawk for eight years. Our story will continue.

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Dark Horse Comics has announced the release dates for the next Groo mini-series…

The bumbling barbarian Groo has made quite a name for himself, traveling the land and cleaving a path of destruction and cheese dip. He is either so greatly feared or favored wherever he goes, Groo's earthly reputation causes a Groo deity to arise in the heavens! While Earthbound Groo hungers, his Divine Groo alter ego unleashes chaos! Plus, Sergio's legendary back cover Rufferto strips return! Groo: Gods Against Groo #1 (of 4) will be available at comic stores on December 21 2022.

And then you get #2 in January, #3 in February and…well, you can figure out the pattern.

As usual, Sergio Aragonés draws, he and I collaborate on the story and Stan Sakai letters. Groo remains one of the few comic books published today which is lettered the old-fashioned way: A talented calligrapher with pen and ink letters right on the same pieces of illustration board on which the artist draws. No computer involvement. We also have a letters page, which is something you don't see in many comic books these days.

Not so "as usual" is that this mini-series is the first one colored, not by Tom Luth who has been doing that Herculean task since 1983 (!), but by our new colorist, Carrie Strachan. Tom has retired from Groo coloring to pursue other, saner interests and we thank him for his long, superb service. The last Groo story he colored — and I hope it isn't the last ever — is the eight-pager that's appearing in the Comics For Ukraine benefit book. We hate to see Tom depart but we're really happy we found Carrie.

The four-issue Gods Against Groo mini-series is of a piece with two previous Groo mini-serieses — The Fray of the Gods and The Play of the Gods. All three will probably wind up in a big hardcover collection at some point.

Of possible interest is that, while there are a few different ways to count, Gods Against Groo seems to end with the 200th all-Groo comic book. We did eight issues for Pacific Comics, one special for Eclipse, then two graphic novels and 120 regular-sized issues of Groo for Marvel's Epic Line. That's 131 publications that had naught but Groo in them. Then we did twelve issues for Image Comics, which brings us to 143.

We moved to Dark Horse Comics in 1998. Not counting the mini-series which bows in December, we've done ten four-issue minis for them, one twelve-issue series and one anniversary special. If my math is correct, that takes us up to 196 Groo comics. So the last issue of this new four-issue series will be the 200th Groo comic book.

Now, there are other ways to figure this. We're counting the two graphic novels the same as regular-sized comics. We're ignoring the six issues of The Groo Chronicles that Marvel/Epic released since they were mostly reprint and we're ignoring all the paperback and hardcover reprints and reconfigurations of this material. We're also not counting all the short Groo stories that have appeared here and there in other publications and we are counting the Groo/Conan mini-series and the Groo/Tarzan mini-series. But no matter how you figure it, it's a whole mess o' Groo.

Another weird one from The Muppets on The Ed Sullivan Show. This one was from November 24, 1968…