In the coming months, you're going to be hearing a lot about Special Prosecutors. You're probably going to be hearing more about Hunter Biden's laptop but you'll be hearing a lot about Special Prosecutors.
So what the heck is a Special Prosecutor, what's so special about them and what do they do? Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone is here with an explainer which you may want to watch. I would post more of his videos here if he ended them by singing a few choruses of "Sweet Caroline"…
Eric Idle was recently on a TV show and he was asked about "cancel culture"…
Asked about Dave Chappelle's complaints that he is being silenced for his controversial jokes, Idle responded: "Where does he say it? On SNL? Well, you're not being that much cancelled, are you? If you were in your room complaining, I'd have a lot more sympathy.
"I didn't like it when Bill Maher complains about the audience for not laughing. They're telling you they don't find it funny. You shouldn't moan about the audience. There's nothing wrong with the audience. If they don't laugh at your jokes, there's something wrong with your jokes. I'm not terribly sympathetic to that sort of attitude, to be honest."
Chappelle and Maher are both hit-'n'-miss with me…sometimes brilliant, sometimes not. I don't buy that the "not" times are all because the audience (of which I'm a member) is not hip enough, too uptight on certain subjects, too "woke," whatever. It is possible for even the best comedian to aim, fire and miss; for the material to just not strike that particular audience as funny. A lot of comedians don't like to admit fallibility so they blame the audience.
I remember a comedian I saw once at the Improv and spoke with later out in the street as we were leaving. No, let me correct that: I remember his act, not his name, and I don't think I've seen the guy since. I suspect no one has.
This was around the time Obama was newly-installed as Prez and the comic's jokes, which did not go over well in the room, were all based on the premise that Obama was stupid. So many were built on that premise that I suspect the guy was trying to recycle his old George W. Bush jokes by just changing the name. If you're going to be a topical comedian, you need to pay careful attention to the expiration dates on your material.
The audience didn't laugh. They just didn't buy the basic premise…didn't hear any underlying truth coming from the stage. I don't think even most of those who hated the Obama presidency thought the guy was dumb. Barack Obama was a tough guy to make jokes about, especially compared to the guys before and after him…and it's never been a matter of Democrat vs. Republican. The first of the two President George Bushes was a tough guy to make jokes about, whereas Bill Clinton was the easiest ever until Trump came along.
Still, this comedian's excuse for the non-laughter during his set that night was that the audience was too "tightass" about their beloved Barack. It couldn't possibly have been that the jokes misfired…or even that he simply did a bad job of reading the room. If you were hired to entertain a roomful of octogenarians at a retirement home and you bombed with 20 minutes of dick jokes, whose fault is that?
And like I said, I haven't seen that comedian since that night at the Improv and, honest-to-Lenny-Bruce, I don't recall his name. If he's still on this planet, he's probably working tiny clubs or maybe a whole other profession, bitching constantly that he's not getting work as a comedian because he's too controversial and he's been "canceled."
I'm against shunning people just because they say something that rubs people the wrong way…but people do have the right to feel rubbed the wrong way. They even have the right to decide they don't think you're funny and that they don't want to pay money to see you.
Comic books from the company called Charlton graced American newsstands from (roughly) 1945 to 1986. Based in Derby, Connecticut where they owned a printing plant, Charlton was an unusual operation that usually paid its writers and artists the lowest rates in the business…and occasionally managed to put forth a product that didn't look it. There were some very fine comics now and then out of that outfit, possibly more than they deserved.
The story of the company itself is fascinating and historian Jon B. Cooke has recently given us an exhaustive and amazing book that recounts that history. To put it simply: I am stunned by how much he was able to uncover, especially this long after Charlton is out of business and most of the folks involved in it have passed. I would not have thought it was humanly possible to amass as much information as he gives in The Charlton Companion, which has just been released by my friends at TwoMorrows Books.
He covers how the company was founded behind bars in a jail cell…all its business dealings of questionable legality…how it grew out of the sheet music business…how it survived a major flood…how it made Larry Flynt rich and powerful…how it managed to do comics cheaper than just about anyone…
If you have the slightest interest in the subject matter, you need a copy of this one…the best book on comic book history I've seen in a long time. Order yours right here and count the days 'til it arrives.
I still have industrial-strength dehumidifiers running 24/7 in my home to fully dry out the interior of walls that were flooded more than ten days ago…but portions of the house are returning to some semblance of reality. I actually have running water (hot and cold) in all the places that are supposed to have running water and none in spots where they're not. The place is becoming functional again, which is not to say it won't take months before all the repairs are made.
Volume 8 of The Complete Pogo is now reaching retailers and the folks at Amazon expect to be shipping copies next Tuesday. Since almost all of the credit goes to others, I can say it's a beautiful book collecting two prime years of what I've long thought was the best newspaper strip ever done. You can order it here or you can order it and the previous volume in a neat slipcase here. I highly recommend you do one or the other.
Here's another look at the curtain call from the opening of the Broadway musical, A Beautiful Noise. And there's Neil Diamond himself leading the cast and audience in guess-what-song…
Corey Klemow read this post then sent me this…
Minor question about the "Mouse That Roared" pilot — it runs for 32 minutes and 33 seconds. Most hour-long shows in 1966 had approximately 50 minutes of actual content and ten minutes of commercials. Most sitcoms had about 25 minutes of content and 5 minutes of commercials.
So what's up with a 32.5 minute pilot? Presuming this was going to be a half-hour sitcom, is it a rough cut they were planning on hacking about 7.5 minutes out of before broadcast if it was picked up? It seems to me that in those days before streaming you'd want to demonstrate to a network that you could turn in a product that was the proper length. Then again, maybe that's part of why this didn't get picked up…?
Networks sometimes (note the italics) will tell the producers of pilots that it's not necessary to make them broadcast-ready because they may never be broadcast…and you'll notice that The Mouse That Roared video says on it, "Not for broadcast." They just want to see the concept and the show and the cast and what the thing looks like…and if it's longer, it might give them more of a sense of the program.
I don't think this ever aired. If it did, they probably went back in and did some editing to get it down to the right length for a thirty-minute time slot. But it probably didn't. This is not unusual.
The last live-action pilot that I worked on — I think I was co-producer — was a science-fantasy thing for Fox and we were explicitly told that we didn't have to — and shouldn't even try to — deliver it in broadcast-ready format. So among the many things we did differently was that we didn't spend any money recording a soundtrack or buying the rights to existing music. We just plugged in records — some pretty great stuff, as I recall — and if they'd decided to air the show, we would have gone back in and replaced that music or bought the rights to use it.
I think that pilot, which was for an hour series, ran about an hour without commercials. Again, had they decided to air it, it would have been altered. The networks don't always allow this. Sometimes, they want a pilot delivered in a form that could air if they so chose. But sometimes, they don't.
In recent years, I've almost never watched election night on TV, nor followed the minute-by-minute returns. Usually, I just wait until a little news flash pops up on my iPhone screen telling me NBC News (or whoever) has projected a winner. Or maybe if I'm on the 'net reading something not related to the election, I see an announcement in the margins or on Twitter.
Last night, for no visible reason, I was watching as the returns came in on the Warnock/Walker race and at times, it seemed way closer than it actually was. Herschel Walker seemed to me like the worst possible candidate, coming across as outright stupid, uninformed and not quite understanding of what the job involved. I get the feeling that a lot of people who voted for him felt the same way…but they weren't really voting for Walker. They were just voting for The Republican…or maybe in some cases, the Trump pick. It's still kind of frightening that he came as close as he did.
For some moments there, as the results trickled in, he came a little too close at times and was even briefly leading for fifteen minutes around the time the percentage of votes counted was hovering at 91%. I could have spared myself some needless angst if I'd taken the advice that Josh Marshall offers this morning: "Save Your Brain: Don't Watch TV on Election Night." An excerpt…
If you were watching last night's election on TV you probably had the sense the race was a close run thing with the lead bouncing back and forth, with Herschel Walker possibly mounting a comeback after weeks of coverage that made Raphael Warnock appear a favorite to win a full term.
If you watched the results through my curated Twitter feed of election number crunchers, though, you saw something very different: from the very first returns it looked likely and then with growing clarity that the results would roughly bear out the polls which showed Warnock with modest but significant lead. The final results this morning show Warnock beating Walker by just shy of three percentage points, almost on the dot of what the consensus of polls predicted.
The man is right. When you watch live, your view is colored by the order in which the ballots are counted. There were counties last night in Georgia that were heavily for Walker and others that went overwhelmingly for Warnock. If Walker's counties had all reported first, he could have at one point had a huge lead…and then it would have seemingly dissipated as the counties for Warnock came in.
This is the kind of thing some folks don't understand and it fuels those "the election was stolen" claims: "My guy was winning handily and then suddenly, all these votes for the other guy came out of nowhere. They must have been manufactured!" No, they didn't come out of nowhere. They came out of counties that didn't count as fast as others.
One thing I will say about Herschel Walker: He had the class to concede when he did. He could have pulled a Trump and tried to gin up a scandal but he didn't. I wonder if he was ignoring some advice that came from You-Know-Who.
A few months ago on this blog, we were talking a lot about — and I was embedding — the song "Sweet Caroline" as performed by (of course) Neil Diamond. Eric Gimlin sent me the link to this video which (of course) I had to post here.
It's opening night of A Beautiful Noise, the Broadway musical based on Mr. Diamond's life and music. And the audience that night was surprised and delighted by The Man Himself favoring them with The Song. Thank you, Eric…
We've been wondering who would replace Trevor Noah as the host of The Daily Show. The answer seems to be "Everyone." They've announced there will be rotating guest hosts until Fall of 2023. I would guess that if one of those hosts really nails it, that person might be installed sooner…but maybe not. Hey, it drove up the ratings on Jeopardy!
The press release says that the lineup of temp hosts will include correspondents who currently appear on the show. I hope that includes Jordan Klepper because I think he'd be great at it. And Al Franken, who will be taking a turn in the host chair, would certainly be interesting as would Sarah Silverman. They might even be able to get Rudy Giuliani. It's looking like he's going to need a new profession.
I'm not sure I've ever told this story anywhere in public. Forgive me if I have…and please, as you read it, keep in mind that I was eighteen or so at the time. At any age, it's possible to say something off the top of your head that comes across as rude (when you didn't intend rude) and/or seriously meant (when you intended it as a joke). And it's more likely at that age when you're kind of an adult and kind of not-an-adult and not quite sure how to be either.
People always ask me what my pal Steve Sherman and I did on those comics where we "assisted" Jack Kirby, as on his Fourth World comics and Jimmy Olsen. The honest answer is "very little." We did some production work. We wrote some storylines, a few of which he used some of. Our greatest contributions might have been when we listened to him describe a story he was about to start working on and we said something like, "That sounds great, Jack!"
Once in a while, when he then wrote and drew that next story, it would even wind up resembling the story he'd told us.
I sometimes had an added duty. If Superman was in the story, Jack would usually not draw in Superman's chest insignia as he went along. He never quite "got" the way it was supposed to look. It was not the kind of thing Jack Kirby could have cared a lot about and the folks back at DC Comics in New York treated it as a major defect in the work. The inker or one of the guys they had on staff back there could have fixed all the emblems in one story in, literally, about three minutes but this was somehow a big issue.
At times, it felt like given the choice of an exciting, dynamic story with chest emblems that needed some correction or a boring, hackneyed story with proper emblems, they'd have preferred the latter. So Jack would leave Superman's chest barren until such time as he was ready to send the story off to New York.
If — and only if — it would not delay delivering the job much, he would wait for a day when Steve and I were there and Jack would have me draw in all those "S's" throughout the story. It was the only thing — and I mean the only thing — I could draw better than Jack. He'd go outside for a breath of canyon air, I'd sit at his drawing table and do it, and by the time he came back in, it would all be done.
If, however, we weren't coming out to work in the next day or two, he would draw them in by himself, ship the story off to New York and then brace himself for the inevitable phone call from someone: "Jack, you're getting Superman's emblem wrong again…"
So one day, Jack was an hour or two from finishing a Jimmy Olsen story and we were there. I was doing busy work, waiting for my moment, sneaking glances at whichever page he was working on. Jack did not do his best drawing when someone was watching. I noticed he had drawn Superman in a certain pose I'd seen him use many times before. It was the pose on the two images below and every Kirby fan reading this can probably recall other places he used it.
I opened my big, fat mouth and said, "Oh, you're using that old pose again!" It sounded funny in my head, but I realized as I said it, it sounded pretty damned smartass rude coming out of my mouth. If I'd said that to Alex Toth or a dozen other great, experienced comic book artists I've known, I would have gotten and probably deserved a scolding that began with something like "Who the f word are you to…?"
Jack said nothing of the sort. In fact, he said nothing. He just picked up his eraser, completely eradicated that lovely drawing of Superman and replaced it with another equally as fine (or maybe better) of Superman. In a different pose.
An hour or two later, I'd done my little insignia-drawing and Steve was packing the artwork up to go to the post office the next day. Jack came over to me and said in a sincere tone, "Thanks. You helped me there."
I said something like, "Hey, if you're ever ready to end your career, we could trade jobs. I could draw the story and you could draw the Superman emblems! We'd both be out of the business within a week."
Jack chuckled and said, "No, I meant about telling me I was overusing that pose. Any time you see me doing something like that, please let me know."
I think that says a lot about Jack Kirby as a creative force. There are lot of things one could nitpick about his work — the way he drew fingers, the way he drew women's hair, the way he even drew Superman's chest emblem when he drew Superman's chest emblem. But if you understood the way he approached that work, you could never say that he did the minimum effort necessary to get the check. The job did not leave his studio until he was satisfied he'd done his best work.
I learned a lot of things about comics from Jack but I'd like to think I learned even more about being a person.
Much of my house looks like this. This is — or was the breakfast room and a week ago at 2 AM Monday morning, a steady stream of water was pouring down off that ceiling fixture from a busted water pipe on the second floor. The wall you see in the back had wood paneling over dry wall and plaster and now the wood paneling is gone and much of the dry wall and plastering have been removed. My insurance company assures me they'll pay for the restoration but it's gonna be like that around this place for a while.
The trick, of course, is to go on with your life while all this is happening around you. Like most folks who read Groo, I'm not sure what I do on that comic but whatever it is, I did it on one issue this past weekend and I got halfway through a script for something else.
You may remember that for a long time, I had many phone calls a day from folks who were either contractors who wanted to work on my home or who were representing contractors who wanted to work on my home. Talk about floods…I was inundated with them. The calls finally slowed to a trickle, partly because my turndowns were so emphatic but mostly because I installed some Spam-filtering software. And I apologize that I seem to be hung up these days on "running water" terms. That's how you get when you don't actually have running water…although some of it is back on.
But this past week, I had to turn off those Spam filters. They work by blocking unfamiliar numbers and many of those unfamiliar numbers belonged to folks at my insurance company, the plumbing firm working here, inspectors, my insurance agent, etc. So I'm fielding cold calls from contractors again…and the irony is that this is a time when I actually do need some construction work. Just not from total strangers with no referrals. (I think I have someone, by the way, thanks.)
I look forward to the day when my walls are back the way they're supposed to be. I look forward to the day when I won't have men traipsing in and around my property with huge, noisy equipment. But most of all, I look forward to the day when I can turn my Spam-fitlering software again. As it is, I just got a contractor call as I was typing the previous sentence. It came in mid-hyphen — between the time I typed "Spam" and "filtering."
I love what they used to call "novelty records." There's no firm definition of the term but it mainly described a record you were supposed to laugh at rather than dance to or "make out" to. I have two examples here, both of them recorded by Fletcher Peck.
Here is just about everything I know about Fletcher Peck: He was born Adrian George Greenberg but he went under several different monikers and had different combos and groups. "Fletcher Peck" was the name he settled on when he began appearing on Broadway Open House, the late night TV show that was the forerunner to The Tonight Show. He was all over early television including appearances with Steve Allen on Tonight, which is what The Tonight Show was called when Steverino hosted it.
Fletcher Peck was also big in jazz clubs and night clubs. Like Spike Jones, he learned to play real good before he started playing real funny. And I know he's no longer with us…but that's about all I know. If the readers of this blog respond like they usually do, there will be a post here shortly in which I report some of the info that someone out there has sent me about Mr. Peck.
Here are audio links (no picture) to my two favorite Fletcher Peck recordings, which I believe were on opposite sides of one record. First up, we have "The Guy With the Voodoo"…
And here we have "I'm a Fool For Beans," which is — as you might imagine — a song about being a fool for beans. Enjoy…
The plumbers worked here all weekend and they're coming again today…and tomorrow and the day after that and probably the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and maybe even the day after that…I think one of them took a look at what remains to be done and switched his voter registration to my address.
Fortunately, I have access to all three bathrooms in my home — the one with cold water only, the one with hot water only and the one with no water. If the first two were on the same floor of the house, I could perhaps dash back and forth between the two of them and approximate a shower.
I know you have your own problems and don't need to hear about mine but it helps me to do this because it forces my brain to seek out the humor in the situation. I actually have terrific plumbers — one of them, it turns out, knew me from Comic-Con — and they'll get it all done soon. Then come the carpenters and plasterers and painters…
Changing subjects: I didn't feel qualified to write a lot about Bob McGrath but I knew who he was even before he set foot on Sesame Street. He was one of the busiest Manhattan-based studio singers, meaning he was heard on hundreds of records and commercials recorded in New York. He was even somewhere in the chorus for Songs of the Pogo, the LP that showed Walt Kelly was as good at writing songs (and singing some of them) as he was in drawing my favorite newspaper strip. Mitch Miller, when he did his TV show Sing Along With Mitch, tapped into that talent pool for his on-camera chorus and Mr. McGrath was prominently featured. What an impressive career.
A few folks in the world of comics have passed away lately. Based on my e-mail, I need to post this reminder that if I don't write an obit for someone you think I must have known, it probably means I didn't. Or it could mean I can't think of anything to say about them that dozens of others aren't already saying. It certainly doesn't mean I had some grudge against them. I am surprisingly grudge-free…which doesn't mean there aren't some people in this world I choose to avoid.
The folks who make the Funko Pop figurines finally made one of a real person that looks exactly like the real person.