I've become a big fan of Devin Stone, the "Legal Eagle" of YouTube who explains lawsuits and other legal matters in the news. In his latest post, he brings in an associate — "Spencer" — to explain the case in New York which the Attorney General there, Leitia James, has filed against the Trump family. It's a little over a half-hour but I found it enlightening.

I have friends who believe Trump will never get convicted or pay any serious price for breaking the law. That's what they once said about Al Capone…

Hey, remember these? On March 11 of 2020, I began more-or-less isolating myself so I wouldn't get that "coronavirus" thing that we were all hearing about. In hindsight, I was probably a bit more cautious than I needed to be…but only a bit. And if you're going to err, that's the side to err on.

It wasn't that huge a hardship, at least for a guy like me who works from home and needs to be alone a fair amount of the week. I switched from going to the market or restaurants to having food and supplies delivered and that's worked out so well that I'll keep doing it even when the chances of catching this week's variant are down to zero. My cleaning lady, my assistant and my lady friend all agreed to be super-cautious so as not to infect one another…and when my assistant did get it, she isolated until negative.

I rarely left my house unless you count walks in my neighborhood. That was not that difficult because for a while, there was really nowhere to go. Conventions and live shows were canceled. Restaurants were closed. No one threw parties. Business-type meetings migrated to Zoom or Skype. I actually liked most of the meetings better that way and hope that custom remains in place.

I felt and still feel sorry for those whose lives really were torn asunder by isolation and sorrier for those who got the dread disease. I know many who did but I think I run with a smart crowd. So far — and I hope I don't jinx it by typing this out loud — no one that close to me has died from it or even been hospitalized, as far as I know. That may be because no one close to me ever doubted the necessity to keep a fair distance in certain situations, to mask where appropriate and to get vaccinated. Night before last, I got my fifth shot of Moderna.

You may notice that I have reverted the heading on this blog to me working at my computer, unmasked. This does not mean I think it's over. The Sergio drawing of me masked and gloved may yet return. At the same time, I have a drawing of me tossing away the mask and declaring the Pandemic a thing of the past…and it's not time for that one yet. I'll still mask where and when it's required or requested or even when I think it might be wise or even polite.

And I'm not traveling far and not by plane. When will I abandon that policy? I dunno. I'll decide when there's somewhere farther than San Diego I want to go. At the moment, I don't even want to go to the Ralphs Market if I can help it and not because of COVID. I'm just enjoying not having to go to the Ralphs Market as often.

Next year's Comic-Con International in San Diego is July 20-23. That means that Preview Night — which is Wednesday, July 19 — is a mere 280 days from today. Each year when we get close to the convention dates, I get e-mails and phone calls from people who suddenly started thinking about attending and are surprised to find out that they're a couple hundred days late in thinking about that. There's one guy — you know who you are, fella — who makes the same mistake year after year after year.

If you want to attend, you need to plan ahead. Let me say that again in all caps and boldface: PLAN AHEAD! And if you are a returning attendee, meaning that you paid for and attended Comic-Con 2022 and/or Comic-Con Special Edition 2021, you can dive into the pool to try and purchase and memberships for 2023 for up to three people (yourself probably being one of them) this coming Saturday morning, October 15. Read how to do it on this page and don't wait until Saturday to read it.

Memberships of other sorts will be available at later dates and I'll try to alert you about that but don't count on me. Follow the convention on Facebook and/or Twitter for announcements. In fact, if I were you, I'd make frequent checks of the convention website. You can have a wonderful time at Comic-Con but it takes a little work to get yourself there.

• Today is the best possible day to not be Alex Jones. So far.

Ken Scudder wants to know something…

Big fan of pretty much everything you've done except your ill-considered attacks on cole slaw.

Stupid question, so I thought to ask you. Back when comic covers were more than just pin-ups having nothing to do with the story, more often than not they had word balloons. Many of these were variations on "Superman, you've got to save xxx" and Superman just sitting on his Kryptonian ass ignoring it. My stupid question — who wrote those word balloons? Dumb follow-up — how was this coordinated with the cover artist?

I thank you for your time and attention to this highly trivial matter.

Most of the time, covers started out with a sketch that may or may not have been by the person who did the finished art. During the time Carmine Infantino was in an executive position at DC Comics, he did most of these sketches, often consulting with the book's editor, and Carmine approved and fiddled with those he didn't do. At Marvel during the same period, Stan Lee had approval and the sketches were worked up by a number of folks but mostly Marie Severin or John Romita, everyone working under Stan's supervision and final OK.

If the cover sketch incorporated word balloons or cover blurbs, they were usually planned as part of the layout…so whoever suggested the scene might also suggest the text. These were more or less committee decisions. I sat in once on a cover conference with Infantino and with Julius Schwartz, who was the editor of the book in question. Schwartz suggested a couple of different wordings until they hit on one Infantino liked.

Carmine moved from being an artist for DC into an executive position by suggesting a reason that the management there could believe as to why Marvel was increasing its market share and DC's was declining. They would never accept the premise that maybe the Marvel books were better but they could accept that maybe Marvel's covers were more exciting. Most of the DC editors at the time designed their own covers and these men were not for the most part, artists. They came up with covers with intriguing (they hoped) plot twists but not interesting visuals.

Look at the Superman covers from this period and you'll see an awful lot that show The Man of Steel standing around…and you don't know what's intriguing about the situation depicted unless you read the word balloons. Infantino argued successfully that covers should be designed by artists who could make the visuals exciting…and he got himself a job.

Once a cover was drawn, both Stan and Carmine liked to fiddle with it. This is less true of the folks who've been in charge of covers since then. But sometimes, they'd order changes — some trivial, some major — to an almost-final cover and that often included rewriting the cover copy to make it punchier. Almost anyone in the office could have pitched in on this.

The last few decades though, there is a sense that the purchase of a certain comic book is no longer an impulse buy. A kid is no longer studying at a comic book rack in a 7-Eleven store or market, trying to decide if he'll spend his pocket change on a comic book or a candy bar. So there's less tendency to try and hook a browser with a situation that causes them to think, "I need to buy this and find out how Batman survives what's happening to him on the cover." That kind of cover usually meant expository word balloons.

So we now have less words on covers. We also have artists submitting their own rough sketches and then doing finished art for covers they initially conceived. Most of them tend not to suggest a lot of cover copy.

• The job I want is the one where you work for either political party taking every single thing anyone in the opposition party does and explaining why it's shredding The Constitution, destroying the economy and dooming us all to an unavoidable painful demise. Probably pays great.

Alan Menken performs a ten-minute medley of songs to which he contributed the music.  You may know some of these lyrics better than he does but he's still an amazing talent…

The other day here, I linked to a chunk of an interview that Jon Stewart did for his AppleTV show, The Problem with Jon Stewart. (I like this show, by the way. The only problem I have with The Problem with Jon Stewart is that it's on AppleTV where a lot of folks who oughta see it won't.)

In the episode, Stewart interviewed Leslie Rutledge, the Attorney General of Arkansas about a law that state has enacted that bans gender-affirming medical care for minors. In the excerpt to which I linked, Ms. Rutledge did a pretty awful job of defending the reasoning behind this law. If you watch the whole episode — which you can do here for free — she did an even worse job.

Among other evasions and disingenuous replies, she claimed to not remember which medical experts and organizations had testified about the wisdom of this law when the state held hearings. It sounded like there had to be a lot of them to cause Arkansas to disregard the recommendations of the American Medical Association, The American Association of Pediatrics, The Endocrine Society and others. She said the experts they relied on are listed in the reports on those hearings.

She further said, "We had plenty of people come and testify before the legislature" and that "For all of those physicians, all of those experts, every single one of them, there's an expert that says, 'We don't need to allow children to be able to take those medications…'" Well, Alejandra Caraballo — a Clinical Instructor at Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic — looked up those reports and she says there were but four "experts."

One, according to Caraballo, is a former plastic surgeon who now runs a Botox clinic and who "never worked with trans patients and has no experience treating gender dysphoria." The others, if we believe Caraballo's findings, sound like they have little to no experience with patients with gender dysphoria but lots of experience opposing gender reassignment. In other words, the "expert" witnesses were selected to present one point of view and there weren't even very many of them. Caraballo tweets about all this in a thread starting here.

Thanks to my pal Bob Elisberg for letting me know about this. I expected it would be a small, lopsided group but I didn't think it would be that small or that lopsided.

I regret to report that, first of all, Angela Lansbury has died at the age of 96. Secondly, and of vastly less significance, I don't have a personal story about Ms. Lansbury. Never met her. Didn't even see her perform as often as I would have liked. She was always a class act and very, very good in whatever she did. And while it's sad to lose her…my God, what a life. What a career. And was there anyone anywhere who didn't adore her?

From Frank Balkin, I have this…

Hi, Mark — as always I've been enjoying newsfromme.com. I enjoyed your recent columns about onscreen credits — here's one that's always confused me, maybe you'll have some insight on. On the Orson Welles film Touch of Evil, there's an odd title that says "Guest-starring Marlene Dietrich, Zsa Zsa Gabor." How do you have a guest star, or two, in a standalone film, not a series?

I would imagine the answer is the same answer Jonathan Harris gave when folks asked him — as everyone did — why on the Lost in Space TV show, he was billed every week as "Special Guest Star." He said, "My agent got it for me, probably in lieu of better money."

Someone else whose e-mail I can't find wrote to ask me why TV shows these days have so many producer credits, way more than they used to. There are two reasons, one being that if the program wins an Emmy for "Best Show" of its kind and you were important on it, you might not get a statuette unless you had the word "producer" in your credit.  (I have a story to tell about this, one of these days.)

The other is simply money and the studio's desire to pay out as little of it as possible. The agent asks that his client be paid $25,000. The studio counters with "How about $17,500 and a special credit?" Special credits are easy to give as long as they (a) don't go counter to any rules in any union's contract and (b) don't inspire everyone else to demand one.

And they cost nothing.  An agent and a guy in Business Affairs negotiate the wording of that credit, caring little about what it actually suggests. It's just a deal point to them. Agents love to go back to their clients and say, "Hey, I got you a credit that no one else is getting!"  And the guy in Business Affairs loves to go back to his boss and say, "They were demanding $25,000 but I got them down to seventeen-point-five!"

I would guess that's what happened on Touch of Evil. In negotiations, either Marlene or Zsa Zsa got a credit ("in lieu of more money," as Jonathan Harris said) that sounded good to them…and the other one demanded the same special credit. If that isn't the answer then I can't imagine what it would be.

• If you're a blogger and you think you're putting up a great blog, just remember that you'd get a thousand times more hits if you were teaching how to make pizza or you were a cute young lady doing bikini try-ons.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Ancient Internet Custom that only I follow: When the blogger is known to post every day or almost every day…and there comes a day when he or she is so busy that they may be posting little or nothing…the blogger posts a photo of a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup? Why Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup? Because Bean with Bacon would be silly.

I have stuff due that needs to be written. I may pop back in with something but I may not. Life can be so uncertain at times.

We had a wonderful voice cast on The Garfield Show and one of our players was the great actor (and great guy) Jason Marsden. He, like the other performers, made my job easy and I miss those recording sessions.

Jason occasionally shot video while we were working and recently, he edited some of it into a little video. Here it is…

• Rick Caruso is running for Mayor of Los Angeles, bragging about how successful he's been as a real estate magnate. So howcome the mail-in ballot I received yesterday lists him as "Businessman/Nonprofit Leader?"

Around 8:55 this morning — and remember, today's Sunday — a lady came to my door to urge me to vote for Mark Meuser…and I actually had to ask her who Mark Meuser is. Turns out he's the Republican candidate for Senate in my state, California.

Before we get to the futility of her mission, let's discuss the bad judgement shown by ringing doorbells this early on Sunday morning. I was up but I'm often not up at 8:55 AM. I would think anyone who rings doorbells before 10 or so, no matter how worthy their cause, is going to piss off more people than they convince. In fact, I think that if I wanted to get Mark Meuser elected, I'd go door-to-door even earlier, waking folks up and telling them to vote for his opponent, Alex Padilla.

Now, to the futility: The reason I didn't know who Mark Meuser is is that even though I keep better informed than most voters, I haven't seen or read a word about this race. I get tons of mail that seeks to impress upon me the critical urgency to save mankind as we know it by voting for a certain candidate or a certain way on some proposition. But neither Meuser nor Padilla has sent me so much as a postcard.

There's probably a simple explanation for this. There isn't a lot of polling of a race like this but the ones that exist all have Padilla (D) beating Meuser (R) by around 65% to 35%. That's how California is these days. Even Trump didn't spend a nickel in the '20 election campaigning here. I'm not sure he even insisted he won the state and was cheated. Meuser has about the same chance of winning as I do and I'm not even on the ballot. For Congress, I have my choice of two candidates, both Democrats.

The lady on my front porch and I had a brief conversation that we both knew was not going to swing my vote to this guy I'd never heard of. Her outstanding issue — her sign of the pending apocalypse — is the price of gas, which she blames on Democrats, though she can't explain why. Me, I've decided to blame the price of gas on the people who set the price of oil and on every politician who won't vote to regulate those prices and/or tax windfall profits…which seems to be darn near all of them.

Then she left and I came upstairs here and marked my mail-in ballot for Alex Padilla, which I would have done anyway.

She reminded me of a lady — and I don't think it was the same lady — who came to my door during the 2008 election. I know flashbacks are a thing of the past but let's have one now. It's October 25, 2008…

Last evening, I was napping — or rather, trying to nap — when I heard someone pounding on my door. Turned out, it was a McCain volunteer working the neighborhood, trying to convince folks to save the world from the inexperienced commie-terrorist on the ballot.

We have a simple policy here at Casa Evanier: We don't buy anything from or give any money to anyone who comes to the door that way. Ever. If you were going door-to-door handing out free hundred dollar bills, we'd slam said door in your face. Especially unwelcome are those who think a brief porch visit will prompt me to change my religion…and the McCain worker was perilously close to that category.

Still, she seemed like a nice, sincere person…nice enough that instead of scolding her for waking me up or mocking her for thinking she could possibly make one bit of difference, I talked to her for a few minutes. She admitted that California was a lost cause and even told me that she'd been ringing doorbells all day and didn't think she'd flipped one voter from blue to red. The few positive notes had come from other McCain backers thanking her and encouraging her…but also, she told me, declining to donate cash to a lost cause. I did say to her, "John McCain has written off this state. Don't you think it's about time you did, too?" (For some reason, possibly because I was still half-asleep, I forgot to tell her that I'd already voted. As bad as the odds of her convincing me seemed at the moment, they were actually worse.)

One of two things she said that made an impression on me came when she admitted her efforts wouldn't change the outcome but explained, "I just couldn't sit and do nothing." In other words, she was standing on my welcome mat, not so much for the nation's benefit as her own…and y'know, I could almost respect that. She's not going to swing California's 55 electoral votes over to the McCain column but she might make herself feel a little better for having tried. In a like situation, I think I'd feel like I was compounding the loss, adding a colossal waste of time (mine and others') to all the other bad things I believed to be occurring. But obviously, she and I do not see the world in much the same way.

The other lingering impression was not something she said so much as the urgency in her voice. She's scared…scared Obama might be a secret Muslim and/or radical who'll destroy America with a socialist agenda. (I said, "Yeah, he might even start partially nationalizing banks," but she didn't hear me or didn't get it.) On the one hand, I think the current McCain-Palin crusade to make people feel as she does is great — great because it isn't working. Every day, their campaign demonizes Obama by another notch and every day, another state that formerly seemed bright red moves to pink or even light blue. On the other hand, it's a shame to scare people like that. They panic, they get ulcers, they divide our country and spread apocalyptic visions of the future…and worst of all, they knock on my door and wake me up when I'm trying to sleep. That kind of thing — the waking-me-up part — has got to stop.

So my feelings about people who ring your doorbell and try to sell you a candidate, a religion or gardening services haven't changed. I wonder if that woman's feelings about Barack Obama ever changed. She was worried Barack Obama might destroy America and he was in office eight years and I think the country is still here.