• Simone Biles finally got the most important honor an athlete can achieve. Forget about all those medals. She's on Wheaties boxes coming out later this month.

In response to this post, Roger Green wrote…

You noted: Standards and Practices at ABC had made up a list of racial and ethnic minorities and it was kind of like "Pick one." and "one of the other Standards/Practices rules at that moment…was that every show had to have a female character who was assertive and/or in a position of authority instead of just tagging along as the male characters drove the story forward."

I was wondering if you thought that was a good thing, a bad thing?

Surely having someone other than white people might attract non-white viewers, and help white ones to note, "Oh yeah, there are other people. And having a strong woman (not Nell, or '50s Lois Lane always imperiled) is a good thing for women (and especially men) to see.

In this world — or in my world, at least — one often finds situations that fall under the category of "Doing the right thing for the wrong reason" or maybe "Achieving the proper goal in an improper way." I don't think it's a good thing for, in this case, network functionaries to be dictating creative content because they're afraid of advertisers who are, in turn, afraid of pressure groups.

But I also don't think it's a good thing for police officers to pull you over for speeding. That should not be necessary. You shouldn't be speeding in the first place.

I'm fine with female characters who are strong and assertive. I'm fine with characters not all being white guys. I'm fine with both those things because in real life — or in my real life, at least — a lot of women are strong and assertive and a lot of people are not white guys. Those who felt animation was deficient in representing those kinds of human beings were right.

But the Standards and Practices people we dealt with in the late seventies/early eighties were sometimes very clumsy and tyrannical and creatively insensitive. I wrote one particular ABC Weekend Special where at the last minute, they demanded major (and, I thought, injurious) changes to the script because of some crazed concern of the week. And I was arguing with someone who really didn't care if the changes disfigured the story and betrayed the book being adapted for the special.

It was like if you were adapting Moby Dick (the classic novel, not the Hanna-Barbera cartoon show of that name) and they came to you and said, "We're under fire for not having enough black women in our shows!" You might say in response, "Okay, they're right. After I finish this, we'll come up with some stories featuring black women" and they said, "No, no! This can't wait! You have to make Captain Ahab a black woman! And make sure she's a good role model!"

And then they added, "And although we haven't had any complaints about this, we need to lose the stuff about Ahab only having one leg. Just in case!" Maybe the right long-term goal but the wrong time, place and method to achieve it.

They were also, I thought, often dead wrong about their goals. As I've written elsewhere, some of the "pro-social" messaging they demanded pushed the premise that "the group" is always right; that if all your friends want to do one thing and you think that's a bad idea, you should yield to the majority. I thought that was a dangerous message — that's kind of how The Crips and The Bloods got started — and when I worked on the Garfield and Friends show, I wrote several cartoons refuting that message.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that in (roughly) the years 1977-1986 when I wrote cartoon shows, most of which were on ABC, I battled constantly with the Standards and Practices people — and one lady in particular. Sometimes, I lost. Sometimes, I won. Often, I won but the producers of the show made the requested changes anyway because they were afraid that even if ABC would let a certain joke or action in now, they might not a few years down the line and would not then buy the show for reruns.

When I started doing Garfield and Friends in 1987 (it began airing in '88), all that changed for me. No one ever suggested pro-social concepts to me. No one at the network (CBS) really suggested anything. In 121 half-hours, the Standards and Practices guy had about five requests, all of them minor and reasonable and easy to accommodate. And as noted, I even got to do episodes ridiculing what Standards and Practices had demanded at all three networks in the previous ten years.

These days, very few cartoon shows face anything like what we faced way back when. My friends working on current programs do sometimes complain about notes from someone upstairs about story elements that might lessen a character's merchandising potential. But that's another matter.

The fine folks who run Comic-Con International today announced…

Bob Bolling, Don Rico to Receive 2022 Bill Finger Award

Bob Bolling and Don Rico have been selected to receive the 2022 Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. The selection, made by a blue-ribbon committee chaired by writer/historian Mark Evanier, was unanimous.

"We're excited to be back presenting awards in our original format," Evanier noted. "And we couldn't have better recipients than these two men, whose work in comics never received the recognition it deserved. Too often, they worked in utter anonymity, creating work that is fondly remembered even if those who enjoyed it were unaware of its authors' names."

The Bill Finger Award was created in 2005 thanks to the late comic book legend Jerry Robinson, who proposed it to honor the memory of his friend, Bill Finger. According to Evanier, "At the time, though everyone knew Batman and his supporting cast, not nearly enough knew Mr. Finger and his vital contributions to the creation of that beloved hero. Finger's name now appears on Batman movies and comic books, and we want to keep it on this award, as he's still the industry poster boy for writers not receiving proper reward or attention."

Bob Bolling was born on June 9, 1928, in Brockton, MA. His parents were scientists, but all Bob wanted to do was write and draw. He drew for his high school newspaper, then did a four-year stint in the U.S. Navy, after which he studied at the Vesper George School of Art in Boston and finally at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he studied under master illustrator Burne Hogarth. Bolling worked briefly on a short-lived newspaper strip called Marlin Keel before a friend recommended him to Archie editor Harry Shorten. Shorten liked the young man's work, and in 1954 Bolling began a 50-year association with the publisher, interrupted only briefly in 1985 when he drew Wally the Wizard for Marvel's Star line of comics for younger readers.

Otherwise. Bolling worked for Archie — at first, mainly on a "Dennis the Menace"–like character named Pat the Brat. His skills at handling kids of that age led to his most esteemed work in 1956, when he inaugurated the Little Archie series, writing and drawing some of the most memorable comics to ever come from that company. It was also one of its bestselling and was quickly promoted from standard to giant-size, with additional spinoffs as well. Later, he also did many stories for the better-known teen version of Archie with work in Life With Archie, Betty, Betty and Me, Sabrina, and others, along with more tales of Little Archie that are avidly collected and treasured. Bolling began painting in the 1980s and turned to that full time after retiring in the early 2000s. He is unable to attend the awards ceremony, but he will be receiving his award plaque before then.

Donato "Don" Rico (1912–1985) was one of the first writer/artists in comic books, starting with a story in Fantastic Comics #1 (Dec. 1939) from Victor Fox's outfit, where so many began their careers. His work soon appeared in publications from Fiction House and from Lev Gleason Publications, where he worked on Silver Streak and on the first comics character to bear the name Daredevil. Many of the stories he wrote and drew there were signed with the name of Charles Biro. Rico joined Timely (now Marvel) in late 1941, in time to work on a back-up story in Captain America #13 and to later contribute many stories of Captain America, The Human Torch, the Whizzer, Sub-Mariner, the Blonde Phantom, Venus, and the Young Allies.

Beginning as a fine artist whose work is still in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums, he also wrote novels and screenplays, leaving and rejoining Timely/Atlas many times. He eventually worked there mainly as a writer and editor, contributing to their horror and western comics and specializing in jungle girl comics such as Jann of the Jungle and Leopard Girl, both of which he co-created. In the 1960s, he specialized in paperback novels but wrote three stories for Marvel under the name "N. Korok." In one, an Iron Man tale, he co-created The Black Widow, who would become one of Marvel's most popular characters. His later work was mainly for film and television, but he was a featured guest at many of the early years of Comic-Con, and he co-founded C.A.P.S., the Comic Art Professional Society, with Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier. His Finger Award will be accepted by his widow, actress Michele Hart, and his son, Buz Rico.

The Bill Finger Award honors the memory of William Finger (1914–1974), who was the first and, some say, most important writer of Batman. Many have called him the "unsung hero" of the character and have hailed his work not only on that iconic figure but on dozens of others, primarily for DC Comics.

In addition to Evanier, the selection committee consists of Charles Kochman (executive editor at Harry N. Abrams, book publisher), comic book writer Kurt Busiek, artist/historian Jim Amash, cartoonist Scott Shaw!, and writer/editor Marv Wolfman.

The major sponsor for the 2022 awards is DC Comics; supporting sponsors are Heritage Auctions and Maggie Thompson.

The Finger Award falls under the auspices of San Diego Comic Convention and is administered by Jackie Estrada. The awards will be presented during the Eisner Awards ceremony at this summer's Comic-Con on Friday, July 22.

Angelo Torres began drawing comic books in the mid-fifties and he's still at it. He worked for EC Comics and other firms, often collaborating with folks like Al Williamson, George Woodbridge and Frank Frazetta. In the late sixties, he went to work for MAD and drew 282 articles for them, making him the mag's ninth most-prolific contributor. (In case you're interested, Al Jaffee holds the title of Most Prolific MAD Contributor, though some guy named Sergio Aragonés is on target to bypass him in the next year or so.)

If you are at all interested in the work of Angelo Torres, get thee over to this page on his website and spend 36 minutes watching My Dinner With Angelo, a delightful film that was made in conjunction with a recent exhibit of his work in New York. I could embed it here but I'd like to see his site get all the hits…and while you're over there, browse around a little. The length and breadth of this man's talents have not been properly recognized. Nice guy, too.

Mark Rouleau wants to know…well, here. Read it for yourself…

I was a big fan of The Plastic Man Comedy Adventure Show. (Why not? I was 7 or 8 at the time …) And I understand why they gave him a girlfriend, and I understand why they gave him a baby, but I never could figure out why they changed the Woozy Winks character to "Hula Hula." Especially as the two characters are similar enough to be long lost cousins. Did somebody at S&P not like the word "woozy"? Were the rights to the character in limbo due to a big budget Woozy Winks movie that was in development?

I'm hoping since you wrote some of the episodes you might have some insight, as my Google-fu is failing me, although I suspect the answer might be "that's showbiz."

Two reasons, Mark. One was that everyone involved with the show's development — the studio, the network, the writer and even the folks then running DC Comics — thought the Woozy Winks character from the original Jack Cole comics was old-fashioned and outta date and a relic of the past. Plastic Man, they thought, could be brought into the present day but Woozy…? Nope.

Oh, and I should mention that contrary to what a couple of folks on the never-inaccurate Internet have said, I was not the writer who developed the property for television. That was Norman Maurer, who I've mentioned on this blog before and will mention again shortly. Norman was a former comic book artist, the manager of The Three Stooges, the son-in-law of Moe and a very clever, nice man. He was then among the favorite writers of the folks at ABC who programmed kids' shows.

As it was explained to me, none of them were mad about Woozy…and they weren't really trying to adapt the old Jack Cole comics for television. The mission was to take the idea of this guy named Plastic Man and find a new, modern-day context in which he could operate. I doubt anyone even looked much at the old comics.

So that was one reason Mr. Winks was in absentia. Another was that ABC, respecting certain urgings of parents' groups, then had all sorts of rules about the content of their Saturday morning shows that involved inserting "educational" content and certain pro-social values. And yes, "respecting" is a euphemism for "fearing."

Among the pro-social requirements at that moment was that every show that particular year had to have minority representation. Someone in it had to not be a white guy.

As it was explained to me, Standards and Practices at ABC had made up a list of racial and ethnic minorities and it was kind of like "Pick one." Joe Ruby, one of the producers of the show, looked it over and picked "Hawaiian." He and Norman had previously invented a sidekick for Plas who had perpetual bad luck and whose voice would be based somewhat on Lou Costello's.

They had the fine animation designer (and producer of the show) Jerry Eisenberg convert that character's look to Hawaiian and named him Coconut. Around or about the last minute, someone heard that was an ethnic slur so he was renamed Hula-Hula.

If my Plastic Man history is correct, Hula-Hula's constant bad luck made him even less like Woozy, who in his earliest appearances had constant good luck.  Woozy had encountered some sort of wizard who cast a spell that gave it to him…but I think the folks writing Plastic Man comics eventually forgot about that and I'm fairly sure Joe and Norman didn't know about it.

Also, I should mention that one of the other Standards/Practices rules at that moment (this kind of thing was constantly changing) was that every show had to have a female character who was assertive and/or in a position of authority instead of just tagging along as the male characters drove the story forward. That explains why Plastic Man's boss was a lady.

I was not hugely involved with the Plastic Man cartoons. I wrote several episodes, rewrote someone else on a few more, recommended my pal Steve Gerber to write a few, and also wrote the speech that the announcer read over the opening titles. I don't think the cartoons stand up all that well today but at the time, I felt it was much better than a lot of then-current shows produced under the same restrictions of time, budgets and network constraints.

As noted here, I decided to not follow every moment of the January 6 hearings. I have largely failed to carry out my own decision. I'm not watching live but thanks to TiVo and various online sources, I'm watching almost all of it, perhaps as much to admire good television presentation as for any political reason. They're making a solid case for those willing to listen. Those who won't, of course, won't.

I finally watched the Tony Awards…a very slick, well-produced show. Ariana DeBose was a terrific host and most of the show excerpts made me want to jump on a plane and go east…but I still won't for a while. I really liked the moment at the end of the number from Six: The Musical when Ms. DeBose came out to single out one of the performers as a swing who'd been put into the number twelve hours earlier. That was indeed what much of the telecast was about.

Most of the speeches were memorable and/or fun. Joaquina Kalukango's win for Lead Actress in a Musical (for Paradise Square) gave us what may be the most emotional, crowd-pleasing acceptance speech in Award Show History. The folks who produce award shows have little to no control over when these moments happen but the producers of this one must have been happy they had this one at (almost) the end of the show.

I love these videos of driving around old Los Angeles even if color has been added or augmented and a phony audio track has been added. The folks who did this one say that it's been "restaurated," which some dictionaries say has something to do with operating a restaurant but others tell us it's an archaic term for restoration. Anyway, it's not a typo as I first thought.

This one starts roaming around Hollywood and then downtown Los Angeles in what they say is the sixties. One movie theater we pass is playing One Eyed Jacks with Karl Malden and Marlon Brando, which came out in March of 1961. There seem to be some 1962 model cars in it and downtown movie theaters were mostly grind houses running films that had long since left the more prestigious houses. So draw your own conclusions about the date.

I did spot Clifton's Cafeteria, a local downtown landmark which for the last decade or three has closed, been remodeled, reopened, closed, been remodeled, reopened, closed, etc. Last I looked, it was passing for a trendy nightspot with a dress code and everything — the precise opposite of the "cheap food for everyone" image it had in its heyday. I doubt that anything I loved about the old Clifton's can be found at the current Clifton's.

Then later in the video, we jump to footage from a somewhat earlier period…

• I've long wondered why Rudy Giuliani chose going from being so respected to so loathed — hated by non-Trumpers for defending Trump, hated by Trumpers for doing such a bad job of it. When Liz Cheney described him this AM as "inebriated," I thought, "Hey, maybe that's it!"

I got busy last night and didn't have time to watch the Tony Awards, which await on my TiVo. In fact, since CBS ran the show twice, I think there are two copies of it on my TiVo. Those of you who want to hear what I thought of the show will have to wait until I get the time to watch one of those copies.

I did hear who the winners were and the four predictions (not mine) I cited here all came true. In some ways, the actual competition is less interesting than this consideration: Which shows improved their box office receipts as a result of what was presented on the telecast? There have been shows that were saved from an imminent closing not because they won a Tony but because the sample presented on TV sent folks scrambling to purchase seats.

You can't always tell. The Music Man was selling out all of its absurdly-expensive tickets before last night so it may not be possible to track if there's even more demand for them today. I see folks online saying that what was seen of Mr. Saturday Night made them want to see it. Take Me Out won for Best Revival of a Play but that won't help its ticket sales since it closed over the weekend.

The revival of Company won big and I have no idea if I want to see it. While I love moments of the basic show, I've never loved it as a whole…and I've seen a number of productions. Switching some genders around as this version does doesn't sound like it will change things for the better for me but, hey, it's getting raves. So who knows? I'll decide if I'm going to see it if and when it comes out here or I go back there.

In the meantime, I dunno how I missed this but last November, most of the cast members did this mini-concert version. Some interesting lyric changes in there…

Chef John is the reigning recipe guy on YouTube…and one of the few online chefs who doesn't end his cooking videos with shots of himself tasting what he has made and orgasming with sheer delight. Most of his recipes are too labor-intensive for me to think of attempting…and the real fancy ones convince me that I am way too inept to be allowed to make anything for dinner more involved than an order on Grubhub.

But this Chef John video came in handy. I tried it and it worked — and left me wondering how I got to be 70 years old and didn't know you could do this. I also like that he didn't even add in, as he usually does with everything he cooks, a few shakes of Cayenne. I swear that man would put it in a chocolate milk shake…

The other night on his show, Stephen Colbert reopened the occasional debate one sees on the Internet — and Thank God we don't have anything more important than this to argue about these days — as to whether a hot dog is a sandwich. I do not know why some people are willing — nay, eager — to die on the hill of insisting it isn't.

A sandwich is something you eat that consists of just about anything (meat, fish, poultry, peanut butter, jam, vegetables, et al) between two pieces of bread. If you put a blob of Worcestershire Sauce between two slices of bread, it's a Worcestershire Sauce sandwich. And come to think of it, you don't even need two slices of bread as proven by the many open-face sandwiches that are served in this great land of ours. Why do we need a more complicated definition than something edible on bread?

But Mr. Colbert, when asked what makes a hot dog not a sandwich, answered — I'm quoting now — "The fact that the two pieces of bread do not separate." He did not specify, and I'm guessing has no idea, who made that rule and how it was that they had the legal or even the moral authority to make a rule which all of us should respect.

Which brings me to Exhibit A and Only: Let us pause and look upon one of the most frequently-made and eaten sandwiches in the world today. I am speaking (of course) of the Subway® sandwich…

According to this page — and if it isn't right, I'll bet it's close — the Subway chain serves 5,300 sandwiches every 60 seconds, which is roughly 320,000 sandwiches every hour. That's zillions a year and that isn't even counting the ones made by Togo's and Jersey Mike's and dozens of other chains and hundreds of thousands of business establishments around the world that make things we all call "sandwiches" in this format.

I believe that if you examine any one of these "food items" (yes, I'm being a little loose with the language), you will see that the bread on top and the bread on the bottom are no more separable than the bread on the top and bottom of a hot dog. So if a hot dog is not a sandwich, neither are millions of "food items" we eat each day and refer to as "sandwiches." I rest my case.

And now that that's settled, let's get on to a more pressing matter — like does a drinking straw have one hole or two?  Or if as most say, a tomato is a fruit, does that mean ketchup is a form of jam?

We mentioned Larry Kert here the other day. Here he is with Carol Lawrence on The Ed Sullivan Show for November 2, 1958 singing a song they were then performing eight times a week at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York (where The Music Man with Hugh Jackman is now playing). Ms. Lawrence was obviously quite Puerto Rican so she was ideal to star in the original production of West Side Story…

Several folks including Douglass Abramson have informed me that some CBS stations (including the one in L.A.) are running The Tony Awards live at 5 PM and then the 8 PM telecast is a repeat. Remember the old days when the show was two hours and forbidden to go even a minute over? Now it's three and they're airing it twice.

It almost got by me but The 75th Annual Tony Awards will be televised tomorrow evening. The first hour commencing at 7 PM Eastern Time will apparently only be available on Paramount-Plus and I dunno what'll be in it but one assumes they'll save the major awards and musical performances for the CBS telecast.

The CBS broadcast is live at 8 PM if you're in the proper time zone or if you have Paramount-Plus anywhere. The rest of us will be watching the delayed rebroadcast at 8 PM Pacific Time. Ariana DeBose is the host and one of the themes will be to salute the understudies and swings who have performed so heroically on Broadway stages during The Pandemic. If I were producing the ceremony, I'd have an announcement at the beginning that Ms. DeBose has taken ill and then I'd have the first ten minutes hosted by a standby.

I have seen absolutely nothing on Broadway for 2+ years so my opinions are even more worthless than usual. But the folks who go to everything and predict seem to think that A Strange Loop (a show about which I know nothing) will win for Best Musical and The Lehman Trilogy will win for Best Play. In the category of Best Revival of a Musical, everyone expects Company to beat out The Music Man and for Patti LuPone's performance in Company to win her the Tony for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical.

I don't see anyone predicting any wins for the two shows we've been keeping an eye on from afar — The Music Man and Mr. Saturday Night. Neither Hugh Jackman nor Billy Crystal are on the list of the presenters but it does include non-nominees Lin-Manual Miranda, Nathan Lane, Bryan Cranston, Samuel L. Jackson, Bernadette Peters, Billy Porter, Sarah Silverman, Chita Rivera and RuPaul. For some reason, these people will all be wearing the same outfit. There will be musical performances from all the nominated musicals except Caroline, or Change, which has closed. I've set my TiVo.

Many a blogger (for example) is lamenting the closure of the last Howard Johnson's restaurant. There are still motels that bear the once-ubiquitous name of Mr. Johnson but no more eateries. To some, it feels like it will feel for a kid of today to hear that the last Burger King has shuttered some day in the future. The food was not good but it was there…and you can probably recall some happy memory that took place at one.

Howard Johnsons' used to be everywhere…except near where I grew up. I don't recall one within twenty-five miles when I was a kid but when we made vacation car trips — up to Monterey or down to San Diego — we passed a bunch of them. I don't recall we ever stopped. I do recall that some of their advertising promised "28 flavors of ice cream," to which I sniffed, "Big deal. Baskin-Robbins has 31." (And being a kid who didn't like trying new foods, I don't think I tried more than about six.)

But I was aware that people loved Howard Johnson's. And (again) being the kind of kid who didn't like trying new foods, I could understand why: Dependability. If you went to one, you knew what you were going to get.

So there was the conundrum that doomed Howard Johnson's. You went to one because it was familiar. But if the one near you closed, a Howard Johnson's was no longer familiar…so you didn't go to one when you were traveling. And with less travelers going to them, that caused more and more of them to close…so they were no longer familiar to the non-travelers who went to them and that caused those non-travelers, when they became travelers to not go to them and…

You figure out what I just wrote. I sure can't.

The only one I ever went to was out in Thousand Oaks near where Jack Kirby lived in the early seventies. When my friend Steve Sherman and I worked for him, usually on the weekends, we usually wound up going out to dinner with the Kirby family and those dinners were often at the Howard Johnson's. I had the same thing every time: A hot turkey sandwich and a dish of orange sherbet with a cookie stuck in it.

And the dinner I most remember there — the only one I remember there of all the times we went — was one in which Jack sat quietly while the rest of us talked. Jack, though seated at the table throughout, was somewhere else entirely. DC Comics had asked him to come up with a new comic in the weird/monster vein and as the rest of us talked, Jack just sat there and created in his head. When our meals arrived and we stopped talking, Jack started.

He told us the idea for the new comic he'd just created. It was called The Demon and he'd worked out everything about it — who The Demon was, who the other characters were, how they interacted, a couple of plots for stories, etc. — before the server arrived with our entrees. He'd even figured out what everyone looked like and was eager to get back to the drawing board and putting those ideas on paper. I ate my sherbet and the cookie stuck into it in a hurry.

That's my only Howard Johnson's story but it's a good one. I hope the rumors about the Applebee's chain closing down aren't true, not because I especially like eating at them but because I don't have a story about anything interesting that happened while I was at one.