My pal Marc Wielage dug up this list of records of songs written or co-written by Sid Jacobson…
They all seem to be on YouTube if you want to look them up. Here's the first one on the list…
When I travel, I often forget that X days outta town is not just X days outta my life. You have to factor in the days getting ready to go and the days recovering and unpacking. It's one of the reasons I turn down most conventions. A three-day con can take up six days of my life. You probably understand this or maybe you've learned how to make travel not so disruptive…but I'm writing here to remind myself that I can't.
I'm still winding down after Comic-Con, still catching up on sleep. Oh — and I home-tested again and I'm still negative insofar as COVID is concerned. A few of you wrote in to suggest that my fatigue could be a sign of it…and while I appreciate the concern for my well-being, I'm pretty sure it's just sleep-deprivation and that I'm catching up. As my sleep normalizes, so shall this blog.
Sid Jacobson died last Saturday at the age of 92 in a hospice in Redwood City, California. He had a long, fascinating career as a writer and editor of comic books and, for a time, writing popular songs. Songs that Sid wrote were recorded by, among others, Frankie Avalon, Johnny Mathis and Dion and the Belmonts.
Sid was born in Brooklyn and attended Abraham Lincoln High School, followed by New York University. A brief career in journalism led to a wide array of writing jobs and he connected with Harvey Comics in the early fifties. Several online sources say he wrote Casper the Friendly Ghost, Little Lotta and Little Dot in 1950 but Harvey didn't begin publishing Casper until 1952 and Little Lotta until 1953. However and whenever he started there, Sid quickly moved into the job of assistant editor and then editor, working — sometimes on a part-time basis — for Harvey until the company ceased publication in 1982.
During all that time, he wrote for and served as editor for all kinds of comics but mainly Casper, Richie Rich, Sad Sack and other titles affiliated with those three or similar in style. He forged a close friendship with one of Harvey's best artists, Ernie Colón, and the two of them would later collaborate on a series of graphic novels, mostly based on true events in the news.
After '82, the story of Harvey Comics got especially complicated with the firm and its various assets being sold and re-sold with publication (mostly reprints) starting and stopping. Between 1984 and 1988, Sid edited and wrote for Star Comics, an imprint of Marvel Comics aimed at a younger audience that employed many of the longtime Harvey Comics artists like Warren Kremer and Howie Post. Some of the comics like Royal Roy and Wally the Wizard even looked a lot like Harvey Comics and there was at least one lawsuit which ended when Star Comics ended. Later, when the then-current owner of Harvey resumed publishing new stories, mostly of Hanna-Barbera properties, Sid returned as editor until that line collapsed.
Mostly in later years, Sid worked with Ernie Colón on the aforementioned graphic novels which included The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, After 9/11: America's War on Terror, A Graphic Biography: Che, Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography and The Torture Report. Some of these, I thought, were outstanding.
I worked with Sid a few times and found him genial and easy to get along with. Mostly, I knew him from Comic-Con where he often appeared on panels and delighted audiences with his tales of working in comics for an awful long time. I had not spoken to him in twenty-or-so years but I'm reasonably sure that as long as he was able, he was writing and trying to sell something somewhere.
I didn't run into my pal Mark Waid at Comic-Con but he's reporting he has COVID, whereas I am still testing negative. The convention did everything possible, short of calling off the whole event to keep folks healthy but with 130,000 people (give or take a cosplayer) crammed into one building, there couldn't help but be some infections. None of us, of course, spent every minute of our San Diego stays in the convention center. We were in hotels and restaurants and off-site events and at parties that weren't as diligent.
If it turns out I totally avoided The Plague, it might be because I mostly avoided the main exhibition hall. I was in there for about 90 minutes on Friday and not at all on Saturday and Sunday. What I couldn't avoid was getting so tired that once I got home to my own bed, I decided to take a brief nap, woke up seven hours later, then went back to bed for six more — and I'm a person who's usually fine with five hours a night. For me, thirteen hours is one short of a coma.
I was exhausted every minute of the convention so if you came to Quick Draw! or a Cartoon Voices Panel or any of the events I was on and you heard me slurring words or using the wrong ones, that's why. I wasn't drunk. I wasn't ill. I was just fatigued from the moment the hotel made me park my car in a lot so remote that I could hear music from Tijuana brothels and then we had to shlep our suitcases up to the room owing to a dearth of bellhops. I am not thinking of not attending Comic-Con again but I'm sure going to think of ways to make it less tiring. Fewer panels might help but having them closer together would be better.
I did enjoy the panels, especially Quick Draw! (which managed to be pretty funny despite its dearth of Sergio), the two Cartoon Voices panels and the Jack Kirby one. Here's a shot of the Saturday Cartoon Voices Panel. I'm the guy in the green shirt who looks like he's falling asleep…
The other folks in the back row are Shelby Young, Brian Hull and Townsend Coleman. In the front, left to right, we have Alicyn Packard, Phil LaMarr and Gregg Berger. Brian is a new guy in the business who's getting lots of jobs he can't talk about yet. He's the one responsible for this video which has 1.6 million hits so far…
To anyone who wonders, "Why can't he talk about what he's doing?" — as I explained on both panels, voice actors are often under NDAs…which stands for "Non-Disclosure Agreements." They've done a job for a producer or videogame company and that employer doesn't want the project or the actor's involvement in it publicized yet. So the actor has to agree not to disclose that involvement until the company announces it as per their own schedule.
Later Saturday afternoon, I got to spend an hour interviewing my pal Phil LaMarr. I enjoyed it very much even though as you can see below, I really wanted to sneak off to my room and grab a nap…
What Phil is holding is an Inkpot Award which was presented to him by Comic-Con at the beginning of our chat. Inkpot Awards have been presented by the convention since 1974. I got mine in 1975 and there was a point in the con's history where I thought they were kind of meaningless and silly…which is far from the only opinion I've had which I later decided was meaningless and silly. Many times when they've gone to the right people at the right time, they brought a lot of joy and satisfaction to their recipients. And that's neither meaningless nor silly.
I need to go resume my post-convention hibernation so I'll leave you for now. More on the con in the days to come.
Celebrating eight years since the end of Monty Python…
Whatever happened to Sandy Duncan? This profile, which focuses a lot on her time spent Peter Panning on Broadway and on tour, will tell you. I saw her in that production (with Christopher Hewett as Cap'n Hook) and I thought she was quite wonderful…
It's rough typing on my busted laptop but I can upload these photos that Ace Photographer Bruce Guthrie took yesterday at two of the four panels I moderated. This first one is Frank Miller and me at what might have been the best of a few dozen Jack Kirby Tribute Panels I've done…
Also on that panel were Bruce Simon, Steve Saffel, Rand Hoppe and Jack's grandkid Jeremy Kirby. Bruce and I discussed our great friend, the late Steve Sherman. Steve and I discussed the relationship Jack had with his one-time partner (and our great friend) Joe Simon, Rand talked about the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center, and Jeremy discussed carrying on the memory of his grandpappy. I may have typed the name of the museum wrong but given the shape this computer is in, it's amazing I can type on it at all.
I described how Frank stood up for Jack during Jack's famous battle with Marvel Comics for some of his original artwork, and we talked about how comic book creators became empowered — to not wind up as the creators of Superman had — in the seventies and eighties. The conversation will probably be published in a forthcoming issue of The Jack Kirby Collector and maybe I'll write more about it when I'm not typing on a broken-down jalopy.
And here's the Sunday Cartoon Voices Panel. In the back row, left to right, you have me (obviously thinking, "Two more to go after this one"), Zeno Robinson and Kaitlyn Robrock, First row is Rosemary Watson, Jim Meskimen and Fred Tatasciore. It's very easy to host a great panel when you get people like this to be on it.
I shall write more when I have a real, working computer to do it on. This one is already sounding like Mel Blanc making the sounds of Jack Benny's car — or for you slightly younger readers, the sounds of Speed Buggy.
A problem with my laptop is making it beastly difficult to type so I can't yet write up any closing thoughts on this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. So here's a rerun of a post that ran here way back on July 23, 2003…
That's me interviewing Ray Bradbury at the Comic-Con International in San Diego. Much of what he said at the event fell into the general category of "Encouragement For Aspiring Writers" and it sent me into spasms of Flashback. In 1968 when I was a lad of 16, I went with several friends to Mr. Bradbury's office in Beverly Hills for what we thought would be maybe a half-hour of his time. It wound up being all afternoon, as he seemed to enjoy the chat as much as we did. He liked talking about comic books and strips and science fiction, and about the way the mainstream world treated those of us interested in such things.
That day in '68, Bradbury had powerful memories of growing up in Los Angeles (like we were doing) and participating in fan-type clubs (as we were then doing) and feeling a bit out of sync with the world (ditto). So we were in awe of him and he identified like crazy with us, especially after being informed that I was aiming to be a professional writer. The advice he then gave me was all pretty generic and obvious but the fact that The Great Ray Bradbury was telling me to keep at it had enormous impact. It made my intended occupation sound eminently possible and when I went home and told my parents that Ray Bradbury had told me to keep at it, they took it as airtight proof that I was on the right path — this, despite the fact that Mr. Bradbury had not read one syllable I'd written. I have the feeling he had the same effect on at least a few folks who were in the audience last Saturday afternoon. He's one of those writers that makes you feel like a writer.
I subsequently met Mr. Bradbury maybe a dozen times. One encounter that I prize occurred around 1978 when I came across a copy of a movie magazine that contained an article he'd written. It was all about his experiences as screenwriter of the 1956 film of Moby Dick and, of course, quite interesting. The following weekend, he was making an appearance at a local mini-con that I knew always had rotten turn-outs, so I went and took the magazine along. Sure enough, upon my arrival I found Ray Bradbury sitting there, ready to sign anything fans brought to him…but no one was paying him the slightest attention. Since he didn't drive, he was stranded there for the next few hours, until the con ended and its organizer could take him home — bad for him, good for me: I had him all to myself. We sat and talked, mostly about Los Angeles and what was to become of it. When I hauled out the magazine, he practically jumped out of his chair. "I don't have a copy of this," he gasped. "I've been looking for one for years."
For the next five minutes, we argued: He insisted on paying me for the magazine. I insisted he just take it. We finally compromised: He would take it and send me an autographed book. He asked me which of his I wanted and I said, "It doesn't matter. I'm probably not going to read it since I already own well-worn copies of every one of your books. I just want to put an autographed Ray Bradbury book on my shelf. Send me whichever one you have the most copies of." He seemed to like that answer. Even better, he liked that I offered to rescue him from the dreary convention by driving him home. A few days later, he sent me an autographed copy of The Martian Chronicles in Swedish and another of a short story collection in German — a terrific, clever gesture, I thought.
I interviewed Mr. Bradbury last year at the Comic-Con. He is in poor health, primarily from a couple of strokes that have robbed him of most of his ability to walk. At one point, I felt it was appropriate to tell him that though I was sure he didn't recall it, I had visited his office in 1968 and he had been most encouraging, sending me well on the way towards this thing my agent and I laughingly call my career. He smiled and said he had a vague memory of it…but of course, I assumed he didn't and was just being polite. This year, we had a few more minutes to chat before the panel as he sat there in his wheelchair, looking for all the world like someone who couldn't recall his name, let alone past events. When I reminded him I'd moderated the same event last year, he said he remembered…and then surprised the hell out of me by saying, "You gave me a magazine once…about Moby Dick." That would have been an impressive feat of recollection even for a man who hadn't had a stroke.
I guess we're too quick to assume that if the motor skills don't function properly, the brain doesn't, either. Just like last year, when the program started, he suddenly turned pretty much into Ray Bradbury from the waist-up. Owing to a set-up problem, we couldn't get him onto the elevated stage so we had to situate him on the floor in front of it, where more than half of the 1000 people present were unable to see him. It almost didn't matter. His mind was sharp and his words were passionate. He touched every person in that hall and infused them with a large dose of inspiration and creative energy. A fellow who sat way in the back, unable to see Bradbury even during the standing ovations later said to me, "This may sound weird but it really felt like he loved us all." He did…and the feeling was more than mutual.
Some nice Bob Fosse moments…
My new laptop computer — so new it's still actually under warranty! — is malfunctioning and if my reports from Comic-Con grow sparse or cease, that may be the reason. I can use it but I'm not sure for how long.
I also don't have a lot to report. The con we love so — which some of us love so — is back and in some ways, it's the same event it's always been, packed with happy, enthusiastic people, some of them dressed as characters from their favorite source of incredible fiction. I was in the main exhibit hall yesterday for about 90 minutes and am not likely to be in there at all today or tomorrow. I'll be upstairs playing Mr. Panel Moderator.
But what struck me in that downstairs hall was how much was the same as it ever was: Same crowds, same jammed aisles, same exhibitors — most of them with the same displays in the same places. Everything was the same but the prices. I guess I'd hoped for less humanity in the usual close proximity but that was a silly thought. If you sell the same number of badges to enter the same building, you're going to have the same density of people in there. Simple rule of Physics.
But there was something different you couldn't miss: The masks.
Everyone was masked…or should have been. A few, less than I might have expected, had their defiant nude faces or wore their masks improperly. Some seemed to be employing the Beverage Ploy based on the premise that you're not expected to mask when eating or drinking…so you carry around an open bottle of water or something all the time on the premise that makes you exempt. By contrast, most cosplayers I saw were masked and many had figured out clever ways to incorporate a mask into their particular, peculiar ensembles.
You can't ignore the masks. Yours is right below your eyes and they're a constant reminder of how few of us are fully-comfy with being around so many people. They also remind us how thanks to COVID-19, Comic-Con missed two years, is still a bit risky to attend, and is even weirder than it used to be. Which was already pretty weird.
That's all for now. I have to get over to the convention center to host Quick Draw! and then the first of two Cartoon Voices panels this weekend. On the way over, I'm going to stop at the front desk of my hotel and ask about what seems to be a new policy of this establishment. It seems like every three hours, some hotel employee is required to think of a random amount of money between fifty dollars and five hundred, and to then charge it to the credit card they have on file for me…without explanation. If I'm late for Quick Draw!, I'm probably duking it out with some assistant manager over this. Maybe I can get the guy in the tiger suit to confront him about the $217.44 I was charged at 4 AM this morning.
Here from sometime in the sixties is one of Bob Newhart's better monologues. One night around 1983, I took a date to a comedy club called The Ice House in Pasadena. You hear a lot about places like the Comedy Store and The Improv but not much about The Ice House, even though most of the comics who played at those other clubs and went on to fame and fortune also played The Ice House. It's been there since 1960 and it's still there even though it hasn't reopened after closing for COVID.
So anyway, this one night a new comedian you never heard of (and never will) went on and as his act, did Bob's act…including this same routine almost word-for-word and others from Newhart's albums. And I'll give the guy this: He was about 35% as good as Bob was with the same material, which is not bad for a beginner. Those in the room who didn't recognize the bits laughed and applauded. Those of us who did grumbled and marveled at the sheer chutzpah.
When the guy departed the stage to scattered applause, someone yelled out, "I hope you paid Bob Newhart!" and the departing performer yelled back, "As much as you did," whatever that was supposed to mean.
There was a long pause of one or two minutes, then someone who I guess represented The Ice House came to the stage and said, "The management would like to apologize for that. We had not seen this performer before and he will never be asked back." The next performer who was introduced — who you also never heard of — came out and opened by saying, "Too bad I'm white or I could do Dick Gregory's albums for you."
Here's Bob Newhart doing his own material his own way…
I posted some wrong times for my panels today. I knew when they are but my fingers didn't…or something. Whatever the excuse the Secret Service had for deleting all those text messages, that's my excuse. Here are the corrected times…
Friday, July 22 — 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM in Room 10
COMICS FOR UKRAINE
Comics for Ukraine is a crowdfunded comics anthology through zoop.gg initiated and edited by Scott Dunbier to help relief efforts in Ukraine. Dozens of creators have stepped up to help. Alex Ross, Bill Sienkiewicz, Dave Johnson, and Arthur Adams have supplied covers. More than a dozen all-new stories will be included: Astro City by Busiek and Anderson, Groo by Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier, American Flagg by Howard Chaykin, Scary Godmother by Jill Thompson, Chew by John Layman and Rob Guillory, Grendel by Matt Wagner, Star Slammers by Walter Simonson, and Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai make up a portion of this book, But there are more, too many to list—so come to the panel (which will have several of the creators listed here) and find out about this very important book and what you can do to help this charitable endeavor.Friday, July 22 — 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM in Room 10
WALT KELLY AND POGO
Some would tell you that Walt Kelly's Pogo was the cleverest, most wonderful newspaper strip of all time. It was certainly up there with them. It's now being reprinted in full for the first time in a series of lovely hardcover volumes from Fantagraphics Books and Volume 8 (of 12) is on the presses now. Hear all about Kelly's work from Pogo authority Maggie Thompson, Walt Kelly archivist Jane Plunkett, cartoonist (and creator of Bone) Jeff Smith, Fantagraphics editor Eric Reynolds and his co-editor and your moderator Mark Evanier.
If the Internet works as it's supposed to — which it does, about 68% of the time — there will be a live feed above of the Brooklyn Bridge, which I recently purchased for a surprisingly low price. I just have the one. They had them on sale at Costco but what do I need with a ten-pack of Brooklyn Bridges?
If you like that, you'll love the video embed below, which dissolves from one live web-camera somewhere in the world to another live web-camera somewhere in the world and then another and another. If you want to linger on a specific one, go to the YouTube page for this video and scroll down. You'll find all sorts of amazing links. But remember that if you visit my bridge again, you need to pay me toll…
Eight New York Times opinion columnists do something that today's political pundits rarely do. They admit they were wrong about something. There are people in this world who are congenitally incapable of doing that.
I'm no longer on hold…but not because I got to speak to Tech Support. After 45 minutes waiting, I called the company on Line 2 and told them how long I'd been waiting on Line 1. A nice lady — who, alas, had no power to get Tech Support to actually speak with me then and there — apologized, took my number and promised they'd phone me within one hour. This has not happened.
In the meantime, I got this message from Brian Phillips, a wise and sage reader of this site…
I empathize.
The day after my birthday, I needed an item that only a certain supermarket sells and it's about 25 miles away, so I'd rather know that they have it before driving. I called to ask them and they put me on hold.
I waited.
Then I got in the car.
I drove all the way there (they had what I was looking for) and I spoke to the manager. I said, "If you look at line 1, that's me on hold, waiting for your staff to find out whether you had this item. I showed him my phone. I was on hold for 35:52.
He did not apologize. Hopefully, he spoke to the staff about this.
In an ideal world, all these CEOs who are paid six and seven figures per year to run a company would have the following clause in their contract. Once a week, they must get on their cell phones or call from home, phone their company, pretend to be just an average customer and ask a real question. If they don't get a satisfactory answer to that real question within fifteen minutes, their salary for that week goes to charity. If they don't receive that satisfactory answer within thirty, the entire salary for that year goes to charity.
It probably wouldn't change anything but some money would go to a good cause.
And just as I was proofreading the above before posting it, Tech Support called me and gave me the answer to my problem: The device is old, it's out of warranty, the price of repairing it is about 80% of the price of a new one and their new model is so much better. I've decided to toss it out and buy a new one…of a different brand.