Operating on the assumption there will be an actual, for real, people-gathering-in-person Comic-Con International in San Diego this July, we announce the annual call for nominations for the annual Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. In truth, we have plenty of nominations from the past and all will be considered by the judges for this year's two awards. But if you have a new name to throw out for conversation, this is the time to throw it.

This is an award for a body of work as a comic book writer…someone who is or was unrecognized and/or unrewarded for that body of work. It is not for your favorite artist. It is not for someone who wrote a few stories. It is not for someone whose talents have been honored over and over.

It is not for someone who got very, very rich and/or famous writing comics. And the posthumous one is not for someone who is alive. The last two years, we only did posthumous awards and you'd be amazed at the number of people who, for reasons I cannot fathom, nominated writers who were still among the living. One such very-much-alive writer was nominated by his agent who I guess didn't know what the word "posthumous" meant…or maybe he just hadn't talked to his client in a real long time or thought the guy was looking kinda unhealthy.

It is also not for anyone who has received this award in the past. The full list of such people can be read over on this page.

Here's the address for nominations. They will be accepted until April 1 — a shorter span than in years past — at which time all reasonable suggestions will be placed before our Blue Ribbon Judging Committee and we'll pick six names to add to the hallowed ranks. Thank you.

And here's another number from that London production of 42nd Street. In it, you can briefly see the characters of Maggie Jones and Bert Barry, who wrote the musical being produced, Pretty Lady, and who also play character roles in it. Maggie sings the lead on "Shuffle Off to Buffalo" in the second act and they both pop up in other numbers.

I remember when I first saw the show, it seemed like they were based loosely on Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who wrote a lot of musicals and also appeared sometimes in them. And in the four or five times I've seen this show staged since then, it always struck me that the folks playing Maggie and Bert were kinda playing Sally Rogers and Buddy Sorrell…

Joe Frank wrote to ask about the teaming of Jack Kirby as penciler and Wally Wood as inker at Marvel in the sixties…

Questions about Kirby/Wood inks pre-Fourth World. He had instances of Jack and Wally coming together, at mid-'60s Marvel, on some very impressive covers.

But not on the stories. He inked Jack's Daredevil figures in Fantastic Four #39. He inked the Odin/Absorbing Man cover to Journey Into Mystery #122. But no full tales on those books. Was Stan not impressed with their previous collaborations? Or did he prefer to use Wally over other pencilers?

If not for starting the Tower line, would Wally have been okay just inking others as needed?

Well, first you have to remember that Wood didn't work a lot for Marvel in the sixties. He was there about a year, during which time he was also producing a fair amount of advertising art and he also drew the first three issues of a Gold Key comic book known variously as Total War or Mars Patrol Total War. For Marvel (by my count), he inked or penciled and inked about ten covers, inked three issues of The Avengers, drew (with some help) seven issues of Daredevil, and he inked one 12-page story for Strange Tales and a few pages in a Captain America story in Tales of Suspense. Then there were those art fixes on Fantastic Four #39 which, Wood told me, he did in about an hour in the Marvel offices.

If he'd stuck around longer, he probably would have inked more covers and more stories and some of the stories might have been penciled by Jack.  Wood told me Stan also wanted him to do some issues of X-Men over Kirby layouts but I suspect that plan went away, along with Stan's thought of having Wood as the artist of the new Sub-Mariner strip in Tales to Astonish, with the decision to up Daredevil and X-Men from bi-monthly to monthly.  That was, of course, just prior to Wood's decision to get out of Marvel and never work, at least directly, for Stan Lee ever again.

But while Wood was there, Stan was happy with the inkers he had on the books Jack was drawing and he put Wood where he felt he needed him at that moment.  Being the editor of a line of comics like that involves moving around a lot of chess pieces and you need to consider all of them with every move.  If Stan had said, as some have wished he had, "I'll have Wood ink Kirby on Fantastic Four," then he'd have had to find someone else to ink The Avengers.  He may have thought that book needed Wood's touch more than any of the Kirby books.  Or Jack's books may have been so far ahead of schedule, as he sometimes was, that Stan wasn't assigning anyone to ink them at the moments when Wood might have had time.

Not long after, Marvel raised its rates for inking.  That made it possible to engage Joe Sinnott to ink F.F., but in the years before that raise, they had a fair amount of trouble finding inkers. A lot of assignments were made based not on "Who'd be the best choice?" but rather "Who's available at the moment?"

As I understand it, Stan would have been much happier to have Wood pencil (only) for Marvel.  Stan tended to judge artists by how well they functioned as plotters or co-plotters.  Could they come up with story ideas?  Could they take one of his sparse story ideas, go home, figure out all the details of the story and bring back twenty fully-penciled pages that he could easily dialogue?  Some guys who could draw pretty-enough pictures couldn't do that.

Obviously, the two artists who were the best at it — who could figure out the whole story and all its twists and turns largely on their own — were Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Artists like Don Heck and Dick Ayers could do it decently if/when Stan (or someone) gave them more story input. But it didn't work so well with artists like Bob Powell or Carl Burgos…and when Joe Orlando was drawing Daredevil, he'd plot out and draw the story and then Stan would make him redraw a large hunk of every issue — without pay, of course.

It wasn't that Orlando was a bad artist. It was that he didn't plot the way Stan wanted stories plotted. It only took Joe three issues of Daredevil to decide to take a hike. Another person wrote me to ask why, of all the books Marvel was then putting out, Stan assigned Wally Wood to Daredevil. It was not a profound editorial casting decision. Wood walked in just after Orlando walked out and Daredevil needed an artist. Frankly, I think Wood could have drawn any comic in the place…

…and briefly, Stan thought he'd found another guy with the story sense of Kirby and Ditko.

You asked, "Would Wally have been okay just inking others as needed?" Probably not exclusively. Comic book artists all have different ways of working and sometimes, they have different attitudes about penciling, inking or doing both.

Chic Stone wanted to do full art. For a while though, he let Stan turn him into an inker because that's what the company needed just then. Stone agreed because he didn't have any offers to do full art just then, plus he found it educational to ink Kirby. He told me Stan kept promising him the chance to pencil and after repeated nagging, Stan finally gave him a Human Torch story to pencil. Stone got a few pages into it and then Stan stopped him — the pages were never used — and tried to put him back to inking. I'll bet you the problem wasn't with the way Stone drew but what he drew in each panel…the plotting, not the artwork.  That was when Stone went elsewhere.

John Romita, when he came over, wanted to only ink for a while…and then Stan pressed him into drawing Daredevil when Wood quit and a tryout of Dick Ayers didn't work out. There are other guys who at times wanted to pencil and at times wanted to ink, and at times wanted to do some of each or full art on some feature.  They couldn't always get what they wanted.

Ditko liked to pencil and ink, especially on strips he considered "his" like Spider-Man and Dr. Strange.  He was pressured into doing pencils only for a while on The Hulk — a character he did not consider "his" — but he resisted Stan's requests to let others ink Spider-Man or Dr. Strange so he'd have time to pencil more for Marvel. (George Roussos inked a few Dr. Strange stories and did some uncredited inking on others when Ditko had some health problems.)

What I got from Wood is that once he became the official artist on Daredevil and did some redesigning of the feature, he wanted to pencil and ink that comic on a regular basis. When he realized how much he was expected to contribute to the stories as artist, he began pressing to also write the comic…and Stan did let him write one issue, then declared it a failure which was not to be repeated. That was when Wood decided to leave, which roughly coincided with when he got the offer to do T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. He told me he did not decide to leave Marvel because of that offer. He decided to leave, then got the offer.

So when he was working for Marvel then, Daredevil was his regular assignment and then he did inking when he had time. He did not want to only ink and he didn't want to only pencil and he didn't want to commit to penciling another regular comic because that would have meant learning who its characters were and its past storylines and doing more of what he considered unpaid and uncredited writing.

And he certainly didn't want to commit to more regular assignments which might have forced him to turn down some of the more lucrative advertising jobs he was offered…and he still had some projects of his own he wanted to pursue. The quantity of work he could do for Stan varied depending on other assignments and who he had available to assist him at any given moment. So he was more comfy just committing to Daredevil and then taking on inking work on a "when I have time for it" basis.

Sorry for the long reply but I hope you found it of interest and I hope that somewhere in there, I answered your question.

I always liked Victor Borge. I saw him perform live three times and every show was exactly the same but I didn't care. It was a good show, well worth multiple viewings.

Here he is on The Ed Sullivan Show for February 14, 1965. It may explain a few of his jokes if I tell you that Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey were sworn into office less than a month before this telecast. Not long before this, Johnson came under a fair amount of criticism for the way he was treating his dogs. On a press tour, he was photographed picking them up by their ears.

The incident was soon forgotten as President Johnson gave people quite a number of other reasons to not like him.

Borge was Danish and at various times, he was referred to as The Clown Prince of Denmark, The Great Dane and The Unmelancholy Dane. He had a fine career as a musician but he began playing less and less, talking more and more, and proving to be a very funny man. I don't know if on this appearance on Ed's show, he ever got around to playing the entire song he promised. Often, he did not…

Electricity in my neighborhood went out at 3:03 in the afternoon and came back on at 3:06 — just long enough for all my clocks to need resetting. Then it went out again at 3:46 and stayed out until 8:08. I am showing great optimism to begin typing this but not enough to start going around, resetting clocks.

During this second outage, there was still a good amount of sunlight out but there were still two separate automotive collisions outside my house, one of which went like this: I heard the thump of metal followed by a barrage of shouted language that would have offended Larry Flynt. Then came police sirens and a fire engine and paramedics, though from my window, I didn't see anyone look seriously injured.

I wish people would learn to drive slower and more cautiously when the traffic lights are out. And why don't those things all have backup batteries that are constantly recharged by solar panels?

During the 4+ hours, I read stuff on my iPad and listened to the latest episode of Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast, which has as its guest, the oft-mentioned-on-this-blog Frank Ferrante. It's a very good conversation and I'll try to embed a link to it below this paragraph. If it doesn't work, there are a half-dozen other places on the Internet where you can hear it like here and here and here.

Yesterday here, I told the story of going to see the Broadway show 42nd Street in New York in 1983 with my friends Len Wein and Marv Wolfman. I said we saw it at the Winter Garden Theatre and this morning, I awoke to an e-mail from Joe Miller telling me that by '83, the show had moved from the Winter Garden (where The Music Man is currently ensconced) to the Majestic Theater (where The Phantom of the Opera has been playing since the Crimean War and where it's expected to remain until you, I and any children or grandchildren you may have are dead and buried.)

Joe is right and I have corrected the post accordingly.

Meanwhile, Marv Wolfman wrote to tell me he recalled a slightly different scenario…and having nothing better to do with no power here, I called him and we discussed it and decided it really doesn't matter. So we agreed to disagree and if you care in the slightest, you're free to believe him or to believe me, except that you should believe me because I'm right.

And now it's 8:40 and the power's still on so I think it's safe to go start resetting clocks.

I refuse to post another thing on this blog until electricity is restored in my area.

Back here, I expressed my amazement that the Senate had passed a bill — unanimously! — to make Daylight Saving Time permanent. That's the current U.S. Senate which you wouldn't think could reach total agreement on a bill that said there should be chocolate chips in chocolate chip cookies. Well, we all should have suspected that unanimous vote was an aberration.

My pal Bob Elisberg, who blogs here, calls my attention to an article in the Washington Post by Dana Milbank. It seems the unanimous vote was kind of an accident…a mistake made by 100 Senators who didn't know what the heck they were voting for. Kinda scary that that can happen.

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Then the other day here, I posted a link to the "Lullaby of Broadway" number from 42nd Street as performed in a London production. Bob suggests that I also offer you the number as performed by the original cast at the 1981 Tony Awards ceremony. The original cast included Jerry Orbach as Julian Marsh.

This was the first Broadway show I ever saw on or around Broadway. The year was 1983 and I was back in New York for meetings with the DC Comics folks (for whom I was writing/editing Blackhawk), ABC's Saturday morning department (for whom I was writing ABC Weekend Specials) and NBC's daytime department (for whom I was developing a gothic-flavored soap opera).

One evening, my pals Marv Wolfman and Len Wein and I went down to Times Square to the TKTS booth and picked out a show to see, bought half-price tickets, then went to dinner at a Beefsteak Charlie's — a now-extinct chain that then was about as ubiquitous in New York as Duane Reade drug stores, hot dog vendors or Naked Cowboys are today. Then we went to the Winter Garden Majestic Theatre and there we saw 42nd Street. It was everything you'd expect in a show of that sort.

The next night, some other friends of mine and I went to dinner at the Russian Tea Room, followed by the musical Nine at the 46th Street Theater, which is now the Richard Rodgers. It was snowing lightly when we went in see the show and when we came out, we found ourselves in the 13th largest snowstorm on record in the city — no cars on the streets, no trains running, howling winds blowing around the snow and the people…and we were a full mile from the Sherry-Netherland Hotel where we were staying.

I enjoyed the night before a whole lot more. Here's that number from the Tony Awards…

There would have been more posts here the last few days except that my vast computer network was undergoing the upgrade from the top speed I could get from my old Spectrum Internet Service to the top speed I am now getting from AT&T Fiber. With the former, the top speeds I logged were downloads of 230 Mbps and uploads of 12 Mbps. With the new service, I'm getting 951 down and 945 up. I did not mistype those numbers. And I still have one or two hardware adjustments to make which should bolster those AT&T stats a bit.

The new service is also, amazingly, only a few bucks more per month than Spectrum…and that's more than made up for by the price reduction I get on my AT&T iPhone and iPad service by signing up for their Internet Service. What did cost though was that to take full advantage of the new speeds, I had to upgrade some hardware, including changing from the Google home wifi system to the Eero home wifi system. (Anyone wanna buy four used Google Nest wifi points?)

Before you get too envious of my download/upload speeds, know that just browsing the web ain't that much different. It's great when I upload or download files to the cloud or Dropbox or various servers. It just doesn't make slow webpages load much faster. I haven't tried it yet for Zoom calls or video streaming. Also, it did take a long time to set up and configure — an hour on Saturday in-person with one expert and two hours on a Sunday phone call with another, both of whom charge by the hour for their knowledge and make me think I should.

This may be way more speed than you'd want to pay for and way more tech time than you could endure. So if they don't have it yet in your area, don't feel deprived. I'm still not convinced I needed it that much but we'll see.

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A couple of friends who read my latest piece on COVID-avoidance suggested a point I should have made. The folks arguing that vaccines are worthless because even triple-vaxxed people have caught COVID are missing a key consideration. Fully-vaccinated human beings might get the disease anyway but the odds are strong that it will be less severe and not-life-threatening. We do not take flu vaccines to guarantee we never get the flu. They just reduce the chance we'll get it or that we'll get it bad.

Also: I wrote and deleted a paragraph I wish I'd left in. I cut it because I realized I've said it before on this blog and later decided it's worth repeating often. More and more as I get older, I think it's important in life to (a) connect with doctors you trust and (b) not take medical advice other than "Listen to your doctor" from people who haven't graduated medical school. When you get down to it, they're all like Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies, who thought she was a doctor because she said she was, and believed you could cure cancer by having a raccoon squat on your lunch. Or something.

I have what I consider a great doctor…and it has been my experience that great doctors network with other great doctors. I don't believe they know everything; just that they know a helluva lot more than I do. And when I tell that to someone who fancies themselves a non-credentialed medical expert, they say, "Aw, you can learn all that stuff on the Internet."

To which I say, "Fine. I'll read a lot of websites and I'll watch a lot of online videos and then, when you need quadruple-bypass surgery, I'll be the guy with the scalpel who cuts you open. Okay with you?"

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Lastly: In the next week or two, there may be more posts than usual on this blog about the history of the comic book industry. I have no idea of the percentages but I'm well aware that I have steady readers here who couldn't possibly care less about this topic and who don't even recognize most of the proper nouns when I write about it.

When I write about something that doesn't interest you, just remember that this blog is not behind a paywall. Just skip on to the next post…or the one after or the one after. I don't need to hear that not everything I write gets your attention. I'm still amazed that anything I write ever does.

Did you see the video that Arnold Schwarzenegger made in which he addresses the people of Russia?  I've never had much admiration for Schwarzenegger as an actor and certainly not as the governor of California.  I thought he was a guy who had a good product (himself) and was good at marketing that product.  Whether his video will change any minds in Russia, I have no idea…but it did make me see him in a new light.

Over on the fact-checking site Politifact, Angie Drobnic Holan writes about how impressed she was with the video and the way Arnold talked to its intended audience in a sincere, friendly manner. He displayed some communication skills we could all stand to learn or learn better. And if you didn't see the video yet, there's a link in there to it. Watch that before you read the article.

Here's one of my favorite magicians, Pop Haydn, performing recently at the Magic Castle. I studied with him many years ago and this was one of the tricks he taught me and the others in the class. I don't know about the others but I did it about one three-hundredth as well as Pop does…

• I'm changing Internet providers. Today, I spent an hour on the phone to cancel the old subscription, discovering that the speed of their Customer Service was even slower than the speed of their downloads.

I haven't written under the above banner for a full month here. I even skipped Day 730, which I think would have been two full years since I decided to heed my physician's counsel and begin isolating myself from others as much as possible. We've all had to mud-wrestle with the question of what's safe and what isn't and for me — since Day One of this — that starts with the belief that no one's COVID predictions are worth a whole lot.

What little trust I place in the advice of others, I place in certain Medical Professionals who have impressed me as being good at what they do for a living. A good doctor has not only knowledge of medicine but also the skill of Crisis Management. They're able to not confuse hunches with facts and to be neither overcautious nor over-reckless. And they know, when the future is not certain, to err on the side of overcautious.

Over the last two years, a number of people have tried to convince me that I've been being overcautious and they seem to think that's a much bigger mistake than I'm afraid of making. I do not find wearing a mask in public places to be a big deal. If you think it's uncomfy or bad for your breathing, maybe you need to try on different masks. I'm real happy with the one I found…but your face, if you're fortunate, is different from mine.

The masks I get may seem expensive but they're nowhere near as disposable as their packaging indicates. I get enough mileage out of each one to make them utterly cost-effective. Yes, you can find cheap masks. You can even find free masks. But, like so many things in life, you get what you pay for.

And if your discomfort at mask-wearing is political — it feels oppressive, it feels like the government is trying to control you — I think you're connecting two unrelated things. A friend who's been trying to convince me that masking is "theater" has as his primary argument that the governor of our state, Gavin Newsom, is an idiot and/or tyrant. Now, I don't think that and neither do the 62% of Californians who voted against him being recalled…

…but even if I did, I'm not wearing a mask or not wearing a mask because of my governor. My decisions about masking are based on my doctors. And it's not just that I think (correction: I know) that they know more about this stuff than my governor. They know more about this stuff than I do. That doesn't make them infallible…just closer to it than I could ever get watching YouTube videos or listening to professional politicians.

I knew a guy once who used to argue that there was absolute, undeniable proof that Climate Change was a hoax. And here, in toto, was his proof: That Al Gore said it was so. Science…rising temperatures…evidence of changing weather patters…none of that entered into it. All he had to know was that Gore said it was so. If Al Gore had warned against drinking poison, this guy would immediately have chug-a-lugged a liter-sized bottle of Drano.

So, bottom line: I have no long-term plan for ending my COVID-avoidance lifestyle. Like I said, I think long or even medium-term projections are pretty worthless…kind of like getting a wager down now on who'll win the 2024 Super Bowl. You might turn out to be correct. Hey, even Sylvia Browne guessed right once in a while when doing her phony "psychic" readings. You just shouldn't bet money (or your health) on uniformed prognostications.

I am getting out more. I am going to places I didn't go when the virus seemed to be at its peak. I'm just not quite ready yet to post the new header I have at the ready for this blog: It's a Sergio drawing of me throwing away my masks. Hopefully, you'll see it here soon.

The famous Broadway producer Julian Marsh was about to open his latest show — Pretty Lady — on the Great White Way when tragedy struck. His leading lady, the famous star Dorothy Brock, broke her ankle. Marsh thought he'd have to close the show before it opened, which would mean failure, a huge financial loss and unemployment for all the folks involved in the show.

But the cast members told him there was someone who could step into Dorothy Brock's tap shoes…someone who knew the part and could play the lead. They were thinking of Peggy Sawyer, a member of the chorus who had just been fired by Marsh. The producer was skeptical but he decided to roll the dice and take a chance on her…

…but there was a problem. Sawyer had packed her bags and headed for the train station to move back to her home in Allentown, and to abandon her dream of a career on the stage. So Marsh raced to the train station where he asked her to come back and star in the show from which she'd been fired. She said no and it was up to Marsh to convince her.

And that's where we are as you click and watch the best number from the London production of the musical about a musical, 42nd Street…

Ron Kasman read this post I put up about Wally Wood maybe inking Jack Kirby's comics for DC Comics starting in 1970. Then Ron sent me this…

At age 17 at the time of the New York Comic Art Convention, I went to the offices of DC with a few friends. Carmine Infantino took us into his office for a long visit. It might have been two hours. He showed us Kirby originals on what became know as the Fourth World Series. One of the group commented that Wood would have been the right inker. Infantino immediately responded, "Too expensive." I remember this because at that point in my life I had no idea of fiscal constraints in comics. I thought it was all done for the good of the artform.

As I got into comics, one of the things that stunned me about the business was how nickel-and-dime it was, especially when it came to rewarding (or just keeping around) the people who created the product. I'm not really talking about Carmine here but at times, it seemed like those who owned or ran some companies didn't want to pay the writers and artists well because that would have been some sort of admission that the writers and artists were in any way responsible for the company's success.

Quick Analogy: In 1979, the comedians working The Comedy Store here in Hollywood went on strike, demanding to be paid. They weren't even asking to be paid a lot…and when they finally settled, they weren't. The Store was making millions and the guy who cleaned the rest rooms was being paid but the comedians weren't. The comedians just wanted some acknowledgement that what they were contributing had value.

And Mitzi Shore, who owned and managed the place, kept repeating like it was some sort of holy mantra, "Not one penny, not one penny," until she finally had to give in. I believe she was clinging to a faulty premise — that all those folks were flocking there because of her and what she had built. They weren't coming to spend money because of Robin Williams, Richard Pryor, Jay Leno, Dave Letterman, etc.

A lot of what I observed with comic books reminded me of the Comedy Store and vice-versa. In many cases, the difference between getting your first choice artist on a comic book and your second or eighth choice was just a couple of bucks per page. In a comic containing a 22-page story, it might be $44…or way less than what some guy in management spent on business lunches that week.

It wasn't the money so much as it was a principle — that principle being that the company was successful because of management, not because of its creative talent. That's a fallacy. Success in a field like this comes from a combination of both and that is how it will always be in comic books…and for that matter, in comedy clubs.

You can learn to do all the stuff my buddy Charlie Frye can do. Just practice all day every day of your life starting when you're around six. Piece o' cake…