I'm getting lots of messages about the songs written (or not) by the late Sid Jacobson. He's listed in some sources as having been the writer (or one of the writers) of "Put a Ring On Her Finger" as recorded by Les Paul but this may be an error…or it may be a confusion involving two songs with the same name. Among other songs I could/should have listed for him were…
Earl Grant — "The End"
Dion and the Belmonts — "Don't Pity Me"
Frankie Avalon — "A Boy Without a Girl"
Gene Pitney — "Oh Annie Oh"
Clarence "Bad Boy" Palmer and The Jive Bombers — "You Took My Love"
It all makes for an impressive list. I sure wish one of the songs I'd written had been recorded by Clarence "Bad Boy" Palmer and The Jive Bombers. Hell, Stephen Sondheim probably wished one of his songs had been recorded by Clarence "Bad Boy" Palmer and The Jive Bombers. I'd like to thank Roger Green and Mike Kazaleh for info and also Devin Thompson.
In 1972 when Apollo 16 landed on that Moon of ours, the call sign for one of the lunar modules was named for Casper, that friendliest of ghosts. Devin tells me that Sid wrote this to mark the occasion…
That's almost as impressive as having a song you wrote recorded by Clarence "Bad Boy" Palmer and The Jive Bombers.
Three things you should know about cartoonist Paul Coker Jr., who died July 23rd at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico…
1. He was an important figure in the history of greeting cards. Born in Kansas in 1929, he studied art at the University of Kansas, served in the military, worked as a graphics designer at a local TV station and eventually (around 1955) landed a job at Hallmark Cards. His work there was very popular and his distinctive style was much-imitated, not just by others at Hallmark but at darn near every greeting card company in the world. Go by a display and even today, you'll see a lot of Paul Coker wannabes.
2. He was an important figure in MAD magazine. Around 1960, Coker moved to New York to seek other, better-paying work — though he continued to work for Hallmark by mail for many years. Also looking for work in New York was Phil Hahn, a close friend of Paul's who'd written cards for Hallmark. When Phil tried submitting material to MAD, he had Paul sketch out a few of his ideas and the folks at MAD decided they wanted both men in their magazine. Coker's first work for MAD was in #60 (January of '61) and he and Hahn became regular contributors, together and apart. (Together, they did "Horrifying Clichés." Coker was the fifth most prolific contributor to MAD, drawing some 372 pieces for them.)
3. He was an important figure in animation, especially for the Rankin-Bass Studio. Coker was the principal designer of, among other specials, Cricket on the Hearth (1967), Frosty the Snowman (1969), Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town (1970), Here Comes Peter Cottontail (1971), The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974), Rudolph's Shiny New Year and Frosty's Winter Wonderland (both 1976), Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey and The Easter Bunny Is Comin' to Town (both 1977), Jack Frost (1979), Pinocchio's Christmas (1980), The Leprechauns' Christmas Gold (1981) and Santa, Baby! (2001).
And since I started writing this, I thought of a fourth thing you oughta know about Paul Coker: His fellow MAD-man Sergio Aragonés called me while I was composing the above and we got to talking about what an all-around nice, friendly man Paul was. Sergio has particularly wonderful memories of rooming with Paul on some of the famous MAD trips and he said Paul often knew more about where they were and what was around than the official guides did. Great guy…great artist.
I recently bought a new laptop computer for travel. Got it from Costco on June 13 and it worked fine until the first time I traveled, which was to the Comic-Con in San Diego. The morning of July 22 when I tried to open it, the right hinge broke — or something — and parts seemed to suddenly be welded to other parts. I had to force it open, whereupon the entire housing around the screen came loose. Only later did I read the customer reviews on the Costco website and found among them comments like these three…
Computer worked fine and then one day i tried to open it and the inside of the screen started to break. It seemed like it was stuck to the keyboard and may have overheated.
The electronics work fine, but the cheap plastic bezel broke several days ago. Never dropped it or mistreated it in any way. Opened up the top and left rear hinge cracked. Tried to fix it and the bezel started coming off of the screen. Not good.
Bought this laptop in December, by March- just past 90 days developed the same hinge issue as others described, like it was melting.
That's kinda what happened to mine. I only had it for 40 days and I'd be surprised if I used it more than 12 hours, mostly to load my software and the files I'd need on the road. Fortunately, just before I went to San Diego, I backed the whole thing up to an external drive. A new laptop of a different brand arrived yesterday but it may be a while before I have the time to set it up and restore from the busted computer's backup.
Morals of the story: Always backup. Read the reviews. And buy from Costco. I bought the faulty laptop via mail order but took it back to my nearest Costco warehouse. There was a bit of delay while the man waiting on me waited for a manager who could come by and authorize the refund but there was no hesitation about taking it back. They didn't care that I didn't have the box or a few pieces of paper that came with it.
And before someone asks: Yes, I did irrevocably delete all my data from the computer before I took it back. Wiped it clean. And while I was at Costco, I blew part of the refund on english muffins, bacon, a huge bag of croutons and Rao's Marinara Sauce.
The first cartoon show that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera produced out of their then-new studio in 1957 was The Ruff and Reddy Show. It was on NBC Saturday mornings starting in December of that year…and I'm pretty sure that five-year-old me was watching that debut episode and all that followed. It had clever stories, good voice work and animation that was a few notches below the quality of the animation in this cereal commercial. Ruff was the cat with a voice by Don Messick. Reddy was the dog with almost the same voice Daws Butler used for the star of Hanna-Barbera's second series, Huckleberry Hound…
Most people who visit Comic-Con take home to-be-treasured-forever memories, autographs, photos, merchandise and souvenirs. I always take home some of those plus an enormous feeling of accomplishment. I did all the stuff I was supposed to do…or almost all. There were friends there I didn't get to see and others I did see but didn't spend nearly enough time with. Since the con, I have had phone conversations with a couple of them — conversations that should have occurred in person — and I have a few more such conversations to have.
I mentioned a lot of trouble checking into the hotel — parking, getting our stuff up to the room, etc. — then dealing with a flurry of mysterious charges to my credit card. I should have also mentioned that check-out was just the opposite. It went like a cool breeze, including the proper resolution of all those credit card puzzles. At least, I think they all were resolved. The drive home was easy and stress-free. I've never liked driving but if it was always like that, I could possibly learn to enjoy it.
I was with my longtime friend, the lovely actress Brinke Stevens, and we stopped off to eat, stretch our legs, use our respective restrooms and gas-up in San Juan Capistrano. That is a lovely…I was going to type "city" but "village" might be more appropriate. We did the eating and restrooms at a lovely Italian restaurant called Ciao Pasta which was just opening for the day when we stumbled in so we had the outdoor patio mostly to ourselves. The contrast to Comic-Con could not have been starker and I found myself wishing the restaurant wasn't 68 miles from my home. And by the way: They make a really fine Tagliatelle Bolognese there.
Jon Stewart joined an impassioned press conference on Thursday, calling out Republican Senators who are blocking passage of the PACT Act in the Senate. The bill will expand healthcare and benefits for the more than three million veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxins during their military service. The Senate originally passed the legislation in June with extraordinary bipartisan support. The House passed it shortly thereafter, and it arrived back to the Senate on Wednesday for final passage. But a group of Republican lawmakers, led by Sen. Pat Toomey, decided to block the measure for purely political reasons, costing sick veterans time they do not have.
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…
Photo by Bruce Guthrie, of course.
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…
Photo by You-Know-Who
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.
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…
Photo by Bruce Guthrie
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.
Photo also by Bruce Guthrie
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…
Photo by Robert Skir
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.
