From The Ed Sullivan Show for April 25, 1965: Two numbers by Freddie and the Dreamers — the British group that your parents were supposed to like…

Regular readers of this blog should probably be grateful to Brian Dreger, who sends me some of the best questions I receive — like this one…

You've said that your earliest writing work included comic books for Disney's overseas market. I'm curious why you were only working for the overseas market. Was it because you were new and the new people started out working on the overseas content? Was writing for the US market a goal to eventually achieve, or was the overseas market just as important as the US market?

The two "markets" were of equal importance to everyone involved…but you've made me think of a story I don't believe I've ever told here, at least in full. So settle back. This may take a while. In fact, I should probably post one of these…

Okay, you've been properly warned. I grew up wanting to be a writer but for the longest time, I wasn't sure what I could be a writer of. This was back when I thought (wrongly) that I'd have to pick one area and stick with it for all or most of my career. Comic books, though I loved them dearly and owned more of them than anyone I knew, were not high on the list, This was not so much because I didn't want to write them but because every interview I read of someone who worked in comics said that to write for the publishers in New York, one had to live in or around Manhattan.

I didn't. Nor was I ready to scratch off writing for television — live-action or animation — by relocating to the east. I also had some sense, especially after I met Jerry Siegel, that the comic book industry didn't treat its creative folks all that well.

There was a brief time when I almost did sell a couple of comic book scripts by mail — to Dick Giordano (then editor at Charlton) and to Mort Weisinger and Jack Miller (editors at DC) but it was only because they'd asked me to submit to them. They were impressed somehow with letters-to-the-editor I'd sent in…and it was kinda funny: Giordano was going to buy a script I wrote for Ghostly Tales but then he left Charlton for DC and I somehow didn't connect with him there.

Weisinger was about to buy a script I'd written for Superboy but then he was taken — kicking and screaming, I later heard — off the Superboy comic. Jack Miller wanted me to write an issue of Metal Men but before that could happen — to my surprise and I think his — he was no longer on the DC staff.

It felt like there was a secret rule then for comic book editors: If you even think of hiring that kid out in Los Angeles, you lose your job. So I just wrote off writing comics…and it wasn't really a disappointment because I'd never thought it could become much of a reality. This was shortly before Jack Kirby moved out to Southern California.

Now, you might be thinking, "You were living in Los Angeles. Why oh why didn't you start submitting scripts to the Gold Key Comics office (based in L.A.) or to the Disney Foreign Comics Department (based on the Disney lot in Burbank)?" And the answer is that I didn't know about the latter…and it just plain didn't dawn on me to submit to the former.

As you probably know, I started working with Mr. Kirby in early 1970, teamed with a great guy named Steve Sherman. Jack believed (then) that the only way to elevate one's self in the comic book business (then) was to create a new comic. Taking over an existing book, no matter how well you did it (then) or how much its sales soared (then), would probably not translate (then) into much more money for you. It was why Jack really didn't want to take over Jimmy Olsen at DC in 1970 and didn't want to return to Captain America at Marvel in 1975. He would have preferred to only create new books and I think it was a bad decision on those publishers' part to not let him. I believe both companies made a number of very bad decisions as regards to Jack Kirby.

But that was how it went at the time. One day, Jack suggested that Steve and I create some new comics. None of us were quite sure just what we'd do with these ideas but if Jack thought it was a wise move…okay. He knew the business a lot better than we did.

So Steve and I spent a few days throwing around ideas and we came up with six concepts for new comics. They were all different enough from what was then being published that they genuinely qualified as Fresh Ideas — but not so different that they wouldn't fit in on the newsstands. That's the sweet spot you usually want to hit. We wrote up presentations and pitched them all to Jack and he said they were all terrific. But of course, that was what Jack said to almost anyone who showed him an idea or art samples, no matter how crude. The only times he didn't give out with encouraging words were when he was shown something that looked lazy or plagiarized or, as was sometimes the case, both.

At the time, Steve and I were talking a lot with my friend Mike Royer, who had not yet wrangled the assignment of inking Jack's then-new books for DC. Mike was working for a great many other markets including Western Publishing, which was the company that published, along with so many other things, Gold Key comics. One day, he mentioned to me that Gold Key was looking for new, original comics. We had nothing to lose so Steve called their offices and got an appointment for us to meet with Chase Craig, who was the editor-in-chief there.

We went in, met Chase and told him our six ideas. He listened politely and seemed to think a couple of them had possibilities — but he warned us that it was not up to just him. A whole lotta people within the company had to say yes. We left him copies of our presentations and a week or two later, he sent them back to us with a nice note that said, approximately, "I'm sorry but I couldn't get anyone else interested in them." Very professional. Not in the least surprising.

Only much later, I realized that if I'd started submitting scripts to Chase for the comics he was editing — the Disney comics, the comics featuring Bugs Bunny and his cohorts, Woody Woodpecker, etc. — he would have given them professional consideration and I might have begun selling him scripts a year or two earlier than I did. That, alas, just plain did not occur to me. Ah, hindsight.

And if I had thought of submitting work to Chase, I probably wouldn't have followed through because of someone else…

I used to go visit Alex Toth — one of the greatest comic artists of all time and a man who, I did not then realize, had some serious anger issues at everyone in the industry. On one visit, I mentioned to Alex that Steve and I had tried to sell some ideas to Chase Craig. Alex exploded, yelling about how Chase, for whom he had once worked, was a horrible, evil, incompetent Spawn of Satan…or worse. He was someone to be avoided at all cost.

That's what Alex told me and it took many years before I learned two things about Alex. One was that he talked that way regarding just about everyone in the industry. The other was that he was wrong at least 90% of the time. He wasn't the main reason I didn't pursue writing for Chase but he was a reason.

Some time passed. Mike Royer finally got the job as Jack Kirby's inker. To thank me for my role in that — and because he no longer had time to pursue it himself — he told me about the Disney Foreign Comics Department. One of the eighty jillion revenue streams at The House of Mouse was that they'd sell foreign publishers the right to publish comic books featuring Mickey, Donald and other Disney Superstars…and then they'd sell them the reprint rights to the comics of those characters that Western Publishing was creating.

In most of those countries, there was a huge demand for Disney comics — so huge that after the publishers in those countries bought and translated the Gold Key material each month, they still needed way more pages. To fill that void, Disney set up a division on their Burbank lot that bought more stories and art — hundreds of pages each year that would never be published in this country. Mike had some sort of "in" there and was going to try working for them before he got the job inking Jack's work, which was a full-time-and-a-half gig.

He told me who to contact there, I did and I began selling them scripts. A very nice man named George Sherman was my editor there and it was also in his job description to be a kind of liaison to Western Publishing. One day, he and Chase were talking and the conversation went something like this: George told him he thought some of the scripts lately for the comics Chase was editing were weak. Chase agreed and explained that a couple of his best writers had recently retired or died or something. Most of the folks working for Chase were people with decades of experience in the animation and/or comic book business so they had a tendency to retire…or die.

George said something like, "We've got a kid writing for us whose work we really like" and he sent Chase Xeroxes of a couple of stories I'd written for the division. Chase liked them and one life-changing day, I got a phone call from him asking, "Can you write scripts like that for me?"

I gave it a whack — cautiously at first but it only took an assignment or two for me to realize Alex Toth could not have been more wrong about Chase Craig. And I mean "wrong" the way I'd be wrong if I told you that Hannibal Lecter was a real person, a nice guy and a helluva great gourmet. A lot of people in the comic book industry have been good to me — honest, benevolent and helpful — but if you made me pick a Top Three, it would be Jack Kirby, George Sherman and Chase Craig, not necessarily in that order. Here's a photo of Chase at his desk…

I wrote a lot of comics for Chase, originally when I was attending college at U.C.L.A. Writing for him was such a good experience that I got to thinking that maybe I oughta quit college — where I was learning absolutely nothing that would ever be of any use to me — and become a full-time writer. Chase did not know I was thinking that when on one other life-changing day, he told me, "If you could write a lot more scripts for me, I could probably buy almost all of them."

I'm probably not remembering his words exactly but I definitely recall sitting in his office after he said what he said. Then and there, I decided to quit U.C.L.A. — which I did. I am not suggesting that would be the proper move for someone else in different circumstances at a different time but it was the absolute right move for me at that moment. I hedged the decision a bit by enrolling in some part-time curricula at Santa Monica City College but soon quit that, too.

So this has been a very long, long answer to the question as to why I didn't try writing comic books for Gold Key earlier than I did. I probably could have given you this as a one-sentence answer: "There was an opportunity there but I was just too friggin' dumb to see and take advantage of it." I can now think of many times in my life I've made similar mistakes and there have probably been many more I don't know about.

Here's a cute segment from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. I think this is from February 19, 1967 but I could be wrong…

Thank you to the billions of you (it feels like) who sent me a link to this article about a guy who really, really loved Garfield. I appreciate the gesture but I don't need any more.

It's Father's Day so here's an article I first posted here on 9/21/14. It's about my father but it's also about my grandfather — two very kind, wonderful men…

I know people who love to drive…and I'm not talking about NASCAR and road racers and such. I mean: People who just love to get behind the wheel of their everyday car and go someplace…or even not go someplace. They'll go for a ride for the sheer pleasure of going for a ride. Somewhere here, I'm sure I've written about a gent who worked with me at Hanna-Barbera in the seventies who had a three-hour daily commute…and that was just one way. He was fine if not delighted with spending six hours — a quarter of his day and an even higher percentage of his "awake" hours — driving on the freeway.

I do not like to drive. To me, it's no pleasure. It's a chore. Often, it's a necessary chore and often too, the result of that drive makes it well worth the chore. But just driving is to me about as joyous as wheeling the trash cans out to the curb on Wednesdays and wheeling them back in on Thursdays. You do it because you have to do it in order to make some aspects of your life work the way you want them to work.

My father loved to drive…but mainly, he loved to drive friends and family around. He had no desire to be a taxi driver or a chauffeur but he loved to drive me to school or drive my mother to the market or drive my Aunt Dot to the airport. He sometimes got annoyed if a friend or loved one wouldn't let him do that, especially if they spent money on a cab. He'd say with a note of hurt in his voice, "Why didn't you let me drive you?"

He was, as I hope I've made clear, a very nice man who enjoying doing things for those he loved or even liked. This was one of the few things he could do for most of them. I'd like to think that some of that primal kindness has rubbed off on me. Clearly though, the Love of Driving was not hereditary.

My mother hated to drive. It made her extremely nervous. Other things did too but with other things, she could calm her fluttering nerves by smoking. When she drove, she was too afraid to not have both hands on the wheel and her total attention on anyone or anything she might hit within a radius of about twenty car-lengths.

She did not drive when the two of them lived back in Hartford. The train system and the occasional cab got her where she wanted to go and my father didn't drive much back there, either. But Los Angeles is, let's face it, Los Angeles and when he moved out here in 1951 and she followed him out to get married, he began driving everywhere. He even drove them to Las Vegas to get married. When she said, "Maybe I should get a driver's license," he always said, "No, you don't need one. I'll take you anywhere you need to go." And he did. She was happy to have it like that.

Finally one day when I was somewhere around ten years of age, there was an item in the newspaper about a child who'd died from an injury because his non-driving mother hadn't been able to get her son to a hospital in time. At that moment, my parents decided my mother should learn how to drive and have a car. There were, after all, times when he was off at work. So driving lessons and a car were all arranged but it put her under so much stress, I wondered if maybe I should have an emergency where she had to rush me to a hospital. Just so it would all seem worth it.

Her dislike of driving was not like my dislike of driving. I didn't get mine from her. Hers was out of sheer dread of hitting someone or something. She sometimes went weeks without getting in the car…and when she did, it was to go to a market two miles away on a Sunday morning, driving 25 MPH in the right hand lane. You would have loved everything about my mother except driving behind her.

For the reasons stated, my father encouraged her to get her license. For other reasons, he discouraged me. As I crept up on the age where a boy starts thinking about that, he'd say things to me like, "Oh, you don't need to drive. I'll take you anywhere you want to go." He meant that.

Between the ages of about 10 and 14, I was actively building my comic book collection by going to used book shops around Los Angeles. There were a lot of them then and most (not all) had a section devoted to old comics. The standard price was a nickel per comic, six for a quarter. An annual (double-sized issue) was treated as two comics.

Many a Saturday, my father would say to me, "Would you like to visit some bookstores today?" The answer was always yes.

I'd studied the Yellow Pages and made a list of all the ones that seemed close enough to visit. They pretty much broke down into two groups: Those to the east of us and those to the west of us. When my father volunteered an outing, I'd choose three or four stores in one direction. A few were conveniently clustered together. Down near MacArthur Park — then as now, a rather sketchy part of L.A. — there were three situated so my father could park once for all three.

He rarely went in with me. He'd find a parking spot and sit there, reading a newspaper while I went from shop to shop, looking for issues I didn't have. I carried lists but rarely referred to them. With lightning precision, I could ruffle through piles of old comics, spotting those I needed. Of course, at stores that sold six for a quarter, I always made my selections in multiples of six.

That mathematical requirement had the effect of broadening my reading horizons. I had my little mental list of comics I purchased and ones I did not. I'd select every as-yet-unowned issue from my list on the premises and find that I had 59 comics. To get full value for my money, I had to buy sixty…so that's when I'd try some comic I hadn't collected before. If I liked it — and I almost always did — I'd start searching for old issues of it on the next bookstore expedition.

I was in Bart's Books out on Santa Monica Boulevard one day when I needed to select two more comics so I'd have some neat multiple of six to purchase. At that moment, I was not a collector of war comics but I picked out two and took them home. The next visit to Bart's, I left with more than a hundred war comics.

I built quite a collection thanks to my father's generosity with his time. He was delighted when I'd stagger back to the car with an armload of comics. "Find some good ones?" he'd grin. I always told him I had, whether I had or not.

He wasn't thinking that they were a good investment; that some day, those comics would go for a lot of money. He also wasn't thinking that reading all those comics would lead to a career for his little boy. He was just thinking he was making me happy…and he was.

Around the time I hit fifteen, a lot of those bookstores began closing — the start of a long economic trend that has made that kind of business almost extinct. The stores that were around began charging more than cover price for their old comics — sometimes, a lot more. I had new friends who were into collecting and sometimes, we'd take the bus up to Hollywood Boulevard and the shops up there. So my father and I stopped making our Saturday morning runs.

Still, he was always available and eager to drive me anywhere I wanted to go and dismissive of my thoughts of getting my own car and license. If he'd had his way, I would never have learned to drive and he would have shlepped me around, well into my forties. Among other problems, that would have cooled off my dating considerably.

Around age 19, I finally learned to drive. My father was due to get a new (used) car then so instead of trading in his Buick Skylark, he gave it to me when he purchased something else. I liked the freedom I got from driving — the ability to go where I wanted when I wanted, but that was about it. Just getting in the car and driving didn't do anything for me. I always had to want to go somewhere.

About that time, a duty fell upon me. I had to stop someone else from driving.

My mother's stepfather — the man I called Grandpa — lived with my grandmother in Hartford. The two of them came out to visit every few years and every time they came out, he did the same thing. He'd go out in our back yard and work. Grandpa loved yard work and he'd always find something to do out there, ripping out an old hedge or planting a new one or something. He would have been heartbroken if we'd told him, "No, Grandpa. The yard's fine. Nothing for you to do out there." So we let him putter.

One day when he was out trimming our lemon tree, I was summoned into our living room. My father was there and my mother and my grandmother. They sat me down and my mother said, "Mark, there's something that needs to be done and we've been discussing it and we think you're the one to handle it." At that moment, if you'd given me a hundred guesses what they were talking about, I wouldn't have gotten it.

My mother continued, "Grandpa's eyes are not good. He's had a few minor accidents behind the wheel lately and his motor skills aren't right for that anymore. We've decided he must stop driving." My father and grandmother nodded grimly. It was for his own good…and also, I suppose, for the good of anyone he might run over.

"We've decided it will hurt less coming from you," my mother said. "We'd like you to be the one who tells him."

I looked over at Grandma and now saw that she was crying. Then I looked over at my father and realized he was crying, too and my mother was starting. I thought, "Gee, everyone's crying" and then realized that I was no exception.

Grandpa, I guess I should mention, was 81 years old.

We decided to get it over with so I thought for a few minutes about how to phrase things. Then I took some lemonade out for him, sat him down in one of two patio chairs we had back there and said it as simply and directly as I could. As I recall, the opening was: "The people here who love you, myself included, have made a decision. This is only because we love you. It is only for your own good." And then I told him. I made it clear we were not asking him to consider it and it was not open for discussion. We were saying he was going to stop. No arguments.

He was a sweet old man and the possibility of killing or injuring himself was of less importance to him than the possibility of killing or injuring someone else. And to the extent that killing or injuring himself was important, the worst part of that would be to turn his beloved into a widow or at least a full-time caregiver.

Once he grasped what I was telling him, he fell silent for a few long minutes. He cried a bit. He thought it over. Finally, in a quivering voice, he said, "Well, I knew I was going to have to stop someday. If you all say it's now, I guess it's now."

Then he hugged me and we changed the subject. That evening as we all headed for my father's car so he could drive us to a restaurant for dinner, Grandpa got in behind the wheel first and announced, "I'll drive!"

He got a big laugh, then he moved into a passenger seat for the rest of his life. I'd like to think it was longer than it would have been if we hadn't done what we'd done.

I thought of that incident often. I thought of it a lot as my own father neared that age and what I thought was, "It's not going to be that easy with him." It wasn't just that not being able to drive would make him feel old. It was worse than that. It would make him feel useless.

I thought about it a lot when he turned eighty. He was still quite capable of driving an automobile but, I wondered, for how long? As it turned out, it was about five months. He had a heart attack. It was his third and it was the kind his cardiologist described as, "Maybe not life-ending but life-changing." He would not be back to normal functioning soon, if ever. A week or so later, he had the life-ending kind.

When someone close to you dies, you look for that silver lining, however thin and fragile it may be…some way to "spin" the death in a way that's more comforting to you. I had no trouble doing that 22 years later when my mother died because she really wanted to go. She was verging on blindness and a life which did not contain one single thing that brought her any joy; just a constant, overpowering guilt that she had become a horrendous burden on her only son.

With my father, it was different…kind of. As I explained in another of these pieces, he dreaded being someone who required 24/7 care like a neighbor of ours who went literally senile. The constant care that man required — dressing him, feeding him, changing his diapers — destroyed his wife's savings and, eventually, her health. When my father was told he'd have to go home in a wheelchair, he immediately began fearing he'd wind up like that neighbor. I know because he told me that…many times.

When he had that last heart attack — the one that ended his life — I told myself the timing was right. He certainly did not want to go home in a wheelchair. He certainly did not want caregivers to be brought in and a ramp built on the front porch of his house and the money he could otherwise leave to my mother to be spent on keeping him alive. He especially didn't want that if there was little or no chance he'd ever recover to the point where he could walk and go out and get in his car and drive somewhere and do something useful.

So I was really glad we never got to that moment when I had to sit down with him and say to him what I had to say to Grandpa. Because that would have had the same effect on him as that last heart attack. And I would have felt in a way like I'd caused it.

Every year, most of the current TV shows do some sort of outreach to Emmy voters. Here's a video of a live event recently done for The Daily Show which may prove to be a fruitless effort to snatch one or more from the grasp of Mr. John Oliver. It's a bunch of clips followed by a good Q-and-A with Jon Stewart and others from that program…

Philip Lacovara was once the deputy solicitor general of this country and president of the D.C. Bar and he has all sorts of other impressive credentials. He wrote this open letter to U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito about why it would be right and proper for Justice Alito to recuse himself from cases involving January 6 and the legitimacy of the last presidential election. Justice Alito probably won't read it and probably wouldn't do as suggested even if he did.

Kevin Drum explains that crime in this country is down. Those who wish to oust Joe Biden will never, of course, admit that.

Here is a link to Politico's rundown on all of the criminal cases against Donald J. Trump and where they currently stand. That man is still in — and will always be in — a heap o' trouble.

I buy some things for my house in quantity and not long ago, i ordered a small case of Campbell's Chunky Chicken Soup from an online store.  Just to have on hand.  The ad said I'd be getting the 18.8 ounce cans — the only size I've ever seen in stores — but what they delivered was 16.1 ounce cans. I called the store and after too long a wait on hold, I spoke to a gent who didn't sound like he was from this planet, let alone this country. He explained to me, like it was my fault, that the case lots only come in the 16.1 ounce size. If I ordered a case, I should have expected that.

I explained to him that his webpage still said that what I was ordered was 18.8 ounce cans. He said, "Yes, but we couldn't ship you a case of 18.8 ounce cans since we don't handle those. We shipped you the only cases we had." I said…well, what you probably would have said. He told me that if I didn't like what I received, I could ship it back to them and they'd issue me a refund. I pointed out to him that the cost of shipping would be more than the amount of money I believe I was shorted. He said, "Well then, I don't know what I can do for you. We don't have cases of the size you want."

I suggested he could issue me a refund for the difference in price. He said they couldn't calculate a difference. They don't carry the larger cans and so have no established price for them…and no, they would not go by the prices of any other merchant.

I finally decided that my time is worth a lot more than I'd been shorted on this deal so I'll just take the loss. I ended the call and ten minutes later, I got an e-mail from the company requesting that I rate the quality of their service. It was accompanied by an ad to buy several products including a small case of Campbell's Chunky Chicken Soup. Same picture of the 18.8 ounce size can.

Here's a fun cover of Billy Joel's song, "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant." The performers call themselves the Middle Aged Dad Jam Band and they have Al Yankovic sitting in on, of course, the accordion…

In 1964, not long after he'd been removed as Producer of the legendary Judy Garland Show on CBS, George Schlatter produced this special starring Jonathan Winters and his guests, Art Carney and the New Christy Minstrels. It was the second attempt to package Winters' unique comedic talents into a TV program, the first being The Jonathan Winters Show — a fifteen-minute long series that ran on NBC from October of 1956 until June of 1957. There would be many more attempts after this.

Mr. Schlatter himself recently recorded an introduction to this video…

Comic-Con in San Diego commences in 41 days and tickets to it have been sold out since…well, an hour or so after they went on sale, whenever that was. It's amazing how swiftly that event sells out every year and unlike some other conventions, it isn't because they advertise super-duper superstar guests. Comic-Con sells out immediately without announcing or advertising anyone who'll be appearing or signing things there. The event itself is the thing.

It has come to my attention that some folks who did score tickets to the convention are presently trying to resell them for a considerable profit on Stubhub and other online services that traffic in marked-up tickets, mainly to concerts, plays and sporting events. I just looked through about a half-dozen of these sites and saw a wide range of prices. This was by no means a carefully-researched study but the cheapest asking price I saw for a four-day admission to the con was $749. That's for one ticket.

The highest I saw was $2400 and change — and I wonder if anyone is paying that price now. I can understand why someone might think the $2400 tickets to an Adele concert or the Super Bowl might be more desirable than the $749 ones due to seating placement but a ticket to Comic-Con just gets you in the door with no guarantee you'll get into any event or be able to sit down anywhere, restrooms included.

And if you buy it from a scalper site, it might not even get you in the door. The convention takes the position that tickets are non-transferable and I've heard that in the past, people have been refused admission. I don't know much about this. The old Comic-Con website, which was very simple to navigate and loaded with info, explained it but the new website — which is neither of those things — has vaguer language…I think. Maybe there's something there I couldn't find.

In any case, if I bought a ticket through a third-party seller, I sure wouldn't be shocked to get there and find out that it wasn't real or wasn't valid. Traveling to San Diego…booking and paying for a hotel room…then getting to the con and discovering your passes aren't good…that sounds like a real good way to not have a good time. You might as well cosplay as a giant Tootsie Roll Pop so you can be the biggest sucker in town that day.

I've had a number of e-mails asking me to update the condition of that ankle that I broke 143 days ago. It's a good news/bad news thing, the good news being that my left ankle is a lot better. So what's the bad news? My left knee is in serious need of replacement. I'm still bad at balancing without a walker and at navigating stairs. My orthopedist though assures me he'll have me walking well in time for Comic-Con via an injection yet to be injected. And then we'll schedule a replacement of that left knee some time in the coming months.

The recovery period has not been as awful as you or I might have imagined. I only leave my house for the occasional doctor appointment…and I was even able to do a couple of them via Zoom from my office chair. I have frequent visitors and some evenings, it feels like I'm doing my own talk show from my home office here. I also have a great physical therapist who visits me and — all in all — it hasn't been terrible. Still, I don't recommend it.

The Legal Eagle weighs in on the alleged theft of Scarlet Johansson's voice. For some reason, this is all reminding me of the plot of The Little Mermaid…

Byron Erickson has been deeply involved in the reprinting and creation of Disney Comics for many years. He read this post here and then sent me this…

This is in response to your "Ask Me: Licensed Comic Libraries" column on Monday. I know nothing about most comics publishers' practices in maintaining archives, but I do know a lot about how Disney handled their comic book archives worldwide. This is probably more than you want to know, so feel free to cut as needed (or desired) or paraphrase mightily if you post any of it.

As the production manager for Another Rainbow's Carl Barks Library in the 1980s, and then editor-in-grief of Gladstone's comic books, it was my job to source printable "proofs" for both the Barks reprints and Dutch and Danish created original material.

That should have been easy, because — and it may come as a news flash — Disney's license required all publishers to send proof copies of all their created material to the Disney Studio in Burbank. For free. Disney would then make available all that material to any Disney licensee that requested it. Not for free. I'm sorry, but I don't remember what they cost, but it would have been just a few dollars per page.

Unfortunately, as we soon discovered, Disney didn't provide actual photostats. Instead, they sent what can only be described as old-fashioned xerox copies (for your younger readers, that's copies on coated paper where the blacks weren't really black). Some of them required lots of touch-ups by our talented production artists who had to meticulously compare the copies to the original published comics to reinstate small pieces of lines that had faded out or were missing.

Luckily, Disney's archives was missing some stories and almost all of the Barks covers. I say "luckily" because that meant Disney was forced to order the missing material directly from Western Publishing's archive in Racine, Wisconsin, and Western sent incredibly high-quality photostats. Again, I don't remember what they cost, but it was at least triple the cost per page of Disney's xeroxes.

Now, Bruce Hamilton (Another Rainbow and Gladstone's publisher) was not a spendthrift in any sense of the word, but he immediately realized that to make a high-quality "Barks Library" we needed to get *all* our proofs directly from Western. He got a bit of pushback on that from Disney, but they finally relented and Bruce and I flew out to Western's office in Racine to arrange the deal.

I could fill pages with stories of what an amazing treasure trove Western's archives were back then (and the very nice Vice President there who let us wander around and poke in the archives unsupervised), but the deal was made, even though said Vice President questioned Western's continuing obligation to fulfill the terms of a Disney comics license they no longer had.

Cut to my years working in Denmark for Egmont's Disney comics production. The same licensing terms applied to all the European (and Brazilian) Disney comics producers: all had to provide archival copies of all Disney comics material to Burbank for free. However, unlike in the U.S., each publisher was free to order directly from any other publisher, and the material had to be provided "at cost." The price of "at cost" was fixed at $30 per page for color separated film (no one ordered black and white proofs). This price never changed while I was with Egmont, even though at some point in the early 2000s the material started to be supplied digitally.

Finally, I know the "foreign" publishers' mutual agreement is still in force and functioning, but I'm not sure that the modern Disney corporation still maintains its archive in Burbank. During my time visiting it in the 1980s, it went from a large air-conditioned office on the Studio lot, to a series of hot trailers parked way in the back. And I've heard (but can't vouch for) rumors that it's been completely cleared out. Maybe that's because everything is digital now, but also maybe it's because the modern Disney Corporation doesn't care about their non-film heritage anymore. After all, the comics are no longer the cash cow they once were when Walt Disney's Comics & Stories sold more then five million copies a month in the early 1950s, and the various European Disney publishers combined through the early 2000s sold almost that many millions per week.

Well, there you are: The corporate mindset that since there's no money right this minute in preserving something that may be of value in the future, we don't want to spend money on it now. I could fill this blog for years with horror stories that have been told to me from folks who are charged with selling old movies and TV shows for home video and streaming. One told me once that the answer to the question "Why isn't this old TV series being rerun or sold on DVD?" is too often because they can't find decent prints and maybe that someone is reticent to invest in restoration of what they do have.

When I was involved in Disney comics in the seventies, they had a library of good stats and negatives. I'm sorry that seems to no longer be the case but it's not uncommon. Most folks would not believe what we had to go through to reprint the early years of Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip. Now that we're into the later years, it's much easier but there are still occasional problems finding a good copy of a certain strip.

Here's another one of Robert Klein's HBO Specials, this time from 1995. Back when I was teaching Comedy Writing at U.S.C., I showed a couple of these to my students and I think they learned a lot from them — if not from the shows themselves then certainly from the discussions that followed. The man could take the simplest things from everyday life, turn them into very funny routines and deliver them with a sense of spontaneity that masked the fact that he'd done the material hundreds of times before. One of the best…