This is a group called Kippalive…
Recommended Reading
Rand Paul — who, let's remember, is Dr. Rand Paul — has been going around saying that masks don't work. A fact-checker at the Washington Post says Paul is basing his assertion on one study and ignoring many others that say the opposite — and even the one he cites doesn't say what he says it says. What mainly interests me about the fact-check article is its explanation of how masks work.
Dispatches From the Fortress – Day 633
2022 is almost upon us and I'm looking at three comic conventions in Southern California next year. This is assuming we are past the stage where comic conventions get canceled for medical reasons.
WonderCon is in Anaheim from April 1 through April 3. The San Diego Comic Fest is in you-know-where from April 21 to April 24. And Comic-Con International is in the same city from July 21 to 24 with a Preview Night on July 20.
WonderCon is a big convention that covers comics, animation, gaming, anime, TV, movies and a whole lotta things. The San Diego Comic Fest is a small (by comparison) and intimate gathering that focuses mostly on comics, especially older ones. And Comic-Con International is a huge mother of a blow-out about everything that's fun and imaginative. If you go to one of these events and don't have a great time, it may be because you picked the wrong size one.
Me, I'm hoping to be at all of them but I have made this policy that has (so far) served me well throughout The Pandemic. I don't assume I can predict how things will be in the future. I don't think anyone can and while I have a lot more faith in the Dr. Faucis of the world than I do in myself, I don't gamble my health on anyone's predictions. I especially don't listen to the vast number of Internet Experts who have never attended five minutes of Medical School but are sure they know all about viruses.
And yes, I felt this way even before the news that…
A man who flew from Minnesota to Manhattan to attend an anime convention last month at the Jacob K. Javits Center tested positive for the new omicron variant of the coronavirus, Minnesota Health Officials announced Thursday. The man, who was fully vaccinated, was in attendance at Anime NYC 2021, a convention of all things related to Japanese animation, from Nov. 19-21.
I also don't believe in drawing any conclusions or worries from a report like this. It's a reason for caution, not panic. A few weeks ago, none of us had heard the word "Omicron" and a lot of us still don't know how to pronounce it, let alone how dangerous it is. We know how dangerous it might be but that's not the same thing. I have some real good doctors in my orbit and I'm going to wait until they tell me where between caution and panic this one falls. And where the next one falls and the next one falls…
Today's Hannukka Video Link
It's a holiday dance spectacular with Elliot Dvorin and the Key Tov Orchestra…
We Almost Never Mention Trump These Days Here But…
I didn't think anything could lower my opinion of the man any more than its current subterranean level…but the list of places he went and people he probably infected after he knew he had COVID has done it.
From the E-Mailbag…
This first ran on this site on 11/21/10. Everything in it is still valid except the line at the end where I say, "I've been at this for 41 years and so far, it seems to be working." It should now read, "I've been at this for 52 years and so far, it seems to be working."
From a reader of this site who goes by the handle, Dubba-hugh…
On every other blog run by a professional writer, I've seen the answer to the meme, "When did you first know you were a writer?" So, Mr. Evanier, why are you holding out on us? When did you first know you were a writer?
Disbelieve it if you will but it was in Kindergarten. I began reading Dr. Seuss books at a very early age. I largely taught myself how to read (I have no idea how) from the output of the Good Doctor as well as piles and piles of comic books, mainly of the Dell funny animal variety. About the same time I was first enrolled in Kindergarten, I was taken to the first play I'd ever seen. There was an investment firm up on Wilshire near Highland that had a small theater. I think it seated around 35 people and on weekends, they had local actors come in and put on plays for kids…some kind of invitational perk for the families of employees or clients. My Aunt Dot and Uncle Aaron were investors there and they got us tickets. So one Saturday afternoon, my mother took me to see a presentation there — a stage adaptation of The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins that I don't think Dr. Seuss or his agents knew about. (Can you imagine? A real estate investment company doing something unethical? Good thing that doesn't happen these days.)
It was a perfect intro to theater for kids. Our visit started with some sort of director or instructor welcoming us individually and then because I was new to this, explaining what a play was and how I should sit still for it and not make a lot of noise…a lesson I wish they'd teach adults who go to the theater these days. Our welcomer also explained that Bartholomew Cubbins would be played by a girl and that this was a long-standing theatrical tradition, as in Peter Pan. Part of my job as a member of the audience was to pretend along with the actors on stage…in this case, to pretend that the girl was a boy. I didn't quite get why they didn't just get a boy to play a boy but it was no hardship to pretend. We then saw the play, which was the perfect length for a kid my age — about twenty minutes. I remember the lady playing a boy playing Bartholomew doing a deft little sleight-of-hand trick as she kept placing hat after hat (actually, the same ones over and over) on her head to simulate hat after hat appearing there.
I was quite smitten with that whole world and when I got home, I re-read and re-re-read the Seuss book. We always had a couple of his checked-out from the public library and my mother, wisely thinking I might want to contrast and compare, had made certain we had that one in the house that weekend.
The following Monday at school, we were given construction paper and crayons to draw on. I decided to write a book. In fact, the book that I decided to write was The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. I began to write and illustrate my version of it from memory. When the allotted time for drawing ran out, the teacher saw what I was doing and encouraged me to continue while the other kids did other things. So I sat there another hour or so until I finished…and she was so amazed at what I had done that she sent my "book" up to the principal, who was equally impressed. The next day, I created my own version of another Seuss classic, Bartholomew and the Oobleck, which I had not seen on stage but had read about ninety times.
I would later learn that this was a great way to launch a career as a professional writer. Many successful authors got their start stealing from Dr. Seuss.
So much fuss and encouragement was made over my little construction-paper books and about some subsequent, wholly original ones, that I just kind of assumed, "Okay, this is what I'll do with my life." In later years as I proved to be utterly inept at anything involving physical skills or math, that decision was constantly reinforced. Being a writer seemed like a great idea if only by default. If I stood a chance of doing anything well enough to earn a living at it, it was that. Years later, I met a rather stunning fashion model and heard someone ask her why she got into that line of work. She said, "I looked in the mirror and decided the only thing I had going for myself was my looks…and besides, I really enjoyed it."
I kinda always felt that way about writing and never considered any alternatives. When friends of mine were fantasizing about being movie stars or Los Angeles Dodgers or the President of the United States, I would stick with my goal because it seemed quite satisfying and, perhaps as important, quite reachable. I've been at this for 41 years and so far, it seems to be working.
Today's Video Link
Here's another Sondheim song I like a lot — "Our Time," sung here by Stephanie J. Block and a bunch of other Broadway performers…
When We Don't Know
The U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to do something to Roe v. Wade. There are a lot of different opinions out there about what this will mean for a woman's right to choose abortion…so many opinions that a couple of them have to be right. But that also means a lot of them won't turn out to be right. I feel I should remind you that lately, every time SCOTUS Watchers predict what the highest court in the land is going to do, some pretty firm opinions turn out to be wrong.
So it may be as bad as some predict but I think I'll wait until the opinion is (a) known and (b) fully understood before I get upset or mad or relieved or whatever the proper response may be.
The same is true of the buzz about the COVID variant, Omicron. There's an awful lot of panic out there and not a whole lot of hard information.
You know, it's nice in a way to be able to get 24/7 news on our TV sets and our computers whenever we want it but it does have its downsides. It's been a while here since I've quoted the late journalist Jack Germond but it helps to remember when he said, "The problem is that we aren't paid to say 'I don't know' so we have to say something even when we don't know."
Today's Hanuka Video Link
Here are the nice Jewish (I assume) boys from Six13 who did that West Side Story parody I linked to the other day. In this video, they spoof Hamilton with a pretty impressive person introducing their performance…
A Charlton Mystery
Warning: The following story is a mystery with no verifiable ending…just speculation. If you're the kind of person who likes your questions to have solid, inarguable answers, you might want to find something else on the Internet to read instead of the following…
Charlton Press was a comic book company that existed roughly from 1945 to 1986. They published a lot of comic books and back when I was a kid, I kind of rooted for them the way you might root for any underdog. They didn't have a lot of memorable characters and their books were cheaply printed and the stories were often kind of sappy. Real good artwork did appear in them but not often. As I later learned, the company had a reputation for paying its writers and artists poorly and…well, it showed.
Sometimes though they got more than they paid for. A guy named Joe Gill wrote an awful lot of them and he'd just bang out story after story after story, whether he had an idea for one or not. Occasionally, he hit a vein of gold. Sometimes, Steve Ditko drew for them as did a couple other good artists like Dick Giordano and Rocke Mastroserio. I started buying Charltons when I was about ten and with few-and-far-between exceptions, I liked them then more than I did when I got older.
Most of those I bought, I bought at second-hand book stores, most of which charged a nickel each or you could get six comics for a quarter. Needless to say, I only bought comics at such stores in multiples of six. That was how I started buying comics from different companies. For a while, I was only buying DCs but one day at some store, I found some quantity of DCs I wanted like 23 or 35…where one more comic would be free. So I'd take some interesting-looking Marvel home as my free comic and I'd like it so much that I'd find myself collecting DCs and Marvels…
…and then one day at some store, the pile of DCs and Marvels I wanted would be, say, 47 and since one more comic was free, I'd try a comic from some other company. I'm pretty sure that's how I started buying Charltons.
Used book shops were a good place to buy Charltons, not just because they were cheaper but because those stores were a good place to find them. Many of the stores I frequented here in Los Angeles to buy new comics simply didn't carry them. The few that had any Charlton comics didn't have many. Even later when I began to learn some things about comic book distribution back then, I couldn't understand why Charlton's product wasn't as available as comics from DC, Marvel, Archie, Harvey, Dell, Gold Key or one or two others.
I still don't know why but that's not the mystery that this post is about. The mystery that this post is about occurred one day at a used bookseller on Santa Monica Boulevard near Sawtelle. I'd picked out some comics to purchase when the guy who ran the place asked me if I collected Charlton Comics. I said I did and he took me into the back room and showed me five boxes of comics he'd recently acquired. Let me describe what was in them…
Each box had about a hundred Charlton Comics. Every single comic was in perfect condition as if they'd just come from the printer and never been read. And what they represented was one copy of every single comic that Charlton had published in about the last two years.
There were copies of Army Attack, Army War Heroes, Battlefield Action, Billy the Kid, Black Fury, Blue Beetle, Brides in Love, Cheyenne Kid, Fightin' Army, Fightin' Five, Fightin' Marines, Fightin' Navy, First Kiss, Freddy, Frontier Scout Daniel Boone, Gorgo, Gunmaster, Hot Rod Racers, I Love You, Jungle Tales of Tarzan, Just Married, Konga, Li'l Genius, Love Diary, Marine War Heroes, Marines Attack, Montana Kid, My Little Margie, Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds, Navy War Heroes, Outlaws of the West, Romantic Story, Sarge Steel, Secrets of Young Brides, Six Gun Heroes, Strange Suspense Stories, Submarine Attack, Sweethearts, Teen Confessions, Teenage Hotrodders, Teenage Love, Texas Rangers in Action, U.S. Air Force, Unusual Tales, War Heroes, Wyatt Earp and maybe a dozen others.
The storekeeper told me someone had brought them in and swapped them for two cents per comic in store credit, not cash, and had picked out ten bucks worth of old books (not comics). He would let me have the lot of them for twenty dollars. I offered fifteen. He said, "It's a deal if you get them out of here today."
I was about thirteen years old when this happened. I didn't have a lot of money but I had enough for this transaction. During all this, my father had been patiently waiting in his car outside, reading the newspaper. When I think about how good comic books have been to my life, I am grateful for my father's willingness in those years to drive me to second-hand bookstores and sit outside in his car reading the newspaper while I went in.
He was a little startled when I came out carrying crates of comics but by that age, he was used to his son surprising him…and he figured I knew what I was doing even though I didn't always figure that. I had to make five trips to his car.
The comics were not in order and it wasn't until I got them home and did some sorting that I realized what I'd acquired. It was, as I said, one of every comic book Charlton had issued for two years. That wasn't readily apparent to me until I realized that Six Gun Heroes had changed its title to Gunmaster and continued the numbering. Or that Charlton published five issues of Blue Beetle numbered #1-5, then they stopped Unusual Tales after #49 and followed it with Blue Beetle #50. So the numbering of Blue Beetle went #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #50, #51 and so on…
Charlton did things like that all the time and back then, there were no reference books in which I could look this stuff up. I had to figure it out for myself.
But that also is not the Charlton Mystery that this post is about. The mystery is: "Where the heck did this collection come from?"
How or why could or would anyone collect one copy of every Charlton comic for two years straight? They didn't miss one issue, even with Charlton's rotten distribution and its comics changing names as effortlessly as some people change socks. I could understand (maybe) being a lover of Charlton's romance comics or their war comics or every comic they put out with the words "Fightin' or "Attack" in its title…but every Charlton comic? And in perfect condition? How? Why?
Here's the best theory I came up with and if you have a better one, I'd love to hear it…
Someone in Los Angeles had a relative who worked for Charlton…or some business connection. Maybe some artist or writer who worked for the firm lived out here. Charlton for some reason sent them, individually or collectively, one copy of every comic that came off their presses and the recipient just tossed them all in boxes. That would explain the perfect condition. One day, they looked at the accumulation and said, "I'm sick of having this stuff piling up like this. I'm going to take them to a used book shop and I'll take anything they'll give me for them."
That's all I've got. I don't even have all those comics. I traded or sold 'em off long ago but I still sometimes wonder where they came from.
Today's Hanukka Video Link
And of course, we have to include Tom Lehrer's memorable ditty…
From the E-Mailbag…
Quite a few folks wrote me about what I said yesterday about Chris Christie. Our pal Doug McEwan wrote to say, "I think one reason Chris Christie's book is flopping is that the people who would most want to read Christie's book are mostly illiterate." I think the point is that nobody wants to read it.
No one cares about Chris Christie. He is well past the stage where he's likely to matter in any way in politics. Once upon a time, he had some appeal as a Republican who was (briefly) able to work the middle of the road and win the governorship of a usually-Democratic state. But he left office with an approval rating two points below that of cold sores. He was never going to win an election again but he might have wrangled an appointment in the Trump Administration — and indeed, he claims he turned down Chief of Staff.
But now even Trump doesn't want him around. And voters don't want a middle-of-the-road guy these days. Not being loathed by the opposition party is proof you're a traitor to your party. Christie's trying to sell himself as a sensible Republican who admits Trump lost…but who also wants and needs Trump supporters. Can't be done. You not only can't sell a candidate from that stance, you can't even sell a book.
Today's Video Link
If Rodney Dangerfield hadn't died on us, he'd be a hundred years old. That's as good a reason as any to watch 100 Rodney Dangerfield jokes. (Actually, it's more like 98. There are a couple of repeats in here but just go with it…)
Recommended Reading
The last few weeks, it's been hard to turn on the TV without seeing Chris Christie plugging his new book. I kept hearing in my head that little earworm that was once placed there by a Hanna-Barbera cartoon: "He's here / He's there / He's everywhere / So beware!" And speaking of cartoons, I was afraid to turn on a rerun of my old Garfield & Friends show for fear he'd had himself edited into an episode.
But he was all over, doing his little act where he denounces Donald Trump, then says he might vote for him next time because Trump's definitely gonna run, then he walks that back and says Trump might not…then Christie says he hasn't decided about entering the race but argues against the notion that he won't. The guy's on all sides of every issue and, as Eric Boehlert notes, his book and comeback tour are flopping big-time.
C.C.S.E.
Rob Salkowitz has a positive report on the Comic-Con Special Edition last weekend and I also heard (mostly) positive things from others who were in attendance. It was smaller, it had wider aisles, it had very little "celebrity" presence, it was a lot more about comics than about Hollywood, etc.
I'm glad to hear it was a success and I'm glad I made the decision I made not to attend. I wasn't ready for it.
The same fine folks who run Comic-Con will be running WonderCon in Anaheim from April 1 to April 3 next year. And the (presumably full-size) 2022 Comic-Con International in San Diego is set for July 21 to 24 with, I assume, Preview Night on July 20. During Covid Times, I have made it a point not to guesstimate that it will all be over by any particular date. We've all been wrong when we've done that. But I'm going to try to transition out of Stay-At-Home mode and work towards being ready for both.