Hey, here's a bargain and I have no idea how long it will last. Amazon is selling two volumes of our Complete Pogo series — Volumes 5 and 6 — in a slipcase for $35.63. Usually, these sets sell for close to double that and right now, if you order those two books individually from Amazon, they'll run you $48 without the slipcase.

I have long thought that Walt Kelly's Pogo was the finest newspaper strip ever done and there are plenty o' folks who agree with me. I also think this series of reprint volumes — the first ever to be complete and in chronological order — do Mr. Kelly's work proud. True, I'm one of the editors of this series but if you've been in the world of publishing for any amount of time, you've learned the simple truth: That editors never lie. Ever.

If you've been thinking of starting a collection of these books, here's the perfect starter set. Order it right here before Jeff Bezos fires whoever did it and raises the cost. They probably slashed its price when he wasn't on this planet, figuring he wouldn't notice.

In this video, I spoke with my great and sadly late friend Steve Sherman and we talked about a trip we made to New York in late June of 1970. There was some confusion about the flight that got us there and, yes, I know it really doesn't matter. Didn't matter then, doesn't matter now, But I'm going to tell it anyway. Feel free to skip on to the next item here or click onward to some other website. You won't hurt my feelings.

Back then, there was this thing called "student stand-by" and I'm not sure you even had to be a student to stand-by. These were cheap tickets that didn't guarantee you a seat on any particular flight; just that if there was space on a flight, they'd put you on it and if there wasn't, you'd wait for the next flight to that destination and maybe the flight after that and maybe the flight after that and so on. Eventually, they'd get you there…I suppose. In the meantime, any luggage you checked would go on the first flight for which you were standing-by even though you might not be on that plane.

At the time, the big thing in aviation was the new, massive 747 airplanes that had recently been introduced and everyone wanted to fly on one. I don't recall who told us but we went to the airport that day with the knowledge that there probably wouldn't be two seats open on a certain New York flight that was on a 747 but there'd be plenty on the next New York flight (not a 747) an hour or so later. That was how it worked out for us.

Flying on a 747 was a huge deal at the time and there was one very conspicuous, hard-to-ignore gent who had genuine tickets (not stand-by) for himself, his wife, his daughter and the family dog. We referred to the gentleman as "C.B." because he was taking 8mm home movies of their trip with the seriousness of the legendary director Cecil B. DeMille staging a massive crowd scene in a Biblical Epic. He had apparently already filmed the dog being "checked in" in one of those doggie-travel carriers along with their luggage.

Now, he was at the gate with his wife and daughter, filming them walking up to the counter, showing their tickets and receiving their boarding passes. Something about it wasn't right so he had them do it again. And again. And again. He was ordering other travelers to wait until he got the shot he wanted. Then he filmed his ladies walking over to a newsstand and buying some magazines and candy bars…again, in multiple takes. Then there were shots of them sitting down in the waiting room to await the call to board.

This all took a while, especially because he had to keep opening the camera. 8mm cameras used reels of film that could only hold four minutes of material — and after two, you had to stop, open the camera and flip the film over. Then after two more minutes of filming, you had to put in a new reel. And every time you opened the camera, you had to find a spot to do it where no light would get in, which in his case meant throwing his coat over the camera and then flipping or changing the film by sheer touch. That, as I well knew from shooting my own 8mm flicks, could take a while, especially when you were "on location."

You kids today with your cell phones…you don't know how good you have it.

At some point, they asked all passengers holding boarding passes to get on the plane. This did not apply to Steve and myself. We had no boarding passes and already knew we were waiting (hopefully) for the next flight. This also did not apparently apply to C.B. and his family. He was too busy making his little silent film masterpiece to pay attention to multiple announcements.

Finally, there came a moment when he was at one of the big windows, filming the majestic 747 aircraft as it taxied away from the gate and headed for the runway from which it would take off…

…and it was a good hundred yards from the gate when it suddenly dawned on C.B. that he, his wife and his daughter were not on the plane. But his dog was.

He began yelling to stop the 747, bring it back, etc. They don't do that…or at least they don't do it when you're too dumb to board when they tell you. "My dog is on that plane," he kept hollering — and the hundred-or-so people waiting at the gate were all laughing and saying to one another, "How nice of that man to let his dog ride on the 747."

C.B. and his family wound up on the next flight to New York, which is the one Steve and I got on. We heard him explaining to its flight crew and to other passengers how he'd had seats on the 747. I still don't know what he expected anyone to do because of that.

Not much was heard from C.B. until we were a few hundred miles from New York, at which point he and his family gathered their belongings and came down the aisle like this was a bus and they were getting off at the next stop. The flight attendant — we called them stewardesses then — explained to them that they had to be in their seats and fastened-down during landing. He argued that he had to be the first one off because of his dog. He lost that argument and grudgingly led his spouse and kid back to their seats.

Then the pilot announced that due to congested skies, there was no runway open and we'd have to wait until they found one for us. So our plane circled Manhattan and the surrounding areas for an extra forty-five minutes. Personally, I think they did that just to torture C.B. He sure was loud complaining about it.

As we landed, we were asked to remain in our seats if we weren't making connecting flights so that passengers who were could exit the plane first. C.B. and Company were already in the aisles and he was yelling about his dog and announcing that no one — no one!!! — was getting off before he and his family did. Somehow, it all got settled, we all deplaned (to use that silly verb) and when Steve and I were down in the Baggage Claim area claiming our waiting baggage, we saw C.B. with his dog.

We resisted going over and asking the dog how he enjoyed riding on the 747. But then when we passed C.B. with our suitcases, I asked him, "How's the movie coming along?" He shook his head and said, "This is not the ending I planned for."

Anyway, Steve was wrong in the video when he said we flew there on a 747. Steve flew home on a 747. I didn't. I flew on normal-sized planes — first to Baltimore (for reasons that wouldn't interest you) and then the next day back home to Los Angeles. I'm not sure I ever did ride on a 747 but if I did, it was many years later. See? I told you this was a trivial posting.

Sutton Foster is starring in a production of Anything Goes in London — though not indefinitely. That production of The Music Man starring her and Hugh Jackman opens for previews in New York just before Christmas. But here are some clips from the show she's doing in England…

I have thirty e-mails here asking what I think of Jellystone, the new cartoon series that redesigns a lot of classic (to me) Hanna-Barbera characters and changes a few genders and…well, my answer is simple: I haven't seen it yet. When I do, I'll let you know. This applies to a lot of things people write to ask me about like Schmigadoon and Hacks.

I'll get to 'em. Maybe not all this decade but I'll get to them.

Last August, I was playing around with webcasting. Apart from recording panels for things like Comic-Con@Home, I gave it up. I kinda realized that if there was anything the world didn't need, it was one more guy doing webcasts. Nothing against those of you who have them but you have to admit: There isn't exactly a shortage of you.

But I was glad I gave it a shot and very happy with some of them, especially a 95-minute chat I recorded with my old friend/partner Steve Sherman. As you probably know, Steve passed away a little over a month ago. He was a splendid, creative human being and I'm glad I have that conversation to remind me of that; not that there's any chance I would ever forget.

There was a lot of comic book history in there and for the record, I think I need to correct/clarify a few minor things. For instance, discussing our 1970 trip to New York, Steve said we'd visited the offices of Warren Publishing, which was the company that put out Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella and Famous Monsters of Filmland. He did. I didn't. I took one day of the trip to take the train up to Hartford to see my grandparents and Steve went to Warren on that day…I think with Mike Royer, who was then drawing for the company and rooming with us.

In the video, Steve and I talked about our visits to the Marvel offices and somehow left out the person we spent the most time talking with…Marie Severin. What a charming, affable, funny lady. And there was another person working in the office we forgot to mention: Stu Schwartzberg, who ran the photocopy machine and did other production chores. We also should have mentioned how much time John Romita (Sr.) and Herb Trimpe gave us.

I also had a nice, long conversation one of those days with Larry Lieber, who dropped by. I told a funny story about that day here.  And I told a story about our time with Stan Lee on that trip on this page.

Steve and I reminisced about our visit to the offices of MAD and I mentioned how on the way in, we passed the great artist Wally Wood coming out and I wondered, "What's he doing here?" Someone wrote in to tell me — like I might not know this — that Mr. Wood was one of the mainstay artists in MAD beginning with issue #1. True, of course. But at the time of that visit, he hadn't worked for MAD for six years. (One last Wood art job — a two-pager — turned up in MAD the following year. I don't know when it was done.)

At the comic convention we attended a few days later, I got to sit and talk with Mr. Wood for about 45 minutes and I found out why he was up at MAD that day. He had a presentation for a magazine he wanted to do…a publication more or less in the format of Creepy or Eerie but with some color inside and several regular strips featuring women without a lot of clothing…or in most cases, any.

He showed me a few pages of it. Everything was, of course, magnificently drawn and I remember wondering why some publisher hadn't grabbed it up yet. If there was anything that was commercial in 1970, it was naked women drawn by Wally Wood. Some of that material did see print in various places but I still find it hard to fathom that the magazine itself never happened.

He had been to MAD to show it to MAD's publisher, Bill Gaines, just in case Gaines was interested in publishing a new magazine. Gaines was not and according to Wood, not because this one was risqué. He quoted Gaines saying, "I'm very happy publishing MAD. I don't need the aggravation of publishing anything else." That seems to have been Gaines' reaction to every chance he had to expand his empire.

Also, we left dozens of names out of the list of comic book writers, artists and editors we met during that trip, either at some publisher's office or at the 1970 New York Comic Art Convention. They include Wood, Gene Colan, Al Williamson, Gray Morrow, Jim Steranko, Bob Brown, Howie Post, Denny O'Neil, Sal Amendola, Byron Preiss, Joe Kubert, Robert Kanigher, Jack Adler, Nelson Bridwell and I'll probably think of ten more after I post this list. It was quite a week for meeting people whose work we'd followed for years.

Steve and I also did a bad job telling the quite-unimportant story of our flight to New York. I'll write a separate post about that soon not because it's important — it couldn't be less so — but because it'll be easier for you to skip it in its entirety if I give it its own post.

And there were probably a few other places where one or both of us misspoke. I know we left out lots of good stories. I'll watch it again in a week or two and see if anything else cries out for correction or amplification.

I'm not quite sure why I put certain songs on my mixtape. It was always a two-second decision without much thought behind it. "The Mighty Quinn" by Manfred Mann was one of those songs. I think I was intrigued by how little sense it made to me at the time with lyrics like "Let me do what I want to do / I can't decide on my own."

I had no idea what any of it meant…which in 1968, often meant drug references. I almost never got them, as opposed to some kids at school then who could find drug references in any song ever written, including instrumentals. I did not know at the time that Bob Dylan had written "The Mighty Quinn" and had described it as just a "fairy tale" he made up, perhaps inspired by Anthony Quinn's role as "…an Eskimo in the 1960 movie The Savage Innocents," as I just learned on Wikipedia.

Fine. Whatever. It's kind of nice now to read that listing and find out that it probably never meant anything. Which just leaves me with the riddle of why I put it on my mixtape since I never liked it that much. Here — see if you do…

As longtime readers of this blog know, I'm a big fan of the song "The Rhythm of Life" from Sweet Charity. As recent readers know, I highly encourage people to get vaccinated. How could I not post a video in which a bunch of stage stars combine the two?

Since the world went all pandemicky on us, a lot of us have been saying it's foolish to try to predict the return of normalcy. This is all so unprecedented and so many people are not doing what others would call "the logical thing" that most predictions have been pretty useless. When the wise folks who run Comic-Con International announced that their 2021 event — scheduled for last weekend — would be virtual and not in person, there were all these outcries: Surely COVID crisis would have abated by then, allowing us to convene in the flesh. Hasn't worked out that way, has it?

It's much, much better than it was before the vaccines but we ain't outta the woods yet on this one. I'm repeating my "no predictions" policy not to remind you it was right but to remind me it was right. I've forgotten it too many times lately.

Working at home for most of the last few decades, my life hasn't changed that much. Back when I was on staff on various TV shows, I had to get up in the morning, make myself fit to be around others and go to an office and be around others. There are many, many good things about that lifestyle just as there are many, many good things about working with few (if any) people around you. And there are downsides to both.

One of the downsides to my "staff" years was that there always seemed to be someone in the office who was sick. I don't mean "sick" like in "coronavirus sick." I mean "sick" like in "bad cold sick" or "flu sick." And due to some misguided notion of heroism and/or devotion to duty, they would not stay home when, it seemed to me and others, they should.

I remember an Associate Producer on one show. Her work was vital but I think she was afraid that if she took too many days off to get better, it would become dangerously apparent that others could cover her responsibilities. And I'll say this for that concern: The guy who owned the show was constantly thinking about how few people he could have on salary. Less people on the payroll meant more money for him and he sure liked more money for him. That factored into every decision he made.

So this A.P. was often coughing and congested…and also not functioning at 100%. She made a lot of us uncomfortable and while I couldn't prove direct causation, her presence at the office (instead of at home in bed) did seem to lead to others coming down with whatever the hell it was she had for a month or three. She got better but she never got all-the-way better.

A person with the power to do so finally ordered her to take a few days off and she did…but not enough of them. When she decided she was well enough to return to work, she was back — still coughing to punctuate every sentence, still sounding less like a thirty-something-year-old woman than like Lurch on The Addams Family. Someone who didn't have the power to send her home again said, "She thinks she's helping the show by working while ill but she's working half-speed and sending more and more people home."

I don't know if this is an old saying but people at that office were reminding each other, "When you think you're feeling well enough to go back to work, take at least one extra day off to make sure. Otherwise, you may just be prolonging the epidemic" — and they all used the word "epidemic." Maybe now that we have a real epidemic, we should err more on the side of caution before declaring it's behind us.

Wanna hear nine minutes of great Big Band Music? Of course you do…

Here's a news item that should shake up some things…

Theatregoers eager to return to Broadway will need to show proof of full vaccination against COVID-19 before the curtain rises. The Broadway League, the trade association representing producers, theatre owners, and more, announced that all 41 Broadway venues will require vaccines for audience members. Masks will also be required inside the theatre, per current CDC recommendations in the wake of the Delta variant.

The news follows the release of safety procedures made in agreement between the League and Actors' Equity, the union representing stage performers and stage managers. Those protocols include, among others, that companies are "Fully Vaccinated."

As is the case with company members and with some out-of-town engagements (like Hamilton's upcoming run in Los Angeles), exemptions will be made for patrons under 12 and those with either a medical condition or "closely held religious belief" that prevents them from receiving the vaccine. In those instances, the individuals will be required to show proof of a negative COVID test (either a PCR test taken within 72 hours of the performance or an antigen test within six hours).

If Broadway's doing it, other entertainment venues will do it. There are already isolated shows (like Bruce Spingsteen's) that required it of audiences and, of course, counter rules like Eric Clapton and Van Morrison insisting they won't play venues that require proof of vaccination.

It looks like we're in for a lot of that…with people who won't get a vaccination comparing themselves to anyone anywhere who's ever been discriminated against because of their race, gender, heritage, religion, whatever.

But at the moment, I'm thinking about this: We are all familiar with people who stake out positions and say, in effect or for real, "Nothing will ever convince me otherwise." Back when I was way too interested in the Kennedy Assassination, I ran into them at every turn. J.F.K. was killed by Lizard People from the planet Reptilon and no evidence of any kind could ever convince them otherwise.

Or Man never walked on the Moon or 9/11 was an inside job or Donald Trump really won every state, etc. We've all heard these set-in-stone beliefs. But here's the thing: COVID Denial — it's a fake disease or it's nowhere near as bad as they say or it's all a plot for Mind Control — is the first time people are literally betting their lives. You couldn't die by believing Elvis is still alive but you could by refusing to take the coronavirus seriously. You and someone close to you could.

Obviously, some will continue to deny, deny, deny and they'll survive to say, "See? I didn't need the shot! I didn't have to wear a stupid mask!" And they'll have some cockamamie conspiracy theory to explain away the alleged X million deaths worldwide.

But some of them are going to quietly get the shot(s) while either denying they did or declining to state. Many Republicans in the House and Senate are refusing to say if they were vaccinated…which almost certainly means they were but they fear losing the support of the anti-vaxx crowd if they admit it. And now they can't go see Hamilton. And if Major League Baseball adopts the same rules, they can't go to a Nationals game. And they already can't go see Springsteen.

For some people in this world, admitting you were wrong about anything is as bad as — if not worse than — dying itself. I hope a lot of people, including some I know, won't be like that.

From Hyde Park in London, back in 2017: Frankie Valli, his back-up singers and a big orchestra sing thirty minutes of Four Seasons hits. Let's hang on to what we've got…

This article delves into the question of what kind of folks are refusing to get vaccinated. It covers many different groups but it doesn't address two kinds that I've encountered. One is the kind of person — and we all know a couple of these — who make up their mind about something and that's it. It doesn't matter if it's vaccinations or politics or what are the best pizza toppings. They decide something and even if the facts change, insist that's it a sign of weakness to change one's mind about anything.

And the other kind is the one who simply resents being told what to do…by anyone about anything. You've met some of them too.

Before you criticize Simone Biles for withdrawing from competition, ask yourself the questions on this "decision tree." (Thank you, Paul Harris.)

I hope you folks like The Fifth Dimension because I had a lot of their records on my mixtape. For no particular reason, I'll start with "Wedding Bell Blues," which was a hit for them in 1969. I think I liked the Laura Nyro version of this song a little better but this one somehow got on my mixtape and the other didn't…

Jackie Mason on The Ed Sullivan Show. This is not the infamous episode where he kinda/sorta/maybe gave "the finger" and one of his umpteen feuds erupted…