I always love old TV theme songs. Here from the 2008 Emmy Awards ceremony, we have Josh Groban performing a medley of some of the best ones…

For the rest of the weekend, I want to get some stuff on this blog that isn't about You-Know-Who so I thought I'd answer this question from Michael McKeever…

I have been noticing on Facebook and elsewhere, a lot of fans pointing out that on a certain cover by Neal Adams, a figure was redrawn by John Romita or in a certain story by someone else, a panel was drawn by Murphy Anderson. On your list of A List of Things I've Learned About the Comic Book Industry Since I Got Into It In 1970, Many But Not All of Which Still Apply [link], I notice you wrote that "Approximately 50% of editorial alterations made on the work of the writers and artists were made mainly because someone in the office wanted to look like they were making a vital contribution." Could you write something more about this and also about the other 50% of reasons?

Sure. But first of all, let's note that it is completely within the rights and power of an editor (usually) to dictate corrections on a comic that he or she is in charge of. Occasionally, the talent has a contractual guarantee — we had one on Groo when it was published by Marvel — that nothing can be changed without the talent's permission. But those arrangements are rare exceptions and they usually are negotiated in cases where the talent is delivering a finished, ready-to-go-off-to-the-printer book.

Secondly, let's note that just because they ask for a change, that doesn't mean they're right. I see folks on discussion forums notice one of those Romita figures on a Gene Colan cover who assume "Gene must have screwed-up there." Well, maybe and maybe not. The editor thought the drawing needed fixing but maybe it didn't. I've seen editorial decisions I thought were ridiculous…and as I noted, sometimes the only reason for them is that someone wants to change something to assert their standing as The Boss.

Or there's one other reason I'll discuss in a follow-up post to this one.

Also, let's remember that it's easy for some of us to spot a retouch done by John Romita on a Neal Adams page. There were also surely retouches made by John Romita on John Romita pages and retouches by Neal Adams on Neal Adams pages and we can't spot them. If the editor can have the retouch done by the original artist, he or she usually does. Sometimes though, the original artist isn't around, whereas John Romita and a few other guys worked full-time in the Marvel offices. There was a period when Murphy Anderson worked in the DC offices and was called on to do redraws.

Romita went on staff at Marvel around November of 1965 and he became the main guy Stan called on to do retouches when they had to be done quickly. Before that, Sol Brodsky or Carl Hubbell did most of them on staff but Stan also lassoed various freelancers to do such work — for which they were not paid — when they were dropping off pages at the office. Jack Kirby redrew the Spider-Man figure that Steve Ditko drew on the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #10 and Steve Ditko redrew the Spider-Man figure that Jack Kirby drew on the cover of Avengers #11.

Also, let's note that when Romita redrew something on an Adams page, it probably did not mean John said, "Oh, I can draw that so much better than Neal! I'll improve it!" It probably means that John was directed by the editor to "fix" something the editor thought needed "fixing." I have seen artists, including Mr. Romita, making changes with which they did not themselves agree.

And I guess I should mention that one time when I was loitering in the Marvel Bullpen, I saw Marie Severin redrawing a panel in a page by someone else not because anyone thought the artist did a poor or wrong drawing but because someone had spilled ink on the page. That kind of thing happens too.

Now then. Were these changes necessary? Sometimes. The original artist may have drawn something not up to standard — everyone does at times — but more often, it was a matter of the drawing being wrong. Someone drew the wrong character or the wrong action. Or some editor had gotten ultra-fussy about a certain character being drawn a certain way.

When Stan Lee was writing dialogue for a story that was already drawn, he would sometimes think, "Gee, I wish the artist had drawn something else happening in that panel." If he did, he might hand it to Romita and tell him what should be there in its stead. It did not always mean the original artist had erred.

When I work with Sergio Aragonés on Groo, I sometimes ask him to change what's happening in a certain panel and since he makes the change himself, there's no way you can look at the published comic and know. (We also both sometimes have done corrections to the lettering, not because letterer Stan Sakai made a mistake — though in a very rare while, he does — but because we changed our mind about what a character should be saying.)

Lastly for now, there's a special kind of correction/change that is often made on comic book covers. They're changes made because someone in power is nervous. I have an e-mail from someone else asking about this kind of thing so I think I'll end this discussion here and pick up on it in a few days to talk about that kind of correction. Thanks, Michael.

This is long and it may be exactly what you aren't in the mood for today. If you aren't, just skip it. But the folks at The Daily Show have compiled a 25-minute video of "The FULL List of Trump's Most Tremendous Scandals," though they limit it to 100.

Maybe 25% of them are trivial and another 25% are probably dandy reasons to support the guy if you believe that America should be run by and for wealthy white men. But the rest? I'm thinking that if a Democratic president had been responsible for even one of the remaining 50%, everyone who just voted for Trump would call that one an iron-clad reason for impeachment, removal from office, criminal prosecution and in some cases, commitment to a psychiatric ward.

And this list stops way before anything he's doing now…

Back in the mid-seventies, I took a course in Criminology. It was taught by a former F.B.I. agent who also had a police background and it was one of the few times I really looked forward to sitting in a classroom and listening to someone. I learned many things that later came in handy writing stories but I think I learned a lot more about making deductions and assumptions about things that happen in real life. I'll just mention two…

The instructor was often talking about how things worked in an actual criminal investigation and contrasting them to what you see in mystery novels, TV shows and movies. One difference he noted several times was that in fiction, there comes a point where the reader or viewer is more or less challenged to solve the crime before the person in the detective role does in the story. He said, approximately…

When you're at that stage when you need to figure out the puzzle, you know that you have all the clues. The writer made sure you have them so maybe you can figure out whodunnit before the hero of the story does. Or if you can't, at least when he or she reveals it, you can say, "Of course! I should have noticed that…" In real life if you're investigating a crime, you never know if you have all the clues. They don't all magically appear for you. There might not even be enough to solve the crime. As a reader, you know they're all there…somewhere.

Absolutely true. It's something to keep in mind when you have to solve some mystery — not necessarily involving a crime — in your life. You might not have enough information to solve it. And the other lesson I wanted to mention here is when he said, again approximately…

You've all seen movies or TV shows where the detective has to try and think like the killer. He puts himself in the killer's place and thinks things like, "Okay, the easiest point of access was the dining room window…then he would have walked through the kitchen…then he would have known what time the victim always got home from work because he would have cased the house…then he would have approached his victim from the right side as they walked down this hall…"

…and that kind of thinking is almost always wrong because the criminal was not logical. He didn't think like you. He might not have even been thinking the way he did on other occasions. He might have been acting with no coherent thought process guiding his actions…of it may have been one so bizarre that there's no friggin' way you could meld your mind with his and deduce it. In reading about serial killers or even in my way-more mundane existence, I have learned this to be true. Often, you just can't know…

Good thing to keep in mind if and when you try to figure out what Donald Trump is up to.

The Alvin Show — starring "David Seville" (Ross Bagdasarian) and his three chipmunk children — was a prime-time animated series that ran a year on CBS (1961-1962) then ran a while on Saturday morning and in syndication. It doesn't get a whole lotta love these days but I thought it was pretty good then and a lot of the episodes stand up well.

General Foods sponsored the show so it was full of commercials for Jell-O and Post cereals. Here are several of them…

I'm watching the Trump "I won" campaign with about a fourth of my brain…which is a very small portion of brain indeed. I can't see him remaining in office but I'm curious as to what's going on here. Does the guy really believe there's a way to prove the votes were miscounted and he truly got more?

Or is he just positioning himself to get donations from his supporters and to position himself as not a loser but a winner who was cheated out of his win and therefore deserves to be a powerful political force out of office? (And then, when he gets indicted, it's all a hoax to bring him down, fabricated by those who know he's still the most powerful man in the world.)

Or maybe he's just out of his mind and is barking orders without a real plan. I've seen people in power do that.

I think I'll try to pay very little attention to this over the next few days. Better to do that and then mentally check in later to see how it all played out.

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Dr. Fauci is optimistic we'll all be getting vaccinated around next April. Well, we won't all be getting vaccinated. We don't all get vaccinated for anything these days and there will doubtlessly be many who'll resist, claiming all sorts of reasons including the safety of that particular vaccine and, of course, the fact that there was never any such thing as COVID-19 so why do they need a vaccination?

So what happens then when some of us have had the shot and some of us haven't? Will stores and events say that no one is admitted without proof of vaccination? Will there be a little card to prove it and you'll have to show it to get into Costco or go to a show?

There are people now who are furious that they can't go into some stores or get on an airplane without a piece of cloth on their faces. How will they feel if they can't do what they want to do without getting an injection of something they've decided is a poison or a cure for which there is no known disease? I'm not looking forward to this.

I love that musical comedies can travel all around the world. Here's the opening number of a production of Fiddler on the Roof as performed in Panama…

Quiet day here. No one who doesn't seem like a Trump toady seems to think he has any chance of remaining in the Oval Office and some of the toadies aren't too convincing in pretending they believe he does. But I guess they figure it can't hurt to collect someone donations to fight the unstolen stolen election and put that money to use elsewhere. It's a lot like Max Bialystock convincing little old ladies to invest in that surefire Broadway smash, Springtime for Hitler. Come to think of it, it's the exact same thing.

Also, I assume they figure that it can't hurt to keep Trump's base — which is increasingly becoming the base of the Republican Party — angry and convinced they're in the majority and will always win unless Democrats cheat. I seem to recall Trump on with Letterman or some talk host once explaining that, yes, his business did have its bankruptcies but they were all other folks' screw-ups and failures, never his…and he personally always profited off those business ventures even if everyone else involved lost their skivvies.

I have written before on this blog about people who think never admitting you're wrong is the same thing as always being right. A closely-allied species is the person who thinks never admitting you lost is the same thing as always winning.

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For the benefit of those of you who keep asking me when there will be more issues of Groo: Whatever I do on that comic, I'm doing at the moment. You can expect an announcement soon.

Also, people who pre-ordered their copies of the new Pogo book are telling me they're receiving them. If you were waiting until it's actually out to order it, wait no longer. That's all for now.

I'm trying to decide — not that anyone will ever really know for sure — if Donald Trump really thinks he won the election or if he just thinks protesting it has its advantages. He seems to be raking in money from Trump supporters who want to help prove the election was stolen and don't realize that a majority of what they're giving is actually going to pay down Trump's enormous campaign debts. So there's an advantage to not conceding. Another may be to position himself as true-president-in-exile in the minds of his supporters, the better to exploit them for whatever he sees as his future.

I dunno. Kevin Drum says "[Republicans] want to enter the Biden presidency with their base riled up about a stolen election. Maybe Lindsey Graham will start up an endless Senate investigation to keep it fresh in everyone's mind. This provides Republicans with a great excuse to obstruct everything Biden tries to do, and two years from now it gives them a great foundation to turn out their base and win back the House." And he may be right.

In other news, the drug maker Pfizer has announced that "an early analysis" of its coronavirus vaccine suggests it could be more than 90% effective against COVID-19. It strikes me that if you read the full announcement — or even the sentence before this one — there's a lot of optimism there about something that isn't proven yet. Further down in the New York Times story is stuff like…

The data released by Pfizer Monday was delivered in a news release, not a peer-reviewed medical journal. It is not conclusive evidence that the vaccine is safe and effective, and the initial finding of more than 90 percent efficacy could change as the trial goes on.

A cure? Maybe. I'm taking the wait-'n'-see approach before unfurling any optimism. Actually, my plan is to not to think anything about this or any other vaccine until my wise physician says, "I think you ought to take this." That's when I'll start considering taking whatever he recommends.

Lastly: In an opposite-of-slow news day, it's amazing that the press found as much room as it did for this headline…

McDonald's to launch its fried chicken sandwich in the U.S. next year

That was on every news site I went near this morning and while they all wrote about the threat to McDonald's posed by the chicken sandwiches of Chick-Fil-A and Popeye's, no one noted that McDonald's came out with a chicken sandwich a few years ago, reacting just to competition from Chick-Fil-A. I reviewed it here back in 2008…

Lately, McDonald's has introduced its Southern-Style Chicken Sandwich — a breaded filet served on a (sorta) buttered bun with dill pickle chips. In other words, it's precise imitation of the Chick Fil-A specialty. It's not as pretty good as the original but it ain't bad at all. It also, by the way, is nowhere near as thick as the above photo and advertising promos would indicate. But if size doesn't matter to you, you might be happy with one.

I guess it didn't go because it quietly disappeared from menus. I believe that one had the chicken deep-fried in the same vat as McDonald's french fries, whereas for the new one they're installing pressure cookers in their restaurants. I find it hard to believe that McDonald's could improve on anything cooked in the vat with their french fries. Even those paper hats the employees all wear would taste mighty good fried alongside those fries.

Last August, we lost Joe Ruby, who was half of the writing/producing team of Ruby and Spears, who created and/or supervised some of the most popular animated characters ever on television including Scooby Doo. Now, we must say goodbye to his long-time partner, Ken Spears. Ken died last Friday following a long illness.

Ken Spears was born March 12, 1938 and grew up in the Los Angeles area where one of his friends was the son of Bill Hanna of the Hanna-Barbera Studio. That led to a close personal relationship between Ken and Bill that lasted until Hanna died in 2001. It also led to Ken getting a job as a sound editor at the studio in 1959. There, he worked alongside Joe Ruby and forged another lifelong friendship.

From there on, most of what I wrote about Joe professionally is equally applicable to Ken so the following is a slight rewrite of what appeared on this blog when Joe passed…

H-B needed writers so Ken and Joe submitted some story and gag ideas…and I'm pretty sure Joe said they started with interstitial gags for the Huckleberry Hound show. Eventually, they were writing (not cutting film on) many Hanna-Barbera shows and their work found great favor with the networks. This was at a time when the studio was selling shows to CBS, NBC and ABC and there were many instances when the execs at one of those networks would say, "We'll buy this show if you put Joe and Ken on it."

At one point, Fred Silverman at CBS reportedly told H-B that they would buy nothing from the studio unless Ruby and Spears were employed exclusively on what CBS bought. Fred did the same when he moved over to ABC and finally, ABC just hired them…which is why Joe and Ken created and supervised, for example, segments like Electra-Woman and Dynagirl or Wonderbug on The Krofft Superstar Hour…on ABC.

They worked on many shows but their biggest hit, of course, was Scooby Doo. I don't know if Hanna-Barbera and its various owners ever formally acknowledged Joe and Ken as the creators of TV animation's longest-running character but almost everyone in the industry seemed to. They were also responsible for a dozen or more shows at H-B including Dynomutt and Jabberjaw, for The Barkleys and The Houndcats for DePatie-Freleng and on both the live-action and animated TV versions of Planet of the Apes. I am leaving out an awful lot of credits here.

In 1977 with the financial backing of Filmways and a commitment from ABC to buy programming from them, Joe and Ken founded their own studio, Ruby-Spears Productions. Their output included dozens of shows including Fangface, The Plastic Man Comedy-Adventure Hour, Thundarr the Barbarian, Saturday Supercade, Mister T, Alvin and the Chipmunks and the 1988 Superman series.

I worked for them there and so did a long, long list of writers, animators, designers and all the folks who go into making an animated cartoon. Most, I daresay, were there because they felt Joe and Ken treated them better than other studios for which they could have worked then. One of those was writer Buzz Dixon. I called Buzz eight minutes ago to tell him about Ken and he just sent me this…

Ken was a true gentleman in every sense of the word, kind and soft spoken, brilliant and insightful. He and Joe Ruby made a great creative and producing team, seemingly diametrically opposite personalities yet 100% complimentary to each other's abilities. It was always a treat when Ken could break free from his daily business responsibilities and come back to hang with the creative staff. He had a quick wit and a warm heart and more than once supplied the breakthrough on a creative log jam we had.

I'm going to miss him and Joe. They were quite the pair and it's hard to imagine anyone filling their shoes.

What Buzz meant about Ken's "daily business responsibilities" is this: Most animation studios of the time followed the model of Hanna-Barbera where one guy (like Bill Hanna) took primary responsibility of the production/business end of things — making sure the shows were produced on time, for instance — and the other guy (like Joe Barbera) was mainly in charge of the creative end and the sale of shows to networks.

There was great overlap and Ken — who took on the Hanna role — was as creative as anyone in the building. As a writer for their studio, I dealt a lot more with Joe than with Ken but I never for a second thought Ken wasn't roughly half-responsible for the successes of that team wherever they worked. And Joe would have told you the same thing. They were both clever, creative men and a joy to work with.

This post is the first public announcement anywhere of Ken's passing. Please spread word of it throughout the animation community, and I'm sure it will lead to obituaries in the mainstream media where they, like I did, can reference their recent obits for Joe. Ken and Joe were two of the most important figures in television animation and their lives and careers should be noted and celebrated. And I hope everyone also mentions that they were two really great guys. Like Buzz said.

• I'm getting 10 e-mails a day from the Trump organization asking me to donate to fight the "steal" and give Donald his win. I dunno if he will ever concede but I bet he won't as long as those appeals are bringing in cash. With Trump, everything's a racket.

Alex Trebek was the host of The Wizard of Odds, High Rollers, Double Dare, The $128,000 Question, Wall $treet, Pitfall, Battlestars, Classic Concentration, To Tell the Truth, Game Changers, a half-dozen game shows in his native Canada and a whole bunch of non-quiz shows and specials.

Oh, yeah. And Jeopardy! For a long, long time.

I wonder if there's anyone anywhere who didn't like him or Jeopardy! I know many folks who don't like Pat Sajak and Wheel of Fortune but Trebek and that show always seemed kind of in a category all its own…though I'm sure I"m not the only person who was disappointed in him once. It was when he started selling his credibility to the company that paid him — quite well, I'm sure — to sell reverse mortgages.

As I think I've discussed here, I think hosting a game show competently is sometimes an overrated skill in show business. Bob Barker helmed The Price is Right for 35 years and Johnny Carson presided over The Tonight Show for 30 — both great accomplishments but I think what Mr. Carson did was about a thousand times as difficult as what Mr. Barker did. Mr. Trebek from all accounts did a lot more on Jeopardy! than host. On a scale, I'd place his achievement somewhere between Bob and Johnny.

He did something that everyone in show business aspires to do but few manage. He became a rock-solid part of our lives for a long time. Like most of you, I never met him but I feel like I did.

Two men with real high voices sing many  of the songs from Wicked.  I give you Peter Hollens and Nick Pitera…

Boy, isn't it nice to have a president who can talk about something other than himself and who isn't filled with hatred for anyone who doesn't kiss his buttocks?

(Okay, president-elect.)