I woke up this morning and as I often do, I picked up my iPhone from the bedside table to scroll through the news headlines. The first one was a report on how hospital beds in Wisconsin are in short supply due to a record number of people there coming down with COVID-19. The second news story was a clip of Trump speaking in Wisconsin a day or three ago saying the virus has been beaten, the Pandemic is over and his Administration is to be congratulated for the great job it did.

And my thought after seeing those items in succession was: Wow. There's the election right there.

Those of us who want Trump out can name a hundred reasons having to do with incompetence, dishonesty and just plain being a horrible, horrible human being. Put all those aside and what you have is a guy thinking he doesn't have to actually deal with real problems if he can convince his supporters he has.

I dunno how much of it is cluelessness and how much is just his natural proclivity to fling bullshit and it almost doesn't matter. It's just not leadership and if a Democratic president had done that, every Republican now backing Trump would be saying, "I don't care that he'll be out of office any day now. We need to impeach that monster today!"

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Ed Kilgore has a should-read article about how and when the presidential race may be called on Election Day. Or more likely, a few days after Election Day.

Matt Yglesias has the comforting explanation to give to someone who says the polls were wrong in 2016 so who's to say they won't be wrong this time? (Short Explanation: Biden's lead is larger and has been more stable and most pollsters have learned from their mistakes last time.)

And Michelle Goldberg on how much Trump has occupied our minds the last four years. When I get rid of him in mine, I'm going to rent out the empty space for a boat show.

What we have here is a nice profile/interview of John Cleese which I should have linked to yesterday on his birthday. Mr. Cleese identifies his favorite joke ever in all of Monty Python and I am pleased to see it's my favorite joke in all of Monty Python…

Just to remind you: I'll be discussing Jack Kirby's Fourth World comics with Pop Culture Man Arlen Schumer in just a little while. The audio podcast commences at 8 PM Eastern Time (5 PM where I am) and can be heard by clicking here.

The other day here, I noted that The Economist, which is one of the three Poll Aggregator/Analysis sites I follow, had Trump's chances of winning the Electoral College down to 4%. I said I didn't believe they were that low. Nate Silver's 538 had him down to 12%. Today, The Economist has him at 3% and 538 has him at 11%.

These drops are probably because this morning's ABC News/The Washington Post gives Biden a 17 point lead in Wisconsin. There are always outlier polls that report numbers way outta line with the others but this one's more credible than some because it's a well-respected poll and the other polls all show Biden ahead, though not that far ahead. It also gets a bit of credibility because Trump was just in Milwaukee giving his current "We defeated the Pandemic" speeches in a state where record numbers of new coronavirus cases are now being reported.

More amazing, the third Poll Aggregating Site I consult — The Cook Political Report — has now reclassified Texas from Leans Republican to Toss-Up. That one's neck-and-neck and it won't surprise me if Trump wins it by a comfy margin but…still. For Texas to even be in play as a swing state is amazing.

Trump's Closing Argument keeps shifting. Today, it still seems to be something like "Pay no attention to those rising COVID reports. My administration has handled it brilliantly and it's all but defeated!" I don't get why they think that's a winner. The polls say that 58% of the country thinks Trump and his crew have done a poor job of handling COVID-19 while 40% approves. And that 40% is probably the 40% incapable of disapproving of anything he does. He's got their votes and desperately needs some of that 58%.

History may show that Trump's marathon rallies these days are doing a great job of exciting the kind of people who would risk disease to turn out for a Trump Rally…but very few who wouldn't.

---

Facebook puts a limit of 5000 on how many "Friends" you can have and I'm currently at 4950. Once I passed around 4800, it would sometimes tell me I couldn't accept a new friend until I deleted an old one. I think a few of the new ones it did let me accept were because old "Friends" had left Facebook and therefore my list. Oh — and I un"friended" one "friend" because he kept sending me messages that there was solid proof Joe Biden was the head of that Pedophilia Ring that the Democratic party operates.

Anyway, I now have around 780 unanswered Friend Requests so obviously, most of those folks aren't getting onto my "Friends" list. I apologize to everyone who's on that list but I don't know what else to do.

The seventh volume of Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips is a'comin'. Printed copies exist.

It's called Pockets Full of Pie…and how could you not love a book called Pockets Full of Pie? I like that title so much that at this very moment, the pockets in the pants I'm wearing are indeed full of pie. The right one has Chocolate Cream, the left one has French Apple, two back pockets have Lemon Custard and I just paid my cleaning lady Dora with money that was covered in meringue.

The book — which contains no actual pie, its foolish publishers having rejected my brilliant suggestion for an "extra" — will be out around November 10. We actually got this one to press well before the deadline. The first four, for reasons everyone following the series knows, were all late — in some cases, very late. Volumes 5 and 6 went to press on or about the deadline.

This one got in early and then along comes Trump's foreign import tariffs and then there was that Pandemic Thing you may have heard a little something about, screwing up both the printing and importing businesses. But Volume 7 should be shipping from Amazon by 11/10.

Rather than me, the co-editor, telling you how great this series is, I thought I'd enlist the aid of whoever wrote the longest review of the previous volume on Amazon. Well, I didn't really enlist their aid. I'm just stealing (without their permission) their review and reproducing it here. This is by someone named "Newsboy" and I swear it isn't me, nor do I know who that is. He's reviewing Vol. 6: Clean as a Weasel, which you can order here…

The Pogo collections from Fantagraphics Books continue to be the gold standard for comic strip collections. It's an incredible presentation for what many (me among them) consider one of the greatest comic strips ever. Pogo may never have inspired multiple cartoon series, it didn't have the merchandising success of Peanuts, Garfield, Bloom County or some other strips, but it had as big an impact — arguably bigger — than many strips that are more well known today.

Political humor. Funny animal humor. Jokes about the human condition (in a comic with no humans). This comic had it all. Bottom line: These comics are funny. Walt Kelly was not just a great artist. He was an incredible wordsmith, who used dialect, puns and even playing around with the font in the word balloons to make the joke work. In a review of a previous volume I compared Kelly to Mark Twain for his use of language. Honestly, that's not hyperbole.

Fantagraphics has set a standard with these books that will be hard for any publisher of classic strip collections to meet, let alone beat. The comics are reprinted at a size that never strains the eyes. The colors on the Sunday strips is perfect. The binding on the books is exactly what you want — it lays flat and no art is lost in gutter.

But what really sets this collection apart are the little things. They've included an index in every volume. There's a great introduction by a famous person who is a Pogo fan (this one is by Garfield creator Jim Davis). Each volume includes an introduction with some background on the time period and Kelly. And there is also a section, Swamp Talk, that helps explain some of the historical references (this volume wraps up a couple years before I was born, so these sections are always welcome). Beneath the pretty book jacket is an embossed cover. There's nothing they haven't thought of — even the color of each volume is a nice pastel that is different from its predecessors. On a bookshelf, it's just a good looking set of books.

If you've never read Pogo, do yourself a favor and order this volume. It's a great place to start.

Actually, I think they're all great places to start because no matter which one you pick, you're going to rush to order all the rest. You could also pre-order Pockets Full of Pie, which features a foreword by Sergio Aragonés…which shows you how hard I work to find foreword writers. Just when I needed to find one, he was sitting in my office. If he hadn't been here, I could have gone to Dora.

It also features two years of what the noted critic Newsboy considers "…one of the greatest comic strips ever." This series is just about the only thing I hard-sell on this blog and that's because I know you'll love it. And you won't love it because of anything I did except maybe to nudge you into buying it.

Nothing on this blog from now on is intended to get you to vote the way I want you to vote…and I think it's actually been that way for some time. I'm not sure any blog ever really moves people to do that but if this one could, it is long past the time to do that. I don't believe you haven't made up your mind by now and I think that if you want to vote in this election, you've either done so or made real firm plans to do so.

That said, I can still post things that I believe are interesting. Here's author and übernlogger John Green with why he's for Biden. It's not an argument I've heard stated quite this way before but I think it's quite valid…

Two questions from Ben Sternbach, the first of which is…

On your blog, you mentioned that you left your job with Jack Kirby just before they started putting Assistant Editor credits into his comics. I did a search and it looks like that happened as of Kamandi #4. Is that right and why'd you leave?

That's about right. I worked a little on the first issue of Kamandi, did nothing whatsoever on #2 or #3 and left while #3 was in production. The whole premise of having Steve Sherman and myself helping Jack out was that he had all sorts of expansion plans where he'd edit comics he didn't write or draw. He also wanted to launch comics in new forms, some of which would require a staff that could do editorial and production work under his supervision. Those projects would have required assistants.

But by the time we got to Kamandi, it had become obvious that DC was never going to really allow a comic to be edited outside their New York offices. They didn't even like the fact that someone in Southern California was lettering and inking Jack's books. They grew to like Mike Royer for his talent and, as I've mentioned many times, his uncanny professionalism. The man was never late with anything. But they really didn't like the fact that he lived out here and turned his work in to Jack and not them.

I'd been thinking that Jack barely needed one assistant, let alone two, and I was uncomfortable that he kept forcing money on us when we really weren't doing that much. If it had been DC's money, that might have been different but it was Jack's. At about the same time, I was getting real busy. I had gone from writing comics to be published overseas for the Disney Publications Department on the lot to writing Disney comics for Western Publishing (i.e., Gold Key) to be published in this country.

One day, my editor there — a very wonderful man named Chase Craig — said to me, "Y'know, if you could write more scripts for us, I could probably use everything you could produce." And he dangled a couple of tempting books at me like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. So the decision was easy. I still saw a lot of Jack and Roz; just not every week.

Ben's other question:

You implied that the decision by DC to redraw Jack's main characters on the Jimmy Olsen comic was done behind his back. I read an interview with Dick Giordano, who was an editor there at the time, and he said Jack was informed of it and agreed. Which of you is right?

I am (mostly) and Dick agreed with me about this when we discussed it on a panel at…a Mid-Ohio Con, I believe. Some convention. Jack was told that they wanted to make "minor adjustments" on the way he drew Superman. He said fine. The folks who inked Jack's works were always making little adjustments on characters' costumes when he was inconsistent or forgot some detail. But he was not told that they were having other artists redraw the faces and sometimes body parts, as well; that the Superman in the book would be an Al Plastino Superman or a Murphy Anderson Superman instead of the Jack Kirby Superman that readers were expecting in a comic sold with his name on it. Steve and I told him that after we read it in a fanzine.

The thing is: Jack wanted to be a good soldier for his new employer and he kept thinking they were about to take him off that comic anyway because he'd never wanted to do it in the first place. He thought all those other projects pending…the ones that, when it became clear they were never going to happen, caused me to quietly withdraw.

So he went along and didn't object much. Maybe he was a good enough sport that he convinced some folks at DC he was fine with it. Or maybe someone fibbed to Dick, who had no direct contact with Jack during that period. But come on! How could any artist with any pride not be pissed to have that done automatically to his work issue after issue?

Retouching artists' work was pretty common back then and Jack never had a problem when Stan Lee would have someone in the office (usually, John Romita) retouch a few faces here and there if he didn't like the way the main artist drew them. Jack even did some redraws on other artists' work there before Marvel had John Romita on staff. But imagine, Ben, if you were hired to draw…let's say Batman. And the editor decided, "I want to keep Sternbach on the book but I hate the way he draws Batman…so every time he hands in an issue, have somebody redraw all the Batman drawings in it."

For more on this topic, read this article I wrote some time ago.

My e-mailbox this morning is full of all sorts of questions about the work Jack Kirby did for DC Comics in the seventies known as his "Fourth World." It was an extraordinary body of work which — though Jack did a belated, truncated ending to its main storyline — I will always regard as comics' greatest unfinished symphony. I believe I would still love it even if I hadn't (a) been present to witness its creation and (b) gotten to know and love its maker.

I am aware there are those out there who prefer other Kirby work — or in some cases, no Kirby work at all — and I'm fine with that. I am not a salesperson for it. If you try it, it will either sell itself to you or it won't…and it doesn't matter much to me if it doesn't. I just like the fact that it has remained in print for so long (even though many at DC then proclaimed it a flop) and the characters have appeared in/on toy shelves and TV and movies (even though DC's merchandising division back then thought Jack was nuts to think that could ever happen).

I'll be answering questions about Jack's creations and discussing it tomorrow evening (Wednesday) with Pop Culture Man Arlen Schumer. The audio podcast commences at 8 PM Eastern Time (5 PM where I am) and can be heard by clicking here.

That show is kind of a prelude to an online video lecture Arlen is doing the following night (Thursday) at 7 PM Eastern, celebrating and speaking about the Fourth World:

Join Pop Culture Man Arlen Schumer tonight as he explores the comic book origins of these unique Kirby characters and stories, and how they've been a steady influence on pop culture over the decades — most notably on George Lucas' Star Wars franchise!

Tickets for Arlen's talk are available now at this link. I'll be watching.

Here are the Seekers singing their 1967 hit "Georgy Girl" at some sort of amphitheater back then. Well, they're not really singing. They're lip-syncing to the record in what I'm sure was supposed to be a venue for live performing.

Or are they? Maybe they did perform it live at the show but someone took the record and laid it in over the film of the live performance. But I don't think so because the mouth movements are a little too perfect matching the record…and that bass player looks like he isn't even trying to look like he's really playing. But then we also don't seem to hear the orchestra behind them that seems to be playing along during portions of the song, though I think we do hear them playing the exit music. Would those violin players be playing along with a record? Would their microphones even be turned on during a needle-drop?

I always used to be amused when recording artists did lip-sync performances on TV shows and had to deal with the fact that at the end, the song didn't end. It faded out. So one person in the band would still be mouthing the words when others had given up and you can sometimes spot them realize they should still be moving their mouths and they resume. The Seekers get cut off pretty quickly at the end by a little fanfare note.

I dunno. We're not hearing them perform live but did the people in that audience hear them sing and play live? Hard to tell but I still like this song…

P.S., A Little Later: Ah, here's the answer, sent to me by my pal Kurt Busiek. Someone took the video of a live concert with live singing and laid in the record to create something more like a video. Thanks, Kurt. But I still think that bass player looks like he isn't playing…

• The poll aggregator at The Economist has Trump's chances of winning down to 4%. https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president. I want to see him lose but even I'm saying, "Aw, come on. They can't be that bad!"

Fifty years ago this month, my friend Steve Sherman and I were of very little help in assisting the editor who had hired us as his assistant editors on his new line of comics for DC. That editor was, of course, Jack Kirby and the line of comics he was launching would for reasons no one has ever been sure of, come to be known as his "Fourth World" comics. Don't try to tell me you know where that name came from. I didn't know, Steve didn't know and Jack didn't know, If we didn't know, you didn't know.

The first couple issues of Jimmy Olsen by Jack had already hit newsstands. I don't think Jimmy Olsen was considered one of the "Fourth World" books and Jack didn't but if you want to, fine. Doesn't bother me any. The inarguable first one to make it to the racks was Forever People #1 that December and I think the last parts of it went to press in October of 1970, a half-century ago. The last thing in was a text page that Steve and I wrote in our capacity as Jack's assistants. Jack approved it, sent it in for inclusion and then a certain person back in the New York office threw it away.

This Person — there's a reason I'm not identifying him — decided that though Jack was contractually the editor of his comics and it said he was the editor on his comics, he wasn't really the editor of his comics. Anything he (This Person) wanted to change, he could change without consulting or even informing Jack. So a number of things were changed on Jack's comics and Kirby was among the last to know. One of them was that This Person decided the text pages for Jack's comics should be done in New York. He tossed our page and had Marv Wolfman write a new one…as Jack, Steve and I found out when Forever People #1 appeared on newsstands here in Southern California.

Jack complained. This Person back there at first blamed Marv for the decision, which was ridiculous. At that point, Marv didn't have the power at DC to correct a spelling error. But after some arguing, This Person agreed that Steve and I would henceforth do the text pages. He had also ignored Jack's request to put our names in the indicia as assistant editors. (The indicia is that little block of text they used to have at the bottom of page one where among other vital info, the editor was credited.) Jack demanded he do it, T.P. said he would and then he didn't do it. This went on for around two years of Jack reminding him constantly and him saying he would and then it never getting done. This Person finally gave in and did it…and with my superb timing, it was the month after I stopped working for Jack.

These particular things didn't bother me. Honest. They didn't and they don't and I'm only telling you about them for your amusement…and to make the point that things were done to Jack's work behind his back. Those things bother me still…like the redrawing of his drawings of Jimmy Olsen and Superman.

I am very proud of my itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, microscopic connection to such fine, oft-reprinted comic books as Forever People, New Gods and Mister Miracle. They were cancelled well before they should have been, dismissed as low sellers because they weren't putting Marvel out of business…and I guess because some people in the office just didn't like them. I do not know how many times they've been reprinted since in this country and others — someone count it up and let me know — but they've made DC a whole lot more money than some comics of the day Jack was told he should be emulating because they sold better.

A new series of reprints of the Fourth World books is just beginning with the release of a paperback of the issues Jack did of Forever People. If you've never experienced this material, here's a link where you can order this book. But I should warn you of a couple of things. One is that at the moment, the Amazon page says — and this is a cut-and-paste…

For the first time in 20 years, Jack Kirby's Forever People reprints the amazing comic book writer and artist's fantastical black-and-white tales of a group of young, otherworldly adventurers.

It's not the first time in twenty years these stories have been reprinted. They were all in the Fourth World Omnibus series issued in 2007-2008 and some of them are in the lovely Absolute Fourth World book that DC issued recently and which is still very much in print. And I don't know about the copy you'll be able to get when this new Forever People book is released on November 10…but the advance copy they sent me is in full-color and very nicely done full-color.

Also, when you get it: It says on the Table of Contents page that the covers of #2 and #6 were inked by Mike Royer when they were actually inked by Vince Colletta.

This is a great time to revisit and celebrate this work. Tomorrow here, I'll tell you about an online interview I'm doing on Wednesday evening all about Mr. Kirby's Fourth World and about an online visual lecture about it that you can enjoy on Thursday evening. And I still can't believe it's been fifty (five-oh) years.

So we're now in the period when half the news stories you see are going to announce largely-meaningless statements and actions but present them as if they have now made a huge difference in the outcome of the vote…you know, like "Your candidate drinks lemonade, loses election." They'll also dredge up some tortoise in Ashtabula, Ohio who has successfully predicted the winner in every presidential election since Rutherford B. Hayes and it says Abe Vigoda has a lock on it this time.

I thought Donald Trump looked like an idiot on 60 Minutes. But then I've long since recognized that Trump can look like an idiot to me and like Jesus Christ (only wiser) to his base. I'll give the guy this: He's really good at giving his base what they want to hear. And they're real good at overlooking that which they do not want to hear when he says it.

Nice to hear from White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that "We're not going to control the pandemic." And why might that be? "Because it is a contagious virus." When did they figure that out? Is that one of those things Trump told Bob Woodward back in February and they've been waiting 'til now to tell us?

I'm running a backup program on my computer right now and it's reallocating resources such that my P.C. runs about as fast as I do, which is not too fast. Typing this is taking way longer than it should so I'm going to sign off for now. Happy Last Week before what could be Our Last Week.

Here's my pal Charlie Frye doing more stuff that he can do and you can't…

Two hours ago, I (properly masked, of course) popped into a Ralphs Market to get a few items. I was in the checkout line with my few items when a man in the adjoining line began screaming. He was not totally coherent but I gather he was ordering us to all vote for Donald Trump because — this was his argument not mine — people in the "stupid states" were voting the Biden-Harris ticket and we have an obligation to save America by making sure Trump wins California. In case you're curious: Yes, he had a mask on.

Speaking as someone who probably has more chance of winning my state's 55 electoral votes than Donald has, I don't think that's so. And even if the guy in the checkout line has the power to convert every single person he can scream at between now and November 3rd, I don't think Donald is carrying the Golden State. Donald doesn't either. I'd hate to think how many commercials and ads you folks in the swing states are being deluged with from both sides. We're getting almost none of it out here because Biden didn't think he needed it and Trump decided to spend his campaign money in states where he had a prayer.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the guy in the checkout line campaigning for his guy but come on. Politics is supposed to be The Art of the Possible. The Survey USA poll, which is the main one that surveys California, has Biden at 65%. Which is why I'm not out in the streets of Wyoming with a Biden placard today.

Anyway, I had a few minutes before they'd start ringing up my groceries so I just listened to the guy rant for a minute or two. Some of it was about Black Lives Matter and some of it was about Hillary and some of it was about Kamala and there was something in there about pedophilia…but I didn't know what the f he was talking about and neither did he. Pedophilia is a terrible crime/sickness and it's a shame people now think it's just an accusation to be hurled wildly at anyone you hate for any reason. How about if we save that one for when there's actual evidence of child molestation?

Someone said to the ranter, "You're wasting your time." Other voices agreed. I leaned over and asked, "Could I make a suggestion? Trump's not going to carry California but he's got a shot at least in Florida. Why don't you get on a plane to Orlando or Miami, find a Piggly Wiggly market and be real annoying and rude to shoppers there?"

And the guy, so help me, said "Y'know, that's not a bad idea…"

Hello. One of these days, the way voting will work is that you will send in your ballot via mail or some sort of online website…and before you tell me that online voting cannot be error-free or tamper-free, remember that (a) neither is the old polling place method and (b) companies like Wells Fargo and American Express can make online banking error-free enough and tamper-free enough to use it to move zillions of dollars around. At some point, you have to trust some arrangement to count your vote.

After your ballot is officially received, you can receive a little e-mail or log into a site like I just did that told me…

And I could then request that since my ballot is in, I receive no more mail trying to sway my vote, no more robocalls, no more door-to-door persuaders, no more political ads on my computer screen or my TV screen, no more messages from Donald Trump thanking me for the past support I've never given him, no more political commercials if I turn on my radio, no more leaflets on my front gate and I don't have to look at billboards, bumper stickers, skywriting or your lawn signs. It would be a felony with a stiff minimum sentence — oh say, ten years behind bars answering support questions for Brother Printers — if you show me any trace of the election. Or is that too lenient?