Okay, I watched the thing. Did you get the idea that about a third of the way into it, Chris Wallace looked like he wanted to get out of the news business and go make BBQ Bacon Crispy Chicken Sandwiches at Burger King?

I suppose many/most Trump fans liked his I-Don't-Play-By-The-Rules bluster. He succeeded in rattling Biden a few times but I think it was obvious to any watcher that that was the game and that being loud is not the same thing as being right. The fact-checkers are playing Catch-Up right now but it looks like Trump got ten things wrong for every one of Biden's.

Seems to me Trump is going to lose support for his unwillingness to genuinely condemn white supremacists and militia groups — he basically told them to "stand by" in case violence is needed — and for all his rambling about a fake count in the election. But he's behind, he needed to get some Biden supporters to swing his way and I don't think he managed that. He just proved that Donald Trump is exactly what his opponents say he is. And Biden did a lot to dispel the charges that he's slow, has no endurance, etc. Whenever I've stumbled onto Trump-supporting chat boards lately, they all seemed dead certain that he would never show up for the debate at all.

It was also effective that Biden kept talking directly to voters and reminding them that this election is about them and in their hands. Trump kept talking to Chris Wallace. My take is that what most people who watched will take away from the debate is that it was a mess and a "shitshow" and a disgrace on many levels…and that wasn't because of Joe Biden.

Promoters of the L.A. Comic Con have announced a public event for December 11-13 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. In this item here, I mentioned that they had yet to announce any guests. Well, they have now…Frank Miller on Saturday and the cast of My Hero Academia on Saturday and Sunday. Over on this page, they list all the things they're doing to try and make the event safe for attendees.

One line there says, "With input from the City, County & State, we will continue to adapt L.A. Comic Con to be both super FUN and diligently SAFE." I don't know if they've spoken to anyone at the city or county levels but we now have California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly saying that to his knowledge, no one associated with the event has consulted with him.

The state's counties are classified via a four-tier system which decides the threat of COVID-1 is widespread (purple), substantial (red), moderate (orange) or minimal (yellow). According to this report, "…guidance for convention centers should also be out soon and that could possibly provide a road map for reopening, but they will not be in the purple tier and most likely not in the red tier where indoor and outdoor concert venues remain closed." So maybe the convention will have to move wholly online or postpone or maybe Frank Miller, properly masked and sanitized, will come to your homes to sign stuff.

A few folks wrote to ask what the odds were of me attending. They're about the same as the odds of Donald Trump getting the black vote because they agree no one since Abraham Lincoln has done as much for their people. My non-attendance is partly because of the COVID thing, partly because they won't invite me, partly because I have no interest in attending and partly because as I've been stating on this blog for years, "I've always thought the L.A. Convention Center is a real terrible place with a confusing and fragmented floor plan, horrible parking and ghastly traffic for some distance in any direction." That's a cut-and-paste from this blog post from 2015 but I said things like that many times before.

I would love to think that by the middle of December, the threat of the coronavirus will be so minimal, one could attend a public event like that without fear. I don't think it will be.

Tonight's debate begins at 6 PM my time. I'll probably decide around 5:55 if I'm going to watch it live or wait 'til later and watch the highlights, leaving open the possibility of watching it in full on YouTube or elsewhere. One nice thing about the Internet is that you can watch things like this minutes, hour or even days later.

I've probably said this before here but I'm not a fan of these debates. The time limits prevent anyone from giving an answer of any substance and often, candidates get cut off just as they're getting to the topic I want to hear. It's a format that invites zingers much more than actual discussions of policy. There's a small live audience tonight — about seventy people, I believe. One report says they'd all be tested for COVID-19 before being admitted. I'm hoping they'll also be screened to make sure neither candidate is packing the place with supporters.

I guess the thing that always bothers me about them is this argument that your guy "won the debate." You don't "win" this kind of debate the way you win a baseball game by scoring more runs or win a golf tournament by taking fewer strokes. There's no numerical scorekeeping. Still, both sides will be out in force afterwards, making arguments they could have pre-taped about how their guy "won" in some non-numerical way. I suppose you could say that someone won a debate if their polling numbers moved significantly to better positions but that movement, if any, won't be known for some days. And it won't necessarily be because of the debate because there are plenty of other recent news items that could have budged them.

I'll make one prediction: The biggest tune-in for a presidential debate ever. Donald will probably consider that alone a "win" for him, regardless of how well he does or does not do.

• Trump Administration now demanding that Joe Biden undergo DNA testing before debate to prove that he is not McLean Stevenson.

I remember really liking the 1980 movie Fame.  I saw it at a Writers Guild screening and a few weeks later when it was released for mass audiences, I took a date to see it and she loved it, too.  A few years later, it was a TV show and a jacket and a chain of acting schools and a merchandising bonanza and I was unsurprised when it was announced that someone was turning it into a musical for Broadway.  I probably said, "Gee, I'll have to go see that."  But it never got to Broadway.

It has played all over this country in many, many productions.  There was even one in Los Angeles in 1994 (in Glendale, actually) but somehow I never got out there to see it, nor did I see the off-Broadway production that played in New York for about eight months.  My enthusiasm for it may have been diminished when I heard that its book was substantially different from the movie and that they only used the title song and nothing else from the film score.

So I've never seen it.  I have though seen this video of the opening number and it…well, you can only judge a musical by its opening number a bit more than you can judge a book by its cover.  I have friends who watch the sample numbers presented each year on the Tony Awards telecast and we don't judge the shows but we do say of a performance, "That doesn't make me want to buy a ticket."  See if this number makes you want to buy a ticket for Fame — The Musical…

• I have the feeling that at this very moment, Randy Rainbow is shooting a video with lyrics set to the tune of the ABBA song, "Money, Money, Money."

As you know, I've been paying very little attention lately to The Election.  Proof of that is that I went ahead and announced a webcast tomorrow night at 7 PM, not realizing that tomorrow night is the first presidential debate.  I haven't decided yet if I'm going to watch but I'm fairly sure everyone else is.  So I'm postponing tomorrow night's webcast to a later date to be named later.  If you plugged it somewhere, please unplug it.

200 days…wow. When I started my little stay here in the Fortress, I had no idea how long it would last and, amazingly, I still don't. None of us know when this thing will be behind us even if some of us think we do.

I'm seeing announcements for in-person comic conventions in the coming months including a supposed-to-be-big one at the L.A. Convention Center shortly before Christmas. At the moment, their website lists no guests. This does not sound like a good idea to me.

Today was an especially difficult day to not read or hear about Donald Trump. Is anyone really surprised that he's a terrible businessman and that everything he touches fails? The only thing that has really brought him revenue in recent years was appearing on The Apprentice and that wasn't his financial acumen at work. He earned that money by pretending to be a successful businessman. Kevin Drum has a chart of Trump's net gains and losses. Wasn't the big argument for this guy that he would run this country like a business?

Early Friday morning, Turner Classic Movies is running Go West, The Big Store, Double Dynamite, A Girl in Every Port, A Day at the Races, At the Circus, A Night at the Opera and The Story of Mankind. That's eight movies that Groucho Marx was in and you can also see Harpo and Chico in six of them. Then next Sunday, they have The Great Buster — a good documentary about Buster Keaton — followed by four of his best silent features. It's also a big weekend on TCM for screenwriter Irving Brecher since he wrote At the Circus and Go West, and also the screenplay for Bye Bye Birdie, which they're running on Sunday just before the Keaton fest.

As you damn well know, MAD magazine has fallen on hard times. Not that long ago, they moved it from New York to Los Angeles, rebooted it, redesigned it, announced it was ceasing publication, then decided to keep publishing but to lower its budget…and here is its current status as of a few days ago: They are still putting it out but it's almost all reprints. There are new covers and a few new pages inside each issue but it's almost all recycled material. And whereas they used to "colorize" a lot of the pieces that had previously run in black-and-white, the mag is moving back towards all black-and-white as it was for so many years.

At the moment, no change to this seems to be in the offing. Nevertheless, I am still predicting — based on no inside info whatsoever — that someone in the corporation will someday say, "We can't let it end like this. The name alone is too valuable for us to allow it to wither and die" and they'll do something. What, I don't know and they don't know. But they'll do something to try and raise MAD from its near-death state.

In the meantime, a lot of veteran MAD contributors have some free time on their hands. The best movie parodies that have appeared in the magazine, lo this past decade or so, were written by Desmond Devlin and drawn by Tom Richmond. They see no reason why, just because their magazine has been driven to near-oblivion, they should stop doing what they do so well. So they are producing Claptrap, a book of all-new parodies of recent films and some that MAD spared in years past.

It's being crowdfunded and perhaps you know my position on crowdfunding. If you don't want to click that link, I'll summarize: Way too often, they take your money and fail to deliver what they promised.

But as I say in that piece, I don't promote or order any crowdfunded item "unless it's the endeavor of someone I know really, really, really well." I know Tom Richmond "really, really, really well." I only know Desmond a little but this is good enough for me. You might be interested to read Tom's views on crowdfunding which you can do over on this page of his blog.

By now, you're probably ready to go order a copy of this book and if so, don't let me stop you. But just in case you need to hear more, here are Desmond and Tom explaining all about their project. I think it's well-worth supporting…

I continue to receive e-mails from folks offering their copy of Fantastic Four #1 for scanning. Thank you all but the folks who need this think they have what they need.

I also am receiving notes from people who thought I'd slighted John Cleese's co-writer on Fawlty Towers, Connie Booth, by not mentioning her by name. No slight was intended. I just kinda think that Mr. Cleese's performance as Mr. Fawlty is what made that series work as well as it did.

I wrote here that I have/had a low opinion of the DC Comics Production Department pre-1980, at least when it came to making art and lettering corrections. Our pal Mark Waid agrees with me in an e-mail…

Yeah, the lettering corrections were almost universally whatever the opposite of seamless is. I've always assumed that part of it was not that they gave them to a monkey but because the correx were being made on a same-size stat rather than a twice-up. There was, however, a monkey no doubt involved.

I think that was part of it but I also think they just weren't that good at it. I also think no one on the premises had a sense of design when it came to typeset lettering and it was often poor when they tried to integrate typography and hand lettering on a cover or ad. The best DC covers, when you took the copy into account, were those for which Ira Schnapp did everything except the date, the issue number and the price.

In a related note, Paul Dushkind wrote to ask me…

Why is it that the reproduction in comic-book reprint editions is blurry? The older the stories are, the worse the reproduction is. But even fairly recent stories from the sixties and seventies have fine lines missing. Everyone knows that DC is supposed to have the film from every story they ever published, so the sharpness should be perfect!

If they had good film of every story they ever published, the sharpness would be perfect. I don't know where that myth got started but it's kind of obvious, when they have to reconstruct old stories and have someone trace or do heavy Photoshopping of scans from printed comics, that they don't. I doubt that they ever did. And Marvel's files were and still are even worse.

Sol Brodsky, who was the Production Manager at times at Marvel, once explained the problem there to me. Sol said he often urged Management there to shoot better copies of current work for the files and to make more back-up copies of it. But that involved spending money now for a need that might arise in the future and a lot of companies (not just Marvel, not just comic book publishers) don't like doing that kind of thing. It makes this month's budgets look bad. It's easier to not spend that money now and let someone else deal with problem years later.

Paul, you've inspired me to do a long post about this topic. I will…in a couple of days. Thanks.

We have three of them for you today. As I'm sure you know, John Cleese starred in and co-wrote the smashingly-successful situation comedy, Fawlty Towers. There were six episodes made for broadcast in 1975 and six more that aired in 1979 and that's all there ever were. Maybe it was inevitable that something that popular would be purchased for an American remake…but three times?

The first was a pilot called Snavely and it starred Harvey Korman as the U.S. version of Basil Fawlty and Betty White as his wife. It was done in 1978 and it did not become a series. Here is that pilot…

The second was a short-lived series that turned Basil into a woman named Amanda who ran an inn with a lovely ocean view. Bea Arthur starred in Amanda's by the Sea which debuted in 1983, Thirteen episodes were made but the show was terminated before the last three were broadcast. Here's the first one…

And then there was Payne which starred John Larroquette, who played hotel owner Royal Payne with JoBeth Williams as his wife. This one came on in 1999 and they shot nine episodes but only eight ever aired. Here's the first episode…

I don't have much to say about any of them except that if there had to be an Americanized version of Fawlty Towers — and there didn't — Harvey Korman was not a bad choice for the lead. And I suppose I'm curious if any of the importers thought that the secret of Fawlty Towers' popularity was what all three versions kept from the original — the concept of someone operating a small hotel. Me, I think John Cleese might have had a little something to do with the triumph of the Brit version.

Quite a few folks who own a copy of Fantastic Four #1 responded to my public appeal. I think we have what we need and when this project gets closer to its publication date, I'll tell you what this was about. Thanks to all of you.

Last night, Turner Classic Movies ran The Hospital, the 1971 movie which starred George C. Scott and Diana Rigg…but really starred a killer script by Paddy Chayefsky. I meant to record it on my TiVo but forgot. I haven't seen it since it came out and I recall liking it a lot…so I wanted to see if I still did and I wanted to check something else out. The late/lovely June Foray told me that she was called in to do a fair amount of dubbing and looping on the film including a couple of lines for Diana Rigg. I wanted to see if I could recognize June at all in the film and especially impersonating Ms. Rigg, who was back in England and unavailable when dialogue replacement was needed. It's not a big thing but did anyone notice June?

My buddy Gerry Conway has written a lot of great comic books over the years and a lot of great other things. He recently penned an essay about what he thinks has to happen for the comic book industry to thrive or at least survive. The attention-grabbing headline says he wants them to "Cancel Every Existing Superhero Comic." Actually, he says he'd cancel 'em and reshape that genre as "a limited new line for a Middle-Grade readership" with simpler characters and storylines and…

Why am I summarizing it? You can read the whole thing in his own words here.

I don't disagree with any part of it unless Gerry thinks that (a) DC and Marvel are likely to try it, (b) that if they did try it, their sales forces would know how to begin reaching that yearned-for New Audience and (c) the companies would give this approach a fair shot at establishing itself before they panicked at the first sales figures, declared the whole thing a failure and went back to the old approach. And then if they behaved as folks running comic book companies have in the past, they'd (d) blame the writers and artists for giving them a non-commercial product, rather than their own inability to sell anything except what they're currently selling (not very well) and their hurry to surrender.

But Gerry's a smart guy. I don't think he believes (a) and he certainly knows how the rest of the story goes.

As long as I've been in comics, which is about the same amount of time as Gerry, I've heard endless discussions and panels and meetings about "reaching a new audience with different kinds of comics." The 2% of the time all that talk has led to an actual attempt, it's been half-assed…and you can kind of sense the sighs of relief when they get in some early numbers that justify saying, "Well, we tried and it didn't work so let's give up on this."

Also, no one is suggesting that if you put out different kinds of comics, the mere fact that they're different will in and of itself attract an audience. They have to be different and good…or at least different and compelling. Sometimes, it's like if you had a pizza business and I suggested you might be able to sell some other kind of food as well. Then you go and put Baked Gopher Guts in Hollandaise Sauce on the menu and when they don't sell, you say, "You were wrong. People only want pizza."

Hey, let's watch and listen as Bernadette Peters sings a show tune I like. Some time ago here, I promised to tell the embarrassing (to me) story of the one time I met Ms. Peters. A few of you have reminded me and I will get to it. In the meantime, here's a song you weren't expecting…

Someone who signs himself "Gary from Buffalo" and who might even be named Gary and hail from Buffalo writes…

I'm back with another super-trivial question about Superman comics during the silver age, when I was a devoted reader.

Every month, each comic's letter page invariably contained letters pointing out mistakes (or boo-boo's) in previous issues. (The only submission of mine that ever made it to print was such a letter.) Later on, when these stories with errors were reprinted in the 80-Page Giants, I'd notice the mistakes had been corrected. If you knew where to look, these tacked-on corrections were usually very obvious.

My question is, how did DC keep track of the story corrections to be made? Was someone in charge of physically writing the correction into an issue? Or did they put the 1960's equivalent of a post-it note onto each page? And were the issues with corrections then kept in a separate file? They must have had a system, because I doubt anyone would be able to commit all the corrections to memory. After 60 years of wondering, I'd love to know the answer!

I don't know of any organized error-tracking procedures in the DC offices but I did know a man named Nelson Bridwell who was an assistant editor — and sometimes an editor — there during this period. Nelson was in charge of most of those 80-page reprint issues and he was also a highly-sophisticated and obsessive proofreading machine.

He assembled and wrote the replies for most of the letter pages for the Superman comics and later when those stories were reprinted, he was in charge. It would not be surprising that when he selected a story for reuse, he then checked the letter pages of subsequent issues for things that needed fixing. It would also not be surprising if he just plain remembered 'em because Nelson had one of "those" memories.

And it's interesting that you could always spot the corrections. Every comic book company has someone around to fix spelling errors and art mistakes, DC had their Production Department, which was headed up by a gent named Sol Harrison who routinely bragged that his crew was the absolute best-ever at that kind of thing. I kept it to myself when I was around him but I thought the opposite.

I thought they were pretty bad at it. Even as a kid, I could spot all kinds of clumsy lettering fixes and often there'd be some drawing on a page — usually a body part — that you could see wasn't drawn by the credited artist…or even by a very good artist at all.

In the forties, all the way up to 1967 or so, they had a letterer named Ira Schnapp who was to lettering what someone like Joe Kubert or Nick Cardy was to everything else on the page. Schnapp designed most of the title logos and lettering on the covers and most of the house ads and such. When he made a fix, it was seamless and unspottable. When anyone else did, it stood out like a rhinoceros in a box of See's Candy — to coin a phrase.

This is the first time I (or I think anyone) has ever said that the DC Production Department before around 1980 was not only not the best anywhere, it was simply not very good, at least when it came to corrections. If I had said this at the time, I would not only have been banned from the company for life, I would have been somehow forbidden from buying their comics ever again. I had to wait forty years to feel safe in speaking my mind on this topic and it feels good to finally do so.