Byron Erickson has been deeply involved in the reprinting and creation of Disney Comics for many years. He read this post here and then sent me this…

This is in response to your "Ask Me: Licensed Comic Libraries" column on Monday. I know nothing about most comics publishers' practices in maintaining archives, but I do know a lot about how Disney handled their comic book archives worldwide. This is probably more than you want to know, so feel free to cut as needed (or desired) or paraphrase mightily if you post any of it.

As the production manager for Another Rainbow's Carl Barks Library in the 1980s, and then editor-in-grief of Gladstone's comic books, it was my job to source printable "proofs" for both the Barks reprints and Dutch and Danish created original material.

That should have been easy, because — and it may come as a news flash — Disney's license required all publishers to send proof copies of all their created material to the Disney Studio in Burbank. For free. Disney would then make available all that material to any Disney licensee that requested it. Not for free. I'm sorry, but I don't remember what they cost, but it would have been just a few dollars per page.

Unfortunately, as we soon discovered, Disney didn't provide actual photostats. Instead, they sent what can only be described as old-fashioned xerox copies (for your younger readers, that's copies on coated paper where the blacks weren't really black). Some of them required lots of touch-ups by our talented production artists who had to meticulously compare the copies to the original published comics to reinstate small pieces of lines that had faded out or were missing.

Luckily, Disney's archives was missing some stories and almost all of the Barks covers. I say "luckily" because that meant Disney was forced to order the missing material directly from Western Publishing's archive in Racine, Wisconsin, and Western sent incredibly high-quality photostats. Again, I don't remember what they cost, but it was at least triple the cost per page of Disney's xeroxes.

Now, Bruce Hamilton (Another Rainbow and Gladstone's publisher) was not a spendthrift in any sense of the word, but he immediately realized that to make a high-quality "Barks Library" we needed to get *all* our proofs directly from Western. He got a bit of pushback on that from Disney, but they finally relented and Bruce and I flew out to Western's office in Racine to arrange the deal.

I could fill pages with stories of what an amazing treasure trove Western's archives were back then (and the very nice Vice President there who let us wander around and poke in the archives unsupervised), but the deal was made, even though said Vice President questioned Western's continuing obligation to fulfill the terms of a Disney comics license they no longer had.

Cut to my years working in Denmark for Egmont's Disney comics production. The same licensing terms applied to all the European (and Brazilian) Disney comics producers: all had to provide archival copies of all Disney comics material to Burbank for free. However, unlike in the U.S., each publisher was free to order directly from any other publisher, and the material had to be provided "at cost." The price of "at cost" was fixed at $30 per page for color separated film (no one ordered black and white proofs). This price never changed while I was with Egmont, even though at some point in the early 2000s the material started to be supplied digitally.

Finally, I know the "foreign" publishers' mutual agreement is still in force and functioning, but I'm not sure that the modern Disney corporation still maintains its archive in Burbank. During my time visiting it in the 1980s, it went from a large air-conditioned office on the Studio lot, to a series of hot trailers parked way in the back. And I've heard (but can't vouch for) rumors that it's been completely cleared out. Maybe that's because everything is digital now, but also maybe it's because the modern Disney Corporation doesn't care about their non-film heritage anymore. After all, the comics are no longer the cash cow they once were when Walt Disney's Comics & Stories sold more then five million copies a month in the early 1950s, and the various European Disney publishers combined through the early 2000s sold almost that many millions per week.

Well, there you are: The corporate mindset that since there's no money right this minute in preserving something that may be of value in the future, we don't want to spend money on it now. I could fill this blog for years with horror stories that have been told to me from folks who are charged with selling old movies and TV shows for home video and streaming. One told me once that the answer to the question "Why isn't this old TV series being rerun or sold on DVD?" is too often because they can't find decent prints and maybe that someone is reticent to invest in restoration of what they do have.

When I was involved in Disney comics in the seventies, they had a library of good stats and negatives. I'm sorry that seems to no longer be the case but it's not uncommon. Most folks would not believe what we had to go through to reprint the early years of Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip. Now that we're into the later years, it's much easier but there are still occasional problems finding a good copy of a certain strip.

Here's another one of Robert Klein's HBO Specials, this time from 1995. Back when I was teaching Comedy Writing at U.S.C., I showed a couple of these to my students and I think they learned a lot from them — if not from the shows themselves then certainly from the discussions that followed. The man could take the simplest things from everyday life, turn them into very funny routines and deliver them with a sense of spontaneity that masked the fact that he'd done the material hundreds of times before. One of the best…

Andy Krieg wrote to ask…

Since you have worked with a lot of licensed characters on your various comics, I am hoping you can explain some questions I have around what happens when that license moves from one company to another.

I have seen an awful lot of repackaged releases of licensed character material when said character moves between companies.  For example, when Conan moved from Marvel to Dark Horse, Dark Horse started to reprint Conan comics Marvel had produced.  And when the license moved back to Marvel, Marvel started to reprint Conan comics Dark Horse had produced.  You can see repackaged materials at various companies for licenses such as Star Trek, Star Wars, G.I. Joe, ROM the Spaceknight, Planet of the Apes, Red Sonja, etc.  Heck, the whole Disney line has moved from company to company, with Carl Barks reprints (among others) happening at all of them.

My questions lie around how this material is transferred from company to company.  Did Marvel keep a file cabinet full of all their Conan work that got wheeled out the door when Conan moved to Dark Horse?  Or as the comics are written, does the owner of the licensed character get all of the pages, scripts, etc. for the comic each month, and they keep a record of it?  Is this something covered in a standard contract between the licensee and licensor companies?

Are there companies out that whose purpose is to store and maintain these libraries of material for companies that own licensed characters? It seems like something most companies wouldn't have the expertise to do for themselves.  And where does the material go when the person or company licensing off some character no longer exists?  I'm guessing some estate might still hold rights to people like Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope and the Three Stooges. But Dell's Four Color run is full of odd and obscure licensed characters (e.g. Timmy, Johnny Mack Brown, The Little Scouts, etc.). Where would the materials for characters such as these reside?

First off, I've never known any comic book company to keep scripts or anything except the finished pages and covers. Secondly, I'll let you in on a dark secret of the comic book business: In the pre-digital era — before pages could scanned into computers and saved as digital media — the comic book companies were often real sloppy about retaining copies of their own material…pages they knew they would someday want to reprint or sell overseas. Never mind preserving the material done for a licensed property like Conan, there were times when Marvel wanted to reprint an issue of Spider-Man or Hulk and had to scramble to find something to print off of.

This may sound like corporate irresponsibility — and it was — but it was also often a matter of short-term frugality. Before digital, it cost money to shoot extra photostats and/or negatives of pages and it looked better on the budget sheets to not spend a lot of the company's dough to preserve material for the future. DC spent a lot more money on its "library" than Marvel but at times, even DC had no source material to use when they wanted to reprint something.

Back then, reprinting a comic book usually meant you had to have a sharp copy of the black-and-white line art. When they didn't have that, they sometimes had to photograph off old printed comics with filters to try and bleach out the color. There was a process that Joe Simon came up with — though someone else later grabbed credit for it — whereby, they'd take an actual printed copy of an old issue and bleach the colors out of the page with chemicals. Those pages, of course, then had to be retouched and cleaned-up. Sometimes, they'd just pay an artist to trace the pages out of a printed comic and create new black-and-white line art.

I should devote a few of these ASKmes to discussing other ways this was done…but you asked about licensed books changing companies…

There have never been any standard contracts as far as I know but usually, the owner of the property receives copies of every issue in a form that would allow them to duplicate the material and sell it to others. When I wrote Disney comics for Gold Key, Gold Key would send photostats of every page they published to a department at Disney which would store them. When they could sell the rights to reprint that material to some publisher (foreign then, anywhere now) they could duplicate those pages for the new publisher. I would imagine all that material has long since been digitized and that since digital became industry standard, there are no more stats.

So when Dark Horse reprinted a comic done originally by Marvel, they probably had access to whatever the copyright holder had. If the copyright holder didn't properly preserve that source material, that was a problem but not a huge one because digital technology today makes it much, much easier to print off a printed comic. A lot of the reprinted material you buy today is made possible by digital reconstruction. Sometimes, they just scan a comic, tweak the scan and reprint the page with its original coloring.

This is fortunate because a lot of copyright holders didn't preserve whatever they once had. There are to my knowledge no companies that preserve this material for the copyright holders. In most cases, whatever the original publisher had was not preserved unless the copyright holder did…and in most cases, they didn't.

Bob Hope — there's a name drop — once told me (and others I know) that he owned the publication rights to those Bob Hope comic books DC put out from 1950 through 1968 and he had a few complete sets of the published issues. I would imagine that if someone today wanted to reprint them, they'd first have to make a deal with his estate. Then they'd have to figure out if anyone anywhere kept the old black-and-white film or stats and if so, was that material in good enough condition? The answer would probably be no so they'd have to resort to digital reconstruction, either using Bob's copies or someone else's.

They might also find someone had some of the old original art. There have been reprints of some comics that have been made possible because some collector had pages but that doesn't happen very often.

Today's the day Trump is supposed to be interviewed (via Zoom) by a Probation Officer as a kind of pre-sentencing ritual.  That's gotta be a Saturday Night Live cold open.  They're gonna ask him if he intends to communicate with known criminals and he'll have to admit that, yes, he's going to see his family and guys like Roger Stone.  They're gonna ask if he has remorse and accepts responsibility for his misdeeds and of course, he's going to say he's a completely innocent man and it's all a Biden/Soros-driven hoax and…well, he's not going to say any of the things that might get him a lighter sentence or punishment.  It's probably already taken place and I'll bet it went like that.

Steve Benen writes about how, having tried in the past to take credit for some of President Obama's accomplishments, Donald and his lackeys are trying to give him credit for some of President Biden's.

Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In was a ground-breaking show that ran on NBC from January of 1968 to March of 1973. It changed network television and launched a lot of careers and now somehow manages to look incredibly dated but also ahead of its time. The show was hosted by Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, and produced by George Schlatter's company. There was later much bad blood and squabbling between the hosts and Schlatter over proceeds and credit for the show.

Four years after Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In left NBC, Schlatter produced a series of specials just called Laugh-In with no mention of Mssrs. Rowan and Martin…or of anyone who'd been in the cast of the original version. Instead, he assembled a new cast of largely unknown performers, many of whom remained that way. Robin Williams was obviously the breakout star but I'm more interested in the first name among the regular players: Sergio Aragonés.  Could that possibly be my friend and partner, the world-famous cartoonist from MAD and Groo the Wanderer?

Yes.  Sergio did the cartoon graphics throughout the show and was a writer-performer in many of the pantomime blackouts.  He's the guy with the Sergio Aragonés mustache, dressed as a Karate expert and a Mexican general among other guises.  There's a bit in there with a cartoon Sergio studying the navel of a lady in a swimming pool and he not only drew himself but they shot that at the home he had back then in the Hollywood Hills.  He was in all the other episodes of this Laugh-In and turned up on some other shows produced by George Schlatter.  You can spot him here and there in the margins, too.

A few years ago here, I posted a link to a video of the first episode, which aired on September 5, 1977. That video was apparently unauthorized by the copyright holder (Mr. Schlatter) and was soon taken down. Now, he has authorized a much clearer copy to be posted to YouTube and you can watch it below. And if any of the above text seems familiar, I posted some of it before also…

What I wrote here the other day about Jack Kirby doing layouts at Marvel in the sixties quickly brought a whole lotta questions. I'll start with this one from Paul Dushkind and also give some of the back story…

I'm surprised to read that Jack Kirby refused to draw layouts after a while. I knew that his workload got smaller as time went on. You've created the impression that he aspired to lay out for other artists later, when he was at DC. Can you elaborate on this?

It's pretty simple. As Marvel expanded their super-hero line in the sixties, they needed more artists who could draw super-heroes in the new style and who could work — as Stan was insisting everyone work on the comics he was ostensibly writing — from a rough plot. Except that by then, Jack was generally supplying all or most of the plots on the comics they did together.

Very few artists who sought work at Marvel then could do what Kirby and Ditko and just a few others did, which was to take one of Stan's rough plots — which could be as sparse as one or two sentences and have originated with the artist in the first place — and turn it into 10 or 20 pages of penciled art for which Stan could then write dialogue. Joe Orlando quit after just a few stories because he'd pencil the story out, bring it in and Stan would make him (he claimed) redraw half the story. There was nothing wrong with the pictures Joe drew. They were just the wrong pictures, Stan felt. He didn't like the way Joe had developed the story they'd discussed.

Joe quit because he felt what Marvel paid then wasn't sufficient for drawing a story and then redrawing half of it. Some of the other guys didn't work out from Stan's viewpoint. He wasn't happy with what Carl Burgos or Bob Powell handed in, for example, which is why those two men didn't stick around longer. A few other artists who were given a few pages to "try out" didn't even last to the end of those stories and their samples were not paid-for by Stan or published.

For about two years, Stan dealt with this problem by having Kirby "lay out" a story which meant Jack applied his formidable plotting skills to it too. Stan may have had trouble dialoging a story Powell penciled on his own but the results were better (and easier) when Kirby laid it out and Powell penciled over those layouts.

It also helped "teach" some artists how to pace a story Marvel-style and get in swing with the characters. When Stan asked Alex Toth to take over from Kirby penciling X-Men, Alex couldn't just jump in and do it. He was unfamiliar with the strip, the characters and the ongoing storylines…and also, Alex wanted to understand the kind of storytelling Stan was seeking. So at Alex's request, Kirby laid out Alex's first story…which turned out to be Alex's only story because he was not comfortable doing the kind of work Stan was seeking.

Jack didn't like doing this kind of work but he felt he was helping the company — he still felt that if Marvel succeeded, he would reap some of the financial benefits — and he was also helping artists who needed help. When John Romita (Senior) was assigned to take over Daredevil, he drew the first few pages of his first issue like the romance comics he'd been doing for DC Comics. That wasn't the kind of storytelling Stan wanted in his super-hero books so he called on Jack to lay out the rest of the issue and all of the next so Romita could learn on the job.

Kirby did a number of stories this way for The Avengers and The X-Men and for Hulk stories in Tales to Astonish, Captain America stories in Tales of Suspense and Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Strange Tales. In a few cases, he veered more into complete penciling on key pages or the occasional panels.

But while he was always willing to help a fellow artist, Jack wasn't willing to do this forever for what he considered insufficient pay. He felt that to plot and layout a story was at least 50% of the important work on one of those pages — maybe more than 50% — but he was never paid close to that fraction. It was more like 25%. The publisher was unwilling to pay more for a penciled page that was laid-out by one guy and tight-penciled by another than he was for a penciled page that was wholly the work of one guy. And you couldn't pay Jack 50% of the money allotted for penciling and then expect anyone good to finish the art for the other 50%.

So Jack kept cutting back on his willingness to do such work and finally, after about two years, refused altogether. When he went to DC, he wanted to work with other artists but not in the same way, though we did experiment with one story for which Jack did layouts and Mike Royer did finished art. It was "The Psychic Bloodhound," which was intended for Spirit World #2 but which wound up being printed in Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion #6. It turned out to not be a good way to divide up the work or the money and it was never attempted again.

I received a few more questions about Jack's layout work and I'll get to them in the next few days.

As with many comedians, I didn't fully appreciate the Smothers Brothers until I saw them perform (a) live and (b) for more than the short routines you see on TV or hear on records. And once I did, it was a case of "I knew they were good but I never know they were this good."

Alas, Tommy has left us — but here's an hour-and-a-quarter show they did in 2006 at a place called the Casino-Rama near Toronto. It will probably cause you to say the same thing…

Michael Tomasky reminds us that Donald Trump did not become a criminal when that jury returned its verdict on 34 felony charges. Donald Trump has always been a criminal. He's just not doing as good a job of escaping punishment as he used to.

And Mona Charen reminds us what a miserable, dishonest job Trump did handling the COVID crisis.

Jordan Klepper delivers a TED Talk…

Rolling Stone is reporting, as is every other news site that covers the entertainment industry…

Dick Van Dyke became the oldest Daytime Emmy winner ever Friday as the 98-year-old actor was awarded for his guest role on the soap opera Days of Our Lives.

I just looked at about two dozen such stories and couldn't find one that mentioned the previous holder of that honor. With just seconds of Googling, the reporters could have found out that it was June Foray, who won a Daytime Emmy in 2012 at the age of 94. I suppose it was inevitable given the medical miracle that Dick Van Dyke is turning out to be. Next, I suspect he's going to take up gymnastics so he can claim some of the records now held by Simone Biles.

Nick Stuart wrote to ask…

I've often read that at Marvel during the 1960s, Stan Lee deliberately crafted a house style for the artwork modeled on the work of Jack Kirby. In some instances, I've even seen people give the impression that there were a bunch of artists working at Marvel during that time who were nothing more than Kirby clones.

While Kirby's influence on the look of Marvel during those years is fairly evident, I also felt there was quite a bit of variety in the artistic styles of the Marvel artists of the time, more than was sometimes given credit for. To what extent do you feel other artists were told to "draw like Kirby", so to speak?

People get confused about this. The best way for me to explain this is to make clear that Stan did not tell artists to do work that a layperson would mistake for Jack Kirby artwork. He was not looking for forgers. What he did want was for everyone else to pick up on Jack's way of staging action: The "camera" angles, the way of cutting between long shots and close-ups, the techniques of making even scenes of two people standing in a room and talking interesting.

He wanted them to look at how Jack posed his figures and exaggerated emotions and anatomy; how he framed shots so that the characters related to one another in the same shot. If John was falling in love with Marsha and vice-versa, he didn't draw one panel of John and then another panel of Marsha so that their dialogue balloons could convey how each felt about the other. He drew them in the same panel with the proper body language and expressions to tell us how they felt about each other.

I remember Jack once giving a critique of the art samples of an aspiring artist. He said, "Your people never look at each other."

A number of artists came to Marvel after working for other companies — or Stan's in earlier times — where they were given a full script. In a full script, the writer decided how many panels should be on each page, what was shown in each panel and all the lettering — dialogue, captions and sound effects — had been composed. There were a number of variations in how the famed "Marvel Method" worked but they usually involved the artist, not the writer, deciding what to show in each panel and then the copy was written later.

Stan thought Jack was the master of this. You could look at one of his penciled pages with no lettering on it and understand, if not the plot then at least the dramatic tensions in the scene.

So to make clear: He didn't want his other artists to draw hands like Jack drew or faces like Jack drew. He wanted them to lay out the pages and tell the story the way Jack drew. Sol Brodsky, who had a lot to do with who drew what at Marvel in the sixties, told me that Stan would often turn down an applicant for penciling work by saying, "Too DC!"

That generally meant he thought their staging was dull. If he thought someone had promise, he'd either assign them to work over Kirby layouts, at least for a few jobs. After Jack refused to do that kind of work anymore, he'd tell them to study the way Jack "told" a story in pictures. Some got it, some didn't.

Herb Rotfeld sent me this regarding last Monday evening's Daily Show…

I finally watched the Ken Buck interview on Peacock-plus. And yet, the most striking item I witnessed has not generated much attention, or so it seems. Mr. Buck made a comment that generated a loud derisive negative audience response. Stewart immediately called them to stop, told them to not do that — "the tickets are free" — and jokingly-tone threatened to have the impolite people removed by security.

I can't think of any host with a political guest that would do that to their home crowd.

I don't think it's that unique, Herb. Keep in mind that a lot of shows that have political guests don't have studio audiences. Bill Maher does and I'm pretty sure I've seen him do that. And the shows like Colbert's or Kimmel's rarely have on the kind of person who might get booed, nor do they often lead guests into those subject areas.

But I do think Jon Stewart's interviews are somewhat unique because, first of all, he strikes a near-perfect balance between being funny and being an interviewer. Secondly, he's always well-prepared and not just because he read the notes that some Talent Coordinator prepared for him. Thirdly, because he doesn't ask obvious questions for which the guests have developed rote answers. And fourthly, because those interviewers often involve two people with different points of view expressing them and challenging each other…you know, the way two smart people might intelligently discuss politics.

The other night, the guest was George Conway but unfortunately, the host was Ronny Chieng, who's pretty funny on the show but he asked obvious questions, didn't challenge anything his guest said, fawned a bit too much. Here, take a look…

I don't think that was a good interview, at least by Daily Show standards. I wish Conway had been on with Jon Stewart because things would have gone way deeper.

Life magazine, which once was a must-read weekly, now lives on in name and logo only as an occasional devoted-to-a-single topic special that I see in the checkout line at my local market and nowhere else. The issue which you can probably find now in the checkout line of your local market is devoted to Garfield the Cat and Jim Davis and how the latter created the former and how big the lasagna-devouring feline became. The issue is, no doubt, intended to piggyback (cattyback?) on the publicity about the new movie but the story would be worth telling anyway.

A lot of you who read this blog are fans of said pussycat so I wanted to let you know this is out and also, I need to correct/clarify some things. It says in there I wrote all 121 half-hours of the series Garfield and Friends. I am always careful to say that I wrote or co-wrote all 121 half-hours. Another writer worked on some. It also says I voice-directed the series and that's true as of a certain point in the run but the earlier episodes were voice-directed by Mr. Jim Davis and then I took over.

Also, it says that reruns of the show are now streaming on Tubi. On my TV, they seem to be streaming on several platforms, Tubi included. I'm just waiting for all that residual money to flow my way. I may blow it all on a t-shirt.

What's that you say? You want to visit Disneyland but you can't travel there right now and don't want to spend the entirety of your childrens' inheritance on admission tickets and overpriced Dole Whips and churros? Well, you can take a four-and-a-half hour trip to The Happiest Place on Earth in the video below for free. All it will cost you is four-and-a-half hours…

Based on a few visual clues, Trump and his legal team had some amount of confidence that one juror in the trial — Trump reportedly referred to him as "my juror" — would vote to acquit and hang the jury. Didn't work out that way. Griffin Eckstein has more.

My pal Paul Harris links to two articles I recommend to you: In the Washington Post, Catherine Rampell writes about how an amazing number of people are misinformed about how the American economy is doing. And in the Washington Monthly, Robert Shapiro (not the O.J. lawyer) provides some strong evidence that the current polls are pretty meaningless in gauging who'll win in November.

Personally, I think the verdict in Trump's trial is not what's going to drive voters away from him. I think what will is how incoherent he has become and how the lies are becoming more naked and inarguable.