We're just now learning — thank you, Anthony Tollin — of the passing of veteran comic book/strip artist Frank Bolle on May 12 at the age of 95. Over the years, Mr. Bolle worked on at least two dozen newspaper strips, sometimes as a ghost artist or assistant and sometimes credited. Among them would be Winnie Winkle, On Stage, Tarzan, Gil Thorp, The Girls of Apartment 3-G, Rip Kirby and The Heart of Juliet Jones. He was equally prolific in comic books.

Born in Brooklyn, he began drawing comics in 1943, assisting other artists at first but working solo within the year. Soon, his work turned up at Timely (now Marvel) Comics, Fawcett, Lev Gleason and Magazine Enterprises. It was for the last of these that he co-created the masked western heroine, The Black Phantom, who was neither black nor a phantom. She was however, like all the women he drew, extremely attractive.

In the fifties and beyond, he worked for DC and Atlas and began a long association with Western Publishing on their Dell and later Gold Key Comics. Among the comics he did for Western were Flash Gordon, The Twilight Zone, Grimm's Ghost Stories and Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom. For Charlton, he drew The Phantom and many, many romance comics. He also popped up at Marvel from time to time, usually inking for comics like The Defenders and their Captain Marvel. All of this was in addition to his long stint drawing a number of features for Boys' Life, the official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America.

More often than most artists, he was anonymous but you could spot his clean, attractive style and often, he would sneak an "FWB" (his initials) somewhere in a panel. From all indications, he worked until just a few years ago, capping off a career that spanned over 70 years.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Mr. Bolle on a panel at Comic-Con International in 2004 when he also received an Inkpot Award for his long, illustrious career. He was a charming gent who seemed genuinely surprised that so many fans knew of his work and had comics of his they wanted him to sign. If they'd brought every comic in which his art appeared, that would have been a very, very large pile.

On Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood, just south of Hollywood Boulevard, there's a big newsstand that has been there as long as I can remember…although it used to be bigger than it is now.  It's the World Book & News and as of the last time I drove by, it was still there despite a decade or more of news stories that it was closing.  Starting in the late sixties, it was a place I sometimes went to buy new comic books and other kinds of magazines.  I actually met a few fellow comic book fans there and made some friends.

It was kind of a landmark and so is the alley to the right of it which has been seen in more movies than Michael Caine…and that's a lot of movies.  Since its on-screen appearances date back to the days of Chaplin and Keaton, some silent movie scholars are crusading to get the alley declared as some sort of historical site.  I'd grant official landmark status to the whole thing but I'll settle for that alley.  Read all about it here.

I just found out one of my favorite comedians has started a video podcast. So far, there have been five installments posted to YouTube (and probably elsewhere) of I Don't Know About That with Jim Jefferies.  Each one is ninety minutes or so of Jim Jefferies talking with someone about something and I admit I haven't watched all of them yet but I probably will.

I'll watch the May 4th edition and then I'll watch the May 5th installment and then I'll watch the one he did on May 12th which I'll probably follow with the one from May 26th and I've already watched a lot of his June 9th show.  One of his co-hosts is Forrest Shaw, a comedian I thought was real good as Mr. Jefferies' opening act the first two times I took Amber to see him.

It may be a while before I catch up on all these so I can't tell you that I think they're all worth your time.  But just about everything I've seen Jefferies do was worth my time so make of that what you will.

I continue to struggle with finding a balance. My life here in mostly-isolation is quite pleasant when I can manage to get something done each day. I have to, for my own health, write something. Occasionally, there's also something constructive like working on my taxes or organizing a jumbled file in my filing cabinet or on my D drive.

But there's just too much news, little of which is good, and it's hard to take your attention away from it. Somewhere on this blog, I have probably quoted at least once a joke that Jackie Mason used to use at a time long ago when Richard Nixon was in the White House and Jackie Mason was funny. He said, "Because of him, I get up every morning and run out to see if my furniture is still there."

(I just did a search. This is my fourth time quoting it.)

Nowadays, I awake and I pick up my cell phone and flip to a news aggregator to see what stupid, baneful thing he's done already today — and you all know who "he" is. I'm not talking about Jackie Mason.

This morning, it was spreading the insane idea that when that 75-year-old unarmed protester who was doing nothing wrong got shoved to the pavement by a "peace officer" and wound up in the hospital…well, that was a set-up. The 75-year-old guy planned that to make the police look bad because he knew one of them would shove him and then that cop and all the rest of those fine officers would just march past, leaving him bleeding on the sidewalk.

Probably by now, someone has asked Trump if he thinks that's what really happened and Trump's hiding behind the excuse that he didn't say it was so. He was just quoting someone on the Internet. If you think Trump hates the press now, imagine what they'd be publishing about him if their criteria was that anyone said it on the Internet.

This then is my problem. It may be yours too but right now, it's mine. I want to…I need to spend my name not looking like the bad guy in a Tex Avery cartoon doing exaggerated "takes" at what's in the news. But boy, is it hard.

Yesterday, trying to get my blog off the topic, I posted a piece I wrote some time ago about errors in the credits of cartoon shows. It's valuable info for someone but just before bed last night, I read a fair amount of news about racial problems and reinventing police work in this country and the spread of COVID-19 — reopening ain't working so well — and other problems. Then I looked at my blog and having an item there about cartoon credits just looked wrong to me. Of all the things in the world, I picked that to post?

This blog will probably be quite schizophrenic for the rest of this year, careening madly between topical thoughts and non-topical. That's because my brain is doing that and the whole point of this page is for me to write what I feel like writing about, as opposed to what someone's paying me money to write. I apologize if any of you get whiplash because of this.

If you love show tunes, you may love this a little less than two hours of them in Kings of Broadway 2020, a video revue of great singers singing from their homes — all or most of them apparently singing live even though few microphones are in evidence. There are a few speeches in there about the George Floyd matter and they reminded me of a term I once heard — "The choir preaching to the choir" — and most of songs chosen are about sadness and heartbreak and getting over them.

But most of the performances are quite splendid though one gent does display the chutzpah of thinking he can improve on Sondheim lyrics. And it's a fund-raiser for Acting For Others, NHS Charities Together and Black Lives Matter Global Charities so if you enjoy it as much as I did, send some bucks to the cause like I did…

Every so often on animation forums, I see conversations that remind me to remind the animation community that credits on old TV cartoons are often inaccurate. In many cases, they were inaccurate when they first aired because the guy who made them up did a less-than-stellar job. (The name of Gary Owens was misspelled on the first season of Space Ghost, for example.)

Also, some artists and actors for various reasons asked that their names not be in the credits. Daws Butler, because he was so well-identified with his voicework for Hanna-Barbera, asked that his name not be on some of the shows he worked on for Jay Ward…and it's misspelled on others. I don't know the precise reason but Mel Blanc's name was not on several episodes of The Flintstones where it's clearly him doing Barney Rubble and others. Bill Scott was the voice of Bullwinkle, Mr. Peabody and Dudley Do-Right and others on the various shows that featured those characters and he wrote a lot of the scripts as well…but is only credited as a producer.

Also, on shows for Saturday morning, most studios including Hanna-Barbera, liked to make up one set of end credits for the entire season and use it (the same one) on every episode. They'd list all the writers, actors, artists (etc.) who'd worked on even one episode for that season as of the moment when those end credits were made up. That moment would be when the first episode had to air, which might be about the time Show #10 was being worked on.

So if they were doing, say, sixteen episodes that season, the names of folks who worked only on episodes #11-16 would not be included at all. And of course, an actor who did a small voice part on one of the first ten episodes would have the same credit as someone who did the lead character and had tons of dialogue in all sixteen.

Later on, when it became cheaper and easier to do end credits, most studios would make up the end credits individually for each episode. In some cases though, errors still occurred. And often when shows were syndicated, someone would start swapping around which cartoons appeared in which episodes without changing the end credits.

And sometimes, they just plain lost the end credits.

When the Hanna-Barbera series Top Cat was produced, it was a prime-time series and H-B remade the end credits each week to list the writers, artists and actors who worked on each particular episode. Those episodes were later rerun in syndication and on Saturday morning…and rerun and rerun and rerun. Eventually, the film prints wore out and there also came a day when they needed new transfers so the shows could look clean and perfect when released on home video or on the new, better-quality TV sets.

I'm a little unclear on the time sequence of all this and what was done for TV release and what was done for home video. My dear friend, the late Earl Kress, could have explained it all to me because he was deeply involved with a lot of the restorations. Earl spent a lot of time searching through film vaults that housed Hanna-Barbera's past, often spending days examining unlabeled and mislabeled cans. I'm pretty sure he was the one who found the original, lost-until-he-found-it opening from the first two seasons of The Flintstones with its original theme song.

I think (note italics) he was the one who found the negative to the closing of Top Cat but it was just the animation and music before the credits had been superimposed. As far as I know, prints with the credits in place have never been located. They had the episodes themselves but all they had of the credits sequence was what Earl found. What they then had to do was reconstruct the end credits.

They took the names off a print of one episode, had someone set them in a similar typeface and combined them with Earl's find to create one (1) end credits sequence which they tacked onto the new transfers of all 30 episodes.

Here's a frame grab from the credits for one episode as they all now exist. See where it says Kin Platt wrote the episode? Well, Mr. Platt wrote a few of them but he didn't write all of them even though his name is now on all of them and so listed in a couple of online episode guides. Same with Paul Sommer who is credited as "Story Editor."  He was that on some episodes, not all.

On the card with the voice credits, it lists Paul Frees since he guested on one of two episodes, one of which was the one from which they took those credits. Frees is credited on all 30 now and there are no voice credits for Daws Butler, Don Messick, Walker Edmiston, Bea Benaderet, Sally Jones and several other folks who were heard on various episodes of Top Cat.

H-B didn't even have cast lists so the actors were identified for the studio's records by folks like Earl and me who could listen to a show and (usually) identify who did which voice. But we couldn't identify the writers or various artists…so the same guys get those credits on every episode. A similar problem seems to have happened with some (not all) episodes of The Flintstones and The Jetsons.

That's about all I have to say about this. Like I said, this kind of thing is a problem with a lot of cartoon shows, especially those made for television in the early days. So watch out. I will probably have to post this again in a few years.

I keep seeing people worry that if/when Donald Trump loses, he will simply declare the election was rigged and refuse to leave. I'm sure he would do the first part of that. Every bad business deal and bankruptcy of his life has been someone else's fault. Every poll that shows him down is a hoax and every bad news story is fake. But my man Fred Kaplan explains why it's silly to worry that D.J.T. will refuse to leave the White House.

I've paid more attention to Trump this week because he makes himself so hard to ignore. I'll try to pay less attention this week.

I just read a number of articles online about Americans "awakening" to the fact that black folks get treated a lot differently than white people do by a lot of police officers. The articles tossed out all sort of theories for the change but none of the ones I read mentioned two things that I think have made a really memorable difference…

1. Cell phones with cameras
2. YouTube

I have a great interest in the kind of theatrical jobs for actors that don't involve performing in shows that you or I might ever see…industrial shows, national tours of small towns, cruises, theater camps, etc. I once dated a lady who made a very decent living singing musical comedy without ever doing so in a big city or in the same place for very long. As long as she didn't yearn to be home, she could be acting and singing on a stage in front of happy audiences for 6-8 shows a week and the paychecks were fine.

"I wouldn't work anywhere near that much if I tried living in New York and getting into Broadway shows," she explained to me. "I also wouldn't be singing leads." She told me that if I wanted to see her in a show, it was easy. All I had to do was go to Puerto Rico during the ten days her touring company would be there before heading for the Dominican Republic. I told her Anaheim was about my limit which might have something to do with the fact that I haven't seen or heard from this woman since 1997.

A lot of such performers do tours of Japan, sometimes in a show called Disney on Classic. When there isn't a pandemic, it roams about that country, a few nights here, a few nights there with English-speaking singers from New York vocalizing from the Disney Songbook with a Japan-based 60-piece symphony orchestra before usually-packed houses for tours of four-to-six months.

We have below a two-hour example from 2017 which I enjoyed kind of half-watching as I did my taxes. Every so often, one number was so good, I gave it my non-binary attention. There's probably a certain age when kids who know most of these songs would be mesmerized by this show and if it were playing nearby live, I think I'd go see it.

The singers are — I copied this from the end credits — Lawson Young, Patton Chandler, Mara Jill Herman, Charis Vaughn, Steve Markarian, David Wiens, Maigan Kennedy and Rob Hancock. They're all pretty terrific with ample solos with which to shine. The performers seem to change from year to year and I bet if I post this, I'll hear from someone who did one of these tours who'll tell me more about what it's like to be part of one. Maybe I'll even hear from that lady who dumped me last century. She was more than good enough to be in this…

Ah, me. Our Attorney General was on Face the Nation this morning arguing that Pepper Spray, which is identified in the Justice Department manual as "chemical irritant" and by its manufacturer on its website as a "chemical irritant" and by the Centers for Disease Control as a "chemical irritant" is absolutely not a "chemical irritant." One wonders how much of this is Trump telling his people that they must never, no matter what proof there is that news is being reported accurately, admit they're wrong about anything.

Black Lives Matter is achieving some real progress…or at least, that appears to be happening. With things like this, it's best to see more real results before you celebrate. The protests seem to be almost all peaceful, including the one near me yesterday. That's all balanced somewhat by not-very-good-news on the COVID-19 front and some pretty bad weather in parts of our nation. Still waiting for a few days in a row when all the news is good.

Things are quiet here as I try to battle deadlines and occasional headaches. The biggest problem on these premises is that Murphy the Cat (who is relatively new to my yard) keeps scaring off Lydia the Cat. Lydia has lived out there almost 24/7 for a decade now but when Murphy wanders here in search of food and there isn't anything in the dishes, Murphy gets a little growly and audibly upset. I have to keep checking to find out when Lydia's alone out there so I can feed her. I'm feeding Murphy too but I want to make sure my longest-ever feline tenant gets her chow.

It is still way too early to be looking at polls and assuming they tell us much about November. They do tell us that Biden's considerably ahead and that does affect things currently like campaign donations and Trump's mood and everyone's sense of how the momentum is going. You have polls showing Don 'n' Joe tied in Texas and I'm curious how much of that is folks who once supported Trump bailing on him and how much is new voters — many of them minorities — registering. I can't believe that in this day and age, a non-Southern Democrat can carry the Lone Star State but those polls might force Trump to use a sizeable chunk of his campaign loot down there.

Folks are asking me when I'm going to restart my Conversations webcasts and schedule a do-over of the last Cartoon Voices Panel. I dunno. I think I have the tech problems solved. It just somehow feels…well, not wrong but odd to be having an in-depth discussion of the Paramount Marx Brothers films versus the M.G.M. Marx Brothers films when people are marching over matters of life, death and equality in the streets. I'm sure I'll slowly ease back into the webcasts. Just not sure when…

It's Randy Rainbow. And in case you don't recognize the tune to which he's singing, it's "The Jitterbug," the famously cut song from the movie, The Wizard of Oz…

Here's another one of these…

There are news stories (like this one) that Al Jaffee, who has been drawing for MAD since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, is retiring. Actually, Al retired a number of months ago but it's being announced now because MAD has an issue out this week devoted to Mr. Jaffee.

The Washington Post piece leads off with "MAD magazine's iconic back-page Fold-In is about to fold it in." I don't think that's the final word on it forever. MAD has already run one Fold-In by someone else and even if the current editors don't want more by artists who aren't Al Jaffee, I'll bet there will be some someday. This special issue has one that Al drew some time ago to be his last one but they held it until now. With the mix of old and new material that now fills the magazine, it has not been too noticed that all of Jaffee's work in the magazine lately has been reprints.

Some of us noticed it…and it saddens us, though we can completely understand. Al's longevity and devotion to his work is the stuff of which legends were made. Children who hear of it in the future will not believe a human being could do much fine work for so long. Pick up the new issue this week and see a tiny sampling of all he's done.

Here's a great little short film about the making of the Beetle Bailey newspaper strip. It includes footage of the late Mort Walker, who in his day usually had a couple of strips going at the same time and entertained an awful lot of people around the world…

The Lincoln Project is a group of Republicans, many of whom helped elect Donald Trump but now feel that he has to go before he destroys their party and maybe the country as well. And they have someone who's really good at making (I think) effective commercials like this one they dropped this morning…