I'm dealing with a whole mess o' things this weekend, none of which would be of the slightest interest to you. I'll put up some video links because I have those backlogged and I may post a rerun or two…but you may not see much from me here 'til Monday or thereabouts. Every so often, we need to focus our attentions where they need to be. As always, we will make it up to you when we can make it up to you…

…and that's about all the writing time I can devote to this blog right now. Stay dry and if you're at WonderCon, consider yourself envied by me.

And here's Part 2 of Mike Peters talking with Chuck Jones on The World of Cartooning with Mike Peters back in '85…

A lot of people who are ranting about "illegal aliens" in this country need someone to explain to them that that term does not apply to anyone who was born somewhere else and lives here now. It applies to some of them but not all.

WonderCon is convening in Anaheim even as I type this. I keep getting e-mails asking where and when Sergio Aragonés and/or I will be signing stuff there and the answer is that neither of us are attending this year. I'm still nursing my shattered ankle back towards normal but I'm determined to make it to Comic-Con in San Diego this July. I don't know about Sergio for that one yet. But there will be plenty of great folks at WonderCon this weekend to meet amidst all the great things to see and do and buy. Go find my pal Tony Isabella and get him to sign something.

I always tell people that before you go to a con, check its website for the programming schedule and make notes on what you want to see. Well, I went to the WonderCon website and if there's a schedule there, I sure couldn't find it. But there is one on the Comic-Con app if you install it on your cell phone.

It'll be raining much of this weekend and I have no idea what that will mean for attendance. It will impact one of my favorite features of the con…the gathering area outside the convention center where cosplayers cosplay and pose. I assume it will be moved indoors…somewhere. If you attend, find out where those folks are and go see them. There are always some amazing costumes. And if you can't make it this year, mark your calendar for WonderCon 2025 — Friday March 28 to Sunday, March 30. I'll sure try to be there.

The Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas is closing next Monday and Tuesday. At some yet-to-be-determined date, the whole mega-resort will be imploded and by some (apparently) still-being-negotiated deal, a baseball stadium will be erected on the land. If it sounds like someone is gambling a bit with the property…well, that's what they do in Vegas. They gamble.

And it isn't much of one because if they didn't tear down the casino, it would probably fall down on its own before long. Once the management of a hotel-casino starts talking about replacing it with something else, they start neglecting its upkeep and it just gets shabbier and less appealing to patrons. They've been talking about dropping the Trop for years.

I haven't set foot in the place for about twenty years but I have a few nice memories of one big Blackjack win there and of hanging out backstage at the Folies Bergere show, which was more interesting back there than it was out front. It's only a loss in the sense that it's another symbol of Old Vegas that's slipping away from us. Everything's getting so corporate and upscale and (most of all) expensive.

If you wanna take a look at how the Tropicana used to be, there's a nice history of it at this link. I'm not going to miss it but I'm already missing what Vegas used to be.

That's the most recent Fox News Poll about abortion and lately, most of them yield similar results. I'm posting it not to get into an argument about the procedure or the morality or who controls whose bodies or When Life Begins or any of that. I just want to wonder aloud about something.  59% of respondents think abortion should be available all or most of the time and an additional 32% say it should be available for certain situations.

Given what laws are being passed in this country and which ones are being promised or proposed to stop abortions, aren't you amazed that the percentage of people who want it banned everywhere is in single digits?  That 7% seems to be commanding around 77% of the news coverage and just about the entire Republican party.  I see people on my TV all the time talking about abortion and the ones who are against it always seem to want every single bit of it illegal — no exceptions for any reason. They're even going after things like in vitro fertilization because it seems to have a vague connection to abortion. (You get the feeling the people who wanted to ban it didn't really know what it was or how it works?)

It's like that with too many debates on television…and extreme views may make for Good Television but I think they warp the real debates.  When John Oliver started Last Week Tonight several years ago, one of his first segments made this point about the debates over Climate Change.  I thought this was brilliant.  Go ahead.  Watch it.  It's only four and a half minutes…

Mr. Oliver could recycle that same script making it about almost any issue of the day that anyone is prone to shout about. Too many of them are presented as if the matter is 50/50 when it's not. The abortion issue certainly isn't.

This is, sadly, an obit for Bob Beerbohm, who was an important player in the rise of underground comix, comic book shops and conventions. In fact, he was a fixture at San Diego conventions long before they were called Comic-Con Internationals. For the last decade or three, he had been obsessive about researching the history of comics and comic shops and writing an exhaustive history of both.

Bob was 71 years old and the cause of death was cancer…one of many problems he'd been battling for years. Every time we spoke, he ticked off a long, long list of ailments so I don't think any of his friends are shocked by the news…saddened but not shocked.

Bob and I were friends though I did not endorse all of his writings on comic book history and in fact disagreed with a lot of it. Some of you on Facebook forums witnessed some of our back-and-forth and I may write about it here in the future…or I may not.

Right now, I just want to remember the guy as someone who was very passionate about comic books and the people who create them…and who was, like I said, very important in fandom and the marketplace. Despite our occasional disagreements, I have definitely lost a good friend and so has our field.

Back in 1985 or so, my pal Mike Peters — the Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist who is also behind the comic strip, Mother Goose & Grimm — hosted a PBS series called The World of Cartooning with Mike Peters. On it, he interviewed great cartoonists like…well, here's Part 1 of a two-part interview with Chuck Jones. You'll get Part 2 here tomorrow…

Among the many disparate topics we've covered on this blog is — or rather was a chain of soup/salad buffets called, in some climes, Souplantation. In other cities, they were called Sweet Tomatoes and by either name, they were places where you could stuff yourself with soup, salad, baked potatoes, baked goods and a limited selection of desserts. I liked them a lot and was sad when the chain folded, an early casualty of The Pandemic in 2020.

As we noted here, someone recently announced a clone opening in Tucson. And now — much closer, in Rancho Cucamonga, California — another clone has opened. It's called Soup 'n Fresh, it's in a building that used to be a Souplantation and no, I haven't been there. With my busted ankle still healing, I ain't been much of anywhere and besides, Rancho Cucamonga is 54 miles from where I live. But this review says the place is pretty good and that it has long lines…so I have a hunch someone will open more of them.

Then again, I thought that about Love's Barbecue restaurants after they closed the last one in 2017 and I'm still waiting.

Near the end of the first Die Hard movie  SPOILER ALERT! , the evil Hans Gruber — played in a reptilian manner by Alan Rickman — is dropped backwards off a high-up story of the Nakatomi Plaza to certain death. It's one of the more satisfying ways of disposing of the Bad Guy in any movie I've ever seen. The audience in the theater when I saw it couldn't have been happier. After hours of hating that loathsome, murdering asshole, he was finally being killed in a spectacular manner. In slow-motion, no less.

I suspect some of them ran out and bought the DVD just so they could replay that moment over and over and over. It's one of the reasons we go to that kind of movie. We all have Bad Guys in our lives and while they're often punished or even somehow eradicated, it usually isn't in such a total and gratifying moment.

In my lifetime (72 years plus change), I have often — not always — seen my Bad Guys eliminated or punished or even in at least one instance, killed…but it's never as immediate or simple or even as satisfying as seeing Alan Rickman realizing his plan has been foiled and he's plunging to his death. If you're expecting a Bad Guy of yours to meet a similar fate in the real world, you'll probably be disappointed. Some of my Bad Guys took a long time to plunge and probably never realized what they'd done and how they were paying for it. But they did go away. I have had to learn to be content with that.

In case you're wondering about my Bad Guy who got killed: He was a roofer who worked on my house a few decades back, charged me a lot of money and ultimately did more damage than repairs. He refused to correct his destruction, leaving me no recourse but to sue him…but it turned out that wasn't an option either. My lawyer reported back that I'd have to wait at the end of a very long line of other clients who were suing this Very Bad Guy.

And even the folks in that line never got a nickel out of him. One night, that roofer got drunk, tried to kill his wife and the police shot and killed him. I was not there to see it. I hope that if I had been, I would not have enjoyed the moment because I wouldn't want to be the kind of person who would have enjoyed that moment.

But like you, there are people around — mostly in public life but a few in private — who I'd just like to see disappear. I don't long to see them shot or injured or even dropped backwards off the Nakatomi Plaza because that's barbaric and anyway, that's probably not going to happen. But I think there's a good chance of them going away and no longer doing whatever damage I think they do to the world and the people in it or maybe just me. I'll be satisfied with that.

The Legal Eagle explains all about Trump's problems with bonds and payments and deadlines and all that jazz…

If Donald Trump is successful at selling Bibles, I'm going to try selling all the books that I've never read.

A reader of this site, Karl Williams, sent me a whole bunch of questions for this "ASK me" feature. They're good questions but not the kind I'd build a whole long post around so I've decided to answer them in bulk here. The next voice you hear will be that of Mr. Williams…

You used to host wonderful Golden Age Panels at Comic-Con. I understand why you can't do them anymore because so few people are still alive who did comics in the forties and most of them won't make the trip. But if you could assemble one last Golden Age Panel with ghosts, who would you have on it?

Jerry Siegel, Jerry Robinson, Bill Finger, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby and Will Eisner.

Is there any Golden Age writer or artist who's alive who you never got to interview and you'd still want to?

Yes. Jules Feiffer.

Leaving aside Jack Kirby, who do you think was the most talented artist to ever work in comic books?

Oh, I can't answer that. It's especially hard because I have as much respect for the artists who drew funny animal comics as I have for the ones who drew adventures and super-heroes and how do you compare what Wallace Wood and Neal Adams did to what Carl Barks and Harvey Eisenberg did? (A pet peeve of mine is when someone makes up one of those lists like "The 50 Greatest Comic Book Artists of All Time" and you can tell the listmaker knows most of the hundreds and hundreds of super-hero artists and about three of the ones who did funny comics.

Since I'm evading your question, I'll make up for it with a story that I may have told here before. This was at some Comic-Con in the eighties, I think. I had lunch with a wonderful artist and a bit later, I was walking through the main hall and I came upon a gathering of about eight of the "hottest" artists then working in comics — the kind of guys who'd make most Ten Best lists. Felling impish or maybe just curious as to what their reaction would be, I said, "Well, I just had lunch with the best artist at this convention."

They all glared at me with defiant looks and challenged me to tell that person's name. I fearlessly said "Mort Drucker" and there was dead silence for about four seconds as they thought it over…then they all agreed.

Who to you is "the" Superman artist?

There's something about the work of Joe Shuster and his many ghosts/assistants that I find unequaled by those who followed. It isn't that they drew a great Superman so much as that they drew him in a world where I found it easiest to accept that Superman existed.

That was in the forties, of course. In the fifties and sixties, I loved the work of Curt Swan and Wayne Boring. I know a lot of people — especially those who came to Superman after Boring was gone — don't like his version but I have to admit that most of my favorite Superman stories of those decades were drawn by Boring and he handled drama better. Then again, I thought Swan drew better pin-ups and covers of the character. And later on, I really liked what Ross Andru did, especially when not being inked by Mike Esposito. There were a few others.

Favorite Jack Kirby inker?

IMHO: By far, the best artist who ever inked Jack Kirby was Jack Kirby…though if I was his editor, I think I'd rather have him pencil two or three comics a month instead of penciling and inking one or two. I also think Neal Adams was the best inker for Neal Adams, John Buscema was the best inker for John Buscema, etc. There are a few exceptions to that but not many. But if Jack didn't ink Jack, my five favorites were — in alphabetical order — Bill Everett, Frank Giacoia, Mike Royer, Joe Simon and Joe Sinnott.

Karl sent me a lot more of these questions and I'll get to them at some future time. In the meantime, here's this little box…

You're probably watching The Daily Show at least on Monday nights when Jon Stewart hosts. But just in case…

I admire the guts of whatever guy at the advertising agency thought this would be a good way to sell 7-Up…