I miss Charlie Callas — the only man in show business who could do this kind of stuff and call it an act…

The MeTV Toons has had to drop Rocky & Bullwinkle from their schedule at the request of its distributor. It may be back, it may not…but last I looked, they're still running 24/7 on a sub-channel of the Xumo Play channel and perhaps others. If you love Moose and Squirrel and can't live without them, it's still possible to buy the complete run of the series on DVD for thirty bucks. That strikes me as an offer not to be missed.

Coming to MeTV Toons in a week or so is a new series called House of Hanna-Barbera which consists of short cartoons from a number of early H-B shows like Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Pixie & Dixie, Hokey Wolf, Touché Turtle, Wally Gator, Snagglepuss, Yakky Doodle, Hillbilly Bears, Squiddly Diddly, Lippy and Hardy, Atom Ant, Secret Squirrel, Magilla Gorilla and others. I think some of those cartoons are pretty funny.

They don't seem to be running anything from the Quick Draw McGraw show, which I thought might have been the best of all the H-B shows that featured three short cartoons each week. That series has never been released on home video because it used a different music library than other H-B shows and the music is either not clearable or not clearable at a reasonable price. So maybe that's why MeTV Toons isn't running them…or maybe, because they were never put out on home video, clean, restored copies of those cartoons are not available. When someone asks why such-and-such a show isn't streaming these days, the answer is usually music clearances or the unavailability of good copies.

Oh — and the new H-B show on MeTV Toons also includes Loopy DeLoop cartoons. This was a series of shorts that was never seen on TV. They were theatrical shorts and, in my opinion, a lot less funny than what the studio was concurrently doing for television. I once asked Joe Barbera about them and all I got out of the man was "Don't bring up painful memories." It's a shame that the Quick Draw McGraw cartoons aren't on TV but Loopy's are.

That's a photo of my longtime friend Tony Isabella. We met by mail around 1967, by phone around 1968 and in person at the 1970 New York Comic Art Convention. Part of me is sad because there is no more Tony Isabella.

But this is not an obit. You see, that person is still alive. He's just no longer Tony Isabella…and here's where I get into what Daffy Duck would call "Pronoun Trouble." She is now Jenny Blake, having announced today that she has transitioned to what she feels is the proper gender identification for her. I've known about this for a while and as far as I'm concerned, the only bad part of this is the Pronoun Trouble it creates.

Jenny is not the first person in my life to do this and if you don't know anyone who's made this leap…well, maybe someone you know is considering it. Or maybe they've decided it's what's right for them but they're too scared of the reaction they might get from those around them. Sadly, there are some people who do get all discombobulated over this kind of thing.

I suspect that in most cases, they really don't care what the transitioner calls themselves or even what rest room they use. They're upset because the world is not being run the way they want it to be run. Here's a story that feels like it belongs in this post…

When I moved into the house in which I now live, which I did in 1980, I found I had a terrific neighbor. Mrs. Eckstein was just about the sweetest lady you ever met in your life. Dwelling right across the street and living all alone, she would occasionally call on me for help…changing a light bulb, driving her to a doctor appointment, being of aid when she locked herself out, etc. As she got older, there were more such calls for help. She gave me a key to her side door and a few times when she fell, I'd run over to help her up or — in a few of those few times — let in the paramedics.

Once in a while, I'd pass the lightbulb-changing or the driving over to my assistant John. Though we both kept telling her it was not necessary, Mrs. Eckstein insisted on thanking both of us with candy or cashews or sometimes, she even gave me a jar of her homemade chicken soup.

So one day a few years ago, John became Jane…and I have to tell you that Jane is a much happier person than John was. Those who are shaken by this whole concept of gender reassignment sometimes claim that all or most who undergo it regret their decisions. I'm sure somewhere there are a couple who do — it's not supposed to fix everything in one's life — but the stats don't bear that out and Jane sure doesn't. The only downside I can see from this transition is, of course, Pronoun Trouble.

As John became Jane, he she (see what I mean?) suggested I go tell Mrs. Eckstein about it so she wouldn't be mystified. I went over to see Mrs. Eckstein and let me tell you a little more about this wonderful lady. She was a retired schoolteacher in her early nineties. She kept a Kosher home. She never hurt anyone in her long, long life. If you were allowed in this world to design your own grandmother, you'd wind up with someone very much like Mrs. Eckstein. But I wasn't sure how she would take to the news about my assistant.

We sat down in her kitchen and I asked her if she'd seen on the news about how sometimes, someone who is born of one gender comes to feel that they don't belong in that category; how they decide they'd be oh-so-much-happier in the opposite gender and how they then undergo various changes, sometimes involving hormones or surgery, to reassign. Mrs. Eckstein had no idea where I was going with this but she nodded and said yes, she'd heard a little about this kind of thing.

So then I said, "Well, my assistant John is doing this. It's called 'transitioning' and John is becoming Jane."

There was a pause while she absorbed what I was saying. Then she spoke and said, "Are you telling me that that nice young man who's been helping me is becoming a nice young woman?" I said yes. She said, "Okay. If that's what he wants, that's fine."

That was the extent of her reaction. And I suggest to you that that is always the proper reaction or it should be. Especially when politicians and those who surround them see dividing us as a tool to attain money and/or power, we need to remember that human beings are human beings even when they do something you would never do. Or could ever understand.

Nothing else changed as far as Mrs. Eckstein was concerned. Jane kept helping my neighbor by changing light bulbs and such until last year when Mrs. Eckstein passed away. The only real difference was that every so often, Mrs. Eckstein called her "John" and had to correct herself. I still occasionally make that mistake too, just as I'll probably forget and call Tony "Tony" instead of "Jenny."

And I'll have a bit of Pronoun Trouble, too. It's a small price to pay if it makes my friend Jenny happy.

I love the song "Camelot" from the Broadway show of the same name but…well, here's an odd performance of it by Richard Burton, who introduced the song in the show's first production. This was on the 1979 Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon and Burton looks like he's only doing this because someone offstage is pointing a gun at him…or something. I'd love to know what he was thinking…

John Cheves wrote to ask…

When I read the letters to the editor in 1960's Batman comics — where your own name occasionally appeared — I see fans who wrote in to compliment Bob Kane on his artwork. They truly seemed to believe that Kane drew those comics.

For example, in Batman no. 181 (June 1966), Jeff Sosnaud of San Francisco complimented Kane for getting better over recent issues, adding, "Looking at the work he is producing today, it seems almost incredible that he is the same artist."

Of course, Kane wasn't drawing the comics. Other artists drew them, with Kane — as per the terms of his contract with DC — getting the sole art credit on interiors. The artists behind the particular issue of Batman that Jeff praised were penciler Sheldon Moldoff and inkers Joe Giella and Sid Greene.

The weird thing is, based on their comments, the letter writers clearly understood that a stable of uncredited writers penned Batman's stories. They knew names like Robert Kanigher, Bill Finger and Gardner Fox, and in their letters, they speculated as to who wrote which tale.

And yet — the fans believed millionaire 50-something Bob Kane was drawing all of those comics every month? Or did they? Thanks for any insights you can provide.

First off, I wouldn't take the contents of any comic book letter column as indicative of what "the fans" thought. Some of those letters, at least after they stopped printing the readers' full addresses with them, were phony. Some of the real ones that came in were so highly edited or rewritten that they might as well have been phony. (A couple that I had published were almost unrecognizable to me.)

More importantly, the letters you read in those letter pages were selected by an editor from a pile that represented a fraction of a percent of the book's readers. And like I said, they were selected. If you or I had written in a letter that said, "Hey, I know Bob Kane isn't drawing this comic. Isn't that Shelly Moldoff?" the editor — or whoever assembled the letter column — wouldn't have printed it. Kane's deal then was that he would get sole credit for drawing the strip.

So the editors were free to say in the letters page that a given story was written by Gardner Fox but not to say who really drew it.

The one exception to that was that when Carmine Infantino began drawing some of the stories, editor Julius Schwartz said that he was able to get Kane to make an exception. He said he pointed out to Kane that Infantino's work was highly identifiable and his name was well known to readers from his work on other DC Comics. So they'd recognize those stories as drawn by Infantino and if DC tried to claim that was Bob Kane, it would blow the fiction. The readers — and I was one then — didn't know what Sheldon Moldoff art looked like so it was safe to say those stories were drawn by Bob Kane.

Also, I'm not sure Schwartz or any DC editor then knew that was Shelly Moldoff's penciling. Somewhere else on this blog, I probably quoted what DC editor George Kashdan said when I asked him about it: ""No one thought Kane did it all or even most of it. But Kane had this contract and it was easier to just do 'Don't ask, don't tell.' As long as the pages came in on time, which they almost always did, no one cared. I guess we figured Shelly was doing some of it and weren't shocked to hear he was doing all of it."

Shelly himself told me they didn't know…even though Shelly was inking (and occasionally penciling) for other DC books and often was hired by them to ink "Bob Kane pencil art." Me, I think they were just playing dumb.

They did know, of course, that there were Batman stories signed "Bob Kane" that Kane had nothing to do with. This confuses some people so I'd better explain it again: Kane's contract called for him to deliver a specified quantity of penciled pages that his "studio" would produce. DC editors would buy the scripts. Kane would have them drawn. They assumed he was doing some of it with help from various assistants he hired — and early on in this arrangement, when Lew Sayre Schwartz was assisting Kane, Bob did do some of the penciling. Eventually though, he scaled back to drawing either very, very little of it or none whatsoever of it.

This was not at all unprecedented in the business. Siegel and Shuster had a "studio" arrangement with other artists, all uncredited, assisting or ghosting for Shuster. A lot of artists in comic books had uncredited assistants. Kane might have been the only comic book artist whose assistant(s) did all of the work. (I said "comic book artist" because there were plenty of newspaper strips drawn wholly by assistants. One example of many: Walt Disney did not draw the Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse newspaper strips. They were even signed with his alleged signature long after his death.)

Now, if DC wanted to publish more stories of the Caped Crusader than that specified quantity, they could hire Curt Swan or Jim Mooney or Dick Sprang or Winslow Mortimer or anyone else they wanted to draw those stories. Sometimes, they even hired Shelly Moldoff to ink them. When Julie Schwartz took over as editor of Batman and Detective Comics in 1964, he decided that the stories in the eight issues of Batman a year would all be penciled by the Kane "studio." In the monthly Detective Comics, half the stories would be penciled by Kane and/or his mime(s) and half would be an artist Schwartz engaged directly. These were the stories drawn for a few years by Infantino and Carmine also did all the cover for both books.

A few years later, Kane's contract with DC expired and he got a new one which did not involve him or anyone working for him producing any art whatsoever. By that time, it was getting around that others were doing all the work signed "Bob Kane." But I don't think a lot of fans knew it before. And a lot of readers really don't care who drew a story.

The other day here, I mentioned Engineer Bill, who was a fixture of Los Angeles television when I was a kid. He had a couple of different shows and I was briefly (very briefly) on one of them before he went from being Bill Stulla to Engineer Bill. Anecdote here.

Here are some short clips from his show. The commercials and cartoons he showed have been truncated but you will get to see a complete round of "Red Light, Green Light," which was a signature game played every day on his show. You'll also get to see him prompt his youthful co-host to tell the story of The Three Bears and then decide it's running too long and cut her off before she can get to the part where Goldilocks comes into it.

His show was not quite this dense with commercials. It just seems that way because much of the actual entertainment has been edited out of this sampler…

Several of you have sent me either (a) copies of real John Dillinger Wanted Posters or (b) inquiries as to whether to see one. Apparently, some of you have never heard of this thing called Google. Look it up even if it means googling Google for the search term "Google." It will point you to many real (probably) Dillinger wanted posters like this one. And you will probably find my bogus one in there to remind you not to believe everything you read on the Internet — except, of course, if it's on this blog. Don't even believe this blog except for the part about not believing all the others.

A real good (and underappreciated) actor in a lot of real good movies and plays. I never met the man but I'm sorry to see him go.

Confession, some say, is good for the soul. I'm about to test that by admitting to something I did a long, long time ago and which I've felt guilty about for that long, long time. Call it an act of fraud. Call it a deception. Call it false advertising…whatever. Please though remember that at the time, I was young and naïve. Now that I am old and naïve, I know better.

When Jack Kirby left Marvel and joined DC Comics in 1970, he urged the company to experiment with new formats for comics. Comics these days come in different sizes and shapes, including many that Jack proposed…but at the time, DC was resistant to those ideas — or at least to gambling money on them. They kept saying they would try them but saying that and actually publishing were two separate things. Many of his ideas went unattempted and the few that they did try were watered down, dumbed down and produced with the smallest possible investment. One of these was a line of magazines (not comic books) the first and almost last of which was called In the Days of the Mob.

Jack wanted it to be slick and in color and thicker and filled with the work of many different writers and artists. What resulted was in black-and-white with cheap printing, a low page count and no one writing or drawing it but Jack. DC had so little confidence in it that they didn't even put the famous DC name on it.  Instead, they hid behind the moniker of Hampshire House Ltd., which (someone told me) was a dormant sub-company once used by some sister outfit that put out puzzle books.

Almost no one bought it. That was because almost no one saw it. DC, through its Independent News division, had perhaps the best distribution company in the business but they were unable to get this magazine — and the second one Jack did called Spirit World — on very many newsstands. A basic rule of any business is that you can't expect people to purchase your product if they don't know it exists and couldn't find it if they did. Jack also did a never-published-then magazine of stories about people in the throes of divorce.

My then-partner Steve Sherman and I helped Jack put these magazines together. We were all pessimistic about them selling at all, given what DC turned his proposal into…and when Jack saw finished, printed copies of In the Days of the Mob and Spirit World, he knew for sure. We finished up second issues of these but DC never published them. Some of the material for Spirit World went into other DC books. Most of what we did for the magazine projects has been printed in hardcover collections in recent years.

So now you're probably wondering just what I'm confessing to. Here is a chunk of one of the very few ads that DC arranged for the first issue of In the Days of the Mob…

I call your attention to the promise of a "free" (!) Giant Authentic John Dillinger Wanted Poster.  The magazine did indeed contain a pull-out poster that one might call a "John Dillinger Wanted Poster" but it was not particularly giant and it was about as authentic as a George Santos résumé.  Here — take a look at that poster.  The photos of Mr. Dillinger are his actual mug shots but does the rest of this thing look real to you?

Of course not. It looks like something that a 19-year-old kid would whip up on the drawing board in his bedroom in his parents' house. And seeing how it was done in 1971 before we all had computers with infinite fonts, he probably created the text by using rub-on lettering from some company like Letraset or Transfer Type without ever even seeing a genuine John Dillinger wanted poster. You can probably guess who that 19-year-old kid was.

This poster was not my idea. As I recall, DC head honcho Carmine Infantino phoned Jack and said he wanted the black-and-white magazines to have pull-out posters because that would make them thicker on the newsracks and it was way cheaper than adding more pages to the magazine. (Warren's Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella magazines were 50¢ and each had 64 pages. Ours were 48 pages for the same price — yet another reason ours didn't sell.)

Jack told Carmine the poster in In the Days of the Mob #1 would be a wanted poster of John Dillinger. I'm not sure if he said "authentic" or not but the ad they designed in New York said it would be and we were unable to find a real one…just the mug shots in some book we located. So Jack told me to make one and I made one. In more than half a century since this magazine came out, no one has ever mentioned to me what a shoddy fake it was but I still felt some guilt about it.

There's one other thing in that ad excerpt that I might mention. When DC tried to launch this line of comics in magazine format, it brought some intra-company complaints from Bill Gaines, publisher of MAD. He didn't like that another division of the same firm was publishing magazines that were the same size and shape as his…and he really didn't like that they'd be carrying work by MAD mainstay Sergio Aragonés and that MAD was mentioned in the ad. I don't know if this contributed to the distributors' lack of enthusiasm for the line or to their swift termination. But it sure didn't help.

Making my confession here though did. I feel a lot better about it now. Thank you for listening.

First, here's a link to Part 1 in case you need a link to Part 1.

Now then: In the last twenty-whatever-number hours, quite a few of you have sent me e-mails to tell me about your favorite Superman artist and that's fine.  I never argue over favorite Superman artists.  But I was probably negligent to not mention some other gentlemen who drew The Man of Steel for a long, long time.

To me, the Third Great Superman Artist was Kurt Schaffenberger, who most folks of my generation probably think of as "THE Lois Lane artist."  That job, of course, meant drawing Superman a lot and Schaffenberger turned up in the other Superman family of comics often and I thought he was terrific. If his work was ever dull, it was because the scripts were but even then, he drew them very well.

I liked a lot of the other artists who drew Superman for short periods and I'll mention one other who did him for a long time: Ross Andru.  Ross was another artist who — like Bob Oksner, who I mentioned here — was not fully appreciated at the time but is maybe now getting some of his due. Maybe one of these days, I'll talk about some of the other artists who I thought drew a great Superman, unfortunately not for as long a time and Swan, Boring and Schaffenberger.

Right now, I have to tell you about something that turned up in some Superman story I read when I was maybe nine or so. I don't remember which issue it was — they did this several times — but it was the first time I recall reading something in a comic book and thinking, "Wow, that's really stupid!" Here's one of the times this happened in a Superman-connected comic book…

That panel was from a way earlier issue but it's the same scene: Lois Lane, having some reason to need to contact Superman, decides the best way to do that is to jump off the roof or out of a very tall building. Obviously, this was before it was possible to send a text.

Like I said: I was nine or so when I saw her do this in a story and for a moment there, I wanted to haul my entire comic book collection to a store that would pay me two cents each for them and then use the money to take up stamp collecting.

It was, like the caption in the above panel says, downright madness.  What if Superman is at that moment being held prisoner in an interplanetary zoo on the planet Glurp twenty-seven-zillion miles from Earth?  What if he's battling a phalanx of Kryptonite Deathray Robot Monsters?  What if he's saving thousands of people from a volcano whose eruption was triggered by Lex Luthor?

What if just as Lois is plunging, he's rescuing someone in Greenland who happens to be falling off a building?

You could look at the covers of most issues of Superman or Action Comics and see Superman being trapped or engaged in cosmic battle…busy with something that would prevent him from getting to Metropolis in the ten seconds before the Lady Reporter becomes an ink stain on the cement below.

As a kid, I could accept the premise that there was this man who could fly and lift up Chevrolets and he could see and/or burst through walls and let bullets bounce off him like Nerf Balls.®

I could accept the notion that he came from the planet Krypton — which could be found in no science book I ever saw — because his daddy stuffed him into a rocket and sent him into space just before that world exploded. (I could even rationalize it not being in any of those science books because, after all, it had exploded.)

I could accept that he had a superdog named Krypto and a super-cousin named Supergirl, and that he hung out in a group called the Justice League of America with, among others, a guy dressed as a bat, an Amazonian Princess, a guy with a magic green power ring, a man from Mars, a police lab guy who could run around the world eight times in a minute…all that stuff.

But I couldn't buy that Lois Lane, a seemingly intelligent woman smart enough to work for a great Metropolitan newspaper, could be that all-fired, brain-dead, I.Q.-devoid, styrofoam-headed dumb.

And she didn't do this once or twice. She contacted Superman that way more often than I pick up the phone to call my cousin David. She even did it in the second Superman movie when she was Margot Kidder and Superman was Christopher Reeve. That, though, was many years later. All I could think of when I was nine was "That woman's ca-raaa-zy!"

Like I said, I don't remember which comic book I first saw her do it in but it was the first time I grasped that my imagination, which could be stretched pretty damn far when I was nine, had its limits. This morning online, I spotted the panel I've placed directly above this paragraph and I'm not sure if this was from the comic I read then or not but it's very similar to what I remember. It's also from a comic book drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger…my Third Favorite Longtime Superman Artist. It's a stupid scene they made him draw but, of course, he drew it very well.

This is a video called "John Mulaney Replies to Fans Online." It involves John Mulaney replying to fans online…

I was probably seven or eight when I first discovered Superman. I loved him from the start because…well, because he was Superman. How, at least in those days, could you not love Superman? In later years, various folks who had creative custody of him complicated his basic premise with elements and plots that were supposed to make him more contemporary. Some attempted to make him more relevant to some odd interpretation of the real world at that particular moment. I understood from the get-go that the whole point of Superman was that he didn't exist in anything resembling a real world.

I think I first saw Superman in the George Reeves TV show which ran at least once a day on Los Angeles TV and then I think I saw the Superman cartoons — the ones the Fleischer Studio made in 1941-1943. Engineer Bill ran them from time to time on his kids' show on Channel 9. But I might have seen the cartoons before the live-action show. I'm only sure the Superman comic books came third. Between what came out each month on the newsstands and what I could scoop up in second-hand bookstores — five cents each, six for a quarter — I soon had a lot of them. A lot.

Everyone who loves Superman has their favorite version of the character and it's usually the first version they saw. Mine was kind of an amalgam. I loved a Superman that existed in my imagination: If the George Reeves show had been able to do the super-feats (and more convincing flying) of the Fleischer cartoons. The comic books, I thought, were all over the place with some stories that, even in my single-digit years, I thought didn't do right by him.

There's a quote that I heard years later attributed to Mort Weisinger, the editor of those comics and the most powerful force in the Superman industry until about 1970. He allegedly said at some time in some context, "Superman is invulnerable. Even bad scripts can't hurt him!" I dunno if he really actually said that but he should have. He certainly at times seemed to be testing out that premise.

Fortunately for The Man of Steel, certain elements of his mythology were constant even if there were occasional deviations. And fortunately, there were some good artists who could make him look like Superman even when he wasn't being written like Superman. For folks in my age bracket, the two main artists were Curt Swan and Wayne Boring, and I have seen grown men arguing as to which of them got Superman "righter."

When asked to cast my vote in this debate, I usually say, "In terms of drawing the character right on covers and in pin-up type poses, Curt Swan was easily the best…but most of my favorite stories were illustrated by Wayne Boring." Once in a while, I even go off the board and pick Superman's artistic creator, Joe Shuster or the artists at the Fleischer Studios who did such a fine job aping his style.

Having made a few enemies in the previous paragraph, I would like to say that I've loved a lot of different interpretations of that guy from Krypton and that while I don't follow the current comics as closely as I once did, I sometimes see a real good Superman in one of them. They are, however, all drawn by transients. Boring worked on the character from about 1942 to 1967 (with a guest appearance or two later on). Swan first drew a Superman story in 1948 and last drew part of one in 1996.

I doubt anyone in the future will ever be "THE Superman artist" for one decade, let alone several. And most kids today, if they have an idea of who Superman is, probably got it from the movies or recent animated adventures, not the comics.

I remember the first time I read something in a Superman comic book that struck me as really ridiculous. I don't remember which issue it was because they did this a few times and each time, I felt my intelligence was being insulted. I was probably eight or nine and didn't have that much that was insultable but insulted I was. I'll tell you about it in the second part of this blog post tomorrow.

In 1934, the Three Stooges made the first of their 190 short comedies for Columbia. Actually, when Woman Haters was first released, it was not a Three Stooges film. It was just a short they were in. The opening titles on this print which declare it a Three Stooges short were added years later when the boys were popular and the film was re-released.

It's an odd little film with everything done in rhyme and with some forgettable songs…but the Stooges stood out and went on to things that were bigger, better and non-rhyming…

I got this a few weeks ago from Barry Wallace who wants to know…

Thank you for the brief visit with Daws Butler and it is wonderful to hear that such a wonderfully talented man was so nice. A recurring topic on your blog is the good fortune you had to meet and even work with performers who you watched as a child and it must have been great to have a friendship with the voice of Yogi Bear. But I have to ask if anyone you ever met in this sense was a disappointment to you. Was everyone as nice as you hoped they'd be?

Pretty much, yes…and that goes for comic book creators as well as folks I knew of from television. I have mostly good memories of the ones I first knew from television and then later in real life. There were a few who in comics who were exceptions (to me) and maybe a half-dozen in the comic book industry. Each of those fields had about a 2% Asshole Factor and I'd rather not name names here. And that word you used — disappointment — that's exactly what it was. Not anger, not contempt…just a sense of "Gee, I wish I'd had a better experience with that person."

One of the things that happen when you meet the person is that you're meeting a real person. You may have loved their work but they may have bad memories of what happened on that project…what they were paid…what it did or did not lead to. They may not be working much these days and might have anger or deep worry about that. (Some people can be very touchy when complimented about long-ago work because they think you're suggesting they haven't done anything good or successful lately.) Some of them may have family or relationship problems.

Getting to know them better might mean getting to see the aspects of their life that you might have preferred not to see. Those, I'm pleased to report are rare but sometimes not rare enough. So I guess the answer to your question, Barry, as to whether everyone was nice as I hoped they'd be is "Not everyone but most."

Trump's tariffs are unsettling many industries but none more than the publishing biz which depends a lot on getting books and magazines printed outside the U.S. Those who traffic in books in and around the comic book field have had another body blow with the announced bankruptcy of Diamond Distributors, the folks who get their wares from Point A to Point B, Point B being the stores that sell the books to customers.

To put it simply, all publishers who serve that marketplace are going to suffer and the smaller publishers — because they haven't the clout to demand not to be paid last and because they are more likely to depend on last month's receipts to fund the printing of next month's books — are in the most trouble. Some of them literally will not get paid for books of theirs which sold in recent months.

I feel for all of them but am here taking up (and talking up) the cause of TwoMorrows, a small firm which since the mid-nineties has been publishing some of the best magazines and books about the glorious history of comic books. It started with The Jack Kirby Collector but soon expanded to include Alter Ego, Comic Book Artist, Draw!, Back Issue, Comic Book Creator, Retrofan and many more…and those are just the magazines. Many of these and many of their books have won Eisner Awards and other trophies.

They've signed with a new distributor — Lunar — and if you treasure any or all of these publications, now would be a good time to support them. How can you do this? By doing one or more of the following.  TwoMorrows has posted this list…

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This is me again and I have little to add to this. TwoMorrows produces excellent publications which do the good work of uncovering and preserving the history of comics. Their publications and important and excellent and deserving of your support. They're not asking for handouts. But if you've been thinking of ordering some of their excellent magazines and books, here's your chance to do so and help them keeping doing the fine work they do.