I'm still receiving e-mails about my three-part piece (which started here) about comic book/strip creator Frank Robbins. Before I get to some more of those missives, I have to make a correction or maybe a clarification…

I said that Robbins wrote, drew and sometimes lettered his Johnny Hazard newspaper strip — six daily strips and one Sunday page — in three days each week without assistants. At times, I believe he did but there were periods when he employed Howard Liss as a writer — or probably more of a co-writer. Also, a French artist named Patrice Serres assisted with the art at times and said there was one other art assistant while he was doing it.

I was told by Gil Kane, Irwin Hasen, Ben Oda (Robbins' letterer at times) and a few others that Robbins produced the strip without assistants but maybe they meant that was so at the time they told me. In any case, no one doubts that Robbins was very fast and I thank Andreas Eriksson for the information he sent me. Now to the mail, starting with this message from David Long…

Thanks for writing about Frank Robbins on your blog. I feel Frank has been under rated as to his contributions to Batman. While everyone credits Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams for moving Batman back to a dark and serious character, I think Frank Robbins did a lot of heavy lifting of moving Batman in that direction that is often overlooked. (Along with artists like Irv Novick and Bob Brown.)

I will admit I did not care for Robbins' art when I saw it on Batman and Marvel's Invaders. It wasn't until after his death that I discovered his work on Johnny Hazard and saw how good he can be in the right venue.

Yeah, that was kind of my main point — one that I think some readers of this blog missed; that comic book artists sometimes don't do their best work on a certain comic or with certain collaborators. As a kid, I often loved some artist's work on one book but not another and I was curious why. I came to the conclusion that the reason was obvious. Most comic book artists were and are pretty consistent in their skills. What varies from book to book is, first of all, which book they're working on and who they're working with.

This next one is from Bob Thomas…

I'm a longtime daily reader of your blog and just finished reading your series on Frank Robbins. I must confess, I was a hater of his Invaders artwork (but loved his writing on the Batman/Detective stories) appreciate you mentioning the non-Neal Adams art bias (of which I suffer). I took what you wrote to heart and am going to reread some of those Invaders stories with an eye towards non-traditional art. I recently did the same with Alex Toth, whom I previously hadn't liked, and found I liked his artwork when I wasn't comparing him to my favorites (Adams, Kaluta, Wrightson, and other "stars").

When Neal Adams kind of exploded in comics in the late sixties, we had kids in our local comic book club who said, in effect, "Yeah, that's how all comic books should look" and became hostile to any that didn't. As good as Neal was, I always thought there were many comics for which his "look" was wrong…and the same applies to Kirby or anyone else.

This is from Rob Weldon…

I wanted to thank you for the excellent sequence on Frank Robbins. Plenty of new information and context for me, it was great. Outside of Rob Liefeld, he's the most maligned artist online, at least as of today.

I think you're right that poor inking hurt his work, but this was pretty common at the time. But his artwork was really special so it stood out anyways. Everyone complains about his anatomy, but he didn't make random errors in random ways, he did the same things consistently, and conveyed complex movements and emotions. His paintings show that he understood anatomy very well.

And his facial expressions are perfect; you can feel the accomplishment of having worked on all those Johnny Hazard strips where you need to make every bit of space carry meaning. You always know what a character is looking at in a scene, and sense their emotions.

A better critic than I could put together a case that what he learned producing strips, comics and paintings was used across the media and improved his work in each.

In any case, I loved his comics stuff when it first came out, I even put up with the Human Fly and the Man from Atlantis while he drew those books. I later looked into Scorchy Smith and Johnny Hazard. But never hear comics readers say anything good about him, only professionals. I can't think of another artist or writer that is true about.

Well, I know an awful lot of comic readers who have good things to say about Frank Robbins. I now have a folder on my computer with over a hundred e-mails from them…and I also know folks who think Rob Liefeld is terrific. There's a wide variety of opinions and sensibilities out there as well as people who expect different things from comic book art.

I expect/hope for smart panel-to-panel continuity but I've encountered folks — and I'm not saying they're wrong even though they are — who just want neat-looking pictures and don't really care if they tell a story or not. I recall debating with one Alex Toth detractor who thought he'd won a debate by saying, "Show me one panel he ever drew that you'd frame and hang on your wall!" I can think of many with Alex but if that's what you're looking for, you're missing the point of what he was trying to do.

With Toth — with most of my favorite artists — judging the work by individual images was like judging a movie by looking at freeze-frames of different moments in the film. As I mentioned, the aspect of drawing comics that Kirby thought was most important was deciding what to draw in each panel. He meant, "…to tell the story well."

Here's one last e-mail for now, this time from Phil Rushton…

I'm in complete agreement with everything you wrote about the wonderful Frank Robbins, but it occurs to me that I'd have really loved to see his version of Blackhawk. I wonder if you ever tried to get him to draw the title when you were editing it — or had he left comics forever by then?

He'd left comics forever by then and Alex Toth — who was my only possible conduit to Mr. Robbins — told me Frank was happy to be out of them…so I didn't ask. I actually didn't seek out most of the artists who did those short backup stories in Blackhawk. It was more a matter of who asked me or who I ran into at conventions or in my everyday life. Robbins would have been sensational on that feature.

Thanks to all who wrote. I may do at least one more of these. I certainly have enough e-mails to fill ten or more.

The Flintstones debuted on September 30, 1960 when I was eight years, six months and twenty-eight days old. For a while, I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen or ever would see. That changed. It lasted in ABC prime time for six seasons but by about halfway through Season Four, I was bored with it. I liked a lot of cartoon shows better, including some Hanna-Barbera shows. When The Jetsons joined the ABC schedule on September 23, 1962, I thought that was a much better program even though it only lasted one year.

As you may know, The Flintstones occasionally had celebrity guest stars like Ann-Margrock (Ann-Margret) or Stony Curtis (Tony Curtis) and they'd have had more of them if they could have figured out stone/rock puns for more celebs' names. I was always kinda baffled by the first one of these they did. The first episode of Season 2 featured the composer Hoagy Carmichael…and they didn't even turn him into Hoagy Carmarble or anything. He was Hoagy Carmichael, doing his own voice and living in the Stone Age.

At the age by then of 9.5 or so, I vaguely knew who Hoagy Carmichael was and I suspect that 75% of the viewership didn't. He was a great writer of songs but he wasn't that famous. I don't recall seeing him on any other TV show for the rest of his life, which ended in 1981. I regret that, years later when I worked for Hanna-Barbera, I didn't think to ask Bill Hanna or Joe Barbera just how or why someone thought it was a good idea to snag Hoagy Carmichael as a guest star. I pestered both men with questions aplenty but somehow never got around to that one.

I'm going to guess that since they obviously did it for whatever publicity value it had — which was probably not much — somewhere out there, there are a few magazine-type articles about this. They probably explain about Hoagy being a huge fan of the show and Bill and Joe being huge fans of him and somehow they connected and it was too good an idea not to do…which it wasn't. And I'll further guess that while some of all of that was true, there was also some connection like Hoagy and H-B having the same agent or some idea about H-B doing a cartoon series with famous songwriters.

Whatever the catalyst, here's a clip from that episode. Despite the animated Hoagy giving credit for the song to Barney Rubble, it was all a Carmichael composition which, maybe they hoped, would become some kind of hit record…

I just voted to ratify the new Writers Guild contract. So when the final vote is announced, if it's (let's say) 9,261 votes, you'll know that "1" is me.

Earlier today, I linked to a video of New York in the forties. In trying to pin down what year, I took notice of a movie marquee for the 1942 movie, Valley of Hunted Men…and one of another theater marquee showing the 1948 film, The Loves of Carmen. Might it be footage from '48 and the 1942 film was in re-release then? Or might it be that the video shows footage from different years?

Well, one of the many smart, industrious readers of this blog, Eric Costello, dug into some online newspaper archives and found that Valley of the Hunted Men was indeed in re-release in 1948 though he didn't find it playing at any theater in or near New York. He also spotted another marquee in the video. It's the Loew's Criterion and it marquee shows the film Tap Roots which the newspaper archive says was running there in late August and September of 1948, plus he found a review from September 3, 1948 showing The Loves of Carmen at the Loews State in New York. From all this, he concludes the video is from September of '48.

That sounds like pretty solid proof — but then I got this e-mail from another of the many smart, industrious readers of this blog, Peter Cunningham…

As to the question of the year of that New York film, the answer has to be multiple. At 6:45, The Empire State Building doesn't have its giant broadcasting antenna. At 7:20, it does.

So you make the call for yourself. I'm going with footage from different years.

I try not to spend much of my life following the many legal actions against Donald Trump and all he surveys but it's hard to look away. Every weekday, he seems to lose one or more court battles. Every weekday and on the weekends, he seems to make one or more outrageous and perhaps actionable threats against the people and the system that are taking away his assets and perhaps soon his freedom. The associates who've supported him don't seem to be doing any better.

What's happening now — like, as I'm typing this — in a New York courtroom looks pretty devastating for D.J.T. in the very core of his reputation: His image as a hugely successful Manhattan businessman and billionaire. In the video below, we have Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone explaining why it's likely Trump will soon be neither. No wonder Donald looks so furious…

Here's another one of those videos that takes old black-and-white silent film of some city and someone colorizes it and adds a fake soundtrack. This one's of New York and the caption says it's from the 1940s.

Trying to figure out just when in the forties, I note a movie marquee that seems to be showing the Tom Tyler movie Valley of Hunted Men (1942) and another marquee that seems to be showing the Rita Hayworth film The Loves of Carmen (1948). A possible conclusion would be that we're seeing film from '48 and the Tyler film has been re-released as the bottom half of a double feature. Another possible conclusion is that what we have here is a combination of footage from different years. Take your pick…

Sorry to be away from you for a couple days. The reasons would be of no interest to anyone. They aren't even that interesting to me but I'll make it up to you.

Well, one thing might interest you: I had to deal with some credit card fraud…and not the kind you might imagine. I'm still not 100% certain what happened but it involves a Seemingly-Reputable Company that's supposed to bill me for services once a month. For some time, they had been billing me once a month, like they were supposed to, charging what we shall call Credit Card #1. Then one day, along with many legitimate charges, Credit Card #1 was suddenly racking up phony ones — which I caught because they were to companies with which I never did business.

Okay, fine. That happens. The credit card company closed down that card and issued me a new one with a new number. Let us call this Credit Card #1A. Before I received it, I went in and changed several online accounts from billing Credit Card #1 to another card we shall call Credit Card #2. Am I going too fast for you? I'll try and type slower. One of the companies where I made the switch was the Seemingly-Reputable Company.

By coincidence, the change was made just after I'd changed my level of service with the Seemingly-Reliable Company so the amount they billed me each month changed. Instead of billing me Amount #1 to Credit Card #1, they were billing me Amount #2 to Credit Card #2.

But now here's where it gets muddy: When you cancel a credit card and the same credit card company issues you a new one, they continue to honor some charges to the old card. For instance, if you've regularly had monthly charges for your gas bill to a card, they pay those charges on the new card. The credit card company's computer assumes those are legitimate charges…which they usually are.

That's all well and good but in this case, the Seemingly-Reputable Company began billing me twice a month: They charged Credit Card #1 in the amount of Amount #1 and the credit card company, recognizing it as a routine charge from the Seemingly-Reputable Company paid Amount 1 on my behalf. And the Seemingly-Reputable Company also billed Amount #2 to Credit Card #2 and that was paid.

At first, I didn't notice the double charging because both were from a company that I expected to charge my credit card. After a little while though, I thought, "Hey, didn't I pay that bill two weeks ago?" I compared all my statements and realized I was being charged Amount #1 and Amount #2 each month. A nice lady on the phone from the credit card company agreed with me and immediately put a full cancellation on Credit Card #1, meaning that absolutely no charges to that card would be paid. And she alerted the Seemingly-Reputable Company and they admitted their mistake.

So here are the two problems I'm dealing with now…

Problem #1 I'm Dealing With Now: The Seemingly-Reputable Company is refusing to refund the overpayments. They insist on merely giving me credit towards future bills. This would be fine except that I've decided for other reasons that the service from the Seemingly-Reputable Service sucks and I no longer want it. In fact, I completely canceled it and at the moment, they're insisting on giving me five more months of it as my "refund."

Problem #2 I'm Dealing With Now: Since nothing charged to Credit Card #1 now will be paid, I'm going around changing credit cards on various accounts. For instance, the monitoring system on my home security system was billed automatically to Credit Card #1 and I've switched it to Credit Card #1A. That one was easy but some of these companies make it very hard to do on their websites. It must have taken me ten minutes to find where to change the number on the New York Times website. This should not take longer than their crossword puzzle.

I wound up taking a look at every arrangement and subscription I had that bills to a credit card of mine and decided to cancel a few of them. I had forgotten that I meant to do this every six months or so because a lot of times when you cancel an online subscription, you are instantly offered — by a computer or sometimes even a human being on the phone — a lower price to stay. I canceled one $29.95 per month subscription and the computer instantly gave me a "We hate to lose a loyal customer" line and an offer for the same service for $5.95.

And when I turned that down, they knocked another buck off the price. It can be very profitable to cancel your online subscriptions. Some of them offer tremendous discounts…and if they don't, there's usually a way to uncancel that cancellation if you decide you want to keep the service.

The downside of this is that some companies make it real, real hard to cancel. Sometimes, they insist you phone a cancellation department and then they keep you on hold for a long time. In one case, I had to go into a text message "chat" with some sort of Artificial Intelligence program that kept asking me why in the world I wanted to cancel their wonderful service…and keeping me waiting three or four minutes between responses. I think it took about fifteen minutes just to be free of them.

I'm guessing the logic here is that once I've wasted ten minutes online trying to cancel, I'll just say, "Oh, hell! I'll keep it!" In my case though, I thought, "I have ten minutes of my life invested in trying to cancel this service. I don't want to ever go through this again so I'm sticking with this as long as necessary just to get this company out of my life!"

It was worth the time. I think I ended up keeping four services, cancelling three others and getting reduced prices on two others. I'm probably paying $100 a month less and that was worth a couple hours.

So I'm left dealing with Problem #3 I'm Dealing With Now, Problem #4 I'm Dealing With Now and Problem #5 I'm Dealing With Now:. These Problems I'm Dealing With Now, you don't want to hear about but I'll try not to let them keep me away from this blog for so long.

I've received an awful lot o' mail about my three-part article called "About Frank Robbins" — more than I think I've ever received about any one thing on this blog since the passing of Johnny Carson. Given how I'm sure the majority of those who read this blog have zero interest in old comic book artists, I'm amazed at the turnout.

If you haven't read the piece and want to, you can start reading with Part 1 here and it will take you to the others. If you have read it, proceed to the letters below starting with this one from my buddy Anthony Tollin. Anthony did a lot of work for DC Comics and is maybe the world's foremost authority on The Shadow…

When I was hired as DC's proofreader in July of 1974, there were only two issues of The Shadow for me to proof because the title was being cancelled with #8. Then it was suddenly put back on the schedule retroactively when the sales figures came in on issue #5, Frank Robbins' first issue! Sales on the title jumped considerably when Robbins replaced Kaluta, perhaps because Robbins had a lot of the Jack Kirby style action that had made Marvel a success. (This was before the direct sale market when most comics were still being bought by kids before the explosion of comic book specialty stores.)

I remember both Irwin Donenfeld (who ran DC Comics in the fifties and sixties) and Whitney Ellsworth (who did just in the fifties) telling me that the artist on a comic book didn't make that much of a difference to sales. I doubt it was as true as they thought it was then but it sure as heck wasn't true later. And given that The Shadow was cancelled three issues after Robbins left the book, it sounds like he really made a difference.

Next up is this message from Paul Levitz, who worked for DC back when Tony Tollin did. Paul wound up running the place…

So since you're writing about Frank, a factoid: when he was doing a wide variety of art for DC (and personally I think he might have done some of his best on a few mystery stories), he would mark the instruction on each page that the letterer shouldn't do balloons or borders (two tasks generally regarded as time consuming and routine). He wanted to do them and have the freedom when he chose to interpret them stylistically.

I went to an office supply store (remember those?) and had them make up a rubber stamp with the instruction instead. Frank got a kick out of it. A very friendly and talented guy. As you say sometimes miscast, often ill served by an inker when not finishing his own work, but a first class talent when not hampered.

And of course, when he wasn't allowed to ink his own work — as I keep arguing was a mistake — he couldn't do his own balloons or panel borders.  So that Frank Robbins work was even less Frank Robbins.  Moving on, here's a note from another buddy, Andy Paquette, who's a pretty terrific artist himself…

Thanks for the article on Robbins. I recently rediscovered his work and have been avidly buying up everything I can find by him. A lot of his stories for DC had covers by Neal Adams, thus ratcheting up the price, but I only care about the Robbins stories inside. For this reason, I don't buy them in slabs, something I will do for some comics because the cover is all I am interested in.

I prefer Robbins' comics for DC and Marvel to his excellent strip, Johnny Hazard, because they look less like Caniff and more like Robbins. The energy of his inking is fantastic, and the story content engaging. I didn't like his work when I was a kid, but can't get enough of it now. Thinking about the reason why I was less enamored of it then, I think it came down to the fact that his style was so unique that it didn't look like what I expected to find in a superhero comic.

Looking back on his work now, I think he was one of the best artists to ever work in comics.

I should also mention that I have come around to your point of view on Curt Swan. About a year ago, I started buying his work in quantity as well. The funny thing is that I liked those comics when I was a kid, but not the art. I didn't realize that Swan's plain vanilla drawing style was part of the reason I liked the stories, a large part of the reason.

A lot of the letters I received but am not running here said things like "I didn't like his work when I was a kid, but can't get enough of it now."  And moving further on, here's one from Doug Pratt…

Thank you for writing about Frank Robbins! Fans who don't care for Robbins' drawing style are oblivious to what others see in his work. He was a total pro who knew his craft and could put exactly what he wanted on the page. I think Robbins' work on Batman and The Invaders is terrific.

He didn't need an inker, but the other Frank — Springer — complemented his drawings perfectly. Those who don't appreciate Frank Robbins as an artist should at least give the Man-Bat stories he wrote a try.

I'm going to disagree with you a bit, Doug. I think good work resulted when Frank Springer inked Frank Robbins…and also when yet another Frank — Frank Giacoia — did. But there was something wonderful in Robbins' work missing when he didn't do the whole thing. This is true of many artists and especially of guys like Robbins who for years did the whole job and were used to doing a lot of the drawing in ink. I'm sure he didn't pencil tightly for himself on Johnny Hazard and probably didn't closely follow what he'd penciled when he inked. Some of the other guys I mentioned who did outstanding work when they inked themselves (like Joe Kubert, Russ Heath, Dan Spiegle, Doug Wildey and others) really had problems penciling for someone else to ink.

The one real interesting pencil/ink combo for Robbins at Marvel was for me, a Morbius story in Adventures Into Fear #27. The inking was credited to "D. Fraser" who was actually Leonard Starr, best known as the man behind the Mary Perkins On Stage newspaper strip.

Starr didn't do much in comic books after the industry went into recession in 1956. Thereafter, his career was that strip plus advertising work plus later he did the Little Orphan Annie strip and also was the main writer behind the Thundercats animated series. But a couple times, he picked up extra dough inking for comics. I was once able to acquire a page from that Robbins/Starr Morbius story and you can see a scan of it if you click here. It's also missing a lot of what I loved about Robbins' work but it was kind of a neat one-time teaming.

I have a lot more e-mails here about Frank Robbins. There will be another one of these in the next few days that may not be the end of it.

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One thing I miss on most game shows these days is witty people. Most of the shows are about money and about what the money means to the lives of those who win it. I liked it when some game shows were about clever people saying clever things and when there was an element of danger in that the shows were live.

Here's a short segment from the Christmas episode of I've Got a Secret for 12/24/58…and remember this show was done live. There was no script and the panelists could not be rehearsed. The show occasionally planted questions with the panelists that they thought would get big laughs but they had to do so in a way that wouldn't tip the answers.

The witty gent on this episode is Henry Morgan who in TV and radio had the reputation of being quite the curmudgeon. But he was a funny curmudgeon and a likeable one and on the game you're about to watch, he came up with the right answer…which by the time the questioning got around to him was fairly obvious. But then he came up with a very funny line on the spot…and I'm fairly sure it was not planned in advance. You might not find it as funny as I did but you've got to admire the speed…

It's so good to have John Oliver back on the air.

If you haven't read Part 1 and Part 2 yet, read Part 1 and Part 2 before you read Part 3, which is this part, the final part…

I only met Frank Robbins once and then only for about fifteen minutes. It was either 1975 or 1976 and it was at a cocktail party staged by ACBA during that year's New York Comic Art Convention. Those initials stood for "The Academy of Comic Book Arts," which was a short-lived society for professionals in the field.

So I was standing there, not having a cocktail — which is what I do at cocktail parties — and a man I'd never seen before in my life approached me. He asked if I was Mark Evanier and when I owned up to it, he said, "I understand you're a Vince Colletta exorcist." I begged his pardon and ask him what in the world he meant.

He said, "I understand you were responsible for getting Vince Colletta moved off inking Jack Kirby's pencils at DC."

For a moment, I thought this might be some relative of Colletta's preparing to sock me in the gut or something but I said, "I guess so." Whereupon the man extended his right hand in friendship and said, "I'm Frank Robbins. How is it done?"

Much of the fifteen-or-so minutes was spent talking about inkers. I asked him who he'd prefer to have ink his work and he answered, "Me and only me." By that, he meant Frank Robbins, not me. He went on to say that one thing he didn't like about doing comic books was the whole idea of one artist penciling and another guy — often, a stranger — finishing the work: "I don't understand why anyone with any artistic talent at all would want someone else finishing their drawings or would want to finish someone else's drawings." He was not the only penciler or inker I've met who felt this way.

Another thing he said he didn't like about doing comics: Being switched from strip to strip. This is an approximate quote: "I like to really understand the characters I'm drawing and once I learn the characters on one book, they move me to another one." When years later Mike Sekowsky said that line to me about being a chess piece, I immediately thought of Frank Robbins.

Frank and I talked a bit about Jack Kirby that day. He loved Jack and the feeling, I assured him, was mutual. He also told me about his plans to retire to Mexico and paint. By whenever this encounter was, those plans were very much at the "probable" stage. He seemed like a nice man who took great pride in his work and I wished I could have talked with him longer. I did remind him that depending where he wound up living in Mexico, it might be a short commute to the annual comic book convention in San Diego.

I told him I was sure I could persuade the con to invite him as a guest. He thanked me for the thought but said that if and when he relocated to Mexico, it would be to put comics behind him.

By 1977, Johnny Hazard had lost enough newspapers that he and his syndicate decided jointly to put it behind him and to end its 33 year run. The last installment ran in papers on August 20, 1977. He finished out his Marvel contract early the following year and, as wished, moved to Mexico — to San Miguel de Allende, located in the far eastern part of Guanajuato, to be exact. There, he produced a great many paintings, some of which still hang in galleries around the world.

As far as I know, he never drew another comic book or comic strip though he had many offers. That's what I heard from Alex Toth, the only person I knew who kept in touch with him. Alex supplied Frank's address via which I got him invited to the comic convention — an invite that he politely declined. San Miguel de Allende, it turned out, is about 1,600 miles from San Diego so maybe that was a factor in his decision. Or maybe he simply didn't want to discuss the work he'd done in what by then he may have regarded as a previous life.

His run as a comic book artist for Marvel only lasted a little over four years during which he indeed averaged two comics a month…so roughly a hundred stories. I think I've now seen more than a hundred Facebook threads in which someone is losing it over the fact that Frank Robbins briefly drew some super-hero comics almost a half-century ago. It's like their whole childhoods were scarred by the site of a slightly-spongy Captain America or a Daredevil with unrealistic anatomy…as if most other super-hero artists drew the realistic kind.

It bothers me to see so much ire directed at Mr. Robbins for not being John Buscema or Curt Swan, never at the editorial decision to place him on a certain feature with someone else finishing his work. They think he was untalented. As I keep saying here, I think he was miscast…and in the theater or in film, when an actor is miscast, you blame the person-in-charge who miscast him or maybe the business realities that forced the miscasting.

In comics, a lot of that has been because the company was really stingy with their rates. I once asked Sol Brodsky, who had a lot to do with who drew or inked Marvel Comics of the sixties, why a certain artist was employed as an inker. I should have known what he'd say: "Because we were desperate and I couldn't find anyone else who'd work for what the publisher would allow us to pay."

And sometimes, a comic looks like the artist knocked it out as fast as humanly possible…which indeed he may have done because the company needed that artist to knock it out as fast as humanly possible. To be fair, some of the best comics ever done were truly knocked out as fast as humanly possible but that's not a reason to make people do that. And sometimes, oddball "casting" results in something wonderful…but again, that's not the best way to do things.

Frank Robbins passed away at the age of 77 on November 28, 1994 from a heart attack. Alex Toth gleaned from their correspondence that Robbins couldn't have been happier in those last years of his life, painting to please only himself. I've seen photos of some of those paintings and I wish I owned one. Beautiful work.

I understand why some people didn't like what he did in some of the comics that got him there to Mexico and I can even understand why some of them thought he was just a bad artist. What I don't get is why some of them are still incensed over his work long ago and why they blame him. To me, that's a lot like watching a losing game of chess and blaming the pieces instead of the person who moved them to the wrong squares.

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If you're intrigued as I am about Stephen Sondheim's last musical, Here We Are, here's a long article by Frank Rich about it. Don't thank me. Thank my buddy Vince Waldron who told me about it.

Stephen Sondheim's final musical is soon to debut and one can find many conflicting "facts" about it on Ye Olde Internet. It's called Here We Are and it recently started previews at someplace called The Shed in Hudson Yards. I don't know where that is, either.

It opens October 22. Here's an article from the other day about some of the different things that are being said about it including the rumor that it doesn't have very many songs in it and almost none (or maybe none) in Act 2.

If you haven't read Part 1 yet, read it before you read Part 2. This is Part 2…

Comic book readers today seem to be more tolerant than fans in the seventies of seeing their favorite heroes rendered in a variety of styles and interpretations. Back then, some readers were outraged if a Batman story wasn't drawn by Neal Adams or at least by someone trying to draw like Neal Adams. Frank Robbins wasn't at all of that school.

I thought his work was wonderful and I recall his fellow professionals like Alex Toth, Jack Kirby and Gil Kane praising it to the heavens. Some readers though are still, more than a half-century later, angry about it. He did a few issues of The Shadow also when Mike Kaluta left that book and there's a guy on Facebook who is still hating on those issues and thinks (I guess) that someone should have forced Kaluta at gunpoint to stay on the project.

Robbins worked for DC until 1975 when he jumped to Marvel full-time. DC was not buying enough material from him or paying him that well at a time when Marvel was desperate for artists who could pencil super-hero comics. The parent corporation was demanding more and more such books and the editorial side of the firm simply didn't have the manpower to competently produce all the comics that the business side was demanding.

John Romita (Senior) was then the Art Director at Marvel. If you felt qualified to draw for Marvel, you took your samples to him and he'd look them over and give you a solid critique. More than nine times out of ten, he'd say "You aren't quite ready yet" and recommend books and artists to study. Then he'd tell you to come back in a year and maybe by then they could start you on some unimportant back-up feature. One time when I visited John, he told me about a kid who'd come in six weeks earlier and been told that: Come back in a year.

The kid didn't come back in a year. He came back a few weeks later when Marvel called. They were so seriously in need of pencilers that they'd offered him not an unimportant back-up feature but a major book. Mr. Romita told me this story by way of explaining why, admittedly, some of the art in the comics being produced was not up to the standard he would have liked to have maintained. (No, don't write and ask me who the kid was. He did eventually turn into a pretty good artist worthy of the job. He just wasn't, in John Romita's estimation, good enough to be drawing the book he was drawing then.)

That was the situation at that company when Robbins inquired as to whether they could make use of his services. Marvel instantly wanted him…not for writing (they had plenty of writers) and not even for inking his own work. They needed comics penciled so they asked him what his page rate at DC was. Committing a bit of dishonesty that most freelancers commit at one time or another, Robbins fibbed and said he was getting more than he actually was.

Marvel instantly agreed to give him a slight increase on the fibbed rate to lure him over. For a few months, his work appeared in both companies' books, then Marvel offered him another slight increase to be exclusive to them in comic books and to pencil two books a month for them. He did not ink any of his Marvel assignments. As you'll hear in Part 3, he would have liked to but it better served the company's needs for Robbins to pencil two comics a month rather than to pencil-and-ink one.

By this point, his income from the Johnny Hazard newspaper strip had slipped such that Robbins knew its demise was not far off. He was also thinking about retirement in the not-too-distant future. He wanted to get away from comic strips and comic books.  He wanted to spend his days painting what he wanted to paint at the pace at which he wanted to paint it. Retiring to a home in Mexico seemed like an attainable fantasy if he could amass some money quickly. Towards that goal, he took the Marvel offer.

Some artists would have struggled to pencil two comics a month even if that was all they were doing. Robbins continued to write and draw Johnny Hazard while penciling the two comics a month for Marvel. One of them was usually an issue of a new comic called The Invaders written by Roy Thomas. Roy was running the editorial division at Marvel at the time so he could easily have replaced his penciler if he didn't like what Robbins did but as it turned out, he loved what Robbins handed in.

The Invaders featured Marvel Super-Heroes in World War II and a lot of fans thought it was a great comic in every way. Others felt it was a great comic except for the artwork. He also during his stay at Marvel drew for Captain America, Daredevil, Ghost Rider, The Human Fly, The Man From Atlantis and a few others.

At some point in this scenario — I can't place precisely when — someone at Marvel figured out or learned about Robbins' fib about his DC page rate and similar fibs by others moving between companies. There was a squabble that does not seem to have directly involved Frank. It did involve Roy Thomas, who as I mentioned was Marvel's editor-in-chief.

As Roy tells the story, he was ordered to check with DC whenever a freelancer quoted a page rate there and he was to comply if DC called to check on a freelancer who might have been fibbing to them about his Marvel rate. Roy felt this kind of cooperation was illegal and refused to go along with the practice. The squabble ended with him stepping down as editor-in-chief at Marvel but continuing to work for them as an editor on books he wrote, including The Invaders.

Roy and the other writers who worked with Robbins seem to have loved the experience. Most of these comics were done "Marvel Method" with the penciler involved, sometimes heavily, in the plotting of the stories. Being a fine writer himself, Robbins was very useful in this regard.

Tony Isabella, who wrote a number of stories Robbins drew told me…

Frank wanted panel-by-panel plots and I gave them to him. Then he would go over them with me panel by panel and would come up with great ideas we could put into the stories. We got so much in rhythm with each other than he would place the word balloons and captions before I even wrote them and his choices were always impeccable. On one Ghost Rider story we did, he reconstructed a whole scene with airplanes so it made a lot more sense.

I don't believe Robbins was best-suited to draw costumed super-heroes. His figures were somewhat rubbery and the whole impact was a bit more on the cartoony side than some readers liked…but in The Invaders, he probably captured the mood of the time period better than anyone else Marvel then had available. It didn't help that others were inking his work and in some cases, I thought there were some especially bad match-ups of penciler and inker.

As you might have read on this blog before, I believe the number one cause of poor comic books over the years has been Bad Casting. A lack of talent or even initiative in some writers and artists has also been a factor and there are a few others…but I think Numero Uno has been putting together a mix of series, writer and artist(s) who were just plain wrong for each other. The writer didn't have a feel for the material. The artist didn't either and was maybe a bad match for the writer and his/her approach. If the artist didn't ink his or her pencil art, the wrong artist did. Sometimes, even the colorist or the letterer were miscast.

I was once offered the Star Trek comic book to write…why, I have no idea.  I've never been a fan of the property in any form. If I'd needed work and that was the only thing available to me, I might have taken it. I might have had to.

Folks who worked in comics in the first half-dozen decades of the industry often didn't have much say in where those with hiring power wanted to place them…or who else would be working on those issues. Mike Sekowsky — who was high among the most misassigned artists of his generation in my opinion — once said to me, "I sometimes feel like a chess piece being moved around the board by some guy with no strategy at all."

If I'd written the Star Trek comic book, the scripts would have been rotten. And if by chance you're sitting there thinking, "Everything you ever wrote, Evanier, was rotten," then trust me on this: My Star Trek work would have been even rottener. And the comic could have been rottener still with the wrong artist(s).

That said, I think a lot of what Robbins drew for comics in the seventies was wonderful. He was expert at the aspect of drawing a comic book that Jack Kirby often said was the single-most important thing about drawing comics: Figuring out exactly what to draw in each panel and from what angle. To Jack, it didn't matter how pretty that picture was if it was the wrong picture to "tell" the story.

I think Robbins always drew the right picture but sometimes the heroes' bodies looked a bit odd. If Marvel could have deployed him on some other kind of comic that might not have been a problem. Or if the heroic figures of someone like John Buscema had not been the accepted norm at the time, we might not now see as much Facebook hating of artists like Frank Robbins.

Or if they'd let him ink his own work. Some artists — Joe Kubert, Doug Wildey, Dan Spiegle and several others come to mind — were never at their best when the company assigned them to only do part of the task of drawing.

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In Woody Allen's movie Bananas, there's a scene where the dictator of the South American country San Marcos gives a speech to the masses. In it, he declares that from now on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish, everyone is to change their underwear every half-hour and all children under sixteen years old are now sixteen years old. He is so incoherent that even many of his staunch supporters realize that the man is completely out of his mind.

I'm getting the feeling we are only weeks from Donald Trump giving his version of that speech.

Tim Conway made the first of many appearances with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show on September 15th, 1977. This was shortly after Mr. Conway had won the second of his three Emmys as a supporting player on The Carol Burnett Show. He later won two more — one for guesting on Coach and one for guesting on 30 Rock. He was also nominated a great many times as both a performer and a writer.

Before you watch the clip of him on with Carson, you might want to watch this short video with includes some footage (not all) of the 1977 Emmy win he talks about with Johnny…

Okay. Then now you can watch that first appearance with Mr. Carson. I had the pleasure of talking with or being around Tim Conway a number of times and he was very much like this and, of course, always funny…