With rare exceptions, comic books are printed on presses that handle "signatures" of eight pages — so the insides of a comic book usually must be a multiple of eight pages.  The way some printers' presses worked, they had to be multiples of sixteen pages.

These days, those "insides" are on pretty good paper stock but for its first four or so decades, the industry put those insides on the cheapest paper available. Then they'd print a four page signature on a different, more expensive press with more expensive paper and that would form the cover, the inside front cover, the inside back cover and the back cover.

Bind it all together and you had yourself a comic book.

As an example, let's take a long-running book like Action Comics. Action Comics #1 came out on May 3, 1938 and it featured the debut of some obscure character named Superman. The issue contained…

• Superman (pg. 1–13) by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster
• Chuck Dawson (pgs. 14–19) by H. Fleming
• Zatara, Master Magician (pgs. 20–31) by Fred Guardineer
• "South Sea Strategy" (text feature, pgs. 32–33) by Captain Frank Thomas
• Sticky-Mitt Stimson (pgs. 34–37) by Alger
• The Adventures of Marco Polo (pgs. 38–41) by Sven Elven
• Pep Morgan (pgs. 42–45) by Fred Guardineer
• Scoop Scanlon (pgs. 46–51) by Will Ely
• Tex Thomson (pgs. 52–63) by Bernard Baily
• Stardust (pg. 64) by "The Star-Gazer"

There was also a front cover, an inside front cover telling us about the comic, an inside back cover ("Odds 'N Ends" by Sheldon Moldoff) and an ad on the back cover.  For the purposes of this article, we shall henceforth ignore covers and all page counts will be referring to the interiors.  So Action Comics #1 had 64 pages…and it cost a dime.

That was how big an issue of Action Comics was for a while but as we know, prices go up.  They go up on printing and they also go up on what writers and artists have to spend each week on food and rent…so what they were paid had to go up.  Furthermore, as World War II wound down, paper costs soared and it became apparent to all funnybook publishers that they either had to raise prices or decrease page count.  As far as I know, there was no consultation among the many houses that put out comics.  They all just kind of decided that "kids" (which is how they referred to their customers) would object to paying more and it was preferable to give them less.

So as of #61, which came out in April of 1943, Action Comics lost eight pages, slimming down to 56 pages.  That size didn't last long.  It was more efficient to print 16-page signatures so a little more than a year after going from 64 to 56, Action Comics (and most others) went to 48 pages. Action Comics #75 was the first Action Comics of this thickness.

A few publishers had longer-term contracts with their printers or other arrangements that kept costs down but the whole industry pretty much moved to 48 pages…

…until 1951 when another downsizing of the package seemed necessary.  Action Comics #162, which came out in September of that year, was 40 pages.

And then in 1954, DC faced a moment of truth.  They either had to go to 32 pages or raise the cover price from ten cents.

Other companies had already made that decision.  Martin Goodman's company — the firm we now know as Marvel — had been offering 32 pages for a dime for over a year. Fawcett — the output publishing Captain Marvel (the one in the red suit who said "Shazam!" a lot) had been selling 32 pages for ten cents since about the time DC went to 40 pages.  Other companies bounced around.  Dell for quite some time put out some 32-page comics for ten cents and some 48 page ones for the same price.

But in '54, DC had to decide what to do.  32 pages for ten cents or raise the cover price?  I once asked Whitney Ellsworth, who had the title of Editor-in-Chief at DC then and he muttered something I didn't quite understand.  Mr. Ellsworth was one of the most nervous, terrified-of-saying-the-wrong-thing human beings I have ever encountered and I think (italicized for emphasis) that what he said was something like, "We looked at the sales of other companies and it didn't seem like going to 32 pages had hurt sales."

And I'm pretty sure he said — and this is a paraphrase but it's close — "We knew that if we raised the price and anyone else stayed at a dime, we'd get murdered."  So DC went to 32 pages for ten cents and pretty soon, that became the standard for any comic book that wasn't so thick that it felt like a special.  The first 32 page issue of Action Comics was #197 which hit the newsstands in August of 1954.

You really couldn't make a comic book any thinner than that…so the next time costs went up for the publishers, they were going to have to do something they dreaded, something they feared greatly.  They were going to have to raise the price.

I'll continue this in Part 2 in a few days.

The beginning of the COVID Lockdown feels like it happened decades ago but it was actually March of 2020.  Just before things started closing left and right, Lewis Black did this comedy special. Watching it the other night was for me a well-spent hour…

The Walgreens chain has announced its plan to close 1,200 stores…which they could probably do by cutting back to one store per block in New York City. They currently have them all strategically placed to snag any customer who doesn't feel like walking up to 10 yards to the nearest Duane Reade.

As I've mentioned here, I keep getting spam calls from people claiming to work for Walgreens, trying to find out my private medical information. It occurs to me that with the actual Walgreens closing so many stores, a lot of real Walgreens employees are going to be unemployed and some will probably get jobs making those spam calls to me claiming to be Walgreens employees.

An awful lot of full movies are being uploaded, apparently quite legally, to YouTube.  So for a while here, I'm going to link you to two of them each day. Let's start with a little Mel Brooks Film Festival, shall we?

Here's Spaceballs from 1987…

…and Life Stinks from 1991…

I don't have time today — or for that matter, the stomach — to write a long post about politics and the election. But go read Fred Kaplan and his summary of the new Bob Woodward book. The stuff about Trump's relationship with Putin is chilling.

Here's a link to someone's ranking of the 25 best episodes of my favorite TV program, The Dick Van Dyke Show. I agree with a lot of it but not all…so here's my list, going from my 25th favorite to my favorite.  I'm sure your list is different from mine, which is okay except that mine is right…

1. The Sam Pomerantz Scandals
2. Bupkis
3. Brother, Can You Spare $2500?
4. I Was A Teenage Head Writer
5. My Mother Can Beat Up My Father
6. All About Eavesdropping
7. It Wouldn't Hurt Them To Give Us A Raise
8. See Rob Write, Write Rob Write
9. Buddy Sorrell, Man And Boy
10. The Masterpiece
11. The Gunslinger
12. My Husband Is Not A Drunk
13. The Great Petrie Fortune
14. Three Letters From One Wife
15. October Eve
16. The Attempted Marriage
17. One Hundred Terrible Hours
18. Buddy, Can You Spare A Job?
19. Obnoxious, Offensive, Egomaniac, Etc.
20. Talk To The Snail
21. The Bottom of Mel Cooley's Heart
22. The Impractical Joke
23. It May Look Like A Walnut
24. That's My Boy??
25. Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth

You will notice that my list contains no episodes that are essentially about jealousy endangering the Petrie marriage, no episodes with auditions in the Petrie living room, no episodes with Jerry Van Dyke or Marty Ingels, no episodes about Sally's desperation to be married and most episodes that include Alan Brady telling Mel to shut up. And unlike a lot of people, I don't think The Twizzle is the worst episode ever. If I extended this list to cover every episode, The Twizzle would be about ten from the bottom.

Back in this post, I highly recommended the latest episode of American Masters on PBS, which was a look at the life and work of writer-director Blake Edwards. If you haven't seen it, you can see it here. And if you want to see it here, see it soon because I don't think it'll be online for very long…

I want to speak for a moment about Occam's Razor. In case you don't know what that is, I cribbed this explanation off some website…

Occam's Razor is a principle of theory construction or evaluation according to which, other things equal, explanations that posit fewer entities, or fewer kinds of entities, are to be preferred to explanations that posit more.

Or to put it in simpler terms: The answer to most questions may well be the simplest one. This is not an "always" thing. Some answers are complicated and require a lot of research and explaining but one should not overlook the simplest answer. And why I'm bringing this up is that this morning, as I browsed the websites and forums I usually browse, I saw some examples where I think this applies.  One was on a comic book forum where they were discussing, as comic book forums often do, which artist did the best job of inking Jack Kirby's artwork.

(For those of you who don't know what this means: Before digital technology offered several alternatives, comics were drawn in a two-stage process. An artist would draw the page in pencil. Then an artist — who might be the same artist but often was not — would finish the art in ink, tracing the pencil lines for the most part but also interpreting and adding things. So if one guy penciled and one guy inked, the finished product would be an amalgam. Some inkers weren't as good as others. Some also weren't as compatible with the pencilers they inked. So a lot of people might feel that Inker A enhanced Jack's work whereas Inker B butchered it…and there's a lot (a lot!) of debating as to which inkers did it well and which ones didn't.)

I saw a couple of folks asking — and I'll leave actual names out of this — "Why oh why did they assign Inker Q to Jack's work instead of Inker X, Inker Y or Inker Z? It's obvious Inker Q sucked!"

And they discount the simplest — and in this case, most frequent — answer. The editor who made the assignment thought Inker Q did a great job.

There could be other reasons. Inker Q might have been the only option available at that moment. Inker Q could have been the cheapest option and there were budget problems. Those are also pretty simple…but since the person asking that question hates Inker Q's work so much, he rules out those easy explanations. In his mind, it had to be something like "Inker Q had blackmail photos of the editor" or "Inker Q bribed the editor" or something like that. But the true answer more often involves one or more of those simple reasions.

And the most likely is that the editor liked Inker Q's work just like I like some movie that you don't or you love some musical group that I think blows or you don't recognize the utter awfulness of cole slaw that is so inarguable to me. I have my blind spots. I can't fathom anyone eating that stuff except maybe at gunpoint. Maybe delicatessen owners who have a surplus of that noxious concoction are sending out armed mercenaries to force the consumption of it.  Yeah, that makes more sense to me than people actually liking it.

The other argument I saw today where I think Occam's Razor is likely is, of course, about Donald Trump. Most arguments in this country these days are about Donald Trump.  The best reason I see for his defeat is that even though it will probably prompt more arguments about Donald Trump for a while, eventually they will abate, whereas if he wins, we'll be arguing about him for the rest of whatever's left of our lives.

His horribleness is so evident to some of us that we forget that some people have simple reasons for liking him. An acquaintance of mine who has probably already marked his ballot for Trump and mailed it off explained his thinking to me thusly. His number one issue is Abortion and he says,"For years, I've heard Republican candidates promise to do something about Abortion — Reagan, Romney, McCain, Dole, a couple of Bushes — and even the ones who got elected didn't do much. Trump actually did something."

You may not feel that's a good thing and I sure don't but it matters so much to this guy that he'll overlook the felonies, the lying, the graft, etc. It probably helps him ignore those things that he also believes that every single person who ever has or ever will run for President commits felonies, lies, takes graft, etc.

So the simple explanation is that he thinks Trump will give him things on his wishlist and Harris won't. He's also terrified of immigrants.

I'm not suggesting this is how everyone thinks. There certainly are more complex explanations out there that are valid for some people. I'm just saying that sometimes — maybe even most of the time — the real explanations are right there in front of us and we overlook them in search of something more complex. Then again, I guess I can understand that some people would rather consume cole slaw than have their brains blown out by a 9mm cartridge. But that's just about the only way I can imagine anyone eating that stuff.

My all-time favorite entertainers, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, made a lot of great films but they never made a better one than The Music Box, It came out in 1932 and actually won an Academy Award for Best Short Subject.  It also got Stan's endorsement as the best thing they ever did and while I might place many other Laurel and Hardy shorts on the same level, I wouldn't want to argue with Stan.

One of the things that makes us Laurel and Hardy fans love it so much is that it's possible — and we've all done it — to visit the famous steps you'll see in this film.  They're right there in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles (here's a map) and the city has even marked them with the above street sign.

I don't think I've mentioned this before here but during the last year of life for my wonderful friend/companion Carolyn, she was in a nursing home that was about a five-minute drive from the steps. When I ran errands for her, I'd sometimes plot a course that would take me by the Music Box Steps and I'd just idle for a brief pause there. It had a strange calming effect on me, especially when I saw others who were coming to see where Stan and Ollie had once walked.

And fallen. And struggled. And fallen again. And struggled some more…

I also don't think I've mentioned it here but the very first night I ever visited the Silent Movie Theater here in Los Angeles, one of the films they were showing was a 1926 comedy from the Mack Sennett Studio called Ice Cold Cocos. It starred Billy Bevan and Andy Clyde as two guys engaged in what once was a thriving business in this country — delivering ice. That job has now, of course, joined the list of vanished or vanishing professions like operating a telegraph, setting up bowling pins or publishing comic books.

In Ice Cold Cocos, Mr. Bevan and Mr. Clyde delivered ice up the same stairs that Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy climbed to deliver a piano. Here's that film with a new musical track and re-created title cards. It's a good example of what second-tier comedians did on film in the twenties and what real icemen did back when that was a thing…

I just want to point something out. I've been saying for months now that when one looks at polls, one should remember that a lot of possibly game-changing things would happen before the election that could not be predicted. That was my response to people telling me months ago that Trump was certain to win or that Trump was certain to lose. A month ago here, I said…

It's gonna be up and down, up and down, up and down…with many moments which will, at least at first, feel like game-changers. We've already had plenty of these. Trump getting shot at was one. Biden doing so poorly in the debate was one. Biden dropping out was a big one. Trump getting convicted of 34 felonies was one. The big Supreme Court ruling was one. There will be more.

Since then, we've had another possible assassination attempt, the Harris/Trump debate, the Walz/Vance debate, the whole "they're eating the dogs" thing, Hurricane Helene and the government response to it, Hurricane Milton and the government response to it, some revelations from the new Bob Woodward book and some other possible game-changers that no one could have predicted when I typed the above. There's still time for more.

One of the more controversial things I've posted on this blog is the following chart…

I posted it some time ago and some people still want to argue that Duck Soup is a better movie than the two I listed above it.  They want to argue this even though it's not a list of what I (or anyone) would say are the best Marx Brothers movies in order of their merits.  This a list of my personal preferences and telling me I'm wrong is like saying I'm wrong that I like McDonald's more than Burger King.

I might entertain an argument that I don't prefer Room Service enough to put it at tenth place.  I recently tried to watch it again and if I'm ever dumb enough to post an update on this list, I'll probably move it down a few notches.  How could such a funny play be turned into such a not-funny Marx Brothers movie?

Also, I still get the occasional e-mail from someone who wants to argue that Love Happy is not a Marx Brothers movie and should not be identified as a Marx Brothers movie.  To them, I can only offer this incontrovertible Perry Mason-solid proof.  The opening titles of Love Happy say this…

See that?  "Starring The Marx Brothers."  That makes it a Marx Brothers movie, end of argument.  In fact, if Francis Ford Coppola had put that title card on Megalopolis, that would make Megalopolis a Marx Brothers movie. And someone might even go see it.

An awful lot of you liked this music video I linked to of a song by Herb Alpert. Jason Burbee wrote suggesting I also show you this one and that we all read this note that Alpert (apparently) penned about it…

We wanted to make a video that was happy, upbeat and about real love. Our video crew traveled all over the world in 23 straight days. Real couples in love were found through Instagram in each country and city. Our video director, Clark Jackson, a.k.a. Constellation Jones started shooting on June 29th and returned to Los Angeles on July 22nd. This video was shot in East Los Angeles, Echo Park, Santa Monica, Miami, Bahamas, Key Largo, Cuba, New Orleans, Mississippi, Charlotte, Milwaukee, Brooklyn, New York City, Iceland, Paris, Romania, Venice, Marrakesh, Thailand, Seoul and Hawaii.  We feel that Love & Music should always be the link between people.

Well put. Here's the video in question…

In June of 2013, I had arthroscopic surgery performed on my right knee to repair the two tears in the meniscus in there. It helped for a while but only for a while. A little over three years later, I had the entire knee replaced. The day after the first of these procedures, I posted this story of how my mother had her knee replaced…

My knee surgery yesterday reminded me of a Tale of My Mother I haven't told yet. You'll see the punchline to this one coming well before we get to it.

Over the years, due in no small part to a lifetime of cigarettes, she was losing her ability to walk. Both legs were very bad and her right knee hurt her terribly. One of her legion of doctors finally told her that knee replacements would be necessary. They'd do one and then after she had recovered from that surgery — and that could take quite a while — they'd do the other. My mother didn't like the idea of such extreme surgery but she less liked the idea of not being able to walk. Extensive x-rays and tests were done and a date for the first operation was set. A few days before, I took her into the hospital to meet the surgeon who'd actually be performing the procedure. He announced, much to her horror, "We're going to do the left knee first."

This was to her horror because the right knee was the one that had really been aching her. She knew both were bad but the left knee, at least, didn't hurt much. She asked, "Can't you do the right knee first, doctor?" He put the x-ray up on one of those wall-mounted lightboxes and began pointing out things on it that we would both have to have graduated medical school to understand.

"I understand the right knee's the one giving you pain," he said when he finally dialed it down to Layman's English. "But the left one is the one that's about to go. It could just about explode on you at any time. If we do the right knee first and then the left one goes before you can get around on the right knee, you'll really have trouble."

She understood that but said, "I just dread the idea of having to get around on the painful right knee for six or more months."

It was at this point that I asked the question that you would have asked, too: "Doctor…I apologize in advance for this but could you just please humor me for a second? Could you check and see if these x-rays you're pointing at aren't mixed-up?"

"Certainly," he said. He put each x-ray in turn up on the lightbox for even closer study and within moments, we heard him exclaim with his own horror and embarrassment, "Jesus Christ…these are mislabeled." The left said RIGHT on it and the right said LEFT on it.

He was furious with the folks in the x-ray department and he immediately picked up the phone and read someone the Riot Act, the Trespass Act, the Stamp Act and at least two of the three acts of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. He assured us repeatedly that the mistake would have been caught well before they operated but…well, the whole thing would have made you uneasy, too. We went to my mother's primary care physician who, in addition to being a brilliant and trustworthy man who'd taken care of her for many decades, was a senior official with the hospital.

He read the remaining act of Marat/Sade to many people and I think got someone fired or at least transferred to a less critical position. I imagined this person being reassigned to the hospital cafeteria and sitting there all day, labeling the egg salad sandwiches as tuna. At her primary doctor's urging though, we agreed to trust the surgeon we'd met with.

Well, almost trust. The morning of the operation before I took her in, I took a big marker and wrote WRONG KNEE on the wrong knee.  That day, the right knee was the right knee.

Yesterday when I went in for my knee operation, I thought of doing that but right after I got into the humiliating gown, the nurse produced a marking pen, asked me to point to the knee they'd be working on and then she scrawled something on it. A few minutes later, my surgeon came in for a pre-surgery conversation and he had a pen and he asked me to point to the knee they'd be working on. I showed him it had already been tagged…but as he started to put the pen away, I said, "You know, a great artist is supposed to always sign his work." He laughed and added his initials to my right kneecap. (I wonder if they're still on there. It's all bandaged up at the moment.)

Getting back to my mother: They did operate on the correct knee and according to her primary physician and everyone else there, it went as well as could be expected with a woman in her mid-seventies and in as bad physical condition as she was. It took an awfully long time to heal and she began to announce that when the time came to have the other one done, she wasn't going to have the other one done. Too much pain, not enough gain. As it turned out, by the time her left knee might have come up for consideration, her health had deteriorated in too many other ways. The doctors said it was too dangerous…and unlikely to help her much even if it was successful.

For about the last sixteen years of her life, she got around her house in short distances using a walker. When we took her anywhere, she was wheelchaired about…or more correctly, transportchaired about. There's a difference between a wheelchair and a transport chair, though even people who know that difference use the terms interchangeably. She had a transport chair, which is also known as a companion chair. Briefly, the difference is that if you're in a wheelchair, others will push you about but you can propel and steer yourself around to some degree. In a transport or companion chair, someone else has to push you all the time. In fact, I bought her two transport chairs.

One was a fancy, expensive-looking (but not that expensive) and sturdy one that I kept in the trunk of my car. In fact, when I bought my current car in 2010, I told the saleslady, "Okay, I'll take it…if we can fit my mother's wheelchair into its trunk." I hauled it out of the old car, placed it into the one I was about to purchase and said, "Okay, write it up!"

She was very pleased with that chair. Made of shiny, dark blue metal and sporting a thick seat cushion, it had a Nascar feel to it. When I took her to the hospital, as I seemed to do daily for a while there, there'd be other folks around in wheelchairs — drab, battered ones that the hospital had around. My mother loved being seen in her "throne." It seemed to say that someone cared about her. Which was true…and it wasn't just her son who did.

Then she also had a lighter, foldable one I got her. It too looked snazzier than the chairs transporting most patients around the hospital. She kept this one at her home and it was used by her various caregivers when they took her places. They'd take her to the market or take her to the hairdresser. That is, when they weren't robbing her. She liked this chair, too.

When she passed away, I gave the Nascar one to someone else in my life — a performer of some note and a person I love a lot. This person needed a chair and I couldn't think of a better recipient.

I kept the foldable companion chair because I figured, "One of these days, someone else I know is going to have a need for it." And last week, I found someone who did: Me. In preparation for my knee surgery, I had a whole day of running around Cedars-Sinai Hospital and I decided it would be a lot less painful to make it a whole day of two friends pushing me around the place. I didn't stay in the chair all day. They'd push me to an office and then I'd hop out and use my limited ability to walk to get around. Others in the waiting room would look at me like I was Guy Caballero on SCTV, being pushed around in a wheelchair he didn't need, just to make others work and wait on him.

I didn't feel the slightest bit of shame at that. What I did feel was a lot of, "So this is what the world looked like to my mother all those years."

In 1968, Dennis James — who you probably know best as a game show host — was the host of The All-American College Show featuring talented college kids. Here he is introducing a new group in their first time ever on television…

Here's the latest installment of Everything You Need To Know About Saturday Night Live. This is Season 15 and while the thumbnail shows Jan Hooks, they don't feature a lot of her in this season review. I remember her being the best thing on the show in these years, though I admit I may be prejudiced because I knew her and worked with her and thought she was just spectacular in every way…