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…

Dave Garroway was a popular TV host in the early days of television. He was best known as the host of The Today Show on NBC from 1952 to 1961 but before that, he hosted a live variety half-hour called Garroway at Large. It came out of Chicago from June of '49 until June of '51. As you'll see if you watch the entirety of this episode from November 19, 1950, the show had a nice troupe of singers and comedians as well as the then-typical array of on-air bloopers and mistakes.

The member of his cast that you're most likely to have heard of was Cliff Norton, who had a pretty good career as a supporting player and comic actor. I wrote about him here. He had the distinction of being edited out of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World shortly before its release so his name is in the opening credits but he's not in the film.

The special guest on this episode of Garroway at Large was Al Capp, a very awful man who wrote and drew the very wonderful comic strip, Li'l Abner. Before we had the recent debates about whether you could still admire Bill Cosby's work despite his personal transgressions, I heard professional cartoonists having the same argument about the work of Mr. Capp. He appears in the last third of the show mainly to segue into a sketch with the Garroway supporting players dressed up very badly as the characters from Lil Abner. It's…odd.

I've set the video embed below to begin playing at the point in the program when Capp is introduced but if you want to watch the whole show, you can click here. You can also just watch in the window below by moving the little slider back to the beginning…

I spend less and less time these days reading online forums — on Facebook or elsewhere — about old comic books. It's a topic dear to my heart but discussions there are too often hijacked by the occasional participant who's lacking in knowledge about the field and/or an ability to cope with someone having different tastes. It's especially bad in debates over super-hero comics and especially especially (two especiallies) over super-hero comic book artists of the past.

The most debated-over of the seventies is probably Frank Robbins and after reading the eighty-seven quadrillionth thread about him, I feel the need to write something here about the man and his work…and by extension, about creative talents of his generation. In some cases, though the work is long since done and the folks who did it have passed from this mortal coil, some people are still hating on them…to what purpose, I have no idea.

I mean, it's not like there's a chance of Frank Robbins, who died in 1994, coming back and drawing more Captain America stories. Some of us loved what he did but there are folks who I think worry about that happening again. And he didn't even do that many.

Mr. Robbins was mainly a writer-artist for newspaper comic strips…and one of the best. Like about 50% of the artists who drew adventure newspaper strips at the time, he was heavily influenced by two men — Noel Sickles and Milton Caniff — who were in turn heavily-influenced by each other. Caniff in particular was regarded as the supreme role model by most in the adventure strip field and Robbins was hardly the only guy who drew a lot like him.

Robbins was such a natural at the Caniff/Sickles style that he not only got a job producing a nationally-syndicated strip at the age of 19 but the strip he was handed was the popular Scorchy Smith and he took it over from his hero, Noel Sickles. That's how good he was. At the age of 19.

A few years later, Robbins decided to create his own strip and his Johnny Hazard ran in papers from 1944 until 1977…a most impressive run. It was also in the Caniff/Sickles style but what a lot of his fellow artists believed but rarely spoke aloud was that Robbins "did" Caniff better than Caniff. Among his peers, that was a widely-held opinion — if not in the forties then certainly later on. The late Alex Toth used to rant on and on about how as Caniff's work declined over the years, Frank Robbins just got better and better.

Robbins was also, as an artist, lightning-fast. Caniff sometimes spent 60 hours a week producing the daily and Sunday Steve Canyon strip — and that was with one or more art assistants plus a letterer. Robbins, drawing a strip with similar density and detail, would write and draw Johnny Hazard in three days a week — two for the dailies, one for the Sunday page — unassisted except (sometimes) by a letterer. With the rest of his week, he would paint and do what some would call "fine art" and his creations wound up in some pretty prestigious galleries.

Robbins was proud of his "fine art" but there was a problem with it: It didn't pay all that well. And in the sixties, the kind of newspaper strip he drew was going out of fashion so his income from it was dropping slowly but certainly. He was concerned about that one evening around 1967 when at a gathering of the National Cartoonists Society, he met Carmine Infantino. Infantino was then transitioning from drawing for DC Comics to running DC Comics.

Infantino's mission right then was the reinvention/revitalization of the entire line and a lot of longtime freelancers were dismissed — some because they demanded health insurance, some because Carmine thought their work was old-fashioned and dull. There were also some personal animosities in play. One of the people he brought into the DC Talent Pool was Robbins, who decided that it would be more lucrative to spend the days he wasn't working on Johnny Hazard working for DC Comics.

He started as a writer and his first efforts were awful. There's a 1968 issue of The Flash where you can even find a letter from me saying as much. I am now embarrassed by some of those letters and I also now understand the problem that I didn't fully understand then. It wasn't all Mr. Robbins' fault. Marvel was gaining dangerously on DC in sales and several DC writers were ordered to emulate Stan Lee. They all did a pretty poor job of it, picking up on Stan's worst habits and missing even the point of them.

When Robbins stopped trying to do that, he turned out to be a pretty good writer. In fact, he became my favorite Batman writer of the period and I was pretty fussy about Batman writers. He also wrote Superboy for about four years producing what I think were the best Superboy stories ever done.

Eventually, Robbins also drew the occasional story for DC and on Batman, his artwork was instantly controversial…to say the least.

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Here's a Legal Eagle Double Feature for you: Two videos by Devin Stone, the YouTube attorney who talks a bit too fast but seems to know his stuff. In the first, he evaluates the many past and present lawyers who've represented Donald J. Trump in his many recent investigations, indictments and lawsuits. Some of these folks will probably write books and I wonder how many of them are going to say that the reason they lost was that the client insisted on doing things his way despite sound advice to the contrary…

And here's Counselor Stone talking about a legal issue regarding online videos in which someone shows someone else's video so they can "react" to it and when that does and does not qualify as "Fair Use." Stone used to do such videos. He and a lawyer friend would show some law-oriented movie and comment on how much what was in the movie resembled actual courtroom procedures and how much the legal content resembled the actual laws…

Last night, the Writers Guild held a meeting at the Hollywood Palladium. The last time I was in that building up on Sunset Boulevard was for the meeting at which we voted to end the 1988 strike. It's hard to believe that the Palladium has not been torn down and replaced by a Walmart…or just plain fallen down on its own accord.

Anyway, I didn't attend last night but my great friend Shelly Goldstein did. In the wee hours of this A.M., she wrote and posted a report on Facebook and I just got her permission to share it with you here…

My thoughts on last night's WGA meeting at the Palladium. Bear with me:

The room was absolutely packed. The energy was unlike any industry or guild event I've ever seen. I'm going to describe it with some simple adjectives:

"Happy"

"Positive"

"Engaged"

"Unified"

Not a single person in the room thought it was a perfect deal that would revolutionize the industry and end all our creative and financial problems.

It wasn't a roomful of wild abandonment, 1,000 people looking to party. Although there was palpable joy oozing from every inch of the room.

It was a roomful of focused, celebratory word-nerds justifiably proud — showing absolute respect to our board and negotiators…and reveling in the joy of a word that gets way too little respect in this country and perfectly describes what we need a hell of a lot more of:

"Union."

People were — ok, this sounds silly, but it's all too rare in 2023 — "nice." The room was engaged, everyone wanted to hear from others' experiences on the line. People showed care and concern for each other. If you bumped into somebody, they apologized before you could. People showed genuine joy for what we did over 146 days.

What "we" did — thousands of people in the WGA, thousands more who supported us in countless ways. Not — as in the past — a single Kingmaker or Exec or Agent or Politician who swooped in to save the day. It was all of us, together.

The leadership spoke beautifully – notably our President, Meredith Stiehm and co-chief negotiator, Chris Keyser.

If Chris' speech was video'd, please watch it. It was articulate, factual, heartfelt and invigorating. We all bought the pitch in the room.

Our chief negotiator, Ellen Stutzman, went through the deal point-by-point — with pride and intelligence, never overselling it. She explained what was asked for, what was possible, what was accomplished, how it was different from similar asks during these negotiations (and during past decades.) She told us what they'd said and how the negotiators moved the line as best they could.

And moved it, they did. Not 100%, but no one in the room was silly enough to believe that was possible.

Still, the gains in the deal run the gamut from good to strong to spectacular.

How long has it been since a "rally" offered its attendees simple "facts?"

Ellen also made it clear the WGA's future intention is not merely to rest on this contract, but to work more closely with the members to make sure provisions are adhered to by our employers.

Cheers and standing ovations were plentiful. My two favorites went to Drew Carey & "Fake Carol."

There was clear support for SAG, IATSE, UAW and other union workers.

I have been in this guild for a long time and I've never seen anything like it. I don't know if I ever will again.

We all know there will be problems. We're screenwriters.

But sometimes we're blessed with a moment of clarity and actual joy.

This was one of them.

For years I've sung "It Goes Like It Goes," the Oscar-winning song written by David Shire & Norman Gimble from the 1979 film Norma Rae. It ends with this lyric, that played through my head throughout the evening:

It goes like it goes, like the river flows
And time, it rolls right on.
And maybe what's good gets a little bit better.
And maybe what's bad, gets gone.

Last night, thanks to our membership, our leaders and our allies, things got a little bit better.

May it continue.

As you may have heard, all the late night comedy shows are returning to the air: Bill Maher this Friday, John Oliver on Sunday and Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon and Meyers on Monday. Seth Meyers won't be having any guests that night. He's doing a one-hour catch-up "A Closer Look," and I have high expectations for it.

At the moment, Mr. Oliver and Mr. Meyers are my favorites followed closely by Mr. Colbert. My TiVo is set to snare their shows but I figure anything that might interest me on Kimmel's or Fallon's shows will be easily catchable on YouTube. Over the last year or so, I've found that the occasional smart observations from Mr. Maher aren't worth sitting through the many things that seem to be said just to prove he's unafraid to say things that might be unpopular…and I feel like that's the reason he's saying them.

The Daily Show will return on October 16 with more of its on-air auditioning guest hosts. I would guess that Hasan Minhaj is no longer as high as he once was on the list of those who might get the job permanently. Mr. Minhaj, who I liked the few times I saw him perform stand-up, has been accused and has more or less confessed to telling stories from his life that were exaggerated to the point of being…well, if not lies then the next-closest thing.

True, most comedians do exaggerate or simplify true tales to make them shorter or clearer or more pointed or, most often, funnier. I think most audiences understand that but there's a line one can cross and Minhaj seems to have crossed it too far too many times. To his credit, he's confessed to his "crime" but that doesn't give him back all or even enough of his credibility.

Someone will probably write in to ask why, if SAG-AFTRA is still on strike — and it is — the hosts can appear on television again. It has to do with how the role of talk show host falls outside the category of what the current strike is against. I'd explain it in greater detail but that's about all I know. Actors, however, are not supposed to be promoting product from the companies they're striking so the guest lists may be…uh, interesting.

I'm trying to limit the amount of attention I pay to the guy who insists he won the last presidential election even though he can't persuade one judge in this country — including the ones he appointed — that this is so. Still, with the very, very bad news he's gotten lately, it's hard to look away.

If you're puzzled about the adverse ruling he received the other day — or arguing with MAGAfied friends who say D.J.T. was wronged — you might want to watch Ben Meiselas, a civil rights attorney and a partner in the Meidas Touch Network, explaining what it is that Trump and his associates did wrong. Skip past the annoying ad in this video. I like the Meidas Touch Network but I question their integrity in some of the sponsors from which they accept advertising.

In a non-hysterial, non-theatrical way, Mr. Meiselas explains the situation and, unlike so many who discuss this kind of thing these days, cites actual evidence. Too many people think that "facts" are things you establish by saying them louder and more often…

The Writers Guild has declared its strike officially over…with the slight caveat that it could resume if the membership rejects the offer. I said earlier that they won't and now that I've studied it a bit, I'm even more certain than that. It really is an impressive list of gains, maybe the best I've seen in my five (5!) Writers Guild strikes.

And of not-nearly-as-much importance, I've declared my little telethon fund-raiser over…which is not to say you can't continue to donate via the clickable box in the right margin. I'm just going to stop being a nag about it and interrupting the posts here with banners. Thanks to all who gave whatever you gave. You've helped fund this blog for another year during which it will only cost me an awful lot of my time.

The leadership of the Writers Guild of America has announced that the strike will end at 12:01 AM tonight Pacific Time…which is actually tomorrow morning.

In the past, strikes didn't end until the membership had voted to accept the contract but the way it's done now (I guess) is that we go back to work while we vote and if by some chance the membership votes to reject the deal — which won't happen — then we go on strike again. Or something. I'm not entirely certain how that would work but like I said, it won't happen. Voting will be October 2nd through October 9th and I'll go out on a shaky limb here and predict 94% acceptance.

Here is the deal. Here is a comparison of what we asked for and what we got. I gave both a quick read and this is by no means a serious analysis but it reads like a damn good deal. It's certainly an improvement on the final offer we got back on May 1. I would like to hear what people with legal training and more business acumen than I have think of it. I can already hear some people yelling "It's not good enough" but we hear that on every contract, especially from those who wouldn't be losing anything if we stayed out a few more months.

I'll also be interested to hear how our new terms could benefit SAG-AFTRA in their negotiations, which I presume will be resuming shortly. On some level, this kind of thing is like parents with a lot of kids: If you give one child a bicycle, you have to give every child a bicycle. But studio lawyers are sometimes very crafty at giving one union a gain in terms that don't easily translate to another union. I hope they haven't managed to do that in this instance and that our gains become actors' gains.

This might be the oldest episode of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show I've ever seen. It's from January 14, 1964 and while the video isn't great, it's amazing that this exists at all. You'll notice the show has a very different pace from Johnny's later broadcasts and from any other talk show of the last few decades.

Johnny makes reference to his announcer Ed McMahon and bandleader Skitch Henderson sitting in for him the past few nights. I vaguely remember nights like that and I also recall a few times when Ed guest-hosted all by himself. For some reason, Ed in later years (and in his autobiography, I believe) complained that he'd never been asked to guest-host. I don't know what that was all about…