Friday, May 21, 2004

Matinee With Mickey

At a lovely luncheon this afternoon, the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters paid tribute to Mickey Rooney...so this afternoon, I reached my fill of jokes about people being short and often-married. In what turned out to be a very nice event, The Mick was honored by a dozen or so of his friends including Ann Rutherford, Margaret O'Brien, Frank Gorshin, A.C. Lyles, Gene Reynolds, Fayard Nicholas (the surviving member of The Nicholas Brothers), Hal Kanter, Johnny Grant and Red Buttons. I keep seeing Red Buttons speak at local functions and parties and I am amazed how incredibly funny and even topical he is. I wish someone like Jay Leno or David Letterman had the guts to let an 83 year old man come out and do stand-up because the man is an absolute treasure and I think he'd score with all ages.

Mickey was pretty good, too. The last two times I've seen him speak, he was rambling and lacking in coherence and he seemed to be imitating the Dana Carvey parody of him. This afternoon, he was crisp and sincere and told a couple of lovely stories that might have been a wee bit exaggerated (like the one about Mr. Walt Disney naming a certain mouse after him) but they entertained a crowd that loved and respected him dearly. He spoke warmly of his friends and of his spouse, Jan, with whom he currently tours in a one-man/one-wife show. They're playing the Cinegrill in Hollywood in June — a fact that did not go unmentioned. I think it's terrific that at age 84, he's still performing, and that so many turned out to honor him.

• Posted at 8:48 PM · LINK

Hey, Kids! No Comics!

Here's an e-mail that I thought was worth answering in public...

I've enjoyed your blog, and your other work, for some time and I just wanted to ask, how long ago was your article about how difficult things are in the comic book industry written? I ask, not because I'm a wannabe creator myself, but because I'm a wannabe consumer. I've been hearing for years about how bad things are in the industry and well, has there been any sign of recovery at all? And if not, is the day approaching when comics simply won't exist anymore? This is something to be frightened of. I know I should be more frightened about the War on Terror, but honestly, what are we fighting for?

Maybe we can get Halliburton into the comic book business. No, forget I said that. The answer to your question is that my piece was written a few years ago and the business is slowly recovering in some ways and not in others. I suspect that if tomorrow a law was passed that said comic books could not be made into movies or TV shows, about two-thirds of the business would go under because so much of comic book publishing is now in the nature of loss leaders for movie/TV deals. From my own perspective, I don't think I'll say the comic book publishing business is healthy until I see some actual profit in just publishing comic books..

I don't believe there's a danger of the form ceasing to exist. There will always be folks who want to create comics and those who want to read them, and those two groups will always find a way to get together. Certainly though, the "comic book industry" has changed and will continue to change. When you go to a comic book convention these days, there's usually a lot in that hall that has to do with movies and animation and gaming and other media. Comics have become less insular and the very definition of the word is changing. Once upon a time, comics were things that were printed on paper. Now, it's becoming a style of art and story in almost any medium, much as "manga" and "anime" have evolved into more expansive terms that denote a genre more than a specific product.

The old business model for comic book publishing has become obsolete, as all business models eventually do. It's evolving more into graphic novels and to conveying comic-book-style material in other media. In the future, I think most publishers of comic books will think of themselves as multi-media companies that market concepts and a style in a variety of formats, one of which will sometimes resemble what you and I now think of as a comic book. Some of them are already halfway there.

• Posted at 8:14 PM · LINK