Saturday, November 13, 2004

Harry Lampert, R.I.P.

Harry Lampert, the artistic co-creator of The Flash, died this morning at age 88. The cause was listed as a cerebreal hemorrhage, but he had been in failing health for the past few months, battling cancer and undergoing treatments at a hospital near his home in Florida. A native of New York, Harry showed early artistic talent and by age sixteen was working at the Max Fleischer animation studio, primarily as an inker and clean-up artist for Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons. One day, he heard about a way to pick up extra money...drawing for these new things called "comic books." Harry begin moonlighting, and eventually working full-time for some of the earliest "shop" enterprises, thereby becoming one of the true pioneers of the field. He mostly drew "funny" comics but as the industry turned towards superheroes, he did a few of them, too. The most notable came in 1940 when editor Sheldon Mayer at the All-American company (later absorbed by DC) was assembling a new book called Flash Comics.

Mayer needed someone to draw the title character, a super-speedster devised by writer Gardner Fox. Lampert got the job but was not happy drawing in that style. Little suspecting it was the feature with which his name would be forever linked, he asked off after two stories and Mayer, who knew he had miscast Harry, happily replaced him. Lampert moved on to funnier features (including filler gag pages for many of the company's books) and later out of comic books and into magazine gag cartoons for, among many others, Saturday Review and The Saturday Evening Post. In the late forties, he segued into advertising work, where he enjoyed great success and eventually formed his own agency.

Cartooning was only one of his passions. Another was bridge, a game at which he became so expert that after retiring from cartooning in the mid-seventies, he wrote several books and a syndicated column on the topic. In the eighties, comic book fans tracked him down and he began appearing at conventions, selling newly-created sketches of The Flash. The last few years of his life, he bounced back and forth between bridge tournaments and comic-cons, happily signing autographs and marketing his wares at both. I enjoyed talking with the man and interviewing him on panels, and I'm sure glad we all got the chance to meet and know him.

• Posted at 9:22 PM · LINK

Another Tom, Another Jerry

E-mails are reminding me of another duo that went by the name of Tom and Jerry...the singing pair who later reverted to their real names of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. They were "Tom and Jerry" for a couple years...and apparently, they even wrote most of their songs together then, whereas the later Simon & Garfunkel hits (the important ones, at least) were written wholly by Paul. Art was Tom and Paul was Jerry, in keeping with the obvious sense that, in any Tom and Jerry team, Tom has to be the taller of the two. They had ten or so modestly-received records, then broke up, in part because Paul decided he didn't want to be half of the new Everly Brothers. He wanted to be all of the new Elvis Presley, so he went off and recorded a song on his own. Thereafter, they recorded with others under an array of phony names before finally getting together again. Interesting that they didn't do anything all that memorable until they started being, more or less, themselves.

My pal Buzz Dixon informs me that the original, 19th century meaning of "Tom and Jerry" was to go drinking, brawling and carousing, and he directs my attention to this dictionary page on the subject.

• Posted at 2:39 PM · LINK

Today's Political Rant

It's hard to get on a political website this week without confronting the question of whether our recent presidential election was fixed. This is a shame because it largely overwhelms what is probably a more valid, fixable issue, which is whether our recent presidential election was run with all possible competence. It may well be that no one tried to rig the vote in any way but that there were still a lot of errors committed and undependable machines employed, and that the people responsible need to be slapped around a little and forced to correct things.

Unfortunately, Americans don't seem to get mad about the possibility that votes were lost or miscounted unless they think it caused their side to lose an election. After the mess of 2000, I can't recall a single prominent Republican expressing outrage that the machines yielded such arguable results, that voters were wrongly purged from the voting rolls, that ballots were confusing, etc. Some quietly urged a reform of the system, if only so that their side wouldn't get accused of cheating the next time...but there was no public outrage from the winners, and the losers were too busy charging fraud to deal with what may have been simple ineptness. If principle trumped partisanship, both sides would have been equally incensed...and probably about errors, not rigging. Most of the improvements that were put in place seem to have been a matter of local officials knowing they could not defend their voting machines and procedures and not wishing to become "the next Florida." In some cases, it would seem they replaced old, unreliable systems with newer, unreliable systems...and that the appeal of paperless voting machines is not that they're easier to rig but that it's more difficult to prove if they're just plain wrong.

My hunch is that the recent election was not stolen but that there were an awful lot of irregularities that should not have occurred. My further hunch is that if angry Democrats were to shut up about the vote now, there would be a lot less impetus to fix those irregularities.

I know this was not likely but I kinda wish John Kerry's concession speech had instead said something like this...

It now appears that when all the ballots are counted, we will not have enough electoral votes to win the presidency...however, Senator Edwards and I have decided that it is not in the best interest of this country that we concede at this time. We have dozens of reports of questionable vote counts, of precincts that logged more votes than they have registered voters, and of provisional and absentee ballots that have not even been opened. Many of these are in states where they cannot possibly affect whether the state's electoral votes go to us or to the President...but that doesn't matter. Most of these are probably innocent, explainable errors...but that doesn't matter, either. Every American has the right to have his or her vote counted, and to have it counted accurately and given the same respect as any other vote. We do not expect the result of this election to change but in the hope of changing how votes are recorded and counted in the future, we have decided not to concede until we are satisfied that every vote — whether it is for us, the President, Ralph Nader, Michael Badnarik or Daffy Duck — has been counted, and counted properly. If you are upset that this delays the resolution of this election, I'm sorry. Please direct your outrage to the people who are paid to count the votes accurately and, in some cases, have not done this.

There would have been howls of anger and charges of "sore loser," I'm sure. But I think most of America would have respected it, and it might have done some good. In this day and time, there's no excuse for a vote count the losers can't accept just as readily as the winners.

• Posted at 2:20 PM · LINK

Two Toms and a Couple of Jerries

You all know Tom and Jerry, the cat and mouse from M.G.M. cartoons. If you are a true animation buff, you also know Tom and Jerry, the tall-and-short pair that appeared in Van Beuren cartoons before them. This new website tells you all about the human duo, whose cartoons I remember well from my early television viewing. Sheriff John ran them, over and over, on his Lunch Brigade cartoon show on KTTV, Channel 11 here in Los Angeles. After the feline/rodent characters named Tom and Jerry became famous, the old Van Beuren shorts were retitled "Dick and Larry"...but I am certain that the ones Sheriff John ran were still named "Tom and Jerry."

In fact, I recall wondering how the cat and mouse in my Tom and Jerry comic books and in the cartoons over on Channel 13 could have the same names as the two guys on Sheriff John's show. Around this time at a restaurant, I heard an adult order a "Tom and Jerry" from the bar and I wondered if the drink was named after the human Tom and Jerry or the animal Tom and Jerry. When you're a kid, the world can be so mysterious.

• Posted at 12:35 PM · LINK

Remembering

The Washington Post has set up a searchable web page with info and, where available, photos of all the soldiers who've died in the Iraq conflict. A sad reminder of just some of what this is costing us.

• Posted at 10:46 AM · LINK