My buddy Earl Kress, whose new blog is simply bloggerific, suggested I link to this. It's a collage of George W. Bush speeches from the last three years that aired on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. And it looks like it took three years to edit.
A couple more items about the Superboy custody battle. There's a pretty good article over at E!Online that traces the history and even quotes me. Two quibbles: I do not think that Superman was ever ruled a "work for hire." Also, in the mid-seventies campaign to win a pension and credit for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the name of Jerry Robinson should be prominently mentioned. Jerry, an award-winning cartoonist (and one-time assistant to Bob Kane on Batman) was as important as anyone in that battle.
That skirmish kicked off when Siegel authored an inflammatory press release putting a "curse" on the Superman feature that Warner Brothers was about to begin filming. My pal, comics historian Mike Catron, has made the text of that press release available and provided some historical context, all in a PDF file, meaning you need some Adobe product to read it. You can download Mike's presentation of this historic document here.
Those of you who've attended the Comic-Con International in San Diego for a good many years have probably at some point set foot in the Hotel San Diego, located in the heart of downtown. The venerable landmark was built in 1914 by the Spreckels Brothers, owners of the Spreckels Sugar Company. They were responsible for a lot of the development of San Diego and they gave the city what was for decades, one of its finest hotels.
In the seventies, when we all started going to San Diego Comic Book Conventions, back when they called them that, it was a frequent venue for con events. Some years, before it outgrew any available hotel ballroom, the Inkpot Awards presentation was held there. There were many memorable parties and gatherings, such as in 1982 when a group of Jack Kirby's friends staged a memorable surprise birthday party for him in one of its halls. Perhaps some year, you were either so hard up for money or so desperate for an available room (or both) that you even booked into its sadly-deteriorating accomodations. It was one of the cheaper places to sleep and con-goers took advantage of that up until June of 2001 when the building was declared structurally unsafe and was closed down.
On Saturday, April 15 at 8 AM, the Hotel San Diego will be imploded to make way for a new federal courthouse building. Which is silly. Anyone who's tried to find somewhere to stay for this year's Comic-Con International can tell you the city doesn't need a new federal courthouse one tenth as much as it needs more hotels.
Thanks to Jackie Estrada for letting me know about this. I have only fond memories of the place. Then again, I never stayed there.
I need to correct a couple of things in the piece I posted yesterday about the Superboy situation. This is what happens when you're so excited about a hunk of news that you write 'n' post in a hurry.
In the 1947 court decision, the judge ruled that Jerry Siegel (not Siegel and Shuster, as I misstated) owned Superboy. That was because Jerry developed the idea, Jerry submitted it, Jerry had it rejected and then done without him, etc. That's why Shuster's heirs are not involved in the matter. The judge in '47 ruled that Superboy had been wrongfully purloined from Jerry.
I mentioned that a lot of observers thought it was an odd decision — Superman to DC, Superboy to Siegel — that was done with the expectation that ongoing appeals would allow higher courts to sift through the matter. That has sometimes been the conventional wisdom in comic book history...but as I've pointed out regarding other situations, the conventional wisdom ain't always right, or may not be right. A little while ago, I spoke to a learned legal analyst who took a good look at the '47 decision and concluded it was wise and cogent and intended to settle matters. So I apologize for being too quick to parrot the accepted history and I've removed those lines from the earlier posting.
There's an awful lot of misinformation out there. I just took a tour of comic book message boards and in addition to the usual references to "Siegal" and "Schuster" — those names aren't that hard to spell, people — there are a lot of fans who seem to have gotten their facts out of The Phantom Zone. Do not believe everything you read on the Internet. Even on this site.
The simple fact here is that in 1947, Jerome Siegel was awarded full ownership of Superboy. He sold the copyright to DC Comics and they, by purchasing it, acknowledged that he was the owner and also that Superboy was a separate copyright from Superman. Under the laws of the day, that copyright would have expired by now and DC would have long since received the number of years of it they expected to receive for their purchase. But Congress has voted repeatedly to extend copyrights and since they have, they decided it would be unfair to folks who sold them under the old terms to give all the additional years automatically to the buyers. So they set up a procedure by which creators or their heirs can reclaim the copyrights. That is what the Siegels have done, and I think it's terrific. The only way it could be better is if Jerry was still around to enjoy it.
Still to come is the legal question of whether the Smallville TV show infringes on the Siegels' property...but the judge in the current matter refused Time-Warner's motion that he rule that it did not. So make of that what you will.
This morning's feature presentation is a short clip of what Fred Astaire once called the best tap dance routine ever put on film. How's that for an endorsement?
A few months ago here, we lamented the passing of Fayard Nicholas, who was one half of the Nicholas Brothers. That's Fayard and his brother Harold you'll see dancing in the excerpt, which is from the 1943 movie called Stormy Weather. In the number, the great Cab Calloway sings and then the Nicholas Brothers hoof it up. Whoever edited this piece for the Internet cut off Mr. Calloway's part of it...but that's almost okay because this clip over on Google Video has Calloway singing and then it cuts off in the middle of the dance routine.
Actually, if you like either half, you oughta just spend the fourteen bucks and buy the DVD of the whole movie. There are a lot of great musical numbers in it.
Here then are the Nicholas Brothers doing what they did better than anybody else...
April, you may be fascinated to learn, is National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month. Now, this raises all sorts of questions, not the least of which is who the heck designated it National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month? Who has that authority? And what is it about April that makes it more conducive to a grilled cheese sandwich than, say, March or May? I'm guessing there's some sort of National Cheesemakers Council that looked at their month to month sales and noticed that people weren't making a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches in April. So someone there said to someone else there, "What can we do to promote the making of grilled cheese sandwiches in April?" And then the other person said, "Well, how about if we designate April as National Grilled Cheese Sandwich month?"
But never mind that. What bothers me is that in the interest of celebrating National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month, some people are polluting the whole concept of the grilled cheese sandwich. As part of a promotion on this site, the DuPont Corporation has gathered close to 6,000 different recipes for grilled cheese sandwiches and they've posted a sampling of them.
This is very wrong. There aren't 6,000 recipes for a grilled cheese sandwich. There is one. You take two slices of bread, put a couple of slices of cheese between them and grill the thing. That's a grilled cheese sandwich. Even I can make them.
Flipping through the recipes there, I see concoctions involving all kinds of bread (including baguettes, bagels and crullers) and all kinds of cheese (including cream cheese and Brie) and all sorts of additives like walnuts and apples and sauerkraut and peppers and cinammon and molasses and pumpkin and pretty much the entire contents of a Whole Foods Market. On that site, they're all cooked in pans coated with Teflon® because DuPont makes Teflon®...and they may be great sandwiches but they're not grilled cheese sandwiches. A grilled cheese sandwich is two slices of bread and a couple of slices of cheese. And always will be.
According to this site, Americans make 2.2 billion grilled cheese sandwiches at home every year and the average American eats 8.4 grilled cheese sandwiches a year. If they're counting these creations that include sausage and maple syrup and peach chutney on a muffin, they're cheating. A grilled cheese sandwich is two slices of bread and a couple of slices of cheese. If these people had any brains, they'd know that.
April 7, 2006
