Monday, June 5, 2006

Recommended Reading

Before I head off for beddy-bye, I want to link to this article by Andrew Sullivan, a gay Conservative if such a thing is possible. It's about the way Bush and Cheney have treated gays in the past. It may or may not remain Sullivan's viewpoint after Bush's reported plans this week to start pushing that Federal Marriage Amendment that everyone seems to agree has no chance of passing. Which makes you wonder why he's suddenly getting behind it. The more right-wing end of his base won't be fooled into thinking that support for a constitutional amendment that won't happen is any sort of substitute for the things on their wishlist that they still might realize during his term of office. Bush sure doesn't need to look ineffectual about one more of his stated goals and to look like more of a "divider" to the middle-of-the-road crowd...so why get behind this movement now? I don't get it.

• Posted at 1:48 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

I decided not to post any more of the Forbidden Broadway scenes since I can just send you to this page and let you watch a much better-edited version of 'em there. There's a Demo Reel, which is mostly a commercial for the show, that runs a little under eight minutes and there's a reel of "Symphony Highlights" that runs almost twenty and is well worth the time. The video clip I posted yesterday was the first half of this.

So today, we have three minutes of Lewis Black plugging his HBO special which debuts next week. I dunno how the special will be but just about everything Mr. Black does amuses me greatly. So did this three minutes even if the video aspect ratio is a little screwy.

• Posted at 12:40 AM · LINK

Kopy Kane

One of the panels we'll be doing at the Comic-Con International in San Diego this year will be about Batman comics from the beginning through the 1964 "New Look" makeover. The dais will include — and this is a sad comment on the passing of time — three of the only four artists still alive who pencilled Batman stories before '64.

Among the topics I want to zero in on is how much Bob Kane did on the early Batman stories. We all know he did next to no artwork whatsoever on the comic books or strips after about 1946 but some people have — wrongly, to my understanding — declared he never did any of it. No, the man could draw...not well, perhaps, but there were certainly worse people drawing comics in the early forties. He also did a lot of swiping, we must note, copying poses out of pulp magazines, newspaper strips and elsewhere.

There's a weblog devoted to the illustrator Henry E. Vallely that has made an interesting discovery. What was probably the single most famous panel Kane "drew" in comics — a panel from the story in Batman #1 — was copied from a drawing Vallely did for a then-recent pulp magazine. Take a look and see.

• Posted at 12:29 AM · LINK