On Monday, there will be a segment on CNN spotlighting Joe Simon, co-creator of Captain America and a true legend of the comic book industry. I'm told it airs in the news blocks at 10 AM and 2 PM but I have no idea what that means in terms of time zones. I'm just going to set my TiVo to record a lot of the daytime programming and hope to snag it. It'll probably get bumped by Breaking News about who fathered Anna Nicole Smith's cat's last litter.
The above is currently the headline story on the website of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. I read it and my first reaction was that the paper has an odd definition of "breaking news." With all the disasters and scandals and life-threatening things happening in the world today, the fact that Tony Bennett has the flu and can't do two shows at the Las Vegas Hilton hardly qualifies as important.
But then I thought: If I had tickets to that, it would matter to me...not as much as some other things but I'd still appreciate knowing about it, a.s.a.p. so I could rearrange my life and not waste time going to the hotel. Wouldn't it be nice if every event you might attend had a website that you could trust to be updated with last minute info or a confirmation that everything will happen according to schedule? I wonder why the Ticketmaster people haven't set up something like that. I'm sure there are logistic problems with getting the various theaters and concert halls to keep it updated but there are also logistic problems if something's cancelled and hundreds of people show up for it. Just a thought.
If you care about the Don Imus matter — and I could sure understand if you didn't — this article by Joe Conason makes some pretty good points about it. It's a Salon link and if you're not a subscriber, I believe you need to view a short ad before they'll let you see the article. But I'm told the ads are shorter now than they used to be.
Incidentally: When is Al Sharpton up for re-election? I often find the Reverend Al remarkably entertaining and there are times on talk shows and in debates when he speaks with an honesty that folks who might ever hope to get elected to some position never seem to muster. Still, I've never understood his role in all these controversies upon which he seems to pounce. If I were a black guy, I think I'd wonder who appointed him and Jesse Jackson to speak on my behalf and to decide whether those who sin against my race were worthy of forgiveness. As Conason notes in his piece, it's not like Sharpton's hands are completely clean when it comes to accusations. Even leaving that aside, whenever there's an issue that touches upon race, the Reverend Al has a way of turning up and suddenly making it all be about the Reverend Al. That doesn't help.
Also, for a prescient view of the Imus situation from a few years back, read this.
Every time I post about the radio show I'm doing this afternoon, I get the time wrong and have to come back here and correct it. The episode of Time Travel with me as the guest is today at 4 PM East Coast time, which is 1 PM West Coast time. If you see me telling you anything different, don't believe me. It's 4 PM East Coast time, 1 PM West Coast time. Duh.
And this probably won't be the last message on the topic, either.
It's interesting that there is this recurring discussion about whether comic strips should end when their creators die...or even when they've been around for a certain, undetemined amount of time. I can't think of another art form where this kind of thing is even considered. No one is suggesting that now that Vonnegut's dead, we get all those copies of Slaughterhouse-Five off the bookstore shelves to make more display room for new authors. Or — and this may be a better analogy — that today's musical performers should not record old songs, thereby creating more opportunity for new songwriters. Should great movies not be remade so as to make it easier for today's screenwriters?
I guess there are a few people out there who have those sentiments but I think it's awfully unrealistic to think the system will ever work that way. You and I can sit here and decide that James Bond should have been laid to rest when Ian Fleming died and/or Sean Connery turned in his License to Kill. But I'd hope we wouldn't waste a lot of time thinking that anything will kill off 007 except a lack of interest in his adventures on the part of the paying public. Rarely does anything creative go away unless there's no market for it. Why should any other consideration be controlling in comic strips?
A lot of wanna-be strip cartoonists seem upset that reprints of Peanuts are still in newspapers — something like 2,400 of them, last I heard, making it one of the three most successful "current" strips. Why didn't it go away when Mr. Schulz died? Because readers still wanted to see those characters in their newspapers and the folks who make money off the property still wanted to make that money. Here's an excerpt from a message I received from Roy Wallters...
I understand where you're coming from on this but what if someone came up with the next Calvin & Hobbes and there was no room for it on the comics page because of reprint strips like Peanuts and Popeye and old strips being continued?
Yeah, but there was room for Calvin & Hobbes. Old strips being continued didn't stop it from attaining a truly impressive client list of papers in record time. If and when another strip that good comes along, the folks who edit the newspaper comics pages will find a place for it. If it means dropping another strip, fine. They'll drop whatever strip they perceive as their least popular...which will probably not be reprints of Charlie Brown and Snoopy.
Mr. Wallters also asked, "What if the people who will be continuing B.C. can't handle it and it becomes much less funny than it's ever been?" Well then, the same thing happens that would happen if Johnny Hart were still at his drawing board and the strip became much less funny than it had ever been. It might even lose enough audience to not be worth its makers' time to make or its syndicate's to syndicate. A bad strip is a bad strip whether it's done by the guy who created it or by his grandmother. Al Capp showed us what that was like, the last few years he and his crew did Li'l Abner. And when papers started dropping it left and right, he packed it in.
Granted, it's a slow process and if you believe some newspapers are way too reticent to chuck an established strip that's way past its prime, I wouldn't argue the point. I'm arguing that they shouldn't drop it just because one person died, especially if that person has arranged for assistants and collaborators to carry it on.
Let me give one more example here and I'll pick an oldie so I don't insult anyone currently trying to make a living. Bud Fisher created the comic strip Mutt & Jeff in 1907 and before long was making some serious money off it and employing many assistants. Around the late twenties or early thirties, Fisher decided he didn't even want to spend as little time as he was spending on it. His then-current assistant, a gentleman named Al Smith, began doing more and more of it and by 1932, Fisher wasn't even touching his strip. From all reports, he did nothing on it for the rest of his life except to give interviews in which he lamented the long hours he put in at the drawing table, and to pay Smith to ghost the strip and sign "Bud Fisher" on it. Fisher died in 1954, at which point Smith was allowed to sign it...and he kept on doing it for a couple more decades, during which it was one of the most popular, beloved entries on the funny pages. (Interesting aside: DC Comics published the Mutt & Jeff comic book from 1939 through 1958 and for many of those years, it outsold Superman.)
During the sixties, it was still a pretty good feature — Smith won the National Cartoonist Society award for the best humor strip in '68 — but in the seventies, its quality declined and a lot of new and better strips were coming along. Mutt & Jeff lost papers and therefore, income. Smith gave it up in 1980 and amazingly — at age 78 (!) — created a new strip and tried to make a go of it. It didn't succeed and meanwhile, others took over Mutt & Jeff and couldn't reverse its decline. It ended in 1982.
Now, if you believe that strips should end when their creator dies, tell me when Mutt & Jeff should have ended.
Lastly for now, here's a message from Russell Myers, who writes and draws one of my favorite newspaper strips, Broom Hilda — which was one of those great new strips that came along in the seventies and shoved Mutt & Jeff to one side. Russell, by the way, does his strip without a whole support team and still puts in a helluva lot of love and caring. He wrote me with the following to post here...
Over the years I've heard comments about how cartoonists doing older strips should step aside and make room for the new wave. Of course it was the new wave saying that. There has been plenty of commentary about comic strips as art. What I don't remember ever seeing is an in-depth explanation that producing a comic strip is a business. Woody Allen once said that if show business wasn't a business it would be called show show. The same applies to a comic strip.
Yes, as a kid I loved the comics and always wanted to do one. Then I grew up, more or less. I got me a wife and I got me some kids. Doing a comic strip was the only skill I had and it became vital to our welfare. What's more, it was a job that had no pension plan or benefits. Having had a school teacher for a father meant I sure as heck wasn't going to inherit much, so I had to plan ahead in case I outlasted my job by a decade or three. There are a few blessed comic strip creators who make it into the rarified realm of Big Money. Most of the rest of us make a living. Some make a very good living, some barely get by. From what I understand there are several people that make a living from B.C. and The Wizard of Id. More power to them. They should do everything in their power to hang onto what they have. In case the self-proclaimed purists haven't noticed, the Money Truck doesn't come down the street every day passing out free samples.
So to those who suggest that B.C. should be folded because Johnny is no longer at the helm, I say, most respectfully, kiss my inkwell.
I concur with the above except that the Money Truck does come down my street, not every day but Monday through Friday, passing out free samples. It's one of the perks you get from living in Los Angeles. Well, that and the new Third-Pound Angus Burger at McDonald's.
I'll have more on this topic later or, more likely, tomorrow.
This is a Budweiser commercial that I believe was produced for this year's Super Bowl. For some reason, I'm a big fan of Budweiser commercials, which is not to say they've ever caused me to consider buying their product. I'm also fascinated by how, beginning only a few years ago, Dean Martin's 1960 recording of "Ain't That a Kick in the Head?" had turned up in movies and TV shows and commercials, over and over and over. I don't recall hearing it anywhere before about 1993. I don't even recall Dino ever singing that song on The Dean Martin Show, which was on for nine years. But somehow, in a kind of delayed reaction, the record caught on big, at least among those who make movies and commercials. And as you'll hear, it pops up in this ad...
April 12, 2007
