I've updated the list of panels I'm doing at the Comic-Con International in San Diego. A few names have been added and a few have been deleted. Here's where you want to be next week and when.
I promised to start recommending books about comics, did it once and then forgot about it. Sorry. Today, I'm going to suggest that if you're at all interested in the history of comics, you pick up a copy of Brush Strokes With Greatness: The Life and Art of Joe Sinnott, a book all about the man some call the best inker in the comic book industry.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'll mention that Joe is an old and dear friend, and that I wrote the Afterword in this book. (Some guy named Stan Lee wrote the foreword.)
For those of you who don't follow comics: Most comic art is created by someone sketching the thing out in pencil and then someone going in with a brush and/or pen and inscribing the precise lines in ink. Often, one person does both stages but sometimes, the work is divided. Some artists prefer to do one or the other...or are good or fast at one and not the other. In many cases, publishers have encouraged the assembly line procedure so that the better artists can produce more pages. There was a time when most inkers were guys who weren't qualified to do the pencil art and their limitations caused them to bring down the quality of the pages they finished.
That was more common in what we might call the pre-Sinnott era. Joe was and is a very fine artist, and he showed everyone what an inker could be. When he inked a bad artist, the work came out better and when he inked a good one, it also came out better. He's also one of the three or four nicest people I've met in comics...and I think some of you know how many people I've met in comics. So that's not faint praise. This book, compiled and written expertly by Tim Lasiuta, tells the story of Joe's life and showcases his artwork, plus it's filled with testimonials from those who've worked with him and/or admired his skills. How can you not order a copy?
Hey, I don't think I posted a link to order this. One of our "recommendations" that a lot of you took and thanked us for was back when we suggested you catch an old Billy Wilder film called, depending on which print of it you were seeing, either Ace in the Hole or The Big Carnival. For a long time, it was hard to catch and when it turned up on Turner Classic Movies, a lot of you got to see it for the first time. And liked it, if my e-mail is to be believed. It really is a timely story, given the trends of the news media.
It just came out on a Criterion DVD. I don't have my copy yet but I've never known the Criterion folks not to serve a movie well...so here's a link to get one. I just ordered mine. And here's an article by Jack Shafer about the film's history and regrettable relevance.
I never met Shirley Slesinger Lasswell but I followed her legal battle with Disney closely. I'm not entirely sure who was right in this matter but I admire the courage and tenacity to take on The Mouse and his battery of attorneys. I also have a certain fondness for her late hubby, Fred Lasswell, who gave us the Snuffy Smith comic strip for several centuries. "Uncle Fred" was that rarest of creatures — a cartoonist who was as colorful and unreal as the characters he drew. So I figure his wife had to be a great lady. You can read all about Shirley here.
Around 1972, Albert Brooks made a short film called "The Famous School for Comedians" for — I'm doing this from memory so I may be wrong — a PBS program called The Great American Dream Machine. It was based on an article of the same name that he'd done for Esquire, all about a supposed place of higher learning for folks who wanted to become comics. Reportedly, Brooks was amazed at how many people read the article or saw the film and then asked in all seriousness, how they could go about enrolling. I suppose if you didn't realize it was a joke you didn't have much of a future in the fast-paced world of Professional Comedy.
As far as I know, the film is currently unavailable. But around 1974, Milton Berle hosted a couple of pilots for a proposed talk show in which he'd sit around with various comedians, new and old, discussing the art and science of making audiences laugh. The series never went anywhere but one of the pilots featured Albert Brooks as a guest...and it really was quite amazing. Brooks topped Uncle Miltie at every turn and you could tell that though Berle tried to be a good sport about it, he was not pleased with the way the interview went. (The two pilots were released many years ago as a VHS tape and Laserdisc called Milton Berle's Mad World of Comedy. I don't think there's ever been a DVD release...and I'll warn you if you want to hunt it down, apart from the Brooks/Berle dust-up, it was a pretty tedious show.)
Anyway, they ran two minutes of Brooks's "Famous School for Comedians" film on that show — sweetened with phony laughter, which kind of adds an extra layer to the whole joke. Someone put that two minutes up on YouTube and now I'll shut up and let you watch it...
July 21, 2007
