I don't like being solicited. If you come to my door unasked or call my phone without an invite, I don't care what you're hawking. No sale. Even if it's something I need at a price I can't get anywhere else.
I especially don't like being solicited to subscribe to theatrical seasons. I go to a lot of plays but I've given up subscribing to the whole season of any company. It always comes down to me having tickets for some night I can't go and/or a play that I've paid for but really don't want to attend. It's like the Kellogg's Variety Pak. I bought the thing for the little boxes of Frosted Flakes and Sugar Smacks but I got stuck with the little box of Shredded Wheat which I couldn't stand.
And I really, really don't like being solicited to subscribe to the theatrical season of a theater company that I couldn't attend if I wanted to. This afternoon, I got a phone call asking me to sign up for the coming season of the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera Company. This is because when I was in Pittsburgh last month for the first time in my life, I bought tickets to one play.
I live in Los Angeles and have no plans to go back to Pittsburgh at all, let alone four times in the next year. I'm sure the Pittsburgh CLO will have a fine season but I will be, if Mapquest is accurate, 2441.05 miles from the theater.
Come on, people. Look at the area code before you dial it. You're wasting your time and worse, you're wasting mine.
Boy, are some of you going to love this. Alan Light was the founder of what is now the Comics Buyer's Guide and he used to be all over every comic book convention with his camera. He recently came across a huge stash of photos that he took at the 1982 San Diego Comic Con, back in the days before it was called the Comic-Con International. I've helped him identify a number of people in the photos and there are still more whose names escape us at the moment. If you can identify anyone who is presently anonymous, drop Alan a note at .
The picture above is of the great writer-artist of Disney ducks, Carl Barks, posing with Burne Hogarth, who was probably best known for drawing the Tarzan newspaper strip. But that's just a sample. Alan has posted a ton of these great photos...even a few with me in them. I think I'm about eleven in those shots which is odd because I was thirty years old in 1982. But don't let that concern you. Go take a look.
People on both Liberal and Conservative websites seem to be discussing this piece by David Frum on what Karl Rove meant to the Bush administration and our nation. I have to wonder if people don't give Rove too much credit for devious planning. It may be that he was as brilliant and ruthless as some pundits make him out to be. It could also be that a lot of things have happened in our world lately that no one could have predicted or can explain...but since they worked out for George W. Bush, and no political analyst ever wants to say "I can't explain this," it's easier to attribute them to clever Rovian strategy.
You might want to bookmark this link. It's Comedy Central's page for their Indecision 2008 and it's full of stuff from the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert shows, including the latest video clips.
Okay, here's my Buffalo Bob Smith story. It took place at the Licensing Show in New York in the early nineties, and I guess it helps make the point if I explain what happens at those events. The Licensing Show is a place where companies exhibit, either because they own great properties (famous characters, copyrighted designs, etc.) that someone might want to put on a t-shirt or lunch box, or because they license the rights to put great properties on those t-shirts or lunch boxes, or because they broker deals to make that happen...
Well, anyway, just understand that this is a convention about the marketing and licensing of identifiable properties and that most of those present are involved in some way with licensing. There are exhibits all over and many of the booths are filled with celebrities and freebees, the better to attract wanderers to the displays.
This particular year, Buffalo Bob Smith — star of the legendary Howdy Doody kids' show — was there to promote a new wave of Howdy Doody licensing from King Features Syndicate. He was appearing in the King Features booth and when I heard this, I decided to amble over and see if I could meet him. That was until I saw the line. It looked like about a three hour wait to meet Buffalo Bob, get one of the autographed photos he was signing and shake his hand. The line, filled wholly with folks in the proper age bracket to have watched Howdy Doody when they were eight, snaked through the entire hall, down past booths where you could get your photo with W.W.F. wrestlers or Playboy models or some suffocating person in a giant Snoopy costume.
The length of the queue caused me to pass. I mean, with a line like that, how much time could you possibly get to talk to the guy? Twenty seconds? So I took a look at him — older but still handsome in his Buffalo Bob jacket with the leather fringe — and I continued walking.
Later on as I walked past, the line was still just as long, if not longer, but I heard someone call my name. It was a friend who worked for King Features. She welcomed me into their exhibit space and we chatted for a while. Then she said, "Would you like to meet Buffalo Bob?" I said sure but there was that long line...
"You don't need to stand in line," she said and she led me over to Buffalo Bob. We came up behind him and she interrupted his signing to do introductions. He threw down his pen, turned around and got up to shake my hand, then we talked for two minutes or maybe three, I, of course, said all the geeky stuff everyone said to him about watching him when I was a kid and being happy to see him mobbed by fans, etc. And all the time I was saying such things, I was eyeing the line of people who'd been waiting half the afternoon for thirty seconds with him. Eyes were glaring at me with raw hatred and I could hear them all thinking, "Who's this rude clown who thinks he's so much better than us that he doesn't have to wait in line?" Well, of course. If I'd been there for 3+ hours, I'd sure have resented the hell out of me.
It made me nervous so I said to Mr. Smith, "Listen, I'd love to talk to you longer but you have all these people here waiting to meet you..."
He ignored that and went on talking to me about whatever we'd been discussing. The lady who introduced us had told him I did the Garfield cartoon show, and he was telling me how much Garfield merchandise he was seeing everywhere. Again, I said, "I shouldn't monopolize you like this. These people have been waiting all afternoon for your autograph..."
And I will never forget this — and so help, me this is verbatim: Buffalo Bob Smith, the King of Doodyville himself, pulled me to one side and he whispered to me, "You don't understand...my job is to keep the line as long as possible."
Each year at the Comic-Con International in San Diego, I get to preside over a game that people love. It's called Quick Draw!, and no matter how big a room they give us, we always seem to fill it.
Up front each year are three cartoonists seated at projectors that enable everyone in the house to see whatever they draw. One cartoonist is always Sergio Aragonés, my long-time collaborator and the man some call the Fastest Cartoonist on the planet. Another is always Scott Shaw!, my long-time friend and occasional collaborator and a man who does the impossible by keeping up with Sergio. The third slot rotates from year to year. At the most recent con, it was filled — and filled well — by Mike Kazaleh, an animator and comic book artist who proved he was good enough to play alongside Sergio and Scott.
I am out in the audience with a cordless microphone, getting suggestions and running little games that challenge the cartoonists to think on their feet, only with a pen. It's been described as Whose Line Is It Anyway? but with cartoonists. If you've seen it, you know how funny and amazing it all can be. If you haven't seen it...well, we have a little sampler here for you. Someone, quite without my permission, put two video clips up on YouTube of the one a few weeks ago. The video is shaky and the audio isn't grand — you'll hear people seated near the camera better than you hear me running the proceedings — but it may give you a bit of an idea of how it all works.
In the first clip, we're playing Secret Words, which is one of the improv-cartooning games I invented. I select someone out of the audience. In this case, it's the noted author Len Wein, who was there because I asked him to be. We show three words to the cartoonists and to the audience. Everyone in the place knows the three words but Len. The cartoonists then have to do drawings that will cause Len to guess what the words are, one at a time.
Here's the clip, which runs a bit over five minutes. I'm the one playing Game Show Host. Sergio is drawing on the large screen at left. Scott is drawing on the middle screen. Mike is on the screen at far right. Len is the guy guessing. Let's all click and watch...
...and that's how you play Secret Words. Now, this next game runs a lot longer. It's called Sergio Scenario and in it, I keep throwing ideas at Sergio and he must add each one to a drawing. The idea is to try and stump him...which I've yet to accomplish in more than a dozen attempts. The scene keeps getting more and more complicated and he somehow finds a way to include each new element, no matter how outrageous. This clip runs a little over thirteen minutes and it starts after we'd already done about five minutes. It started with me asking Sergio to draw our character, Groo the Wanderer, attacking someone...and then I had him add some bank robbers...and then I said to make it a blood bank, so he drew Dracula into the tableau...and you'll see how it grew from there. If you ever get to a convention where we're doing this, come see it in person because it's even more amazing than this clip would have you believe.
August 15, 2007
