As you may have heard, Idaho Senator Larry Craig was arrested last June and later pled guilty to questionable conduct in a Minnesota airport. Such a little thing — who among us hasn't been in that position? — and now everyone's calling for his hide.
Democrats are demanding he resign because...well, there are few things in the world more satisfying than seeing someone who has scolded you for your supposed low morals be found to have even lower ones. When such hypocrites are exposed, it's hard not to try and make an example of them and besides, it's fun.
Republicans are dumping on him because he can only embarrass them further and, besides, that's pretty much a "safe" seat for the G.O.P. When David Vitter, the Republican Senator for Louisiana, was caught recently in a prostitution scandal, few in his party called for his ouster. That was because his state has a Democratic governor who probably would have appointed a Democrat to fill the vacancy, and then it's likely a Democrat would have won the seat in the next election. But Idaho rarely elects anything but a Republican so the party can only benefit from Craig's replacement.
Frankly, I don't care if the guy is gay or not. That's his business. I also don't care if he's a colossal moral hypocrite since I've kinda reached the point in my Washington cynicism where I figure that the more you lecture people on their morality, the more likely it is you have big problems with your own. No, I think Craig oughta go because he said this...
At the time of this incident, I complained to the police that they were misconstruing my actions. I should have had the advice of counsel in resolving this matter. In hindsight, I should not have pled guilty. I was trying to handle this matter myself quickly and expeditiously.
If that's true — if he wasn't soliciting gay sex when they caught him — then pleading guilty is one of the great all-fired braindead moves of all time. Even without advice of counsel, you oughta know that. Someone that stupid should not be making our laws.
On the other hand, if it's not true — if he was trolling for men's room sex and he said the above to try and save his image, he oughta be kicked out of public service for sheer idiocy. That's even stupider than pleading guilty to a sex crime you didn't commit because you think it'll end your problems quicker. And what's even stupider is thinking that anyone anywhere will believe it.
With both sides dumping on him, it's only a matter of time before he disappears from public life and gets a job at Radio Shack or something. What none of us should forget though is that this man has been a State Senator, a Congressman and then a Senator for a collective thirty-three years.
Discussions of what's wrong with the comic book industry and how to make things better often strike me as talking all around the pachyderm in the parlor — the fact that fewer and fewer potential customers out there are warm to the idea of buying a thing on paper called a comic book or magazine. In an era of Internet and home video and video gaming, one can get plenty of material that more or less parallels what comics have to offer...and you can get it with sound and with animation, and you can get it in your home without leaving your chair, and you can often get it for free. With that in mind, the news that Disney Adventures magazine is ending after seventeen years oughta throw another scare into lovers of hardcopy comics and other publications.
Every panel I've ever been on about the future of comics has included the wish-dream that our form would reach out to younger readers and find new methods of distribution apart from the traditional funnybook racks. Well, Disney Adventures connected with younger readers and achieved a superior market penetration. The problem was not that you couldn't find it. It was easily available at supermarket checkout stands, right next to the National Enquirer and the Altoids. When TV Guide got away from its old digest format, Disney Adventures picked up a lot of those spots, as well. The problem was that advertisers didn't see it as a dandy place to advertise. Even with a million-plus circulation — numbers that any comic book publisher today would kill for — the people behind Disney Adventures couldn't make the math work.
No one who loves the concept of paper magazines should conclude the form is doomed to extinction but we also shouldn't ignore a very real market trend here. Once upon a time, Playboy sold seven million copies per issue and now it sells three million. This is not because of a declining male interest in beautiful nude women or because the women aren't as beautiful or as nude as they used to be. It's because you can now get those beautiful nude women on the Internet or on DVD and maybe they're even better in that venue. The same thing is true of Spider-Man comic books and the Spider-Man movies. Before about 1985, when a comic book character became a movie or TV show, that promoted the comic book and sales skyrocketed. In the last few decades though, it almost seems to work the other way around. If kids can get a great animated Batman for free on TV, they don't need to go out and buy the comic.
It's worth noting that increasingly, Disney Adventures downplayed its comic strip content and sold by promoting the current hot movie, the current hot TV show, the current hot video game, etc. More than a million copies per issue were purchased but they were sold because consumers were interested in Harry Potter or High School Musical or Justin Timberlake. They didn't care about a paper magazine except as an adjunct to the stuff they really cared about.
Obviously, Disney Adventures was not a comic book. It was a kids' magazine that had comic book content — and less and less of it over the years, it seemed. But it's still worrisome that its publishers are folding it and saying they want to "...better focus resources and maximize long-term growth potential through new magazine and book initiatives." That roughly translates to: "We need to figure out if there's a way to make money publishing paper magazines these days." I sure hope someone finds one.
If you think Liberals are glad to be rid of Alberto Gonzales, read what the Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg has to say about the guy. I don't agree that the Democrat-controlled hearings have been about nothing but Gonzales was a disaster either way: If there was wrongdoing, he was a bad Attorney General because he initiated or endorsed or covered up wrongdoing. If there was no wrongdoing, as Goldberg insists, then Gonzales was a bad Attorney General because he made it look like there was. When someone like Goldberg is agreeing with John Edwards that you're terrible, that says a lot.
I know I write too much about Jack but that's because people are always asking me about him. And as more time passes on this planet without him, more people ask. I don't know how many times I've heard fans of his work regret that they didn't get to meet him. His work enriched their lives in some way and they assume, probably correctly, that a personal encounter would have been even more enriching. At the very least, they could have told him what his unbounded creativity meant to them, professionally and/or personally.
It's easy to see the professional influence. A staggering number of people in the arts — and not just in the field of drawing super-hero comic books — learned from him. It might have been how to draw action or how to stage a love scene or even how to invest characters with emotion and excitement. It could even have been his fierce work ethic. That's all well and good.
But I continue to marvel (no pun intended) at the number of people who were inspired by Kirby in non-artistic ways...people who were motivated to make more of their lives or just to be better human beings because of something Jack wrote, something Jack drew, something Jack said. I was always impressed with his outright decency and honesty, and the fact that he treated everyone around him well until they gave him a good reason not to. Sometimes, he continued to treat them well even after he had plenty of good reasons not to.
You'd think it would be hard to miss Jack. We are not all that far from the day when every single important comic book he produced will have been reprinted in a fancy, deluxe edition. I can only think of a few other people in the comic book field of whom that could be said and none of them produced anywhere near as much work as Kirby. But the work is only part of what he meant to so many of us. We still have the work. What we don't have is the man. That's what we miss.
This time, we bring you ten minutes of The Martha Raye Show featuring a pantomime routine by Martha and her special guest, Buster Keaton. This is a live telecast from 1956 and they're more or less replicating a routine done with Charlie Chaplin in the movie, Limelight. I think that's Paul Douglas doing the introduction with the Bil Baird marionettes...and that's about all I have to add. So click already.
August 29, 2007
