Forbes Magazine offers a wise and perceptive report on what's going on with the WGA-AMPTP negotiations...or maybe we should call them non-negotiations. In any case, I think any report is wise and perceptive when it quotes me.
Al Scaduto was born in 1928. I don't know anything about his personal life and I never met the man but I can tell you about his neat and tidy career. In 1946, he graduated from the School of Industrial Art and immediately got a job for life with King Features Syndicate. At the time, one of their star cartoonists was Jimmy Hatlo, who was responsible for two strips — Little Iodine and They'll Do It Every Time. (Little Iodine started as a recurring character in the other strip and proved to be so popular that she graduated to her own, Sunday-only feature.)
Hatlo was assisted by a guy named Bob Dunn and in '46, Scaduto began assisting Bob Dunn, working on both strips and on the comic books of Little Iodine, which ran from 1949 until 1962. Hatlo cut back on his work during the fifties and died in '63 but the transition was seamless, with Dunn and Scaduto there to pick up the slack and replicate the Hatlo style. Generally, Dunn wrote the gags and did some of the pencilling, while Scaduto did most of the pencilling and all of the inking on They'll Do It Every Time. Hy Eisman did much of the art on Little Iodine until that strip ended in the mid-eighties.
Dunn passed away in 1989 and Scaduto took over writing They'll Do It Every Time along with drawing it. He was reportedly still at it when he died yesterday on his 79th birthday. His pal and fellow cartoonist Mike Lynch has the sad news.
You've probably heard the new outrage that CIA interrogation tapes were destroyed, perhaps in violation of the law. Of all the pieces I've read about this, this one by Kevin Drum seems to have the most logical handle on the whole situation.
Monty Python's Spamalot is playing all over the world. Above is a scan of a blurry Polaroid photo of me on stage with the national touring company when they were playing Columbus, Ohio a few weeks ago.
Meanwhile, an Australian TV reporter checks in on the London company of Spamalot. The gentleman wrongly thinks that "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," which is in the show, was from the movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail but otherwise, it's a nice little segment on the production with some good clips.
The other day here, I linked to a fine article by KC Carlson about what comic book collecting was like back in the (cough, cough) old days. Something later went amiss with the link so I took it down. This one should work.
December 9, 2007
