Several folks have already e-mailed me that they have Len Wein comics they'd like to send to Len Wein. This is good. Hold onto them for a few more days. I'm setting up a web page with all the info on where to send them and what we need. When it's up, I'll ask you all to spread the word throughout the comic community.
In the meantime, I need help with something. This site has many readers who participate in the Grand Comics Database Project, a wonderful endeavor that is attempting to list every single funnybook ever done. Would one of you like to volunteer to compile a Len Wein checklist I can post? You have access to aspects of the database that I don't and it would be a lot easier for one of you to do it. Please drop me a note if you can help.
I just spoke to Len, who seems to be in a lot better humor than most of us would be if we'd lost our homes to fire. He has okayed me to begin collecting donations of comics on which he worked. All the copies he had were either burned or hosed down by firefighters.
Insurance will restore the house. I think it would be great if Len's many fans and friends restored his shelves of comic books written and/or edited by Len Wein. In a day or two here, I will post an address to which they can be shipped...and I'm thinking of posting a checklist (if I can put one together) and of appointing folks to accept donations at comic book conventions. Watch this space for details. But in the meantime, you might want to look around. If you read comics, you probably have a lot of Len's in your collection. You may even have duplicates you'd be willing to part with or you can ask your local comic shop owner if they'd be willing to send a few.
Start seeing what you can donate to the cause. I'll tell you where to send it shortly.
To little notice, the movie of Howard the Duck came out on DVD recently. My pal Steve Gerber was both frustrated and perversely amused by the fiasco that was the film made of his greatest creation. He was largely excluded from the conversion job but he saw enough that, about halfway through its filming, he smelled a possible flop coming, mainly due to the filmmakers' inability to deliver a convincing duck. I remember a lunchtime discussion we had. I'd seen nothing but Steve had seen enough to believe that whatever the merits of the script and other performances, the star just came off as a midget in an unconvincing duck mask.
The topic was whether his reaction was because they really hadn't created a on-screen duck you could accept or if Steve was just being too proprietary because they weren't replicating "his" version from the comics. He was trying so hard not to cause trouble for the project that he leaned towards the latter, figuring that the producers must know what they're doing; that it couldn't be as wrong as it seemed to him. As it turned out, it was...and Steve's hopes that the film would succeed and a lot of that success (and revenue) would rub off on him were for naught.
That day over lunch, I suggested that what the producers should have done was to engage Frank Oz to create and maybe perform the title character. Steve didn't much care for that thought. Nothing in any of Mr. Oz's famous puppet characters reminded him of his Howard's voice or manner. Still, he later told me that even if Howard had wound up looking like Cookie Monster and sounding like Miss Piggy, it would have been closer to what he had in mind than what he got.
In this article, Keith Phipps takes a look back at Steve's duck and what Hollywood did unto it. And this might be a good place for me to insert an Amazon link in case you want to order a copy of the DVD for some reason. I can't imagine what that reason might be but people do a lot of things I don't understand. It came out four weeks ago with a $14.98 pricetag and has already been marked down to eight. The insults continue.
The animation on the first dozen-or-so Disney features is considered a high watermark in its category...its category, of course, being Disney-type animation. Many of the later features are quite splendid as well, but one of the ways they made the animation so good (and saved a few bucks) was to trace and reuse animation from earlier Disney masterpieces. Don't believe me? Here's a little montage. Thanks to Mickey Paraskevas, illustrator of The Green Monkeys, for pointing me towards this.
April 8, 2009
