A troop of cartoonists, including a couple of pals of mine, is currently in Germany on a USO tour of military bases. A press release tells us that their ranks include Jeff Bacon (Broadside and Greenside), Chip Bok (Akron Ohio Beacon Journal, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time and Newsweek), Bruce Higdon (Army Times, Army Magazine, Soldiers Magazine), Jeff Keane (The Family Circus), Rick Kirkman (Baby Blues), Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine), Mike Peters (Mother Goose and Grimm), Michael Ramirez (Investors Business Daily), Tom Richmond (MAD Magazine) and Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury).
It's a great effort and you follow them on Tom Richmond's blog, starting with this message. There's a slide show of a visit to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center over on this page.
As Gene Lyons notes, Fox News isn't even pretending to be "fair and balanced" any longer. Then again, I never felt they really expected anyone outside their target audience to believe that.
Since I'm posting a lot of Python stuff, I thought I oughta link to this article in the New York Times which I missed a week or two ago. It's a piece by Charles McGrath that focuses on the inner structure of the group...and it doesn't ask them where the name "Monty Python" came from.
The Army is boasting that its recruitment drives are going well and they're exceeding expectations. But according to Fred Kaplan, that's only being accomplished by lowering expectations...and also the standards for what they'll accept.
George Tuska, whose career in comics dates back to 1939 and his work in Will Eisner's studio, died around midnight on October 16 at the age of 93. The son of Russian immigrants, Tuska was born in Hartford, Connecticut on April 26, 1916 and grew up to attend the National Academy of Design. Even before graduation, he was assisting on the Scorchy Smith newspaper strip and making his way into the then-new form known as the comic book. In addition to the Eisner-Iger shop, he worked for a half-dozen other publishers and studios, including Fiction House, Fawcett, Harvey and Standard.
Drafted into the army, he served during World War II working as a technical illustrator at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. By the time he got back to New York and civilian life, the trend in comics was swinging from super-heroes to crime comics. He went to work drawing gangster stories for Lev Gleason and quickly became the star artist for that publisher's best-selling books, including the ironically-titled (because of how well it sold) Crime Does Not Pay. Not only did he draw most lead features and the occasional cover but other artists imitated his style. One, an illustrator named Pete Morisi, went so far as to call Tuska and ask for permission to draw like him. Tuska was flattered and told him to go right ahead.
Though Lev Gleason kept him busy, Tuska chose to freelance occasionally for other publishers, especially for Stan Lee at Timely Comics. When the comic book industry imploded in the mid-fifties, he segued to newspaper strip work, taking over Scorchy Smith for a time, followed by a long run drawing Buck Rogers. In the sixties, he was tapped to draw for Tower Comics on T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and returned to work for Stan Lee at the newly-successful Marvel line. Lee found him to be a valuable utility man and he worked on many titles including The Avengers, X-Men, Captain America and Daredevil. He was the first artist on Luke Cage, Hero for Hire and became the primary artist on Iron Man for some ten years. From time to time, he picked up assignments for DC, where he was usually assigned to "team" comics including Challengers of the Unknown, Teen Titans, Justice League of America and the Legion of Super-Heroes.
At times, Tuska was regarded as a solid "work horse" artist — dependable but not spectacular. One month, DC assigned a Legion story to a young artist who was considered "hot" in the business but who was not particularly reliable. The young artist missed his deadline and at the last minute, the DC editors turned to Tuska to quickly draw the same script. To the relief of the staff, Tuska delivered efficiently...and the same day his pages arrived in the office, the young artist suddenly delivered his — so DC had two versions of the exact same story. The editors studied both, decided that Tuska's was more skillfully drawn...and published the Tuska version. In the late seventies, they also employed him to draw a newspaper strip featuring Superman and other star characters called The World's Greatest Superheroes.
Tuska was much admired by his fellow professionals for his drawing skills. A few openly admitted to envy at something else. Apparently, as Al Williamson once put it, "George couldn't walk into the office without all the secretaries wanting to sleep with him." But Tuska remained faithfully wed to his charming wife Dorothy for 61 years. He is survived not only by her but by three children and an unknown number of grandchildren and great-grandchilden.
I had the honor of interviewing George at the 1997 Comic-Con in San Diego — not an easy task for he was almost completely deaf for the last few decades of his life. Al Williamson was one of many peers who asked to be there to honor Tuska and at one point, Al called him, "The artist everyone wanted to be when I got into the field." George spent the rest of the convention being mobbed by fans and doing sketches of his past characters. That was his main source of income for the last twenty years and he had a constant stream of commission orders...proof of how many fans he had and how much his work was enjoyed for some seventy years.
Did you catch the Monty Python guys on Live With Regis and Kelly this morning? It was odd seeing Regis challenging Larry King for the title of Least Prepared Interview of the Year. He didn't seem to be aware that the five of them hadn't been appearing together continually for the last forty years. I suspect that Mssrs. Cleese, Gilliam, Idle, Jones and Palin have come to learn that they're in for a rocky interrogation when the opening question is about where the name "Monty Python" came from. The night before, Jimmy Fallon led off with the same query and they didn't answer him, either.
But last night, they had the much-ballyhooed reunion in New York. IFC did a live stream of the event on their website and I've embedded the video here. It's not too clear and the video will cut in and out and freeze up on you now and then, plus the first minute or so is the tail end of something else with low audio. But if you have patience, you might enjoy some of what you can make out. I assume it was also recorded via more professional means and that that video will turn up in some future Python project — maybe the next documentary on the history of the group or the documentary after that about the history of the group or the one after that...
Matt Taibbi uncovers the counterfeiting scheme that contributed to the destruction of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and much of our economy. And of course, no one's doing anything yet to punish the criminals or even prevent someone else from doing the same thing.
October 17, 2009
