This one got past me and most (all?) of the comic book/strip sites. Comic creator Don Sherwood, who was probably best known for the short-lived Dan Flagg newspaper strip, died March 6 at a hospice in Huntersville, N.C. He was 79.
That Sherwood's passing went unnoticed in the comic community is not surprising. He was a man of mystery, telling different things to different interviewers. In one article, he claimed his first job in comics was assisting Milton Caniff on his strip, Terry and the Pirates in the early 1940s. I'm not sure that's true. In another, he said his stint on Terry was working with Caniff successor George Wunder in the early sixties. Again, I'm not sure. He did launch Dan Flagg in 1963. The strip, which was similar to Caniff's Steve Canyon but set in the Marines, only made it into a handful of newspapers and lasted but four years. Still, Sherwood told reporters it was a "...huge success, running in virtually every daily newspaper in the country in the 1960s." (As a reality check: Back when most cities had more than one newsaper, the best a strip could manage would be to appear in one paper in each city. The most successful ones were probably in about 25% of all the papers then being published.)
But Dan Flagg attained a certain notoriety among those who study comic strips. Sherwood employed others to write it (primarily Archie Goodwin) and others to draw it (including Al Williamson, Angelo Torres, Al McWilliams, George Evans and Gray Morrow). For a time, each ghost thought he was the only assistant; that Sherwood was doing all the other work on the strip. Then one evening, Goodwin, Williamson and a few of the others got together for dinner, started talking about their current projects...and discovered that they, not Sherwood, were writing and drawing Dan Flagg. The incident so amused Goodwin that he wrote a story for the first issue of Creepy (drawn by Williamson) about a comic artist named Baldo Smudge who hires others to do his strip. In the story, the ghosts get together, demand credit and more money...and are murdered by Mr. Smudge.
Dan Flagg ended in 1967 and Sherwood began working for Charlton Comics where his most notable assignment was a comic that adapted the TV series, The Partridge Family. Thereafter, it gets harder to track his career, which included a series of newspaper strips, some of which actually appeared in newspapers. He did The Flintstones for a time, primarily for the foreign market. He did a panel in conjunction with Dick Clark called Dick Clark's Rock and Roll, which I think (but am not certain) saw print. There were others that were announced and promoted, like a revival of Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, but I'm not sure if they were actually syndicated.
And I'm afraid that's about all I know about Don Sherwood. Never met the man...but I thought his passing ought to be noted someplace where folks in and around comics might learn about it. Perhaps someone else will be moved to do a little digging and find out more about him.
Message boards where folks can post anonymously always strike me as enormous repositories of outright lying. People often try to win arguments by claiming bogus credentials. During the Writers Guild strike, for instance, the Hollywood-themed forums were full of anonymous people claiming falsely to be WGA members or to have inside info on the negotiations...info that later turned out to be totally spurious. Obviously, some of the messages that claimed special knowledge or access actually did...but enough were fraudulent that it's brain-dead stupid to give any of those messages any credence; not unless there's a real, real good reason.
It's the same way with military-related debates. Debaters keep claiming military experience that they may or may not actually have. That said, I was amused by the following exchange today in a public forum over on the CNN board where the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is being discussed. I have no idea if either of the parties actually served but I thought it was worth noting...
SFC Grunt
As a 18 year Vet of the Army and the Infantry Core , this makes me sick to my stomach , I cant wait to see how the ground force reacts to this. The military is not a place for Gays and will cause nothing but trouble when this is past. So call me what you want , I have 6 deployments under my belt for my county how about you ?
SPC Mike
I'd rather serve with a gay soldier, than serve under an incompetent NCO that can't even spell Corps or passed correctly. Which one of these is a greater threat to military readiness?
Longtime TV host Art Linkletter has died at the age of 97 and I'm getting e-mails from people who are waiting for me to post some great anecdote or personal encounter with the man. I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint these folks but I do have a few thoughts to offer.
Art Linkletter was darn near the last of a breed — those guys who came out of radio, got into television and functioned as hosts. They weren't comedians. They weren't musical performers. They weren't actors. They were just hosts, often of game shows, and there were a lot of them around in the early days of TV. What did Art Linkletter do? He was a host.
I'm afraid he was never a favorite in our household. Much of America saw him as warm and genial and beloved, I suppose...but everyone I knew saw him as unctuous and enormously condescending to the people who got plucked from his audiences to appear on his shows, House Party or People Are Funny. He just had this way of acting like they were all colossal boobs and that it was his job to make sure they came across that way. There also seemed to be no product he wouldn't sincerely endorse if they were paying him enough.
Some of the obits are recalling the event that turned him into a staunch anti-drug crusader. In 1969, his daughter Diane jumped to her death from an apartment window. Dad blamed it on LSD and the drug culture and permissiveness...this, despite the fact that the coroner determined she'd had no drugs whatsoever in her system at the time. Some campaigns to curtail drug use are admirable but Linkletter's just struck me as self-serving. Half of it seemed like a desperate attempt to convince everyone, himself included, that his daughter's death was not a suicide and he had therefore not been a bad father; that she was murdered by drug-pushers. The other half of the message seemed to be that to fight the plague of drugs, we had to all vote Republican.
At the time, I was rabidly anti-drug and reasonably Conservative and even I found Mr. Linkletter's little speeches offensive and counter-productive. To his credit, he eventually backed way off them. I seem to recall a brief news cycle years later wherein he recanted his position on marijuana, decided it really didn't lead inevitably to "the hard stuff" and even endorsed its legalization. But by that point, he was just a guy who sold cheap life insurance to seniors in commercials and no one particularly cared what he said.
He obviously had a long and prosperous life. When Disneyland opened, Linkletter did some hosting duties for Walt...and since Walt couldn't afford to pay the going rate for Art's services, they worked a barter. Linkletter's company got the concession to sell Kodak film in the park for some lucrative number of years. I don't have the stats handy but Scrooge McDuck would have envied the kind of money Linkletter wound up making off that arrangement. His other investments also did nicely for him so he probably lived quite well when his TV career went away.
I used to see him around town all the time but I never said hello to him. Usually when I meet a celebrity of any tenure, I can think of something the person did that I liked...so I can say, "I really enjoyed your work in that." I couldn't think of anything in that vein regarding Art Linkletter so he remained unapproached by me. Oddly enough, the one time I liked him was the last time I saw him anywhere. When Steve Allen passed, there was a tribute evening out at the Alex Theater in Glendale...performers who'd worked with Steverino telling tales, doing their acts, etc. Linkletter was the Master of Ceremonies and though he was around 87, he was sharp, funny and darn good at what he did. I found myself actually wondering why he had so totally disappeared from TV apart from the occasional commercial.
Anyway, as you can tell by now, I don't have a great story to tell you about Art Linkletter. But you know who does? Laraine Newman does. Here's a link to the tale of her TV debut...as one of the kids who was brought on to say clumsy, adorable things on Mr. Linkletter's House Party show.
(And I can't resist pointing something out. I have this ongoing fascination with the way in which everyone I know eventually intersects with everyone else I know. I've been working with Laraine a lot lately...and by the way, as a comic actress, she more than lives up to her reputation, which is that she's one of the best. From this article, I learned that her writing teacher is Claudette Sutherland. You may recall that recently, I did a couple of lectures up at UCLA about the show, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and for one, I interviewed an actress who was in the original Broadway cast. That actress was Claudette Sutherland. My life is kinda like Facebook but without all the annoying invasions of privacy.)
May 26, 2010
