Saturday, June 19, 2010

Coming Next Month...

Hard to believe but the formal opening of Comic-Con 2010 is but 33 days from today, which means 32 days to those of you attending Preview Night. The time between Comic-Cons gets briefer and briefer as I get older. Before long, some of us won't even bother leaving San Diego. When one Comic-Con ends, we'll just hang around in the hotel lobby until the next one starts.

I will be found, as usual, at a mess of panels and events there. At the moment, I'm hosting or co-hosting 11 and I'm on at least two more. The full list will be up in a week or two but it's a lot like previous years. I'll be doing a panel with Sergio and the Groo Crew on Thursday afternoon, running Quick Draw! on Saturday morning, presiding over a Jack Kirby tribute panel on Sunday morning and Cover Story on Sunday afternoon. Earl Kress and I will be moderating a number of panels about cartoon voices. I'll be interviewing Paul Levitz on one panel about his career and on another, Denny O'Neil, Neal Adams and Paul (again) will discuss the revamp of Batman in the early seventies. There'll be a "spotlight" on Stan and Hunter Freberg on Thursday which will pick up where last year's left off covering Stan's amazing career. The con will also have a number of memorial-type panels for friends who've left us in the last year and I'll be emceeing one remembering Dick Giordano.

So is that everything? Well, some of you will notice something missing. Unlike the past nineteen years at the con, there will be no Golden Age Panel. Sad to say, we just won't have enough folks at the convention to have a proper one.

This was my decision as much as anyone's. We've had some great gatherings in this category — and there are still a lot of writers and artists around who worked in the forties and fifties, more than some people think. But most of them have elected not to attend the Comic-Con this year...and yes, many were invited. So it just seems more appropriate to interview those people on individual panels and not try to assemble a group chat when we really don't have the personnel. Perhaps the Golden Age Panel will be back next year. I hope so. In its absence this year though, there'll be plenty of others covering the early days of comics so no one should be too disappointed.

• Posted at 7:40 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Sean Flynn has an amazing piece on what went wrong out there on the Deepwater Horizon...with emphasis on the oft-forgotten human side of things.

• Posted at 9:59 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

This is an excerpt from Teaserama, a 1955 movie that filmed some then-current burlesque acts. Since you're not the least bit interested in the scenes of beautiful women taking off their clothes, we'll confine ourselves to these vignettes with two comics of the day, Dave Starr and Joe E. Ross. I don't know much about Mr. Starr but soon after this film was made, Mr. Ross was "discovered" by producer Nat Hiken and cast in the recurring role of Mess Sgt. Rupert Ritzik on You'll Never Get Rich (aka The Phil Silvers Show aka Sgt. Bilko). Hiken must have liked the guy because later when he produced Car 54, Where Are You?, he cast Ross as one of the two leads.

Ross was kind of a fascinating performer. He never quite forgot his roots in burlesque and in night clubs where he did a particularly filthy (for its time) act. For a time, he was the house comic at Billy Gray's Bandbox, a famous (then) nightclub on Fairfax Avenue here in Los Angeles, not far from where Canter's Delicatessen is now located. When he hit the big time, he'd get booked for live appearances where Middle American audiences would show up, expecting to see Gunther Toody from the TV show. Instead, they'd get Ross doing his old dirty act from the Bandbox and they'd all walk out in shock. He became impossible to work with — showing up late and never learning his lines — and Hiken fired him at least once from Car 54. The show only lasted two seasons but Hiken told associates that had there been a third, it would have been sans Joe E. Ross.

He got other work...like on the TV series, It's About Time. His catch-phrase ("Ooh! Ooh!") is still used by folks who've forgotten that it once belonged to him. He did voices for Hanna-Barbera cartoons and appeared in small roles in smaller movies. He died in 1982.

Sad/funny story about his death: He was hired for $100 to do a show in the recreation room of an apartment complex in Van Nuys where he was living. In the middle of his act, he was struck with a heart attack and died. After the funeral, comic legend Chuck McCann was asked by Ross's widow to go pick up the $100 for Joe E.'s final performance. McCann went and got the check but it was only for $50. "I thought it was supposed to be a hundred," Chuck told the guy who'd hired Ross. The employer said, "It was but he only finished half the show."

Here's the kind of stuff Joe E. Ross was doing before he became a big star...

• Posted at 12:44 AM · LINK