I don't recall when I became a fan of Drew Friedman's celebrity cartooning but it was not long after I first saw him in one of my favorite magazines — National Lampoon, I suspect. I was attracted for two reasons, one being the way he captured likenesses so well. And the other was that his choice of celebs to draw and the contexts into which he drew them suggested that that Friedman guy liked a lot of the same movie stars, Old Jewish Comedians, names-in-the-news and even other cartoonists that I liked. Also, I didn't have to get out the magnifying glass and search for NINAs in the hair and clothing of those he caricatured.

I later got to meet Drew and liked the artist, as well. So I really enjoyed a new documentary about him — Drew Friedman: The Vermeer of the Borscht Belt. It's not too long, the way a lot of those documentaries are and it's filled with famous folks talking about what an honor it was to be drawn by Drew. either in his early "stipple style" period or later when he developed a wider range of techniques. (Before I watched the video, I wondered if it would address his changeover and, yes, it does.) It's currently viewable, as is just about everything, on Amazon but also just about anywhere you'd expect to see this kind of thing. I recommend you seek it out.

A little less than two years ago on this site, we got to talking about an unsold pilot made in 1961. It was for a sitcom based on the movie, Some Like It Hot and it had Vic Damone playing the role played by Tony Curtis in the movie and Dick Patterson in role played by Jack Lemmon. That seems like a weird idea but then to some, so did the idea of turning The Odd Couple and M*A*S*H and a few others into TV shows.

What was bizarre about this transformation is that the pilot for this Some Like It Hot started with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon — unbilled — playing the same characters they played in the movie. Then in the first scene, they undergo plastic surgery and when the bandages are removed, turn into Vic Damone and Dick Patterson. That, it's explained, is how they will hide out from gangsters still trying to kill them. There is no explanation of how their voices and, I think, their heights change.

I wrote about this bizarre unsold pilot here and said I wished I could see it sometime. Well, I finally did and now you can, too. A nice copy is now on YouTube and I've embedded it below. It has a lot of good character actors in it including Peter Leeds, Jack Albertson, Mike Mazurki, Fritz Feld, Robert Strauss, Jerry Paris, Herb Ellis, George Liberace and, of all people, Rudy Vallee. Plus Tina Louise takes over the Marilyn Monroe role and Joan Shawlee plays the character portrayed in the movie by Joan Shawlee.

Someone spent a lot of money to make this and I'd love to know how they got Lemmon and Curtis to be in it and what Billy Wilder thought of the whole enterprise. I can see why it didn't sell and if you watch it, maybe you'll see too…

Actually, there's at least one King who's okay…Jack Kirby. And I have nothing against Alan King, Dr. Martin Luther King, The Little King or even King Kong. But I was glad to see so much of America out there peacefully protesting the kind of "king" we have now ruling this nation with an "I can do any f'ing thing I want" attitude. The turnout oughta convince a lot of elected officials in swing states that things will be swinging the wrong way for them if they don't distance themselves from Trump or Trumpism some time before the next Voting Day.

The Little King, by the way, was the title character of a now-obscure comic strip by the great Otto Soglow…

I wish politicians were better sports and didn't hide behind lame denials of reality like "They were all paid protesters" or "ANTIFA bussed them in." One unfortunate lesson that I think a lot of them have learned from Trump is "Your supporters never want to hear you admit you were wrong or the other side did something right." Here's Donald caught in a blatant mistruth refusing to admit he was wrong…

I suspect a lot of Trump followers know he lies left and right and that you can't believe what he says. I think they just like what they think he's doing to the country and the world and figure that, "Well, if he has to lie to get the job done, fine. Besides, all politicians lie, especially when they tell me something I don't want to believe is true."

I'm not walking well enough to make it to a No Kings rally today but I'm with them in spirit. I've seen a lot of very long lists online of illegal, immoral and unAmerican things that Donald J. Trump and his minions have done and if even only 10% of the offenses listed are true they exceed what any Trump backer would have tolerated from Obama, Biden or any Democratic President.

I used to have friends who were Trump supporters and we could engage in civilized conversations or at least agree to disagree and remain friends. Now, maybe half are former Trump supporters and the rest fall into one of three categories: They don't want to talk to me, I don't want to talk to them or both. They and I might all be better off that way.

I'm not usually a fan of biographical movies where someone plays someone we know well. I always sit there and (a) notice all the ways in which the actor playing the well-known personality doesn't act, look or sound like him. And then there's (b) in which I sit there noting all the ways in which the well-known individual's life has been changed for dramatic reasons when the real story would have been more interesting. But I kinda enjoyed the 2002 TV-movie Gleason, all about Jackie Gleason.

It was co-produced and written by two good stand-up comics, Rick Podell and my pal Mike Preminger…but I didn't know Mike that well when I found myself enjoying it in 2002. And it starred, of all people, Brad Garrett as Gleason. Good makeup made him look portly enough to play the part while clever camera angles made him look short enough. (Garrett is 6'8" whereas Jackie was 5'10".)

Anyway, the whole thing's online (legitimately) and free to watch. You might enjoy it too…

What appears on this blog is whatever's on my mind at the moment and what's on my mind at the moment is how much press — so far, all of it great — we're getting on The Essential Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz: The Greatest Comic Strip of All Time, a book which you can order…

Well, you pay the lowest price and I make a microscopic amount more if you buy it at Amazon but if you find that company distasteful these days, there are plenty of other places to find it. If you're going to order it, order it wherever you're comfiest.

Our biggest plug so far was this morning on The Today Show. I'd tell you what they said but I haven't seen it yet. Other reviews, articles, interviews are around…

• At Boing Boing, Ruben Bolling — a darn good cartoonist himself — wrote a nice review of the book.
• Mercedes Milligan over at Animation Magazine had some nice things to say about the book too.
• Mary Beth McAndrews at Dread Central liked the book and shared some Halloween-themed Peanuts strips.
• Alex Yarde of The Good Men Project also chimed in.
• Ollie Kaplan of The Beat interviewed me about the book.
• And so did someone at Comic Buzz.

And lastly for now, I did a long chat with William Pepper on his long-running Peanuts podcast and though we wandered off the topic a few times, I think it might be of interest. I'll embed a player below so you don't have to click or budge off this site to hear it…

At the 2025 Comic-Con International last July, I was too busy to spend much time in the exhibit hall. Ergo, I didn't get to see very many of the fine, inventive cosplayers on the premises. Here's a long video showing what I missed. Some of these are truly amazing…

And maybe the most amazing one — and I heard a lot of people talking about this but I never got to see it in person — was a rendition of the character Galactus. You caught some glimpses of it in the above video. Here's a little more about it including an interview with the main guy (I think) behind its development. Oh, how I wish Jack Kirby could have seen this…

The first twenty-three issues of MAD Magazine weren't a magazine. It was a comic book and I don't know that anyone even referred to it as MAD Magazine then. But that comic book's editor-writer Harvey Kurtzman did brilliant and funny things in it, aided by a sensational squadron of artists.

Here's something I find kinda interesting. Maybe you will too…

According to all accounts, MAD was started because Kurtzman — a slow-and-steady writer-editor and sometimes-artist — felt he wasn't making enough money. He was writing, editing and sometimes drawing his two scrupulously-researched, adventure-type historical comics that William M. Gaines was publishing as part of the E.C. line of comics. Gaines and Kurtzman later disagreed as to which of them suggested launching MAD because it seemed like something Kurtzman could produce more swiftly than the heavily-researched comics, nor did they agree on which of them named it MAD. But there was no dispute it was started as a way to perhaps increase Kurtzman's income.

Here's the part I find kinda interesting. Kurtzman's great squad of artists on those war/adventure comics consisted mainly of Will Elder, Jack Davis, Wally Wood and John Severin. And then he did the new humor comic with another great squad of artists — Will Elder, Jack Davis, Wally Wood and John Severin. He used the same guys and if he'd scoured the entire industry and had his pick of anyone then in it, he probably couldn't have done any better than Will Elder, Jack Davis, Wally Wood and John Severin.

MAD didn't catch on right away. If it had been a DC Comic in the late-sixties or most of the seventies, it would have been declared a flop and canceled as soon as they saw the sales figures of the second issue…maybe even the first. But Gaines kept it going and before long, it was not only the best-selling comic in his line, it was the one publication he had that survived the horror/crime comic purges of the fifties. It kept him publishing, made him a very wealthy man and spawned countless imitations.

A lot of people think that MAD went from being a ten-cent comic book to a twenty-five-cent (at first) magazine to escape the comic book censorship and the Comics Code. Nope. It changed formats because Kurtzman was embarrassed to be working in the comic book industry. Comics were printed via the cheapest printing possible on the cheapest paper available. Most of the rest of Gaines' line consisted of titles like Tales From the Crypt which many people regarded as a kind of pornography…and Kurtzman didn't disagree that much. He wanted to be in a more respectable kind of publishing.

When he received an offer to work for Pageant Magazine — then, a more respectable kind of publishing — he told Gaines he wanted to leave. Gaines panicked. Most of his comic book line was teetering on extinction. Only MAD looked like it might have a healthy future and Gaines was convinced that only Kurtzman could make the magazine work. He told his restless writer-editor something like, "Harvey, you always said you wished MAD was a slick magazine instead of a comic book. If you stay, I'll turn MAD into a slick magazine." Kurtzman agreed to stay. It kept MAD on the newsstands when many distributors were refusing to carry Gaines' comic book line but that's not the reason MAD became a slick; just a happy side effect.

The first week of May, 1955, the first issue of the twenty-five-cent MAD hit newsstands. It was #24, it was a sensation and it only got more sensational after that but Kurtzman didn't stick around. Hugh Hefner — then flush with cash due to the early success of Playboy — made Kurtzman one of those offers you can't refuse. Harvey couldn't, at least. As of #29, Al Feldstein was the editor of MAD — a job he did for the next 29 years as MAD became a top-selling American institution.

And believe it or not, I wrote all of the above just to lead into a discussion of MAD's famous cover logo. Kurtzman designed it and it first appeared on the first magazine issue. It looked like this…

Harvey did the drawings of the little nymphs frolicking around in the logo but was not happy with how it came out. Harvey was rarely happy with how anything he did came out. One of the causes of friction between Gaines and Kurtzman was that Harvey was the kind of creator who did something, then he did it over and he did it over and he did it over and then he did it over and might have preferred to never send the thing to press; to just spend all eternity trying to improve it another billionth of a percent. Wally Wood, who did finished art over a lot of Kurtzman layouts, told me that Harvey would get it as good as it was going to get on the third or fourth try, then do it ten more times of declining merit, before handing it off.

That mix of perfectionism and fear was the reason that under Kurtzman, the magazine version of MAD, though officially a bi-monthly, kept coming out late. There were three months between his second and third issues, four between his third issue and his fourth issue, etc. At some point in there, Kurtzman even took the time to redo the logo. He redid it for #27. Here's a before-and-after and if you click on it, you can enlarge it…

I once asked John Putnam, who was MAD's first art director, if someone else did the outline of the letters and then Kurtzman drew in his charming little creatures. He said yes but he didn't remember who the calligraphy person was, other than that it wasn't someone who did much (if any) other work for the magazine. I didn't know enough at the time to ask if he was thinking of whoever did the outlines for the first version, the second version or both. Kurtzman was not known for this lettering designs so I suspected both. Then I asked Feldstein and he wasn't 100% sure but he was semi-certain it was John Putnam. So that's as far as I got with that mystery.

The fine folks at Heritage Auctions are about to auction off the original artwork to the second logo — the one that became pretty much official — and a lot of online folks are unaware there were two versions of that logo. There were, of course, lots of variations of it on MAD and MAD products over the years. Kurtzman's nymphs took the covers of #55, #67, #78 off, were parodied on the cover of #76, and then disappeared after #86 only to reappear on #93, #95 and very rarely after that. Sergio Aragonés, Al Jaffee, Don Martin and Antonio Prohias all took turns replacing Kurtzman's creatures with their own.

I read MAD for years before I paid any attention to what Harvey Kurtzman had doodled in the original official logo. Once I became aware of those nymphs (or whatever they were), I wondered what they were, who they were, what the hell they had to do with MAD, etc. The few times I got to talk with Harvey, I wish I'd asked him…but I knew him well enough to believe he had something on his mind. I only wish I knew what.

Hey, we haven't had a Three Stooges short on this blog lately. Here's Dizzy Detectives from 1943, although the opening scene is a reuse of footage from Pardon My Scotch, which the Stooges made in 1935…

And if you didn't like that film with Moe, Larry and Curly, maybe you'll like almost the exact same script with Joe (not yet a Stooge) Besser and his occasional partner, Hawthorne. This is a poorly-colorized version of Fraidy Cat from 1951. Same studio, same script, same director, same gorilla (I think), some of the same footage and different knuckleheads…

I assume everyone knows that I think Donald Trump and his mob are the worst things to ever happen to this country — or at least to the guiding principles of this country, science, equality, honesty and all that stuff Jesus Christ said about caring about those in need. I don't write a lot about this here because you only have about eighty zillion other places online to read that kind of thing. It would be easy to make this blog be about nothing else but I think I give service by writing mainly about other matters and sometimes directing you to certain of those eighty zillion other places.

One of the recent outrages was Pete Hegseth — our Secretary of Defense or War or Whatever The Hell He Is — trying to decree what the press can write about matters under his jurisdiction and what they cannot. It's about as unAmerican as anything anyone in our nation's history has ever done so I was glad to see this statement today…

And I was delighted to read this statement which turned up on the web soon after…

You probably saw one or both already. I just wanted to have them on my blog.

I'm sure a lot of you have been waiting for me to come across a rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody" played by 28 trombonists. Well, wait no longer — and thank Bill Lentz for telling me about this one…

This is the final part of my flashback to 2006 when I underwent Gastric Bypass Surgery. Before you dive into what follows, make sure you've read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 and Part 7. And if you've stuck with me this long, thanks for the sticking.

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So I began losing weight at a brisk clip — brisker than I'd imagined possible. Carolyn would look at me in bed and ask, "Where's Mark? What have you done with Mark?"

For at least ten days after the surgery — maybe a little longer — I had absolutely no appetite.  None.  Couldn't have downed a Hershey's Kiss if you'd demanded at gunpoint that I do so.  I didn't feel the least bit hungry, not even when folks around me were wolfing down chow that I once loved.  It wasn't so much that I was repulsed by food as that I just felt utterly indifferent to the concept of eating. Eventually, I did some nibbling, then some snacking…then finally, some actual, smaller-than-before meals.

I did, of course, hop on a bathroom scale at least once a day and notate how much less of me there was.  I can no longer find the little chart I kept but I recall it worked out to 65 pounds in the first 65 days and almost 75 in the first 75. The losses slowed but when I attended Comic-Con that year, I was a good fifty pounds under my weight on Gastric Bypass Day.  A lot of people commented on how much slimmer and healthier I looked.  A number of folks didn't seem to notice or care.

A few months after Comic-Con, Carolyn and I attended a play and we found ourselves seated next to an actress I knew well but hadn't seen in a year or two.  By this point, I was almost a hundred pounds below what I'd weighed the last time she saw me and we both waited for her to say something — anything! — that indicated she'd noticed but there was nothing.  Not a word.  Before the play started, we talked for a good twenty minutes and she didn't seem aware than I had lost almost as much as she probably weighed.

At Intermission, we all visited our respective rest rooms and when the actress returned to her seat next to me, she was over-the-top in telling me how great I looked, how wonderful it was that I'd dropped so much tummy, etc., all preceded by a "I was so happy to see you, I forgot to mention…"  It sounded clumsy and later, Carolyn confessed to me, "I couldn't stand her not noticing it any longer so I pointed it out to her when we were in the Ladies Room."

Getting back to that Comic-Con — actually, getting back to a time before the surgery — my splendid Dr. Preston had told me something that he felt I should know.  "Mark," he said, "you're going to lose at least a hundred pounds in the coming months.  There will be a major change in your appearance and while many people you know will cheer and congratulate you, you need to be prepared for something.  At least one person in your life — and it may be more than one or two — will hate you for it."

At some length — I can't re-create the whole speech here — he went on about how all people who have a wide circle of friends and acquaintances have within that circle, at least a few people who mask their own resentments and jealousy in order to "get along."  But sometimes when someone scores a big success or improves themselves the way I was (hopefully) about to improve me, the resentments and jealousies come bursting out.

I had never known Doc Preston to be wrong but I was still surprised by how right he was.  A couple of folks said pretty bitchy things, the worst coming from a writer I knew.  He stopped me, made mention of how many pounds I lost but said I'd pay the ultimate price for it.  Having read a few articles somewhere and thus becoming an expert, he said the surgery was a dangerous fad and I'd certainly die within a few years.  He could not conceal a suggestion in his smirk that it would serve me right for whatever I'd done he didn't like.  I think it was getting more work than he was getting just then.

The punchline to this story is, of course, that I am still here and this guy died in 2019.

One odd thing which happened to me — and doctors I've discussed this with have been at a loss to explain it — was that my sweet tooth went away.  I'd already given up  Coca-Cola and other soft drinks, and I never liked coffee or tea.  I tried fruit juices but increasingly, I found them too sweet.  For a while, I tried watering down orange juice but it got to the point where I decided to drop the O.J. and just drink only water. To this day, that's about all I drink.

Then around a year after the surgery, I was in Downtown Las Vegas and in need of lunch.  This is 2007, remember.  Buffets were no longer cost-effective for me — I couldn't eat enough to justify the price of the upscale ones but I liked making a selection of food before my eyes. When you have as many food allergies as I do, it's great to inspect something before you commit to its consumption. The Plaza Hotel was offering what they called their 7-7-7 Buffet for $7.77 and that seemed downscale enough for me.  I went in, paid and started with a not-huge plate of baked chicken, rice and carrots. I also ended with that one plate.

The lady who took away the dirty dishes took mine and said, "Time for seconds!"  I thought for a second, realized I was full and told her, "No, I don't think I'll be having seconds. Or thirds or fourths or even tenths."  She looked at me strangely and said, "I've been bussing dishes in buffets for twenty years and I've never seen anyone not go back for at least a second plate.  I've seen people do seven or eight but never one."

I said, "There's a first time for everything" and she said, "Well, then head over to the dessert table and help yourself there!"

I walked over to a spread that included several different kinds of cake slices, several different cuts of pie, dishes of chocolate pudding, tapioca pudding, bread pudding, butterscotch pudding, eclairs, custards, flan, cannoli, tiramisù, donuts, chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal cookies, about six flavors of cupcakes and a whole area where you could make your own sundae with about twenty toppings and a machine that output soft-serv ice cream in vanilla, chocolate or both in a swirl.  I stared at it for a moment and the dish-removal lady walked by saying, "Don't you want to eat just everything there?"

And I replied, amazing myself as much as it amazed her, "No."

Then and there, I realized I'd been eating such things lately not out of cravings but out of habit. Nothing within me cared about them. This was in 2007 and I haven't eaten anything like that since then with the following exception. Every week or so, I down one of these teensy cups…

But that's it and since I used to eat a lot of Orange Jell-O when I was a kid, I think I'm eating them now for the nostalgia, not the sugar. As I said, no doctor has ever been able to explain how G.B.S. took away my taste for sweet treats but I don't miss them…or other things (like sodas) I thought I couldn't give up.

My weight has gone up and down since then but it's down now and I'm going to do my darnedest to keep it down…and that's the end of my Gastric Bypass Story. But it's not the end of this article because I still need to tell you about Anna.

Anna was the lady I met in the hospital just before our respective surgical procedures. After we were each prepped for surgery, we were lying on adjoining gurneys for maybe twenty minutes talking — mainly about how she hoped to drop enough bulk quickly and find a second husband. Afterwards, we had adjoining rooms in the post-surgical wing and she was part of the little expeditions I led of very large (still) patients hiking around the floor our rooms were on. Most of us exchanged phone numbers and e-mail addresses but Anna was the only one with whom I had any communication after we both left the hospital.

It turned out, she left but had to go back a few times due to little post-surgical complications. I didn't but she did, the difference probably having something to do with her being older than I was but not as tall. She was simply not in as good shape when she had her G.B.S. than I was when I had mine. Yes, she lost weight and yes, she found a guy interested in marrying her. She wrote me that she looked wonderful and he was wonderful and life was wonderful and they were talking about adopting a wonderful child or two after they were wed…

…and that's what was in the last e-mail I ever received from her. She never replied to my replies and I'd like to think that was because she was too busy being with her new hubby and maybe that kid or two. There are other possibilities but I hope you'll join me in wanting to think that's why I never heard from her again.

In the 1920's, Buster Keaton made some of the most brilliant, innovative comedy movies anyone ever made. Then there was a crash and he made a lot of movies that were nowhere near as good and his career — and in some ways, his life — just went down, down, down for the rest of his life.

Film scholars debate just wha' happened. There's general agreement that he was harmed by — in no particular order — the coming of sound, the loss of control over his career and films, his marriage and personal life, changing tastes in film, alcohol and a few other factors. There is not general agreement as to which did him the most damage, how much of that damage was self-inflicted and how much of it was preventable. Here's a short video that offers some views of the downfall of one of the movie industry's greatest talents…

Several folks have written to ask me to post Woody Allen's tribute to Diane Keaton and a couple sent me copies of it, all formatted to fit on this blog.  But it doesn't belong to me and I respect Mr. Allen's right to control where his work appears…so no.  There are a number of news stories like this one and this one and this one (that last one may be paywalled) that excerpt from it and I suspect anyone can find the full, non-paywalled text with enough Googling.  But I ain't posting it here, thank you.

…to those who wanted to read the article to which I linked in the previous item but ran smack-dab, Wile E. Coyote style, into a paywall.  I somehow didn't hit it and had no way of knowing others would.  I also didn't realize Woody Allen had chosen to give it to a politically-controversial website…in fact, one that John Oliver eviscerated on his show last night.  I'll leave the link up but if anyone finds a non-paywalled source, lemme know.  I assume Mr. Allen just wanted it out there for people to read and didn't know enough about the Internet to know so many would have to subscribe or sign up for access.