I'm home. I'll be spending the next few years sleeping and unpacking, sleeping and unpacking, sleeping and unpacking, etc. Eventually, things will return to normal on this blog and I'll finish the story I started. In the meantime, you might want to download your very own PDF copy of the convention souvenir book — or at least, read it online. You can do both those things at this link.

Here's a little less than nine minutes of one of my favorite comedians, George Carl. No, not George Carlin. George Carl. George Carlin was also one of my favorite comedians but he had to say funny things to get laughs. George Carl, who performed all around the world for decades, didn't have to utter a word to be funny. He just was funny. I saw Mr. Carl do about twenty minutes in Las Vegas many years ago at the now-extinct Stardust Hotel and I don't recall laughing harder in my life. I also saw Mr. Carlin in Vegas at what was then called Bally's and he was pretty great too but he had to talk. Here's George Carl. Ignore the silly short cartoons that bracket his performance…

…and in the middle of the night, no less. I enjoyed every nanosecond of this year's Comic-Con International and those of you who thought it was knuckleheaded beyond belief to agree to moderate or be on nineteen panels…well, next year I may go for twenty. I enjoyed every one of 'em and over the next few days, I'll tell you the what and why of the experience. It had a lot to do with liking how much the audiences liked what we did, especially the Quick Draw! game and the two Cartoon Voices panels. More on this to follow…

I'm not going to wait until I get home. Like many of my friends, I can quote or sing many of the weird and wonderful songs of Tom Lehrer, who died just the other day at the not-unimpressive age of 97. And like a lot of us, I wish he'd spent less of his life teaching math and more of it writing and recording joyous and subversive songs like "The Masochism Tango" and "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park."

I won't pretend to understand his career choices, nor is it any of my business why this gifted man didn't write more. A friend of mine who attended U.C. Santa Cruz (I think it was) took one of Professor Lehrer's math classes, at least in part because he was a fan of the man's records and was disappointed when almost the first thing Lehrer said on the first day was that at no point during the term would he be performing or even discussing his music.

That music will, of course, outlive its composer. In a sense, it almost did while he was still alive. But it will be especially available because a few years ago, Mr. Lehrer released it all into the public domain. If you want to do anything with it, go to this website and help yourself. You can even just listen to it for pure enjoyment…which it always delivered.

I’ll write about this extraordinary talent when I get home from the convention.

Committing to nineteen panels over four days seemed like insanity to many of my friends but I gotta tell you: I think it's one of the smartest things I've done all year. Not that I've had that many smart things competing for First Place.

As I sit here in my hotel room, having completed fifteen of the nineteen, I've been having an awesome amount of fun and I'm really happy about how happy most of these program items seem to have made the folks who came to see 'em. The downsides? Well, my legs hurt more than I wish they did. This blog has been neglected. Computer problems — and my lack of time to maybe fix them — are preventing me from posting the rest of the story of the Ackerman/Schwartz/Bradbury convention panel. But that's okay because I decided it could do with a bit of polishing before it'll be ready for human consumption. It shall resume shortly.

I also can't access Facebook so if you sent me a message there or someone posted scurrilous gossip about me, I can't read it. All this will be rectified but probably not until I'm home and unpacked. Oh — and I also ate something I shouldn't have eaten at a restaurant last night. My cumbersome food allergies are at their most allergic when I'm fatigued. But I'm so pleased with how the panels have been going — especially yesterday's Quick Draw! and Cartoon Voices — that it's a more than acceptable trade-off. Wait'll I tell you how yesterday's Cartoon Voices panel went.

Your patience, as Alton Brown says when he tells you how to cook something that takes a lot of time, will be rewarded.

This video has been on this site before but it was a pretty bad copy and anyway, it's been deleted. Someone got a better copy and I think they enhanced it with some A.I. technology. It's not perfect but it's better so I decided to post it.

It's a number from the 1985 special, Night of 100 Stars which was done to benefit the Actors' Fund so they were able to get an incredible number of great performers on it…well more than a hundred. Some of them were in this long dance number.  It's sad to think that today, if you could conscript everyone you wanted, you couldn't possibly put together such a collection of famous hoofers.

You'll see each star's name superimposed when he or she appears…all but Dick Van Dyke. That's because that was not his first appearance on the special. He was in an earlier section of it.

When I first ran this here, it brought a message from my pal, Craig Shemin. I've edited his remarks down but here's the important thing he had to say…

The number is a tribute to Conrad Cantzen, an actor who died in 1945. It was thought that Conrad was down on his luck, but when he died he bequeathed an estate of more than $200,000 (that would be more than 2.3 million bucks today) to the Actors Fund of America.

Here's where the shoes come in. Conrad specified that the money be used to establish a fund for the express purpose of purchasing shoes for actors. This fund continues to operate today, administered by the Actors Fund. Apparently, Conrad thought that actors should not look "down at the heels" while pounding the pavement auditioning.

In case you can't make out what everyone is saying at the end, it's a reprise of the song from the introductory section:

Starting from the bottom up, that's the route to choose.
No one ever feels lowdown at the heels
Shoo away bad news and shoo away the blues
By spending Conrad's Cash on a brand new pair of shoes.

Conrad's tale is such a nice story of an enduring act of generosity that I wanted to share it with you and your readers.

Thanks, Craig…and thanks to whoever fixed it up and put it back on YouTube. It really is an extraordinary piece of work and talent…

Dave Letterman discusses the whole Colbert matter…

Nine panels down.  Ten to go…

We're pre-empting the next chapter of the Ackerman/Schwartz/Bradbury story to bring you this more timely anecdote from my past…

Believe it or don't believe it but I have a story about Terry Gene Bollea, better known as the superstar wrassler, Hulk Hogan. In 1985, CBS debuted a cartoon show on Saturday morning called Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling. I had absolutely nothing to do with the show but I was the writer and co-producer of a prime time special CBS ordered to promote the shows on that season's Saturday morn schedule including Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling.

The special was a co-production between Sid and Marty Krofft's company and a new TV production company co-owned by Cyndi Lauper and a gent that Wikipedia describes as "Lauper's boyfriend and manager at the time." The show was to be hosted by another superstar wrestler of the day, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper. Ms. Lauper and her boyfriend-manager had some interest in Mr. Piper's career as well as many connections to Vince McMahon and the organization then known as the World Wrestling Federation. Mr. McMahon was not credited on the show but he was on the premises as a kind of shadow producer. (In case you're wondering, I thought he was one of the smartest people I ever met in television and he has the bank account to prove it.)

One of the problems the show had may have been too many people with "producer" in their titles: Sid, Marty, Cyndi, the boyfriend-manager, the shadowy Vince, myself and a wonderful producer (who also directed) named Bob Bowker. We all got along famously except that Cyndi was later very unhappy (justifiably) with a number of things for which she wrongly blamed Bob and me. That still bothers me because I always thought she was a wonderful performer and I am unsurprised that she has become such a wonderful writer.

For the cast of the show — and this was all decided before Bob and I signed on — we would have, in addition to Roddy, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Patti LaBelle, Pee-wee Herman, the rock group New Edition, Captain Lou Albano, Hulk Hogan and Hervé Villechaize. When I appeared on Gilbert Gottfried's podcast, the first questions Gilbert asked me were about working with Hervé Villechaize. Once hired, I added a few other bodies to the stage including Gary Owens.

I have many, many stories about the production of this odd production but this is about Hulk Hogan…

Since he was the "star" of the cartoon series being promoted, he had to be on the special. This created two problems, one being that he was booked solid with wrestling gigs and it would be hard to get him into the studio. The other problem was that when we did get him into the studio, the star of our special could not be in the studio.

The hatred that Hulk and Roddy Piper had for each other in the wrestling ring had somehow bled over into real life. Roddy — who turned out to be a very nice guy, by the way — told me that happened…often. You're hired to feign beating the bejeesus out of some other guy when the TV cameras are on and the crowd is cheering…

…and pretty soon, you really, really do want to beat the bejeesus out of the other guy. Often, like everything else in Pro Wrestling, it has a lot to do with money.

So it was up to me, the writer, to figure out how to have Hulk in the show without Roddy around.  We wound up sending Roddy off the lot to a restaurant while we taped a spot in which Gary Owens did a locker room interview with Hulk.  But there were other problems.  Hulk would be coming to us, literally, between planes.  He had to fly from one city in which he had just wrestled to another city in which he would wrestle that night.  We had him for about an hour…and not a second more.

We were all set up when he arrived but there were all sorts of delays in getting him to the set.  One was that to appear in "character," his muscles had to be glistening and that meant he had to be rubbed with oil.  I have no idea why he couldn't oil his own shoulders but a make-up person had to do that…and when it turned out that our make-up person was male, Hulk refused his services.  We had to wait until a female make-up person could be located, hired and arrived to apply the oil.  We couldn't even get him to rehearse, unoiled.

This is the kind of thing that TV producers have to deal with.  On this show, I also had to handle the problem that every time Hervé Villechaize had a wardrobe change, he was unable to zip up his fly.  He demanded that the wardrobe ladies do it and they (rightfully) refused.

Finally, we got Hulk in front of the cameras and we did Take One of the script. He changed the words a lot and did it without sufficient "Hulk" enthusiasm. I think Vince McMahon ordered another take even before our director could. Hulk then did it again — not my words but more Hulkish — and he headed for the door. We asked him for a Take Three but he said, "I've got a plane to catch" and that was that. He also refused to stay so we could shoot the scene again with the camera focusing on Gary Owens — a shot over Hulk's shoulder as Gary asked the questions.

No, he wouldn't do that either so we needed a Body Double and amazingly, that turned out to be me. I took off my shirt, put on one that matched what Hulk had been wearing and the makeup lady applied bronzer and oil to my shoulder. Then they put me on a box. I'm 6'3" and Hulk was 6'7" but they made me even taller since it made for a funnier shot of Gary. I scrunched up my shoulder trying to make it look more muscular but…well, I'm a pretty bad actor and I was even lousy at that. We ended up cropping the shot in post-production so less of me showed.

And that was how I played Hulk Hogan for a few seconds of screen time. I'm sorry the other man who played that role has left us because he could be awfully entertaining.  And then there was this…

A year or two later, I did a job for the animation studio that produced Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling. It was an unhappy project and it ended with one of those awkward situations where I said the equivalent of "I quit!" and they said, roughly, "You can't quit! You're fired!" I've been in a few of those and they sometimes end with my lawyer fighting with their lawyer over what I am to be paid for my truncated services.

My lawyer at the time was Henry W. Holmes, a name which may resonate with those of you who followed the many lawsuits of my friend and his client, Harlan Ellison. Henry is retired now. I had him on last year's Jack Kirby Tribute Panel at Comic-Con International since he helped Jack on some matters. He was a helluva lawyer and we're still good friends. And here's the kind of thing that proves a lawyer is a helluva lawyer: He got the animation studio to agree to pay me every cent my contract specified and they further agreed to deliver the check to him within 48 hours.

After 48 hours passed with no check appearing, Henry called me and said, "Well, we have two choices. I can sue them…"

I asked, "What's the other option?"

He said, "Well, Hulk Hogan is also a client of mine and we had problems with that studio paying him, too. I mentioned to him the problem I was having on your case and he volunteered to go over there, smash in the door, shatter a desk or two and demand your check.  Do you have a preference?"

I said, "I like the second option best, especially if I can be there and watch!" We decided Henry would call them and threaten that but — and this was a real disappointment for Henry and me — my check arrived before he could even make that call, let alone unleash The Hulkster.

A couple years later, I was at the Licensing Show, a gathering where people sell and buy the rights to put out merchandise based on the intellectual property of the sellers. I ran into Hulk Hogan, told him my name and reminded him about the show we met on. He didn't remember me or the show — the result perhaps of some drugs ingested in the dressing room — but he did stare at me for a long minute…

…and then he said, "Are you the dude I was going to go over to that fucking cartoon studio and get the money for?"

I did not know Forrest Ackerman all that well. A lot of guys my age who grew up on Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine worshiped the man who edited it for years and who also was a major figure in the history of science-fiction and science-fiction fandom. I didn't love monster movies as much as some of my friends but I tagged along with them on field trips to Ackerman's home…homes, actually because he moved. The Ackermansion, as he called it in his punny style, was once on Sherbourne Avenue about halfway between where I lived as a kid in the late sixties and where I live now as a kid in my early seventies. Later, he relocated to a bigger, nicer place in Los Feliz and that became "the Ackermansion."

I visited both homes, crammed museum-style full of s-f and horror memorabilia — tons of books, movie stills, posters, movie props, whatever — and found it and him interesting but a little creepy. Needless to say, a house full of what his was full of is supposed to be a little creepy, maybe even a lot creepy, but there was also something a bit creepy about the homeowner himself. I did not find him as charmingly avuncular as some of my friends who referred to him as "Uncle Forry" but we got along. A bit later on after I began working as a professional writer, he kept pressing me to let him agent my work.

Why I never agreed to that: For one thing, he wanted me to write a lot of things "on spec" and maybe he'd find someone — he didn't seem to know who — to buy them. He also wanted me to write pieces for his projects for Absolutely No Money. Absolutely No Money is what "on spec" usually turns out to mean when you write them with no idea who might buy them. He also seemed to have a non-traditional view of agenting, most notably as to which of us should get 15% of the purchase price of any writing of mine he sold. Despite this, we were friendly when I visited his Ackermansions or saw him at conventions.

I probably knew Julius Schwartz too well. At least there were times it felt that way. He was the editor of many of my favorite comics when I grew up — and of course, I'm using the term "grew up" loosely. But I wrote for him and interviewed him a lot at conventions and spent a lot of time with him at cons and found much to admire and like about the man. Eventually, there were things about him that I did not like, not one bit…but they aren't relevant to this story.

Ray Bradbury, I knew fairly well. Around 1968 — I may be off by a year — a group from our local comic book club arranged a visit to his office. He was charming and welcoming and fascinating and he kept saying over and over, "You kids remind me so much of myself when I was your ages." We talked about comic books and comic strips and his work and I could hardly believe that a world-famous author — a man whose work was so beloved — could or would take the time to chat with a half-dozen kids. But he did.

Not only that but he invited me and (I think) me alone to return. Things we said that day made him decide that I was quite serious about pursuing a career as a professional writer. A few of the others did go that route successfully but I think (I can't be sure) I was the only one he chose to encourage a bit. He took me to one side so my friends did not hear him. Softly, he told me to come back alone if I wanted some one-on-one advice about my chosen-but-still-distant career — and, of course, I did.

It was for me an important boost in the direction I was headed. The lessons learned were basic Survival Guide stuff — how to price your work, how to deal with idiot editors, the importance of reliability and meeting deadlines, etc. But I think the best thing he did for me that day was to send me home with the following thought: "Gee…Ray Bradbury thinks I might be able to do this…maybe I can." That was such an important, inspirational concept that my mind dared not clutter it with a few important caveats. The main one was that Mr. Bradbury, for all his encouragement and implied faith in me, hadn't read a single word I'd written. That should have mattered more than it did then.

But I got to spend a lot of time with Ray over the years, especially after I learned to drive because he never did. I'd run into him at local conventions or film screenings and offer to give him a lift. Once, motoring down Olympic Boulevard on my way to a mini-con downtown, I passed him at a bus stop, doubled back around and picked him up. Whenever I took him home, he'd invite me to come in and continue the in-car conversation for an hour or two.

Our chats — mostly me asking questions and him giving long, fascinating replies — eventually wound up on stages at Comic-Con for several years. The story I'm serializing here is about one of those panels which also involved his longtime friends, Forry Ackerman and Julie Schwartz. And in the next chapter, I'll explain how that panel came about.

I actually found this history of the Orange Julius drink and fast food chain interesting.  You might not but I did — and I don't think I've ever even had an Orange Julius…

While I'm at Comic-Con this week, I may not have time to post much on this blog (click here to see why) but I don't want this page to look abandoned. Therefore, I "wrote ahead" a long story about something that happened at Comic-Con in 2003 and I'll be serializing it here over the days I'll be down there doing this year's con and perhaps collecting tales of equal interest.

This occurred on Saturday, July 19 of that year in Room 6A at Comic-Con International. In a blog post here shortly after, I gave this account of the panel I hosted there that day…

At 3:00, I ran across the hall to moderate a gathering of three legends of science fiction: Forrest J Ackerman, a still-feisty Julie Schwartz…and the incomparable Ray Bradbury. Ray is still confined to a wheelchair due to one or more strokes but from the waist-up, he's still Ray "The Martian Chronicles" Bradbury. I took the three of them through the saga of their three-way friendship: In the thirties, the L.A.-based Ackerman and the New York-based Schwartz struck up a correspondence which led to Ackerman contributing to The Time-Traveller, a small-circulation mimeographed publication which Schwartz produced in 1932 with his friend, Mort Weisinger. It was the first science fiction fanzine ever. Ackerman also participated in a small s-f fan club in Los Angeles, which is where he met Bradbury. Later, when Ray travelled to New York (via a gruesome Greyhound bus) for his first science-fiction convention, it was because Forry had loaned him ninety dollars, which he later paid back by selling The Los Angeles Times on street corners.

It was at that convention that Bradbury met Schwartz who had become an agent for s-f writers. Two years later, Julie sold a story of Ray's — the first one ever to be purchased by an editor. As it happened, Schwartz was planning a trip to Los Angeles anyway, so he decided to deliver the good news and payment in person. He drove to L.A. and his first night there, hooked up with a friend and went out to get some dinner. By coincidence, the restaurant was across the street from where Bradbury was hawking newspapers. Schwartz recognized his client…and that's how Ray Bradbury found out he'd become a professional writer. Julie walked up and handed him a check for $35, less the 10% commission.

Bradbury spoke eloquently and passionately about a range of subjects, including the space program's shameful (to him) neglect of Mars. He's just finished an article for Playboy on the subject, so those of you who buy Playboy for the articles can find out his thoughts on the topic. He also spoke with even greater passion to those in the audience who aspire to write, urging them to follow their own muses and to not listen to "any damned fool" who tells them how and what they should write. It was a short but wonderful hour and I doubt anyone who was present will ever forget it.

That's how I wrote the story back then and every word of it was true. But it wasn't the whole story about that panel. If you want to read the whole story, stop by here tomorrow. And the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and as I'm writing this now, I'm not sure how many days it's going to run.

Comic-Con International starts tonight and I've added one more stop in my relentless campaign to have more panels than Steve Harvey has TV programs. I will now be appearing on this panel…

Thursday, July 24 – 4 PM to 5 PM in Room 4
JACK KIRBY'S FOURTH WORLD
Rand Hoppe (Kirby Museum director), Tom Kraft (Kirby Museum president), Bruce Simon (underground cartoonist), Mark Badger (comic artist and educator), and Tracy Kirby (Jack Kirby's granddaughter) discuss the themes of Kirby's Fourth World and how they reflect on his work before (Fantastic Four and Thor) and after (Eternals and 2001).

Those of you tracking me the way the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tracks whale migrations may note that this puts me on two panels in the same hour — to which I reply, "So?" I've done this before. In fact, I did it one year with two simultaneous panels when I was the moderator of both of them. Fortunately, they were directly across the hall from each other.

Here — and this'll be the last time I post this — is what I believe is my full schedule unless I go out to the sidewalk and do an interview with that guy who's usually there with the yellow sign telling us Jesus will be back any day now and this is our last chance to repent. We've been getting those last chances for at least the past fifteen Comic-Cons and I keep thinking Jesus keeps getting shut out of the con because he can't score a badge each year. Anyway, here's this…

This morning on Facebook, I saw a rant from someone about how Comic-Con is not a Comic-Con because there's nothing there about comic books. This complaint usually translates to there being nothing at Comic-Con about the specific comic books that the complainer favors. But just by way of rebuttal…

This year, I'm hosting or appearing on three panels about the works of Jack Kirby. I think those are about comic books. I'm doing panels in which I interview long-time comic book letterer Todd Klein, long-time comic book writer Don Glut and there's another one with Frank Miller, who's among the most important writer-artists of the last few decades. Also, long-time comic book writer Mark Waid and I will be doing a panel where we answer questions about how the comic book world operates or did in the past. I have a panel about a comic book I work on called Groo the Wanderer and another panel about Walt Kelly's Pogo, which was a comic book and a comic strip. So was Charles Schulz's Peanuts and I'm on a panel about that, too.

I'm on a panel about Bill Finger, whose involvement in comic book history included co-creating (arguably) the most popular comic book character ever and that wasn't all he did. I'm hosting a panel in which comic book artists discuss how they design covers for comic books and I'm playing quizmaster on a game show (sorta) in which cartoonists, some of whom draw comic books, compete to draw funny things in a hurry. I'm speaking at a memorial for the late writer of comic books, Peter David, and I'm presenting awards at a ceremony that is all about honoring the best work in comic books.

And that's just me. As I scan the full schedule, I see plenty of programming items about comic books…and yes, there are other things there. Three of my panels are about animation, which is not that far off the topic of comics.

But we now live in a world where a lot of related fields — comics, movies, cartoons, videogames and others, are becoming not only more closely related but are all merging almost seamlessly into one another. The major publishers of comic books are no longer comic book companies. They're multi-media companies that dabble in all those fields and market the properties they control in every possible venue. Superman and Spider-Man are no longer comic book characters. That just happens to be the medium in which they first appeared and a decreasing number of people know or care.

This is the fifty-fourth one of these summer gatherings in San Diego — and I know because it's also my fifty-fourth. They were never exclusively about comic books or even comic books and comic strips. You have no idea how much I'd love it if these get-togethers were still mostly about the men (and occasional women) who created the comic books I read in my youth but I can't seem to get them on any of my panels anymore. Maybe if I did them with a ouija board.

For good or bad, Comic-cons — all of them, not just the one that starts tonight in S.D. — are mainly about what comics are today. And comics today are not just things with drawings and word balloons printed on paper. The definition has expanded considerably and you can accept it and then seek out the parts of the convention that interest you or you can…well, you understand the alternative. One reason I do all these panels is to make sure than for most of the con, there's not only something that interests me but that I'm guaranteed a good seat for it.