It is, of course, impossible to follow all the allegations of wrong-doing by Donald Trump and his goons. One that I kinda follow is this mess with the Reflecting Pool and Trump's claim that what's wrong with it is the fault of vandals, not shoddy workmanship. That claim has pretty much fallen apart as so many Trump claims do. I won't embed it here but if you're interested, here's a link to a video where attorney Michael Popok explains why there's no case against former Olympian David Hearn, who has somehow been charged with destruction he could not possibly have done.

Jon Stewart is, from my perspective, dead-on with this commentary…

And his interview with the non-smiling newsperson Kaitlin Collins is also worth watching…

Checking out of the hotel this morning in San Diego, I had the most delightful bellman.  It was his last day on the job before retirement, he told me.  A day a few weeks ago was supposed to be his last day but he asked to stay on 'til today because he wanted to serve the Comic-Con crowd one more time.  We are, he said, the most delightful of all the conventions that swirl into and out of that convention center — and he enjoys going to the con, though I neglected to ask him how he gets a badge each year.

He's literally bellhopped at that Marriott since it opened.  And he had no answer to my question of why the elevator bank in whichever tower I'm staying in has six elevators and at any given time, three or less are working.  There was a period on Saturday when none of them were working.  That was about the only thing that went wrong this weekend.  The convention center doesn't have anywhere near enough elevators to accommodate all the folks with mobility problems but at least they all seemed to be operational.

I'll write more about what a swell time I had this past weekend after I get some sleep.

You know where I am and what I'm doing and why I'm posting reruns here. This one first saw the light of this blog on 11/20/16…

Back in '83, I wrote the pilot and bible for the animated Saturday morning series, Dungeons & Dragons, then wrote one more episode. After that, I declined further involvement. I had other commitments at the time and other offers so I didn't stay with the show. It was a modest success and the mere fact that I'd help sell it got me more offers and inquiries for my services. I also got a few calls of congratulations and/or praise from other writers I knew.

Never take those seriously. I mean it. They may well be sincere in what they say but they may just be buttering you up because…well, why not? Getting on your good side might benefit them in some way down the line. More immediately, at least a few who called were hoping I could help them get an assignment on the series, which I couldn't. I was able to recommend a few writers early in the process before I'd stepped away from the show but not after.

One writer I'll call Zachary called and could not have been gushier: "You did a great job, Mark…really solid work there…just terrific…" Knowing this guy, I felt for a moment like he was Sgt. Bilko and I was Colonel Hall being set up for the big con but he didn't push me to do anything in particular for him so I was cordial and I thanked him and that was that.

Before I get to this next part, you should know this: I had no opinion of Zachary as a writer. Didn't know if he was good, didn't know if he was bad, didn't particularly care. To this day, I don't think I've seen or read anything he's written. I almost never see myself as being in competition with other writers and even when I do, it doesn't matter what I think of them. What matters is what the people doing the hiring think of each of us.

Okay. So a year or two after Dungeons & Dragons went on the air, my agent got a call from some producers who were doing a live-action kids' show for syndication. The pilot had been sold — or so they said — and they were soon to go into production on 25 more episodes for which a story editor was needed. "They want to meet with you," Bernie the Agent said, "but I need to warn you. This sounds like it could be the lowest-paying job you'll ever be offered." Having been offered some gigs that starving homeless folks would have passed on, that sounded pretty dismal.

I asked him, "Is it WGA?" If a show is covered by the Writers Guild of America, there are certain minimums that must be paid. And now that I think of it, that was a dumb question because Bernie and his agency would never have anything to do with a non-Guild live-action show, nor would I, nor should you.

"It's WGA," Bernie said. "But they're doing this show on a micro-budget and they seem to have found some sort of loophole in the WGA contract that allows them to pay you in beads and trinkets. Do you want to go in and meet them or not? It's your call."

Back then, I went in for every interview, even for jobs I knew I wouldn't want. Even when meetings didn't result in employment, I always found them interesting and educational. I learned a lot from some of those meetings and, of course, there's always the slim chance I'll make a good impression and the slimmer chance that those producers will someday be producing something with real money. So I told him, yeah, I'd go in and meet with them.

At the appointed time, I drove to a tiny movie lot in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles — a lot that I didn't even know existed and today does not. It was not easy to find and I was about ten minutes late…which turned out to not be a problem because everyone else they'd been seeing all day was twenty minutes late. The meeting was in a teensy bungalow — the kind of building in which the Seven Dwarfs would have gotten claustrophobia. Just seeing it made me think I wouldn't be working on this show.

The bungalow had been cheaply-partitioned into two rooms. One was the receptionist's space and a little waiting area. The rest was the office wherein I could hear the producers interviewing someone else. "Just have a seat," the receptionist said…and I didn't intend to peek at it but there was a list on her desk of writers who were coming in today. You couldn't miss it and the name just above mine was Zachary's, plus I also recognized his voice.

I took a seat and I couldn't not hear every word that was being uttered in the next office. Clearly, I could hear him say…

"You know, a lot of shows just collapse in the development stage. The guy who writes the pilot…all he cares about is selling the thing and getting his sales bonus. He doesn't give a damn about what Episode 2 and Episode 3 or Episode 12 are going to be like because he's just going to grab his money and run. He doesn't set things up to make for a good series because that's not his problem…"

An interesting point of view on Zachary's part. That has never been my experience or observation but it's certainly possible that a pilot might be able to sell the series but push it in the wrong direction. That, however, was not what was really on my mind at the moment. What was on my mind was, "I shouldn't be hearing this." I shouldn't be eavesdropping, even unintentionally on his meeting, just as I wouldn't want someone listening in on mine.

I got up and told the receptionist that I was going to wait outside. She said that would be fine but before I made it out the door, I heard —

"I'll give you an example. There's this show on Saturday morning called Dungeons & Dragons. It was a good idea for a show but the development on it was horrendous. I don't know who wrote it…it may have been the producer's nephew or someone because it definitely wasn't a professional job. It set the direction of the show all wrong and…"

That was all I heard but it was enough.

I came to a number of immediate conclusions. One was that Zachary knew darn well I was the next interview. That list of writers on the receptionist's desk was unmissable. Another was that he did not realize he could be heard in the waiting area. Yet another was that Zachary was a weasel of the first, second and third order.

Also, I decided I wasn't going to say anything about it or even let him know that I'd heard him. I waited until he departed the bungalow, went back in and then the receptionist escorted me about 2.5 feet into the inner office. I no longer recall the names of the husband/wife producing team I met with so let's call them Buddy and Sally.

I also don't remember the name of their show so let's call it The Fun Show. You never saw The Fun Show. That day I went in for the meeting, Buddy and Sally were certain it was a "go" project with many more episodes to be written and filmed and none of us knew it would never make it onto television. I do not believe anything beyond the pilot was ever produced.

Exactly what happened, I can't say for certain but after I tell you a little more, we'll all have a pretty good guess. And by the way, I'm calling it The Fun Show because Sally was incapable of formulating a sentence about it without using the word "fun," as in "We want this show to be fun" or "The story editor we hire must know how to inject a lot of fun into things" or "Do you think you can give us the proper quotient of fun?"

At one point, she asked me, "What is your definition of fun?" I started to say "Not sitting here, answering these questions" but instead, I said something utterly meaningless like, "Fun is the antithesis of any condition or situation in which people, alone or in a group, are not having fun."

Sally turned to Buddy and said, "See? He gets it!"

They then showed me a 10-minute hunk of their pilot — "the best moments," they said. I managed to stop myself from saying something that began with "If these are the best moments…" but trust me. What I saw was incoherent, amateurish, badly-staged and about as much fun as a root canal with a Craftsman 19HP 42 in. Turn Tight® Automatic Riding Mower.

When it was mercifully over, Buddy pulled the cassette out of the Betamax® and asked me, "What do you think you can do with this?" I was going to name some good TV shows you could record by reusing the tape but I thought, "What's the point? I need to just get the hell outta here." I gave him some sort of answer, thanked them for having me in and got the hell outta there. As I headed for my car, I thought, "Boy, that show would not be the antithesis of any condition or situation in which people, alone or in a group, are not having fun."

The next day, Bernie phoned. "They called but not to offer you the job. They want to know what kind of salary you'd want so if it's too high, they won't have to spend the time deciding if they want you."

I said, "Price me out of it."

He said, "I can probably do that by quoting them the starting hourly rate at McDonald's" — and off my agent went to try and not get me a job. He called back ten minutes later and told me that just to see what would happen, he quoted them basic WGA scale — in other words, the absolute minimum they could pay me.

"I think you're the first one they asked about this," he said. "They apparently have no idea about the WGA contract that they're working under. The man gasped and I heard him repeat the number to the woman and she was aghast. I think they really were thinking they could get a professional story editor for McDonald's pay." Scale wasn't that much money.

An hour later, the phone rang again. It was Zachary, calling to ask me a computer question of no import. After we got through the bogus reason for his call, he said, "Hey, while I've got you here, I heard you were up for the story editor job on that Fun Show thing that's looking for a story editor."

I told him I'd been in to see them (as if he didn't already know that) and that I'd decided the show was not for me. He said, "Well, you know what's best for you. Say, just out of curiosity, if you did want to do that show, what kind of a salary would you ask for?"

I thought a second and said, "I'd start at triple Writers Guild scale and maybe be prepared to come down to double or a little more. They're looking for someone real good and if you quote them anything less, they're going to figure you're on the bottom of the business. Have you talked to them? Because you'd be real good for it."

"Thanks, Mark," he said. "I knew I could count on you. I always tell people you're truly one of the best guys in this industry."

A whole report on this weekend will have to wait until I'm home and have had about 24 hours of continuous sleep. But I wanted to post this photo of me from yesterday with a friend of mine for about 55 years. He used to be Tony Isabella, writer of many fine comic books, Black Lightning among them. Now she is Jenny Blake Isabella, writer of other fine comic books, her contribution to DC Pride 2025 among them. Last night, I had the honor/joy of presenting her with the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing and she gave one of the all-time great acceptance speeches. I think I'll stay friends with this person for another 55 years.

Comedians often talk about "bombing" — those painful moments when their material is zooming over, under and around an audience of people who are not laughing. Wanna see an example of this? Here are some excerpts from Donald Trump's speech last night at the rescheduled White House Correspondent's Dinner. And you know what else isn't funny? That this man is in charge of bombing human beings…

Hard to believe but The Daily Show has been around for thirty — count 'em, thirty — years.  I believe folks will someday look back on it and consider it, especially when Jon Stewart was on it, the most important TV show of its day.  And it also manages to be damn funny most of the time.  Funny is no small achievement when you're dealing with what are often pretty sad or disturbing stories.  Here's a brief overview of those thirty years…

 I get requests to repost this from to time.  Being at Comic-Con is as good a reason as any.  This is from  October 16, 2014…

I have a script that needs to get done by tomorrow morning and somehow, instead of writing it, I'm writing this piece about how to deal with deadlines. There's a famous quote from the great playwright George S. Kaufman that was uttered when a producer asked him if he could have a certain script done by Tuesday. Kaufman asked him, "Do you want it Tuesday or do you want it good?"

There's a point in there but it's not the one that some writers want to extract from it. That quote is used to justify lateness and it's employed as such by folks who forget that Kaufman did operate under deadlines and did meet them. He had to. An awful lot of his best work was produced on the road when a play was in tryouts and wasn't working. Kaufman and his collaborator (whichever one it was at the moment) would hole up in his hotel room, write an entire scene by dawn and then rehearse and stage it in the morning. That was probably the most grueling deadline-meeting you could have in his profession.

Others have said that what you have to do is to make it as good as you can by Tuesday. That's one of the things you need to learn to do as a professional writer. And what that involves usually is not seizing on any of the eighty thousand reasons you can come up with not to write and not to finish by Tuesday. There's always one. Sometimes if you're sharp, you can use all eighty thousand.

I have a couple of writer friends who sometimes need to be scolded a bit in this regard. Recently, one wrote me to detail all the things that were happening in his life that were preventing him from finishing his novel by the deadline. Actually, this was about his fourth deadline on this alleged book. He blew the first one so they gave him another. Then he didn't get it done by that date so they gave him an extension…and so on. I would ordinarily be more tactful and friendly in my response but this friend's recent antics seem to demand something more like this…

Stop explaining to me how it's everyone's fault but yours that you're not going to finish your book by the latest in a long series of deadlines. I'm surprised you haven't found some way yet to blame Vladimir Putin, Tony the Tiger, me and Edward Everett Horton. If you took all that effort you're putting into blaming others and applied it to the book, you'd be autographing printed copies by now.

Yes, yes…I know this person distracted you and that person put you in a mood where you couldn't write and some other person didn't get your computer fixed on time and on and on. There is always a reason to not get one's work done and you're seizing on every one of them. You probably won't get anything done before Thanksgiving because you have to decide which dinner to attend…so it'll be the Pilgrims' fault your book isn't finished.

Look, I'll say this simply: Get the book done. A writer who can't get his or her work finished is like a plumber who can never fix a leak. You're kind of useless. 20% of your excuses are probably valid but we all have those things happen to us and still, we get to the last page and type "The End." The other 80% are you looking for excuses not to write or, at least, not hand in anything.

Remember our friend [Name Redacted]? She never got anything finished which is why she's now in another line of work. I understood why she couldn't finish her work and it wasn't all those problems, not unlike yours, which she claimed to have. It was because she was terrified to finish the script and hand it in. She was terrified of the moment that the editor would call up and say, "I have some real problems with his." Or she was terrified of it getting published and then getting bad reviews or not selling or something. As long as she didn't finish, she was putting off those catastrophes.

I'd be sympathetic if this happened once in a while. It happens once in a while to everyone. But you have developed this dogged determination to not accept the responsibility for what you're doing…or more significantly, not doing. I like you and your writing too much to go along with this. Finish the script or give up and go apply for a job at Subway making sandwiches.

In case you haven't figured it out, this is me being supportive. I'm always supportive. If you decide it's time to go work at Subway, I'll have a foot-long meatball on Italian bread with provolone cheese. Toasted. And a bag of Baked Lays.

At last report, the novel wasn't finished yet but I think I got him from Chapter 8 to Chapter 9. He was almost to 10 before his sister came into town to visit for six weeks. And as we all know, you can't possibly be expected to do your job when your sister is in town. Since I have no sister, I'm going to go finish my script.

That's my buddy Leonard Maltin and me right after we spent an hour talking about famous comedians and cartoonists we had the pleasure to meet. He told about meeting Smith and Dale. I told about meeting Bud Abbott. He told about meeting Otto Soglow and Rube Goldberg. I told about meeting Harold Lloyd. If shameless name-dropping makes you tingle, you would have had a very good time.

Alas, Room 9 at the convention center only seats 280 and a lot more than that wanted in, not just for this panel but also for three others I did in there today. We need to work bigger rooms. My apologies to those who couldn't get in.

Here's this one more time. Some online schedules haven't been updated with changes. Where they differ from this list, this list is the correct one…

I am becoming a huge fan of most of the current Daily Show correspondents — and especially Desi Lydic…

I'm putting some reruns up here while I'm busy doing thousands of panels at Comic-Con. This one first ran here in December of 2016 and I selected it for reuse because I still, from time to time, get this question…

In 1970, I had…well, not a hand but about half a knuckle in the launching of the Mister Miracle comic book by Jack Kirby. Some time ago, a reader of this site named Joe Wainright wrote to ask me about the coloring of that hero's costume and lately, I've seen a couple of different websites where folks discuss it or misunderstand what happened. So here's the story but first, here's Joe's e-mail to me…

I don't understand why Mister Miracle's costume was one color on the cover of Mister Miracle #1 and a different color inside and from then on, but then he was totally uncolored on the cover of #3. Later, I saw Kirby's original design of the character and the coloring of that was completely different. Didn't Kirby himself do that coloring? Why was it changed? I also read that you designed the final coloring. Can you clear this up?

I'll try. First, we start with the yellow costume above. In either late 1968 or early 1969, Jack was becoming increasingly unhappy with the way he was being treated at Marvel, specifically that he was receiving no financial compensation or credit for his serious contributions to the stories and to the creation of ongoing characters. To try and address this problem, he took some time and created a whole bunch of new characters. A lot of his presentation pieces for them are around. Jack drew them, inked some of them himself and engaged his friend and fellow Marvel artist Don Heck to ink some of them. Jack colored them all.

At the time, Jack was receiving quiet inquiries from other publishers — not all of them then in the comic book business — about maybe creating a new line of comics for them. So Jack did these drawings as part of a two-part plan. Part One was that he'd show them to the folks at Marvel and say something like, "Hey, look! I've got a bunch of ideas or new characters and I'll be glad to sell them to you but I have to have a much different working arrangement with you than I've had in the past!"

Part Two was that if he didn't get that better deal from them, he might use the drawings to make that better deal with another publisher.

Well, Part One didn't work. The people then in charge at Marvel would not discuss any changes in "the deal." They wanted the new ideas but they wanted them on the old terms so that never happened. Part Two did not succeed with the new publishers who'd courted Jack. They either didn't have the necessary funds and infrastructure to get into comics or only wanted to get into comics if they could buy material on the same terms as Marvel.

But the drawings were a key factor in DC hiring Jack away from Marvel in early 1969 and most of the characters from the presentations would wind up in the books he initially did for DC. It's important to understand that Jack did not consider either the designs or his plans for the characters firm. They were concepts he would rearrange and reconfigure into what he did for DC. For example, he had the idea for this epic continuity that he initially called "The New Gods" but he wasn't set on which of the characters he'd created and which additional ones he would create would figure into "The New Gods" and which of the characters he'd concocted would appear in standalone series that were unconnected to "The New Gods."

Mister Miracle and The Black Racer were at one point unconnected to the epic in Jack's mind but he later decided to fold Mister Miracle into "The New Gods" and the guy in charge at DC who hired Jack, Carmine Infantino, urged him to put The Black Racer into that world. Eventually too, "The New Gods" went from being the umbrella title of all the books in that epic continuity to being the title of one of those comics and — seemingly from out of nowhere — "The Fourth World" became the umbrella title.

When Jack did the drawing of the guy in the yellow suit, that may have been the visual for Mister Miracle or — and I think this is more likely — that may have been the visual for some other idea he had and he later decided to use it, sans gun, for his idea for Mister Miracle, the Super Escape Artist. Jack was always rearranging ideas in his mind and marrying this one to that one. Mister Miracle did not arrive at his final form until Jack finally wrote and drew the first issue of this comic…and even then, the hero continued to evolve.

Kirby finished that first issue and sent it back to the DC offices in New York. He did not send them the drawing with the yellow outfit to use as a guide because that wasn't the finished version of the character he now had in his mind. He planned to later work out color schemes for Mister Miracle and all the other characters in the new books he was creating for DC but the folks at the firm said something like, "Oh, don't bother. We'll handle those here."

DC had a Production Department and they were very proud of it. A man named Sol Harrison headed it up and the coloring was supervised by a man named Jack Adler. Both had been in their jobs a long time. Both were considered to be very good at those jobs. Both of them felt (as did others in the office) that the coloring done at DC was the best in the business and that the coloring over at Marvel was really lousy. Neither one was a particular fan of anything at Marvel, including Jack's artwork and the way other artists incorporated elements of his style.

Infantino, who was running DC then, kept asking Jack for suggestions on how to improve the DC line. When Jack suggested that they look at Marvel books to see how comics should be colored, he made instant enemies of the Production Department. Jack just plain thought that Marvel coloring — especially as done by Marie Severin and Stan Goldberg — was superior, at least for the kind of thing he did. Around the DC offices, that was heresy.

It would not be inaccurate to say that for the length of Jack's stay at DC, he never liked the way his work was colored and the persons doing or overseeing that coloring weren't too fond of the Kirby work they were coloring. This was probably not unrelated to the many changes they found it necessary to do to Jack's work there.

Anyway, Jack didn't fight them on most of what they did but when they sent him an example of how they were coloring Mister Miracle's costume, he felt that had to be changed. That was the purple design you see at the top of this post in the right-hand image. I was working for Jack then, teamed with a fine fellow named Steve Sherman. Jack asked us to come up with a new color scheme for the hero and he did a quickie drawing of him. We Xeroxed it about a dozen times and Steve colored half of them different ways and I colored the other half with different ideas.

Neither of us recalls which of us came up with the one Jack selected but he picked one and shipped it back to New York, just days before Mister Miracle #1 was ready to go to press. He probably picked the one he thought was acceptable and the least different from what New York had done. It wasn't that much of a change but Jack felt it was necessary.

The issue had already been colored and color-separated and they'd probably made the printing plates by then…but Infantino agreed to go with what Jack wanted and they spent whatever it cost to change the color scheme on the cover. They said it was too late to replace the purple costume on the inside but I suspect they just didn't want to spend the money.

As of the second issue, the red costume was used and nowadays when they reprint #1, they adjust the colors on it as they did in the image you see at left in the second pair of images, a few paragraphs above this one.

As for why Mister Miracle was completely colorless on the cover of #3…I have no idea. At the time, Jack asked and he got all sorts of double talk that he took to mean no one there knew why, either. He told us, "It looks like their infallible Production Department screwed up."

Christopher Cook wrote…

I remember seeing The Jetsons on at night; I was six when it premiered. We had color TV. Dad worked in the electronics department at Sears so he got the family a set.

I also read that ABC still didn't have color capabilities yet so they had The Jetsons (and The Flintstones) transmitted to them in color from NBC and ABC would relay them to their affiliates. We were in the San Diego market and this posed a secondary issue. The ABC station there was XETV/channel 6 and it was licensed to Tijuana, Mexico. As such, they could not have shows sent from ABC so they either had shows recorded "bicycled" to them from an ABC station (likely KABC in Los Angeles) or they were transmitted from another ABC station (again likely KABC) which XETV beamed to households.

That sounds like a lot of work just to get a show on the air that I wanted to see. It's still a very vivid memory for me, watching the first episode of The Jetsons. I remember a certain joy at recognizing a few of the voice actors and a certain frustration that the end credits went by so fast. I wanted to study them and see which names I could recognize from other Hanna-Barbera shows.

Watching TV was very different back in the days before VCRs or DVRs or anything that let you record the show and watch it when you wanted to watch it and as many times as you wanted to watch it and even still-frame moments. Back then, you got one shot at it.

I have a story I've told…somewhere…about helping get George O'Hanlon hired to reprise his role as George Jetson in the revival of the series. I could have sworn I've told it on this blog but I can't find it anywhere. When I get back from Comic-Con, I'll search my files to see where I could have told it and if I can't find that I did, I'll write it up and post it here. Basically, they initially didn't cast Mr. O'Hanlon to do his own voice because they thought he was dead…and because of Leonard Maltin and me, they found out otherwise.

Several of you have sent me the link to this news story saying that there may be good news in the offing about the Cinerama Theater in Hollywood. It may soon be reopening after way too long a closure. It's the theater that was literally build to show my favorite movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and — no offense to other theaters — it was always the best place to see that movie.  So I hope it opens and I hope that's among the first things they show in it.

And several of you have also written to ask me what I think of a new book that just came out by James Curtis.  It's called Comedy is a Grim Business: The Making of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. And what I think of it is that I haven't gotten a copy of it yet but Mr. Curtis does real good books and I'm pretty sure this will be up there with his others. If you want to get a copy of it, here's an Amazon link.

Rob Salkowitz reports on the financial/business end of Comic-Con International. He says it's in better monetary shape than it's been in a long time but, of course, there are problems with, among other matters, hotel accommodations and the limitations of the San Diego Convention Center.

The article raises the much-discussed question of whether the convention will ever move out of San Diego. I stand by my prediction it won't, at least not in my lifetime. I can't believe the city of San Diego would ever be stupid enough to allow that to happen.