It has been my joy/privilege/honor (all of these) to know several people who were deserving of the oft-overapplied term of "genius." One of those was Stan Freberg, who was born one hundred years ago today and who left us in April of 2015 at the age of 88.

I first discovered his work via Soupy Sales' TV shows when Soupy would fill four minutes by having his puppet friends, Pookie and Hippie, mime to one of Freberg's brilliant comedy records. I was twelve or so…but Freberg had been a presence in my life for years, in one sense before I was born. At my sixtieth birthday party, he met my mother who told him that she used to watch Time for Beany when she was pregnant with me.

Stan was Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent, Dishonest John and several other characters on that legendary puppet show he did with his frequent partner, Daws Butler — another genius I was thrilled to know and work with. Before Time for Beany, Stan was a top cartoon voice actor. During Time for Beany, he became a writer-performer of top-selling novelty records. After Time for Beany, he did more records and became the auteur of some of the cleverest, funniest commercials ever made. For a time, every ad you could laugh at on radio or TV was either created by Freberg or by some ad agency trying to imitate Freberg.

He proved comedy could be smart and that satire was not just something, like the great George S. Kaufman once remarked, that closed on Saturday night. The man may have died eleven years ago but his work and influence are still with us. Here's but a tiny sample of what he could do…

Here's another installment — a pretty long one — of Everything You Need to Know About Saturday Night Live. This one covers Season 28, a season when I don't think I watched the show once. I guess I was waiting for someone to say, "Hey, you oughta watch the show" — or even "watch this sketch" — and nobody did.

Maybe that was a failing of my circle of friends but as I watch the excerpts in this recap, I think maybe not. One person in that circle who did watch described these years as a lot of talented people trying real hard to launch a character who could spin off into a movie. If you want to watch the earlier episodes of Everything You Need to Know About Saturday Night Live, click here.

Every so often, I come across a gizmo that improves my life a smidgen…but enough that I'm glad I spent the money on it. So let me tell you about the Dorobeen Rechargeable Battery Powered Fan, 20000 mAh Personal Desk Fan, Portable USB Table Fan, Quiet Desk Fan, Long Working Time, Desktop Fan for Study, Bedroom, Office, Camping. That's what they call it on Amazon.

In simpler terms, it's a rechargeable battery-powered fan that you can put anywhere you like to blow an adjustable volume of air anywhere you'd like it to blow. Right in your face might be a pleasant use. In times of great heat, as much of the U.S. is experiencing now, that can be an extremely pleasant use. This is either the same fan or one similar to the one Alton Brown uses when he wants to blow a constant stream of air on something he's cooking or something in his refrigerator. You charge it with a USB cable — either one you have lying around or the one they include in the box.

Amazon has them in two models. The blue one, which looks a little different than it does in the above photo, is smaller and it does not have a light on it. The green one, in addition to blowing air, also has a light under the top handle. For some reason, they are currently the same price.

The same price at this very moment on Amazon is $35.99 but there's a coupon thing you can click to bring the price down to $28.79. I have bought about seven of these because friends who visit me see mine, want one and then, being the generous guy I am, I give them mine and order another. I have reached the limit of my generosity so you can't have mine but you can order one at this link that pays me a teensy commission.

It's Amazon so you can return it if you don't like it but I think you'll like it.

Our pal Gary Sassaman has posted a new installment of his popular "Tales From My Spinner Rack" series, all about the comic books he loved when he — and I, to be frank — were younger. This one's a distillation of a panel Gary hosted at the recent Comic-Con International. It's all about Jack Kirby's return to Marvel Comics in 1975 — not the happiest time in his life…

There's this web channel called Secret Galaxy that's so secret I didn't know about it. How I found out is that a whole bunch o' people wrote to tell me they'd just done an episode on the history of Garfield and Friends, the series I worked on for a long time. I just watched it, bracing myself for a video that got lots of things wrong, as this kind of thing tends to do…but I was delightfully surprised. They got almost everything right! Here — see for yourself…

I'm busy today so I'll make this as short as I can…

A lot of folks write me with their complaints about Comic-Con International.  Contrary to what some think, I am not and have never been an employee or official of Comic-Con.  I'm just a Special Guest who does a lot of panels there.  (I am also, in no conceivable sense, a "founder" of the convention.  I know people who were or are, whichever way you want to put it, and they deserve all the credit.)

Most of the complaints that come my way flow from the fact that for some inexplicable reason, the San Diego Convention Center cannot accommodate an infinite number of attendees and have an infinite number of panels and program items and that everyone who wants a seat can get one.  The convention is also doing a particularly poor job of making certain that you can find every item you seek at a highly affordable price and also book a nearby, inexpensive hotel room.

Why oh why can't it be like Disneyland where it's never crowded, you never have to wait in line and all the food and souvenirs are real cheap?

Lately, people are bitching to me about Hall H — you know, that big room that I've never set foot in nor had anything to do with.  The complaints to me all sound like "They have to do something to ensure that all the stars I want to see there are on that stage and I can always get a good seat without a long wait!"

I absolutely understand the frustrations.  What I don't understand are the denials of reality as to what's possible or fixable.  And I really don't understand thinking that writing to me is going to do anything about those realities.  Anything at all.

Hey! Anyone out there in the mood to watch an hour-long, very interesting interview of Billy Joel? If you are, I've got one for you…

Hey, let's watch an old Ernie Kovacs clip. The announcer at the beginning is Bill Wendell, who was David Letterman's announcer for many years…

Over the years, Galen Fott has sent me a lot of solid tips and insights about theater. After I posted this piece about the upcoming national tour of Boop! The Musical, Galen reminded me of something I should have mentioned. This is a non-Equity production.  Don't know what that means?  Well, allow me to elucidate:  Stage actors are more or less divided into two castes: Those who are members of Actors' Equity and those who aren't.  To quote from this website…

Actors' Equity Association, founded in 1913, is the U.S. labor union that represents more than 51,000 professional actors and stage managers. Equity fosters the art of live theatre as an essential component of society and advances the careers of its members by negotiating wages, improving working conditions and providing a wide range of benefits, including health and pension plans. Actors' Equity is a member of the AFL-CIO and is affiliated with FIA, an international organization of performing arts unions.

The current president of the organization is, by the way, Brooke Shields.

Plays are therefore also divided into two groups: Those which are done under the umbrella of the Equity contract and those which aren't. Everything on Broadway is Equity. The theaters in which those shows are performed are all signatories to the Equity agreement.

In other areas, there's a mix. From the viewpoint of the playgoer, it means this: When you attend a non-Equity production, you're probably paying the same price for a ticket you'd pay for one to an Equity production but they're probably paying the actors less. And the cast is not drawn from the talent pool of actors with Broadway street cred. That doesn't mean they won't be good but for whatever reason — and being real new could be one — they haven't joined Equity.

It is highly (note the italics for emphasis) unlikely that anyone who was on the stage of the Broadway production of Boop! will be on the stage of the touring company as it traipses from town to town.  It can be advertised as the Broadway production coming to a theatre near you but that means there's a lineage — in this case, the same director and, to the extent feasible as the show goes from town to town, the same script and art direction and such. It will probably have the same Tony-nominated costumes and staging and choreography.

The sets will be approximately the same, though modified as necessary to be highly portable. The musical arrangements may be scaled down — or maybe not. Some special effects may have to be eliminated.  (We discussed this here recently about productions of Hadestown mounted away from the Walter Kerr Theater on W. 48th in Manhattan.)

A lot of these downgrades are not because it's not Equity.  It's because it's a touring show.  A touring show of either kind may have financial limitations and it surely has to be able to pack up, get out of town and set up in another town in a hurry,

I'm always fascinated by the mobility of a touring show like this. Even it's an Equity-sanctioned tour and an Equity cast, changes must be made and the seemingly-impossible must be done. Look at the schedule for the Boop! tour and wonder how they can make some of these moves. Like, they do their last performance in Schenectady on Sunday, October 18 and play their first performance in Cincinnati (700 miles away) the following Tuesday. Later on, they close in Fort Worth, Texas on a Sunday and open in Las Vegas (1200 miles away) the following Tuesday.  There are other such leaps.

Not a lot of time to rest there. Not a lot of time to get used to a new theater and rehearse with new stagehands and however many local musicians they employ. I'll bet at times it feels less like show business and more like the Bataan Death March except instead of marching, everyone is singing and tap-dancing. I've seen non-Equity shows that were pretty wonderful but they do have a significantly lower batting average than Equity-covered productions.

I'm in no position to judge why the Boop! tour is non-Equity.  The deals for a tour like this are complex and involve an awful lot of money on the line.  Maybe they honestly couldn't make the math work to mount an Equity tour.  I don't know anyone, even a staunch supporter of unions like myself, who decides to boycott all non-Equity productions.

We might opt for caution but in this case, I note that Jerry Mitchell — the show's director-choreographer in N.Y. — is doing the same duties for the road.  Mitchell is a highly respected gent who wouldn't be involved if he didn't think the touring version would uphold the hallowed name of Boop!  So I'll go but it makes me wish I'd made the time/effort to get back to New York when it was there.

I keep linking to Fred Kaplan's articles because, first of all, it seems to me he knows what he's writing about.  And secondly, with so many other news stories competing for our attention, it's hard sometimes to remember that we're still engulfed in a war that D.J.T. started and can't seem to end, no matter how many times he proclaims that he has.  Here's Fred's latest piece and here's the first paragraph of it…

Last Thursday, President Trump announced that his Board of Peace had achieved a "historic breakthrough" in which Hamas agreed to disarm and Israel agreed to withdraw from Gaza. It may seem that this happened months ago — not just four days ago, as I write this — because the deal has vanished from the headlines. There are two reasons why. First, so much has happened since then on other Middle East war fronts. Second, the agreement — which truly would be historic if it were true — turns out to have no basis in reality.

Has anything Trump has said about this war had any basis in reality? And by that, I mean has even he stuck by it a few days later?

Sophia Tesfaye wrote an excellent article on ReflectingPoolGate or whatever you want to call the case of David Hearn being indicted for destroying a national monument he could not possible have damaged.  Go read it and pay special attention to the sheer, stubborn "we're never wrong" aspect of Trumpism.  I really think that's the main reason folks who are loyal to him are loyal to him.  They love the idea of someone who always gets his way, even when his way is impractical or illegal.

Look at all the Trumpers who claim he always does what he says.  Never mind that he didn't build The Wall, let alone make Mexico pay for it.  Never mind that he didn't settle Ukraine at all, let alone in one day.  Never mind that several times a week for months now, he'd been claiming he just overwhelmingly won the Iran War.  To use a phrase I'm sure I've used before here, he's one of those people who confuses never admitting you're wrong with always being right.

Back in a long series of posts which started here, we explored the history of the comic book Blackhawk and the brief time I was involved with that property. Brief mention was made of the 15-chapter Blackhawk serial which debuted — as I did — in 1952. It was made by Columbia Pictures, it starred Kirk Alyn and it's not the easiest thing to sit through.

For the benefit of anyone who wanted to attempt it, I gave you a link to a copy you could stream and perhaps download over at the Internet Archive. Well, Michael Kilgore has clued me in to a couple of better prints of it you can now watch on that site. You have several choices…

1. You can watch each individual chapter the way God and Columbia Pictures intended it — in a better black-and-white print of it here.
2. You can watch each individual chapter they way they didn't intend it — colorized! — here.
3. Or you can watch the entire thing — all fifteen chapters, uncolorized! — here.

I'm going to bet that most of you will select…

4. Either just watch a little of it at any of those links or not watch it at all.

Last November, I was up in San Francisco, signing my latest book at a fine museum/store called The Cartoon Art Museum. I really liked the place so I'm sad to hear that it closed yesterday at its current location and is now looking for a new home. I hope they find one soon. I also hope that me signing books there in no way contributed to their need to vacate.

A North America touring company of Boop! The Musical begins performing October third at Rochester, New York’s West Herr Auditorium — and from there, it works its way across the country. Jasmine Amy Rogers, who was said to be so sensational (and earned a Tony nomination for being so sensational) is off doing other things so they've selected a new Boop. It's Aliya Grace, who was a finalist on American Idol and has some credits in musicals too. Here's a bit of her…

Frankly, if she's good enough for Jerry Mitchell (the show's director-choreographer), she's probably good enough for anyone. But I won't be the judge of that for quite a while. The show doesn't get to Los Angeles until July 6 of next year and, since I'm not going to buy a subscription for the whole season of shows at The Ahmanson, I won't even be able to order a ticket until January.

The whole tour schedule is here and they say other cities will be added. I wonder if they tried to arrange things so they were at a theater in San Diego July 22-25 when Comic-Con was in town. In any case, I'm eager to see this show. A lot of my friends loved it and the video clips I've seen from it make me wanna get a good seat.

I think these are the last of the photos from Comic-Con International in San Diego this year. I'm posting these because I think some of you would like to see them but also because I had a very good time at the convention and I want to be able to read these posts later on and remember. All these photos were taken by my buddy, Phil Geiger…

That's our Walt Kelly and Pogo panel for this year, discussing the work of one of the all-time great cartoonists.  We have Jane Plunkett and Paul Dini in the back row; Maggie Thompson, me and Jeff Smith in the front.  Jane showed slides of some rare items from the Kelly Archives.  Jeff talked about how Kelly was an influence on him and his popular creation, Bone.  The rest of us just talked about how much we liked Pogo.

Okay, now we get to this year's Saturday Cartoon Voices Panel.  Above, we have Michael Scott Action and Stephanie Southerland.

And here, we have Jon Allen and Sean Giambrone.

And here are Shelby Young and Eric Bauza.  Everyone on the panel was pretty wonderful  and I was told we turned a helluva lot of congoers away from this and the Quick Draw! that preceded it.  I feel like I should apologize to those who were turned away, though obviously every room has a finite number of seats and when they're filled to capacity, that's it.  In fact, folks were turned away from most of the panels I hosted at the con and there's not much I can do about that except join the throng of panel moderators who ask for larger rooms.  There aren't enough larger rooms for every panel that deserves one to have one.

Lastly, here's the composition of our Cover Story panel.  Behind Yours Truly and Dan Jurgens, we have Nicole Goux, Steven Butler and Denys Cowan.  We do this panel every year — three or four artists who've drawn memorable comic book covers discussing how they did what they did and how they feel about certain covers in hindsight.  It's a lot of interesting shop talk and a lot of different approaches are discussed…though everyone I've had on it seems to agree that if you submit multiple rough sketches to your editor, your editor will always pick the one you like the least.

And that about wraps things up for Comic-Con 2026.  I hope if you were there, you had even a fraction of the good time I had.  And if you weren't there, I hope you did something you enjoyed as much as I enjoyed my time there.