On the way home from my appearance on Shokus Internet Radio, I stopped off at a supermarket for a few items and I was shocked at what I saw there. It's bad enough that they're selling Dry Cat…but they're even selling Canned Cat. In fact, they had a whole aisle for it. This is just barbaric. I suppose the mini-marts are selling small packages of Kitten.
Hey, take a look at what time it is right now. If it's between 4 PM and 6 PM Pacific Time (7 PM and 9 PM Eastern), then I'm live on Shokus Internet Radio right this minute, talking animation with my fellow cartoon buff Earl Kress and our cheery host, Stu Shostak. You can hear us if you tune in to Stu's Show, which you can do by going to this page and selecting an audio browser. Log in, listen…you can even call in and ask a question. Don't miss this golden opportunity. I may not be back on the radio for quite some time if I wind up going on my killing spree.
Over on Marvel's website, editor Tom Brevoort (Hi, Tom!) picks a whole batch of his favorite Jack Kirby covers. I would have picked some of those and wouldn't have picked others but, hey, it's Tom's list and he has pretty good taste in comics.
Then over in his column, Steven Grant (Hi, Steven!) takes off from Tom's list and discusses Jack's approach to covers. I think it's a perceptive discussion. Grant's right that Jack could be repetitive with designs like that, and that the overriding concern was sales. Back when comics were sold on newsstands, as opposed to the current-day comic shops, a "grabber" cover was much more important than it is today. In fact, there were those in the biz who thought the cover was just about all that mattered; that if you got a good one, the insides were of little importance. Grant's piece is well worth your attention if this kind of thing interests you.
I should also clarify something. Steven writes…
I'd heard on several occasions that Joe Maneely, who drew many '50s Atlas Comics titles (for those who came in late, Atlas is the after-the-fact collective name for Marvel publisher Martin Goodman's publications of the 1950s), was Stan Lee's favorite artist, so I've occasionally wondered what would have happened if Maneely had lived (he died in a freak subway accident in the late '50s) to see the dawn of the Marvel age. Would Stan have recruited him instead of Jack to draw Fantastic Four? (Or however it happened.) I've always though it a good bet but my friend and Kirby acolyte (and that's not hyperbole either) Mark Evanier has pointed out that what kept Atlas from bellying up before they could even get to the Marvel age was Kirby's return to the company and the subsequent upswing of sales of Atlas comics, particularly the "monster" books (like Tales of Suspense and Journey Into Mystery sporting Kirby covers. For Mark, this suggests that Goodman, ever cognizant of sales, would have insisted Stan go with Kirby for the fairly experimental (for Goodman) F.F. book, even if Maneely were available. Certainly Maneely's more restrained and obsessive style would have had trouble drawing in anywhere near the number of readers Kirby's in your face, balls to the wall style did.
Me again. There's a limit to how productive these "What If?" exercises can be but I'll take this one this far…
First off, if Maneely had lived, Atlas/Marvel would have been a very different company. Actually, between him and Kirby and Ditko (Stan's other favorite artist), there would have been little room for anyone else to draw for the firm. It's apparently true that rising sales on Kirby-drawn comics — the ones Steven mentions but especially the western, Rawhide Kid — encouraged Goodman to keep publishing comics at a time when he was considering the abandonment of that marketplace. As I wrote in a recent Jack Kirby Collector, "Would it [Rawhide Kid] have gained readers if Stan had put Maneely on the book? Who knows? Sometimes, it's not a matter of having a good artist but of having the right good artist and the right chemistry."
But then, you get to the moment when Goodman reportedly said to Stan something like, "Hey, DC's getting some good numbers on this Justice League of America thing. I want to try a book like that…a bunch of super-heroes." And at that point, a lot of different things could have happened if Stan had done the illogical thing of trying to develop such a book with Maneely. (It was illogical because Maneely had almost no track record for super-heroes, whereas Kirby was an acknowledged master of the genre.) What I can't imagine them doing is coming up with Fantastic Four without Jack. It's a lot like asking what you'd be like if your mother had married someone else. The first difference is that you would have been a completely different person.
The Lee-Maneely team would have come up with a completely different comic. Would it have sold as well and spawned a new Renaissance in super-hero funnybooks? Again, who knows? Maybe it would have bombed, Goodman would have shut down his comic line, Stan would have gone into politics and by 1968, been in a position to be elected President of the United States…while Jack decided to become a doctor, got his medical license in six months and then found a cure for The Common Cold. I wouldn't have been surprised by any of this.
Three weeks ago here — in this item — I linked to this op-ed article in The New York Times. In it, seven infantrymen and noncommissioned officers who were serving in Iraq said that from their vantage point, the war was going poorly, was being mismanaged and was making things worse for Iraq instead of better.
While this op-ed was being prepared, one of the seven soldiers was shot in the head. He is expected to survive but not without lasting damage. On Monday, two more of the seven were killed in a vehicle accident.
Here, from one of the Cartoon Voice Panels at this year's Comic-Con International, is vocal magician Maurice La Marche doing many of his roles…though not his most famous. We wanted to save his Orson Welles simulation — which he used for The Brain on Pinky and The Brain — for later. But he did a whole bunch of others and demonstrated why he's one of the top guys in the biz. The voice you'll hear at the beginning asking him to save it is me. The others are all him.
I forgot to mention it here before but our pal Floyd Norman is about to be designated as an official Disney Legend. This is an award that the Disney outfit bestows on a select number of folks who've made great contributions to the company that Walt guy started. This is a great honor and the best part is that Floyd will be inducted at a ceremony along with Michael Eisner, subject of at least a thousand unflattering Floyd Norman gag cartoons. Can't wait to see the photo of the two of them being enshrined together.
Fred Kaplan thinks today's Senate grilling of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker had more substance than yesterday's softball game in the House. It probably did but the end-result will be the same: We're staying in Iraq, keeping as many troops there as we have available for that purpose, until someone other than George W. Bush can rethink this thing.
Yes, I'm doing it again. Tomorrow, my chum Earl Kress and I will be the guests on Stu's Show, the gold standard program on Shokus Internet Radio, which is the gem of the Live365 network of web-based broadcasting. Our enthusiastic host Stuart Shostak will be grilling us about animation history and about our dubious careers as writers of cartoons.
Now, get this straight: This is not a podcast. You can't log in and listen to it at your leisure. This is because Shokus Internet Radio pays the proper fees for music use so they are not allowed to make the shows available for download. They can only stream them so you have to log in and listen, just like any radio show, at the appropriate time. The appropriate time for Stu's Show is 4 PM Pacific (7 PM Eastern) and we'll be on tomorrow for two hours. The show will replay, usually at the same time, until next week's Stu's Show so you can also listen then. But listen tomorrow when we're on live. You can even call in and ask a question or answer one of Stu's incredibly-easy trivia questions to win a rather nice prize.
You can hear this tremendous show by going to the website for Shokus Internet Radio and selecting an audio browser. And let me suggest that you go try that right now to (a) see how easy it is and (b) see what's on right now. You'll find that it's a fun channel to listen to even when Earl and I are not on it. Take a look at the schedule over there, too.
Internet Radio is fun to listen to while you're at your computer. Open a window, tune in a channel, then minimize it and go on balancing your checkbook or playing Sudoku or browsing this site or whatever you do at your keyboard. And Shokus Internet Radio is a fun thing to listen to, especially when I'm on it.
Alan Woollcombe writes, regarding this video link from the other day…
A little bit of film trivia here: the universal reaction in our household to your Jack Benny/Liberace clip was "Hey, that's Richard Wattis!"
Who?
Well, speaking from a British perspective, we didn't have Jack Benny or Liberace on our TV screens in England in the 60s (though most knew who Liberace was). What we did have was the tail end of a great British film comedy boom, and one of the principal character actors was Richard Wattis, who makes a fleeting appearance in your Benny/Liberace clip here as the butler. He did a great line in exasperated officialdom (he was in the St Trinian's films as a man from the Ministry of Education) as well as snooty butlers. When British comedy migrated from the big screen to the small, Wattis largely disappeared from view — at least to British audiences. Interesting to see that he made it onto American TV. Was he a regular on either Benny's or Liberace's shows?
If you have any more Wattis clips — with or without that showoff piano player or disgruntled violinist — do let us see them. The man was an unsung genius at what he did.
I don't have any other clips. I don't even have that one. I just linked to it on YouTube, where I believe it's a preview of an upcoming DVD release of Liberace's TV work. Mr. Wattis certainly wasn't a regular on Benny's shows and I'm not familiar enough with Liberace's to know if he made appearances in other episodes. (For that matter, I don't know if the program was taped here or in Great Britain. In the late sixties and seventies, a lot of American TV shows taped over there for no other reason than that it was cheaper.) In any case, Wattis sounds like my favorite kind of comic actor. I'll keep an eye out for him elsewhere.
George F. Will thinks The Surge has failed and that there's no rationale for the current U.S. military strategy in Iraq. And frankly, I'm getting sick and tired of America-hating Liberals like him wishing for our nation to fail.
As we explained back here, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy shot foreign versions of several of their movies, reading phonetic Spanish or French (or whatever language) off an off-screen blackboard. Here's five minutes from the Spanish version of their feature, Pardon Us, which took place mostly in prison. In Mexico or Spain, Stan and Ollie were called El Gordo y El Flaco. For obvious reasons.
Another comic book artist of the past has left us. Larry Woromay, who went from pulp illustration to drawing for Atlas Comics (later known as Marvel) died August 26 at the age of 80. Woromay was born in Greenwich Village in New York in 1926 and after serving in World War II, attended the Cartoonists and Illustrators School in New York on the G.I. Bill. He got into pulps just as that form was dying out and segued into freelance comic book work, mostly for Stan Lee, starting in 1950. He drew mainly crime and horror comics until 1956 when Atlas had its famous crash/downsizing and most of its artists were told there was no more work.
That was Woromay's cue to get out of comics…which he did for the most part, eventually securing a job as director of an enterprise called Puppet Theater in Nassau County, New York. He worked there for twenty years (until retirement) but supplemented that income with occasional work in comics, mostly for Charlton in the late sixties. He also drew one story for Warren's Eerie Magazine in the days when Archie Goodwin was its editor. Woromay moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1995, which is where he passed away. He is survived by his wife of 58 years, two daughters and seven grandkids.
Eric Newsom sent me this link to the text of an interview that Ditko did in 1968 for the fanzine, Marvel Main. If you look at the work he was doing for Marvel just before he left and then you read his words from this interview, you can get a pretty good idea of the creative tensions that were going on in the Lee-Kirby relationship. The company dynamic had evolved into offering a diet of "heroes" who were either flawed or uncertain of their own heroism and values. That's not the way Ditko saw the world.
Also, Josh Wendell just wrote me to ask…
I'd heard Ditko quit Spider-Man because of the storyline about the Green Goblin who was about to be unmasked. Ditko wanted it to be one person and Stan wanted it to be someone else. Is this not true?
It may be that they differed on that plot point…although you also have to remember that the two men weren't speaking by this point. Ditko was plotting and pencilling Spider-Man, then handing it in with notes to Stan's Production Manager, Sol Brodsky. Stan then dialogued the material and it was lettered, then returned to Ditko…who increasingly disagreed with the dialogue Stan had scripted and the changes he'd made in what Ditko regarded as "his" stories.
But come on. You don't quit a company that's employed you for years because you want the Mystery Villain to be one guy and your collaborator wants it to be someone else. At most, that might be a Last Straw that caused you to ask off that particular book. Ditko left Marvel completely and either said or gave folks there the impression that he was never coming back. I'm not taking any sides in who was right or who was wrong…but obviously, Lee and Ditko weren't getting along well before they got near the Green Goblin unmasking storyline. More than a year previously, Ditko demanded and got a plotting credit, and probably some writing money.
And as the friction grew, Stan stuck Spider-Man into the Daredevil comic so that he could "audition" its artist, John Romita, in case he needed to replace Ditko. It had all been building for some time before Ditko quit.
One other thing I should have mentioned: A few months before Ditko announced his resignation, Marvel made the deal for the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon show, the first time those characters were transferred to another, more lucrative medium. The show went on the air with segments of five Marvel heroes (Iron Man, Thor, Sub-Mariner, Hulk and Captain America) "animated" — I'm using that verb loosely — right off the comics that had been drawn by Jack Kirby, Don Heck, Ditko and the others. Ditko didn't mention this to me or to anyone I know who's discussed those days with him…but Kirby and Heck were sure rankled that their poorly-paid comic book work was being transferred to television without any additional compensation. It would be surprising if Ditko wasn't.
It's also not widely known but when the deal for that show was made, Sub-Mariner was not included and Spider-Man was. The original sales presentation film (a bit of which I showed at the Comic-Con in San Diego last year) included Spider-Man. He was taken out of it because a more lucrative offer for a network Spider-Man cartoon series seemed likely…and indeed, such a series was on ABC the following season. In any case, at the time Ditko left Marvel, he was well aware that his co-creation had been sold for a TV show and that there would likely be a flood of Spider-Man toys and merchandise, and that he wouldn't be sharing in that windfall. I can't think of another freelancer in comics who wasn't upset when he found himself in that situation, even if some of them chose to not go public with their feelings.
So is it really that huge a mystery as to why Steve Ditko quit Spider-Man?
Next Sunday, BBC4 in the U.K. is running In Search of Steve Ditko, a film by Jonathan Ross. I'm told it'll turn up on YouTube and other online sites soon after that and I would imagine that DVDs and such will make the rounds. This page gives you the broadcast times in case you can get BBC4 where you are. I spoke with Jonathan about it at the Comic-Con and it sounds like a "must see" for those of us interested in comic book history.
Nevertheless, I'll quibble with some of the rhetoric on that web page. It says, and I quote…
Ditko is a recluse and has never revealed why he left Marvel Comics. He has never been interviewed and won't allow his photograph to be taken.
"Recluse" seems a bit harsh to me, suggesting as it does a person who never associates with other human beings. What we have in Ditko is a very gifted gentleman who refuses interviews and convention appearances and wide interaction with the comic book community and personal publicity. But dozens of folks from that community (including me, years ago) have visited him in his studio or spoken with him in comic book company offices and such.
Yeah, he's never been interviewed in the accepted sense. That's if you don't count a couple of brief Q-and-A things he did for fanzines many years ago. Also, a few years ago, two separate individuals were telling people they'd recorded long phone conversations with Ditko, and they were guardedly letting out tapes. I wouldn't count those as interviews, either. (And don't bother asking if I know where you can get copies. I don't. I refused to accept one because I thought, and still think, it's a slimy and probably illegal thing to do.)
But the man has certainly discussed with others why he left Marvel Comics, even if he has sometimes claimed in print that he hasn't. He was unhappy because he believed Marvel's then-owner was reneging on certain promises about sharing in the revenues of the characters Ditko co-created, Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. He was upset with the way his comics were then produced, feeling that he was doing most of the writing work on the comics he did with Stan Lee, but that Lee — as dialogue writer — was getting too much of the credit and money. (Marvel's two other best artists of the period, Jack Kirby and Wally Wood — both good friends of Ditko's — felt the same way.) There were also personality clashes between Lee and Ditko — they didn't speak for the last eighteen months or so of their "collaboration" — and Ditko was displeased by many of the creative choices Stan was making, treating Spider-Man as a morally-confused, troubled protagonist. Ditko, as was obvious from his subsequent work, didn't like heroes who didn't rigidly adhere to his own interpretation of good and evil, black and white. But Stan, of course, was the editor and had the last word.
Ditko told me all that in his studio in 1970, not long after he quit. He's said it to others and I also think it's pretty easy to perceive in his other comics and in the occasional essays he's written for the fan press. He may write things like "My reasons are my own and I've never divulged them to anyone" but we don't have to believe that. Besides, what other reasons could there have been? He didn't quit Marvel in 1966 because he didn't like the ties Stan was wearing in the office.
Jonathan Ross is quite a brilliant man so I'll presume his documentary doesn't presume there's some dark, unfathomable mystery why someone walks out of a company and refuses to ever work for them again…a vow Ditko kept until 1979 when Charlton, the main company that employed him after Marvel, cut back on buying. (Even then when Ditko returned, he steadfastly declined to draw his old co-creations, Spider-Man or Dr. Strange. Many tried to convince him and a few writers even snuck them into scripts for a panel or two, only to have Ditko politely refuse.) In any case, I think it's time to bury this myth that Ditko's reasons for quitting are unknowable, even if he says they are. They were pretty much the same reasons that anyone quits a job like that.
By the way: I went to look up one Ditko fact on Wikipedia and spotted an error there. I don't know how to correct an entry so I'd appreciate it if someone else could fix this line in their page on Ditko…
In 1968, Charlton editor Dick Giordano moved to DC Comics. Steve Ditko, and several other artists and writers in Giordano's stable, moved with him.
That's the way it keeps getting reported and it's wrong. Ditko was hired by DC before Giordano. The editor of Ditko's first comic for DC (Showcase #73, the first Beware the Creeper) was Murray Boltinoff. In fact, it was in part because Ditko gave him a recommendation that DC management decided to hire Giordano, who then joined up and became editor of several comics, Ditko's among them.
Fred Kaplan reports on today's testimony by Petraeus and Crocker. I agree with him. It was all about as predictable as me linking to a Fred Kaplan article.