Monthly Archives: July 2015

John W. Dean on the tactics being used by Bill Cosby's lawyers to protect their client.

Speaking of Floyd Norman, as I was: Here he is, writing about how Walt Disney was the best boss he ever had. Floyd has obviously forgotten the one time he worked for me.

Carl Hiaasen explains why Donald Trump will never be president. He might also have mentioned Trump's high unfavorability numbers among Republicans.

I didn't notice it until just now but the Washington Post site ran this piece interviewing me while I was at Comic-Con. There are some typos in it which are my fault. I replied to the reporter's questions via my iPad while sitting behind a table at the con and I need to remember I always screw up my own text that way.

One of the artists in our Quick Draw! game on Saturday at Comic-Con was Floyd Norman. Don't know who Floyd Norman is? Well then, you probably need to see this documentary when it comes out…

This morning, I was waiting in my hotel's valet parking area…waiting for Sergio to pick me up in the car that the valets at his hotel couldn't seem to locate. I got to talking with one of the valets and I asked him a question I often ask folks who are in jobs where they get tipped. I asked him how Comic-Con attendees compare with those attending any other convention. He said we were more generous than most. I usually get that answer and I tend to believe it's sincere.

I mean, they could be saying that because I'm about to tip them but I don't think so. If I was in that valet's position and someone asked me what I asked him, I think I'd say, "You guys are the worst. I keep waiting for one of you to turn out to be a decent-enough human being to tip me a few bucks so I can save up enough to get my kid that operation."

Then, of course, I asked who the worst tippers are. The valet this morning said "Lawyers," then thought better of it and said, "No…people who work for pharmaceutical companies. The cheapest! The absolute cheapest!"

I asked, "What do they do? Tip you a free sample of Tylenol?"

He said, "Not even that. I could use that. And the thing that galls me is that it isn't even their money they'd be tipping us. Every single one of them is here on an expense account. They brag to each other about how much they're charging to their companies…but tipping the guy who unloaded eight heavy pieces of luggage from their rented Infinitis and carted them up to their rooms? God forbid. One of them once gave me a dime."

Anyway, it was at that moment that Sergio drove up and we loaded my gear into his car. I put away the copy of Groo I was going to give him and tipped cash instead.

Sergio and I both had a good time at the con. He spent almost all of it behind his table. I, happily, spent very little of it behind a table. On Sunday, I didn't even go into the main hall at all. At 10 AM, I emceed the annual Jack Kirby Tribute Panel before a packed house. At 11:30, we had one of our best-ever Cartoon Voices panels with Chris Edgerly, Julie Nathanson, Misty Lee, Bob Bergen, Wally Wingert and surprise panelist — he was as surprised as the audience — Fred Tatasciore.

As you know if you've ever seen any of these, part of the panel involves me giving the actors a script to read — one they have not seen before so they have to "cold read" it. The last half-dozen or more years, we've alternated between a script for Cinderella and one for Snow White. I retired the Snow White one after last year's Sunday panel and this year, I introduced a new one: The entirety of The Wizard of Oz condensed into 101 lines of dialogue. Don't think that's an easy job of condensation. Both the Saturday and Sunday casts did wonderful things with it, though in quite different ways.  (Misty Lee, who I cast as the Wicked Witch, is also a very fine magician.  She somehow figured out how to actually "melt" onstage…)

After that panel, I had an hour open which I spent at a meeting about an upcoming project that should thrill many people. Then at 2:00, I hosted Cover Story: The Art of the Cover, followed by The Business of Cartoon Voices at 3 PM…and by the time that was over, there was no more con. I'll write more about those panels later in the week if I remember.

Sergio and I made good time going to and fro on the freeway. He drove. I navigated, thanks mostly to a great app I have on my iPhone called Waze. I'm still learning how to use it most effectively but it's a great G.P.S. with social media undertones. Drivers alert one another to hazards and other things to watch out for. We didn't encounter many delays but it can be helpful to know that there are none…and Waze is good at recharting your route when necessary. It takes a bit of getting-used-to but the more I use it, the more I like it.

So I'm home and unpacked and trying to get back into what passes for normal life around here. My main regret about the con is that since my knees didn't allow me to walk the length 'n' breadth of the hall, I didn't run into a lot of folks I'd have enjoyed seeing. If you're one, sorry. Otherwise, a good time was had by me.

John Green explains — in under eight minutes — the mess that is the economy of Greece. You can always tell when John is excited about a topic because he keeps sculpting his hair into interesting shapes…

Leonard Maltin remembers the late Omar Sharif. Was Sharif ever bad in anything? I can't think of an instance.

At Comic-Con, I had a couple of opportunities to chat with award-winning letterer Todd Klein. Todd not only does expert calligraphy but he's quite the student of that art and when we encounter one another, we often get to talking about the great talents of the past in that job description. Todd recently completed a series of articles on his website about the early cover logos on DC Comics and I want to call your attention to them. Read Part 1. Then read Part 2. Then finish up with Part 3.

As you'll see, most of the truly iconic ones were designed by a man named Ira Schnapp who is now considered the master of comic book logos and display lettering. One of many panels I missed at the con because they were scheduled opposite my panels was a talk by my buddy Arlen Schumer about the late, great Mr. Schnapp. I'll have to be content — as you will if you weren't there for it — on watching this video of a different, recent time when Arlen delivered it. He marvels, as do we all, not just at the quality of Schnapp's work but at the quantity. If a big corporation needs a new logo for itself or a product, that can involve dozens of designers, months of samples and discussion and hundreds of thousands of dollars to arrive at the perfect one. Schnapp could do it in an afternoon.

Random notes from Comic-Con 2015…

• Out on the streets of San Diego, I felt I had to keep moving. I was afraid that if I stopped for ten seconds, someone would wrap me in an advertising sign for Conan O'Brien. That guy's ads were everywhere.
• Josh Robert Thompson, who was so brilliantly funny on our Saturday Cartoon Voices panel, was busy at other times cosplaying as George Lucas. Read all about it.
• Speaking of which: I spotted someone cosplaying as an exaggerated caricature of a certain older comic book creator and thought, "Look what Fake Stan Lee started!" Then I looked closer and realized it actually was that certain older comic book creator.
• Speaking of which: Where the hell was Fake Stan Lee?
• A lot of people who want to meet you think they haven't really met you until they have the selfie to prove it.
• An awful lot of panel attendees have adopted this rule: If you want to make sure you have a decent seat for a panel, go to the last half (at least) of the panel before. Meanwhile, an awful lot of people on panels see crowds streaming in halfway through and think, "Ah, more people have come to hear me!"
• There's a thriving industry out there in buying Comic-Con Exclusive items on behalf of those who cannot attend to buy these things themselves.
• It used to be that everyone who wanted comics signed wanted them signed inside with pens that didn't bleed through. Now they all want them signed on the cover with a Sharpie.
• They could easily fit 40% more people into that hall if they banned swag bags larger than 2' by 2' and backpacks.
• The more popular a party is, the less likely I am to be able to find a place to sit or to understand one damned thing anyone says to me. And why, if we can't hear each other, does there have to be music?
• I actually had a discussion with someone over whether Al Capp was the Bill Cosby of comic strip artists or Bill Cosby was the Al Capp of stand-up comedians.
• One guy tried to scold me for saying on this blog that Donald Trump has no chance of getting the Republican nomination. Apparently, Trump's candidacy is so fragile that bad press on a website run by a guy who works on the Groo comic books could doom it.
• You could spend a lot of time at the DC and Marvel booths and not know that any of those characters had originated in comic books.

I polled the audience at my third panel yesterday and about 80% agreed with my observation that the convention seems less crowded this year, even on Saturday. I'm sure in some parts of the hall it didn't feel that way but wherever I wandered — which wisely excluded the main videogaming areas — the aisles were relatively unjammed. I also noticed a lot fewer cosplayers than usual.

Since the con sells out every day and I believe they issued the same number of memberships they always do, what would be the explanation for less crowding? The only thing that I could come up with is the rise of off-site events and maybe the fact that more and more attendees just come for the events in Hall H, Ballroom 20 and similar venues that cause folks to spend all their time inside and/or waiting in line instead of roaming the main exhibition hall. I'm also wondering if the cosplayers are finding a more receptive audience outside in the street fair.

Whatever the reason, it's making for a lower-key convention, at least for me. "Lower-key" does not mean unexciting. It just means not as hysterical.

Saturday morn, we did Quick Draw! with Sergio Aragonés, Floyd Norman and Mike Kazaleh. Scott Shaw! would have been one of the players but he's home with a shattered ankle. I phoned Scott during the games and let the audience yell, "Get well soon, Scott!" to him via my iPhone while our three cartoonists fast-drew cartoons of him at home nursing his injury.

Later in the event, I had about 40 people in the audience fill out cards with the names of beings they would like to see Sergio incorporate into cartoons. Around half said either Donald Trump or Godzilla. Make of that what you will.

The Cartoon Voices Panel featured Josh Robert Thompson, Jessica DiCicco, Eric Bauza, Keone Young, Pat Musick and Phil Morris. Under the category of "even the moderator learns something at these panels," I discovered that Phil Morris, whose voiceover and on-camera work I had been admiring, is the son of Greg Morris, who you all remember from his role on Mission: Impossible. This somehow had not dawned on me. I always thought Greg Morris was a classy guy on screen and it's somehow pleasing to think a family tradition is continuing.

All of our actors were fascinating and amazing in their talents. I'll write more about this one in the days to come.

The photo above is from "That 70's Panel," an annual event in which we discuss the comic book industry back in that long-ago era. The gentleman out in front in the pic is Don McGregor, who was this year's "alive" recipient of the Bill Finger Award. From left to right behind Don, we have Chris Claremont, Bob Layton, me and Dean Mullaney. Chris was inducted Friday evening into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame, a most apt choice.

The reason for a seventies panel — apart from the fact that we no longer have the people around from which to assemble a Golden Age or Silver Age panel — is that the seventies were a dramatic time in the history of comics. Near the start of that decade, almost everyone was forecasting that the industry hadn't long to live; that by 1980, there'd be almost nothing left of the field. The predictions turned out to be so wrong, it's amazing William Kristol hadn't been the one making them.

But a lot of us new kids got into the biz to do what we could while we could. By 1970, comics had been around long enough that the writers and artists who'd gotten into the field in its salad days were starting to die off or go elsewhere. That made room for kids who'd been reading comics and were eager to fill those vacancies, however temporary they might be.

Bob Layton was publishing fanzines and one caught the eye of superstar artist Wally Wood who hired him as an assistant. That led to Bob selling a story to one of the ghost anthology comics then published by Charlton. On the panel, Bob insisted the book was called Creepy Stories of Gooey Death, despite my insistence that Charlton published no such title. (In case you're interested, Layton, it was actually an issue of Beyond the Grave.) He went on from that simple beginning and meager money to become a top creative talent in the field.

Chris Claremont landed a "go-fer" job at Marvel in the late sixties to get his foot in the door. The rest of him got in slowly with occasional editorial duties. The last step was writing — which he proved he could do one day when an issue of Daredevil suddenly had to be dialogued overnight. He took the challenge, things worked out fine and Chris was getting assignments instead of coffee. That sure worked out well, both for him and for Marvel.

Don McGregor went to a Comic-Con and turned a heckle into a career. He told Jim Warren, publisher of Creepy and Eerie, that a lot of the stories in his books were crap. That was the word he said he used: Crap. It led to discussions with Warren, dinner with Warren and finally writing for Warren, which led to editorial work for Marvel, which led to writing. Like the others, he proved he could do it so they let him keep on doing it.

Dean Mullaney passed a test at Marvel and was promised the next editorial position that came open. Then he decided that was the wrong end of the business for him and he turned himself into a publisher…publishing Don McGregor among others. That positioned him to be among the leaders of the many changes that saved the once-doomed comic industry, getting new kinds of comics into new kinds of outlets. We are all very fortunate he took to publishing instead of proofreading.

And me? Well, the panel wasn't about me but I followed a similar, not quite as interesting path as the others. I've written about it here.

Anyway, I thought the panel was quite engrossing and I want to write a little memo to myself here so I can keep something in mind for the future: Self, four people on a panel is just fine if they're the kind of folks who have something to say. Five or six in this case would have been one or two too many. We have this tendency to put people on panels because they're available or because a panel with six or seven people somehow sounds more important than one with a smaller number. Don't make that mistake — and I'm talking to others who arrange panels as well as to myself.

I have four panels to do today. I'd better get dressed and eat something so I can go do them. I'll be back later with a little rant against parties where there's no place to sit and it's so loud, you can't hear the person next to you.

A bearded David Letterman was a surprise guest the other night at an event hosted by Steve Martin and Martin Short. Dave took the opportunity to deliver one of his signature Top Ten lists.  Thanks to about 78% of all the people at Comic-Con for telling me about this..

• Here at Comic-Con: Dumb Dora is so dumb she didn't want to cosplay because she thought it meant playing with Bill Cosby.

• Here at Comic-Con: Saw people standing in a line to stand in a line to stand in a line to get into a panel about how to stand in a line.

On 4/22/10, I posted this. I think it's time to see it again…

In his latest column, my friend and former partner Dennis Palumbo discusses the tendency for a writer to hold onto a line and to keep trying to find a place for it. This is absolutely true with most of us who write for a living.

And Dennis's piece reminded me of a joke that Evanier and Palumbo once wrote, managed to get into a script…and then we couldn't get rid of it fast enough. Every writer has a couple of these, too.

It was while we were working on Welcome Back, Kotter. There was an episode in which Vinnie Barbarino (the Travolta character) was making his acting debut. Around 3 AM one morning, a day or two before we taped, Dennis and I found ourselves punchy from lack of sleep and desperate from lack of a funny line for Mr. Woodman, the surly vice-principal. We needed to have him say something, get a laugh and then get out of the scene. We had to come up with it before we could get out of the office and go home.

One of us said, "Let's have Woodman say something about how he used to be a great actor."

The other one of us said, "Yeah…He could say, 'Y'know, Kotter, I used to be a pretty good actor. In college, we did Of Mice and Men.'"

And then in unison, we finished the line: "I played Mice."

We laughed for about six minutes. If you'd been that tired, you would have laughed, too. Then I typed it into the script, we laughed for three more minutes and we finally got the hell out of there. We thought it was the funniest line in the world…and at 3 AM, it was. In fairness to us, the next day the cast and the rest of the staff liked it a lot — enough that it stayed in, all the way through Tuesday afternoon. That was when we did the "dress rehearsal" — the first of two tapings that day — in front of very live audiences.

Mr. Woodman was played by a lovely little man named John Sylvester White. John was very funny on the show but he suffered through moments of pure stage fright. About ten minutes before he had to go before the cameras, he would become convinced that none of his lines would work, that the audience would hate him and that his career was but seconds from total ruination. This never came close to happening but it was often necessary to reassure him that he'd get laughs, that the audience would love him, etc. That afternoon, just before the show was to be performed the first time, Dennis and I wandered onto the set and John, in a state of panic, grabbed us.

He was in full make-up but he still looked pale. "That Mice and Men joke," he said. "Is that really funny?" We promised him the viewers would howl and he took us at our word and went out to do the show. Things went pretty well up until that moment, the moment when Mr. Woodman turned to Gabe Kaplan and said, "Y'know, Kotter. I used to be a pretty good actor. In college, we did Of Mice and Men. I played Mice!"

And then there was silence.

Absolute, dead silence. Not a laugh, not a chuckle, not a snicker. You would hear more noise if you were floating in the orbital path of Mars…and wearing earplugs.

And then because, I guess, he felt he had to say something before his exit and didn't particularly want to take the rap for the Mice joke, Mr. Woodman announced to Mr. Kotter, "Evanier and Palumbo told me that would get a laugh." The audience exploded in hysterics. Maybe the biggest laugh I ever heard on that stage. They didn't know who the hell Evanier and Palumbo were but they knew exactly what had happened.

Needless to say, the line was changed before the final taping…changed to something that the second audience actually laughed at. In-between the two tapings, there was a dinner break and everyone on the crew looked at Dennis and me and shook their heads, though a few were kind enough to say, "Well, I thought it was funny." When we worked on the following week's script, Dennis talked me out of a line I wanted to put in. I wanted Woodman to say, "Y'know, Kotter. I used to be a pretty good actor. In college, we did Of Mice and Men. I played Men!"

Like Dennis said in his article, some of us just don't know when to give up. I still think the Mice line would have killed if we'd aired the show at 3 AM.