More photos from what was maybe by favorite Comic-Con of all I've attended in years.  There was something magical about the early ones because everything was so new and exciting…and there was also this: My first few dozen years of attending comic book conventions, not just in San Diego but anywhere, I was constantly meeting — and in some cases, getting to know well — the men (and occasional women) who wrote and/or drew the comic books I read when I was a kid.  That's not possible anymore.  The few who haven't passed away are simply not attending cons at their current ages.

But along the way, I discovered another thing to enjoy about conventions…hosting or being on panels.  I help create events that I'd enjoy attending and it's even more fun when I get the best seat.  These first two photos are from this year's Groo Panel…

The lady is Carrie Strachan, who took over as colorist of Groo after our friend Tom Luth passed away.  Coloring Groo is not an easy job — see any page in any issue and you'll understand why — and Carrie is succeeding beyond the wildest expectations of mine, as well as those of that guy with the mustache who draws those pages.  The gent in the above photo is Stan Sakai who has lettered Groo since Day One….and he still letters it "the old-fashioned way," meaning that he letters by hand (not computer) on the same pieces of paper that Sergio draws on.  Close to zero other comics these days are done that way.

Stan is also, of course, the creator-author-illustration and even letterer of his own creation, Usagi Yojimbo, one of the best and most dependable comics you can but after you buy every issue of Groo.  But you already knew that.

And we had another participant, albeit from afar, on The Groo Panel.  This is me holding my cell phone up to the microphone so the audience (we filled the room) could hear the voice of that guy with the mustache who draws Groo.  Sergio Aragonés — my best friend in the Male Division and my collaborator since the early nineteen-eighties — isn't attending conventions these days so he phoned it in and everyone was happy to hear him. And before you ask: The WiFi in the San Diego Convention Center is insufficient to do this via video but I phoned him on this panel and the next day on Quick Draw! and that audience was thrilled to hear him also.

Right after The Groo Panel, I spent another hour in the same room with another great letterer. Todd Klein and Stan have occasionally taken turns winning the Eisner Award for Best Letterer of the Year. And Todd is not only great at calligraphy but he has researched and written extensively about his craft…a craft which is often underappreciated. I've read plenty of comics where the best thing on the page was what someone like Todd put there and I always enjoy talking with this man about what he does so well. More photos from more panels tomorrow.

Ah, here's another chapter in this series that's examining every season of Saturday Night Live, show by show and cast replacement by cast replacement.  This is Season 23 — another year when I barely watched the program — and we aren't even halfway through the history of this series…

Here's an episode of a show I watched every Saturday morning when I was twelve — Mighty Mouse Playhouse, which probably lasted on CBS longer than its ratings warranted for a simple reason: It was produced by the Terrytoons cartoon studio and that studio was purchased by CBS in 1955.  So it cost the network just about nothing to run Terrytoons and they even made a few attempts at programming them in prime time.

This video contains the original commercials and they're probably the best part of it. There's a commercial I must have seen seventy-eight skillion and a half times for Beefaroni. There's a spot in there for Kellogg's Froot Loops which then was a relatively new product…with Mel Blanc doing the voice of Toucan Sam and Lucille Bliss as the little toucans. Later on, Sam got the voice of Ronald Colman as imitated by Paul Frees and later, by Maurice LaMarche imitating Paul Frees imitating Ronald Colman. These days, Sam just sounds British and kinda boring.

At Comic-Con, we took a rather amazing group photo of a whole lotta cartoon voice actors plus me. In this post, we — and by "we," I mean "I" — asked for help in identifying everyone in the photo. A number of you sent in identifications, including one person who I think got 25 out of 35 wrong. But most of you got a lot right and the three people who were the most help were Amber Jones and Seth Rohani (both of whom were in the photo) and Chris Brown. For their help, these three people will receive, as promised, absolutely nothing.

At least, I think we have everyone correctly identified. If you believe — or better still, if you know for sure — someone has been misidentified, send that info to me at this address and I'll see about correcting the list. In the meantime…

• Click here if you'd like to view or download a full-size image of the group photo.
• Click here if you'd like to view or download a full-size image of the group photo with everyone numbered.
• And click here if you'd like to view or download a smaller image of the group photo with everyone numbered and a list of names.

And thanks to all of you who played Name That Voice Artist…all of you except the guy who insisted #1 was Jeffrey Epstein. You'll pay for that, Eric.

Lately, I've been serializing the story of a panel I moderated at Comic-Con in 2003 with Forrest Ackerman, Julius Schwartz and Ray Bradbury. Steady readers of this blog may have noticed that not only has the last chapter of this tale not appeared here but the first five which were here are no longer here. Here's why…

I said in the first part that as far as I knew, no tapes of this panel — audio or video — existed and I was reconstructing what was said from memory. Well, it turns out I was wrong: An audio tape does exist and I will soon have a copy of it. So I decided to take down the chapters I'd already posted and wait until I have the tape and then rewrite the whole thing with actual quotes. Once that's possible to do, I will post the new, improved version here. It might be a few weeks but it'll be here eventually. Thank you for your patience.

More photos from the con.  These are in no particular order…

This is from a panel I was on but I did not moderate.  The moderator was Gary Sassaman and he's the one in the back.  He set up this panel as an extension of his video series, installments of which I often feature here.  It's called Tales From My Spinner Rack and it consists of Gary recalling comics he loved as a kid, particularly in the sixties.  This time out, he brought in John Morrow (of TwoMorrows Books and The Jack Kirby Collector) to discuss and assess the covers Mr. Kirby drew for his original run on the Fantastic Four comic books.  That's John in the Hawaiian shirt and if I look tired in this photo, I don't know why.  This was only my second panel of this convention.

This was my seventh.  My pal Mark Waid and I do this panel called "Two Marks Explain Everything" which operates on the premise that if you have a question about anything pertaining to the comic book field and neither of us can answer it, nobody can.  So for an hour, folks threw questions at us and we did our best to answer 'em.  In one or two cases, the answer as to why some company had done something was "Because the guy in charge was stupid" but that's an answer…and in many cases, a correct one.

On Friday afternoon at the con, I hosted five panels back-to-back in Room 10 and the "Two Marks Explain Everything" one was followed directly by me interviewing my friend-of-many-years Don Glut in the same place.  Later that evening at the Eisner Awards Ceremony, I would present Don with the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing, but first I got to interview Don about his long career working for among other houses, Warren Publishing, Gold Key Comics and Marvel.  The award is for a writer who has been responsible for a strong body of work that has not received sufficient attention and that perfectly describes Don's output.  You can read more about him here.

More photos from the con to follow.  I have a lot of 'em this year.

In 1973, there was an all-star benefit celebrating the work of Stephen Sondheim, a recording of which was released as a double record album. This is a video about that event. It's undergone some A.I. processing so a few of the faces look a little odd but it's a wonderful piece of history and I'm glad it's been preserved…

DC Comics is about to issue a hardcover collection of material drawn years ago for them by the late Alex Toth. This is a noble idea as Toth was one of the ten-or-so (maybe five-or-so) best artists to ever draw for the company but there's a problem. They've released a pic of the cover and it's a Super Friends cover drawing that Alex drew in 1975 when their Production Department was on a kick of retouching the work of freelance artists so they could say, "The artist screwed up and we fixed it!" In this case, they lopped off the head of Superman that Alex had drawn and replaced it with a stat of a Superman head by Curt Swan.

The Toth interpretation of The Man of Steel was appearing on millions of TV sets every Saturday morning on the Super Friends show but it was somehow not good enough to appear on the cover of a magazine with a circulation of (probably) under 150,000. I wrote about this awkward transplant years ago in this article.

In that piece, I congratulate DC for sort of "undoing" the redraw many years later when they issued a poster of the same piece of Toth art. They cloned a Toth-drawn Superman head from the back cover of the same comic and installed it where the Swan-drawn head had once been pasted. I hope before this new hardcover goes to press, someone at DC thinks to do the same thing. If they need a clean, hi-rez copy of that back cover art, they should contact me. I still have the original art to it and I'll scan it for them if they promise me a free copy of the new book. Hell, I'll even scan it if I have to buy a copy…just so long as they restore what Alex drew.

Over on this page of Time magazine — and yes, like you, I'm surprised Time is still around and doing anything more than crown someone Person of the Year every year — Judy Berman posits that Stephen Colbert is practically daring CBS to throw him off the air before the remaining ten months of his series are up.  She writes in part…

…whether you think his response to The Late Show's cancellation is brave or foolish, you can't deny that he's playing his cards perfectly against Paramount and CBS. If the powers that be pull him off the air before May 2026, he'll have all but proven that their decision to dump him was about more than the cost of making his show. And if they resign themselves to letting him say whatever he wants for the next 10 months? Well then, he'll get to say whatever he wants for the next 10 months. I can't imagine either option making his bosses jump for joy.

Interesting theory…and I should mention that now that his employers have gotten what they wanted — the approval of that merger — and Colbert's ratings are up, it is also being theorized Out There that maybe they'll rescind the cancellation notice. Or that he'll wind up at ABC. A friend of mine in the teevee biz wrote me to say, again in part…

It's no secret that Jimmy Kimmel wants to get out of his late night duties on ABC. He's barely even doing his show anymore and I think he and Colbert still have the same agent, James "Baby Doll" Dixon. Could Dixon work a deal where one of his clients replaces the other?

I dunno…but I don't think Disney, which owns ABC, is going to be involved in a merger deal with some big right-wing corporation. And Kimmel has been pretty outspoken in his support of Colbert, as witness this billboard which is turning up around the city…

Plus, you also have the speculations that Colbert may run for elected office…say, against Lindsey Graham for his seat in the Senate. But this all strikes me as people speculating on the plans of people they don't know who probably haven't made any real plans yet. All I'll predict is that Donald Trump is not succeeding, as he's crowing he is, about vanquishing Stephen Colbert.

Comic-Con was great but prepping for it, attending it, unpacking from it and catching up on sleep have all put me behind on a lot of things. I have tons of e-mails that are unanswered and there are blog posts that need to be up here soon. Please forgive me. All will normalize before long.

Oh — and I could use more help identifying all the cartoon voice actors I asked you to help me identify in this post. I have a number of messages but not enough. What'samatter? Aren't you all eager to enter a contest with no prizes whatsoever? To encourage more participation I hereby double the prize. Instead of getting nothing, you can get twice nothing. Don't miss this opportunity!

Hey, how about some photos from the Quick Draw! game we played at Comic-Con a week ago yesterday?  Each year, we have three fast 'n' funny cartoonists competing.  This year, it was Scott Shaw!, Tom Richmond and Emma Steinkellner.  Here's a photo of Scott Shaw!, Tom Richmond and Emma Steinkellner…

During Quick Draw!, I bring various folks up to play a game in which they try to guess what the heck the cartoonists are drawing. Here, trying to guess what the heck the cartoonists are drawing is one of my favorite comedians, Dana Gould. As you can see, he didn't have any idea at the moment Bruce took this picture and neither did I…

During the game, I sometimes bring up three more cartoonists to collaborate with the three we already have in stage. Here are two of the tag-teamers from last Saturday…

The gent on the left is Lalo Alcaraz, who is responsible for the popular newspaper strip, La Cucharacha. The gent on the right is Greg Evans, who is responsible for the popular newspaper strip, Luann.

And here's the third bonus cartoonist, Steve Leialoha, whose work should be familiar to everyone who's read comic books in the last few decades, especially Howard the Duck. He's talking with Scott about I-have-no-idea-what before (or maybe after) they briefly swapped places to draw. If you've never seen us do Quick Draw!, it's always a lot of fun. And very, very difficult to get a seat for even though the room has an awful lot of seats in it.

I'll link to just about anything with Buster Keaton in it.  In the late fifties, he made a whole bunch of commercials for Alka-Seltzer with Dick Beals supplying the voice of Speedy, the Alka-Seltzer mascot.  Buster was the perfect choice for these ads because he always looked like a guy who needed an Alka-Seltzer — or something…

Here are two more photos from the Cartoon Voices panel from last Saturday at Comic-Con. First up is a shot of our honored guest, Mari Shimizu, who I'm told was absolutely thrilled with her reception…

And then here's a shot of Candi Milo, one of the American voices of Astro Boy, meeting the lady who originally voiced the character in Japan. Candi was moved to tears and she wasn't the only one in the house who was…

I've received a number of questions as to how Mari's appearance was arranged. The man we have to thank for that is Craig Miller, a writer-producer I've only known since about 1967. Craig was, in fact, a founding member of the Los Angeles Comic Book Club, an organization which I've written about on many occasions.

Craig contacted me about six weeks ago to tell me Mari would be at Comic-Con as part of a delegation of folks from Japan involved in the field of animation. I believe it was his idea to have her make an appearance on the Cartoon Voices panel and, of course, I said, "Absolutely!" When I called Candi and asked her if she'd be at the con, she said there was no force in this world powerful enough to keep her away from meeting Mari. After that, it was just a matter of a lot of e-mails, text messages and figuring out the choreography. If you run into Craig Miller someday, thank him for helping make possible one of the most memorable moments on any of the eighty zillion panels I've hosted.

As you are utterly aware, we took a historic photo at Comic-Con last Saturday with thirty-five cartoon voice actors. Well, thirty-four and me plus a couple we can't see well enough…but it was still historic. The occasion was to welcome Japanese Voice Icon Mari Shimizu, to Comic-Con and America.

A lot of folks are asking who's who in the pic so let's try to identify them all. I think (emphasis on my uncertainty) I can get about two-thirds of them but I could be wrong about a few.

Some of you are sending me educated guesses so we'll make this a contest with absolutely no prize. If you click on this link, your screen (hopefully on a big monitor, not your phone) will fill with a big version of the photo with everyone numbered. I'm #1, Mari is #26 and you can send in your guesses for the rest of us to this e-mail address. I'll play detective and compare the lists and arrive at what I think are the correct identifications — which I'll post here along with names of whoever got the most right.

That person will win absolutely nothing. In the event of a tie, all the winners will receive absolutely nothing. So go to it, voice actor fans!

Glenn Kessler, the Fact-Checker for the Washington Post, is throwing in the towel and retiring, at least from that position. In his last column, he assesses the state of fact-checking in American journalism and comes to the conclusion that an awful lot of people really don't care if what a politician says is true or not. Guess who brought Kessler to that conclusion.