Veteran comic book and strip artist Tom Gill has died of heart failure at the age of 92. Gill was born in Brooklyn and his career as a professional artist began with a staff job at the New York Daily News. He was never certain what year but he was there in time to draw […]
I had a political-type post in mind to write here. Then I read E.J. Dionne, who said the same thing I was going to say but said it better. It's about how people who cheered on Ken Starr's investigation and chanted "rule of law" are now horrified that Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation and "rule of law" […]
Comedy writers who have to write topical material pray for news items that lend themselves to dozens of easy jokes. This one is worth at least a solid week of Leno monologues. […]
Matthew Yglesias reminds us what the Valerie Plame/CIA matter is really about. It's about the fact that we have American soldiers dying in Iraq because, once upon a time, there was this fear that Saddam was close to having nuclear weapons. Remember them? […]
I think Stephen Colbert's one of the ten-or-so funniest people to grace my Sony Trinitron this century. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is probably my current favorite show and he's probably the best thing on it apart from Stewart…so you figure a whole half hour of the guy has gotta be great, right? Well, […]
The American Society of Magazine Editors has picked forty magazine covers that they say are the "top covers" of the last four decades. I'm not sure what the criteria are. Got the most attention? Sold the most issues? Some of the covers seem to be special because of the concepts, some because of the art […]
I somehow missed the news item when former Saturday Night Live cast member Charles Rocket was found dead on October 7 but I saw the reports today that his death has been ruled a suicide. What a sad ending for a man who — and this compounds the sadness — will probably only be remembered […]
A few weeks ago, we were discussing whether the upcoming movie of The Producers (the Broadway version) would be one of those rare adaptations to include the entire score of the stage production. Turns out, not. "Where Did We Go Right?" was dropped. "The King of Broadway" was filmed but is missing from the prints […]
We still don't know who, if anyone, is going to get indicted in the Valerie Plame/CIA matter. But the revelations lately sure seem to be making the case that The New York Times (Judy Miller, in particular) was in bed with the Bush administration and getting special access in exchange for reporting Iraq-related news the […]
A few years ago, when one of the channels I was then receiving on my teevee began rerunning old Man From U.N.C.L.E.s, I watched a few and experienced a mild but undeniable shock. I'd seen those shows when they first aired and they hadn't been as cheap and shoddy-looking then as they were now. Back […]
This is from Curt Alliaume… There were three different series of paperbacks from Holt, Rinehart, and Winston/Henry Holt: 1. The series shown on your site, with a trim size of about 5" x 8" and uncoated paper covers. For what it's worth, some or most also appear to have been printed on a fairly cheap […]
Kim Thompson gives us a little preview of the fifth volume in the Complete Peanuts series. He also writes to me… I too collected the Holt, Rinehart books religiously as a teenager and ended up with at least the first 20 –most of those original copies are still sitting under "S" in the Fantagraphics library, […]
Read More… from You're an Expensive Thing to Collect, Charlie Brown!
This is what our next strike will be about. Unless, of course, we just fold like we did with home video. You remember when certain parties, some of whom now deny it, assured us there was never going to be "significant revenue" from selling movies — and especially old TV shows — to watch at […]
Now, here's how you write an eBay listing. […]
Several folks have sent links that work for them to view the videos I mentioned on the C-Span website. Unfortunately, these links seem to only work for specific browsers…and not even all the time. C-Span has their video clips on an "RTSP" protocol (Real Time Streaming Protocol) which is almost a guarantee that visitors will […]