Today's Bad News for Donald Trump
Two associates of Rudy Giuliani were arrested today and "America's Mayor" may himself be in great legal jeopardy. That's all worse news for Rudy than it is for Donald but having his lawyer and most visible spokesperson in legal trouble sure won't reflect well on Trump. Giuliani keeps saying that when all this is over, he will emerge as "the hero." And that may be true — to those of us who want to see Trump gone.
Today's Outrage by Donald Trump Trump's attacks against the Bidens are getting wilder, coarser and more hysterical. If he's at this level of mud-hurling with close to 13 months before Election Day, where is the public discourse going to be by Halloween of 2020?
Bonus Article About Donald Trump Daniel Larison makes the important point that most of the folks praising Trump's foreign policy are hailing what he says he's going to do, not what he actually does. There's a very big difference.
This is Part Two of a series by SYFY Wire on Jack Kirby's Fourth World series for DC Comics. Part One is here and — caution! — I'm in both of them, looking very sleepy as we did the interview during Comic-Con back in August and I spent much of that convention in a walking coma. But it was a happy walking coma.
I like what they produced but I would quibble when they say "The Fourth World was due to be Jack Kirby's final masterpiece." Oh my God, no. He did some great things after that — I get the feeling Kamandi and perhaps The Demon now have more fans than the Fourth World — and Jack sure didn't intend the Fourth World to be his final anything. He had dozens of future masterpieces in mind — or at least dozens of projects he thought could or would be masterpieces.
It is important to understand that at that point in comics history — 1970 — newsstand sales were dropping as that distribution system was crumbling, and no one in comics had any serious concepts for other forms of distribution. By "serious," I mean something in which they were willing to invest serious money.
Years later, new means of distribution would turn up but at the time, the business was locked into those little 32-page comics printed via the cheapest possible means and Jack wanted to drag the business away from that format and into higher-priced, better-printed packages, many of which are now the profit centers for the field. DC said they wanted to go there but as we all know, there's often a vast gap between saying you want to invest in something new and actually risking the funds to do so. First though, they wanted Jack to come up with something in the old, atrophying format to boost them up in that area.
When Jack first envisioned The New Gods, Forever People and Mister Miracle — as well as the mythology and supporting characters who could spin off into additional, related books — he thought of it as something he'd launch, then turn it over to others. New writers and artists would continue it under his editorial supervision while he invested his time in the kind of fancier, upscale comics he felt the industry needed to begin producing. My then-partner Steve Sherman and I would probably have done a lot of the writing.
For the art, Jack mentioned getting Wally Wood for New Gods, Don Heck for Forever People and Steve Ditko for Mister Miracle — but those were just thoughts. No firm offer was ever made to any of those men and if you'd asked Jack two days later, he might have come up with three different names. He also sometimes talked about us doing a massive talent search and discovering new, probably-young and inexperienced kids in the local area that he could train.
While Jack was doing the early issues of those three books, he certainly didn't think of them as any sort of "final masterpiece." He expected to be off them shortly and on to other things. As DC began to chicken out on the "other things" in other formats, that trio of comics increasingly became Jack's immediate future and it was then that he began to think of them as his own epic graphic novel. And even that was just something he wanted to do before moving on to future masterpieces.
Despite that quibble, I really like what SYFY Wire did here. Have a look…
Today's Bad News for Donald Trump
For the first time, a major poll shows more than half the country believes Trump should be impeached and removed from office. And it's going to be hard to dismiss this as some rigged Liberal-Democratic poll since it's the Fox News Poll.
Today's Outrage by Donald Trump
According to a new book, back in March, Trump was in a frenzy to stop immigration and he discussed shooting migrants in the legs, electrifying the border wall and fortifying it with spikes, and putting in a moat stocked with snakes or alligators. It's frightening to think how many of his supporters would have cheered these measures…and even complained they weren't harsh enough.
I was at a bookstore event recently and heard a novelist talking about one of his influences, the "Spy vs. Spy" comic strip from MAD magazine. He mentioned that the strip was originated by Antonia Prohias, a Cuban cartoonist who came to the United States to escape the Castro regime. I had no idea, and it sounds like an interesting bit of history. Did you know Prohias, and do you have any stories about him?
I met Señor Prohias a grand total of once and learned almost nothing about him from him. This was because he did not speak English very well…and if my amigo Sergio Aragonés is to believed (and I always believe him) Prohias did not even speak Spanish all that well.
But it is quite true that he was a cartoonist in Cuba who placed his life in jeopardy by drawing anti-Castro cartoons. He fled Cuba in 1960 and never returned, spending the rest of that life he'd saved, living off doing two dozen pages or so of "Spy Vs. Spy" for MAD each year plus the occasional paperback and a few other commercial art jobs.
His is truly a remarkable story and it has been told in some form in most (not all) of the collections of his work that have been published over the last few decades. All of them, alas, seem to be outta print but it wouldn't surprise me if another one comes out before long. If you want to hunt down one, this one is probably the best but it could run you upwards of a hundred bucks in the reseller market. If I were you, I'd wait.
I've been getting an awful lot of e-mail in the last few days…why, I dunno. I also don't know why my server is now taking several hours to make a message accessible to me. Three hours ago, while I was on the phone with him, a friend sent me some info via e-mail and I just received it a few minutes ago.
So don't expect instant replies and, better still, don't expect replies at all. I'm waaaaaay behind (that's with five "a's") and I'll never get around to answering the ones which don't really need responses. This would include those from folks who wish to engage in a private e-mailed debate with me over the merits of cole slaw, Trump, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World or even Trump eating cole slaw while watching It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Just know that I read everything I get and that if I don't reply, it isn't you. I treat almost everyone like this.
Today's Bad News for Donald Trump
Trump's decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria is not going over well with a lot of people. Among them, as Adam Edelman and Elizabeth Janowski report, are a lot of the kind of Republicans who, if Trump mugged an old lady would race to the microphones to praise him for it. Even Lindsey Graham couldn't bring himself to smooch butt over that one. And we also have Fred Kaplan explaining why it's such a wrongheaded move.
Today's Outrage by Donald Trump
Trump has this new, novel theory about how impeachment works. Jonathan Chait explains that it comes down to "Trump will cooperate with an impeachment probe if Democrats stop the impeachment probe." The man who criticized Barack Obama every way he could think of doesn't believe any criticism of him is legit.
I've received a lot of e-mail asking me what I think of the new movie, Joker. I think I haven't seen it and I don't know when I will. I do get the feeling that the filmmakers made at least nine or ten completely different versions of it, all quite different from one another in the levels of violence and the political messaging, and that everyone who's reviewing it is seeing a different version.
And when some folks tell me "It's the Joker from the comic books," I wonder "Which comic books?" Because I think I've seen at least a dozen distinctly different characterizations of that villain in comics I've read. In one or two, he didn't even seem that much like a villain.
I forgot to mention it but last Thursday night, I was up at U.C.L.A. speaking to a class of future (they hope) Animation Writers. It was a class taught by my buddy Brooks Wachtel, who knows so much about the art/craft that he doesn't need guest speakers but invites people like me in, anyway. The students were bright and attentive and they asked real good questions, many of them about the process of being a writer, not just of cartoons but anything. I'm not much help advising anyone on how to break into the field, having last had that problem in 1978. The business has maybe changed a little since then. But I hope they got something out of what I had to say. I like talking to students like that once in a while because I usually think I get something out of hearing what I have to say.
Halloween is coming soon. That means that people are sending me every possible link and news item that mentions candy corn, an alleged food I have said here I think is horrible. Since I gave up candy of all kinds, my campaign against the stuff is pretty hollow and I no longer have any emotions invested in it. If you want to hear someone rant about its evils, go listen to Lewis Black. He rants way better than I do on the topic. In fact, he rants better than I do about everything since he screams all the time and I yell about once every three years.
My dislike of cole slaw, however, remains firm since restaurants keep interpreting a request for "no cole slaw" to mean "make sure I get cole slaw." That's all I ever really had against the stuff apart from the fact that it's repulsive and disgusting and probably fatal if taken internally. For me, anyway.
Apparently, the part of the Constitution that covers impeaching the President has a small loophole we didn't know about. It doesn't apply if the one who might be impeached thinks the process isn't fair to him. Bill Clinton's probably thinking, "Why didn't I know about that?"
I've decided that until Donald Trump leaves office — and maybe even after — I will feature one story each day about what he's doing to The World, America, The Rule of Law, The Dignity of the Executive Branch and himself. He, of course, is concerned only with the last of these. I've decided to also post one bit of bad news for him for that day. I'm fairly confident there will always be one. So here's today's…
Today's Bad News for Donald Trump
A Federal Judge has tossed outta court, Trump's suit claiming that he doesn't have to hand over eight years of his tax returns to an investigation in the state of New York.
Today's Outrage by Donald Trump
Trump and his Giuliani-grade legal team are trying a ridiculous argument: That it's unconstitutional to investigate the affairs of the President of the United States because he can't be punished except by impeachment. So not only would he be above the law but so would anyone who committed crimes in his service.
The New York Times has corrected its obit on Rip Taylor…
Correction: Oct. 7, 2019
An earlier version of this obituary misstated Mr. Taylor's role on the animated television series "The Jetsons." He did voice work for one episode, "Elroy in Wonderland," when the show was revived in the 1980s; he did not provide the voice of Elroy on the original series, seen in the 1960s.
No doubt dozens of Jetsons fans, if not hundreds, informed them of their error. Donald Trump is probably jealous of us for being able to get the Times to change what they print.
I think Rip Taylor would have been very happy to see or know all the attention his passing has gotten in the media. It was hard to tell what would make Rip happy. The New York Times has an obit but unfortunately it includes this…
Mr. Taylor's voice proved to be a bankable commodity. In the 1960s, he did voice work as the son, Elroy, on The Jetsons. He was nominated for an Emmy for playing the voice of Uncle Fester in the television adaptation of The Addams Family.
I could have told you when I was ten years old that the voice of Elroy on The Jetsons was Daws Butler. Rip did a guest voice on the revival of that series in the mid-eighties. He actually didn't do that much voice work, at least in cartoons. When I worked with him, I sure got the impression that he wasn't even all that interested in performing when there wasn't a live audience present to laugh and applaud.
Speaking of which, I got an e-mail from someone named Jillian asking, "With Rip Taylor's recent death, I'd like to know how he came about to be in Garfield and Friends. Did he have a grandkid who watched the show?" Nope. I don't think Rip had any kids or grandkids but he was on the show because I wrote a part that I thought was right for him and I called his agent and booked him. And that day, I came to the above impression.
At the time, he was enjoying a bit of increased attention on TV. Various shows (Mr. Leno's, especially) were hiring him for cameos where he'd come on and do his great entrance — marching through the audience to the tune of "Happy Days Are Here Again" and throwing confetti — and that was all he'd do. We talked about it and he was not about to turn down a chance to be on television but he was frustrated that none of the folks hiring him seemed to want him to do any of his actual act. I didn't say this out loud but I kinda thought he was one of those comedians who was funnier than his own act.
Here's my pal John Fugelsang talking about the enemies of Christianity. To John, it has nothing to do with them self-identifying as Christian and everything to do with them following the teachings of You-Know-Who…
My friend Christine Pedi was a close friend of Rip Taylor's. She just posted a wonderful remembrance of the guy on her Facebook page and I think this link will take you to it.
