Category Archives: Uncategorized

On Monday, there will be a segment on CNN spotlighting Joe Simon, co-creator of Captain America and a true legend of the comic book industry. I'm told it airs in the news blocks at 10 AM and 2 PM but I have no idea what that means in terms of time zones. I'm just going to set my TiVo to record a lot of the daytime programming and hope to snag it. It'll probably get bumped by Breaking News about who fathered Anna Nicole Smith's cat's last litter.

The above is currently the headline story on the website of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. I read it and my first reaction was that the paper has an odd definition of "breaking news." With all the disasters and scandals and life-threatening things happening in the world today, the fact that Tony Bennett has the flu and can't do two shows at the Las Vegas Hilton hardly qualifies as important.

But then I thought: If I had tickets to that, it would matter to me…not as much as some other things but I'd still appreciate knowing about it, a.s.a.p. so I could rearrange my life and not waste time going to the hotel. Wouldn't it be nice if every event you might attend had a website that you could trust to be updated with last minute info or a confirmation that everything will happen according to schedule? I wonder why the Ticketmaster people haven't set up something like that. I'm sure there are logistic problems with getting the various theaters and concert halls to keep it updated but there are also logistic problems if something's cancelled and hundreds of people show up for it. Just a thought.

If you care about the Don Imus matter — and I could sure understand if you didn't — this article by Joe Conason makes some pretty good points about it. It's a Salon link and if you're not a subscriber, I believe you need to view a short ad before they'll let you see the article. But I'm told the ads are shorter now than they used to be.

Incidentally: When is Al Sharpton up for re-election? I often find the Reverend Al remarkably entertaining and there are times on talk shows and in debates when he speaks with an honesty that folks who might ever hope to get elected to some position never seem to muster. Still, I've never understood his role in all these controversies upon which he seems to pounce. If I were a black guy, I think I'd wonder who appointed him and Jesse Jackson to speak on my behalf and to decide whether those who sin against my race were worthy of forgiveness. As Conason notes in his piece, it's not like Sharpton's hands are completely clean when it comes to accusations. Even leaving that aside, whenever there's an issue that touches upon race, the Reverend Al has a way of turning up and suddenly making it all be about the Reverend Al. That doesn't help.

Also, for a prescient view of the Imus situation from a few years back, read this.

Every time I post about the radio show I'm doing this afternoon, I get the time wrong and have to come back here and correct it. The episode of Time Travel with me as the guest is today at 4 PM East Coast time, which is 1 PM West Coast time. If you see me telling you anything different, don't believe me. It's 4 PM East Coast time, 1 PM West Coast time. Duh.

And this probably won't be the last message on the topic, either.

It's interesting that there is this recurring discussion about whether comic strips should end when their creators die…or even when they've been around for a certain, undetemined amount of time. I can't think of another art form where this kind of thing is even considered. No one is suggesting that now that Vonnegut's dead, we get all those copies of Slaughterhouse-Five off the bookstore shelves to make more display room for new authors. Or — and this may be a better analogy — that today's musical performers should not record old songs, thereby creating more opportunity for new songwriters. Should great movies not be remade so as to make it easier for today's screenwriters?

I guess there are a few people out there who have those sentiments but I think it's awfully unrealistic to think the system will ever work that way. You and I can sit here and decide that James Bond should have been laid to rest when Ian Fleming died and/or Sean Connery turned in his License to Kill. But I'd hope we wouldn't waste a lot of time thinking that anything will kill off 007 except a lack of interest in his adventures on the part of the paying public. Rarely does anything creative go away unless there's no market for it. Why should any other consideration be controlling in comic strips?

A lot of wanna-be strip cartoonists seem upset that reprints of Peanuts are still in newspapers — something like 2,400 of them, last I heard, making it one of the three most successful "current" strips. Why didn't it go away when Mr. Schulz died? Because readers still wanted to see those characters in their newspapers and the folks who make money off the property still wanted to make that money. Here's an excerpt from a message I received from Roy Wallters…

I understand where you're coming from on this but what if someone came up with the next Calvin & Hobbes and there was no room for it on the comics page because of reprint strips like Peanuts and Popeye and old strips being continued?

Yeah, but there was room for Calvin & Hobbes. Old strips being continued didn't stop it from attaining a truly impressive client list of papers in record time. If and when another strip that good comes along, the folks who edit the newspaper comics pages will find a place for it. If it means dropping another strip, fine. They'll drop whatever strip they perceive as their least popular…which will probably not be reprints of Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

Mr. Wallters also asked, "What if the people who will be continuing B.C. can't handle it and it becomes much less funny than it's ever been?" Well then, the same thing happens that would happen if Johnny Hart were still at his drawing board and the strip became much less funny than it had ever been. It might even lose enough audience to not be worth its makers' time to make or its syndicate's to syndicate. A bad strip is a bad strip whether it's done by the guy who created it or by his grandmother. Al Capp showed us what that was like, the last few years he and his crew did Li'l Abner. And when papers started dropping it left and right, he packed it in.

Granted, it's a slow process and if you believe some newspapers are way too reticent to chuck an established strip that's way past its prime, I wouldn't argue the point. I'm arguing that they shouldn't drop it just because one person died, especially if that person has arranged for assistants and collaborators to carry it on.

Let me give one more example here and I'll pick an oldie so I don't insult anyone currently trying to make a living. Bud Fisher created the comic strip Mutt & Jeff in 1907 and before long was making some serious money off it and employing many assistants. Around the late twenties or early thirties, Fisher decided he didn't even want to spend as little time as he was spending on it. His then-current assistant, a gentleman named Al Smith, began doing more and more of it and by 1932, Fisher wasn't even touching his strip. From all reports, he did nothing on it for the rest of his life except to give interviews in which he lamented the long hours he put in at the drawing table, and to pay Smith to ghost the strip and sign "Bud Fisher" on it. Fisher died in 1954, at which point Smith was allowed to sign it…and he kept on doing it for a couple more decades, during which it was one of the most popular, beloved entries on the funny pages. (Interesting aside: DC Comics published the Mutt & Jeff comic book from 1939 through 1958 and for many of those years, it outsold Superman.)

During the sixties, it was still a pretty good feature — Smith won the National Cartoonist Society award for the best humor strip in '68 — but in the seventies, its quality declined and a lot of new and better strips were coming along. Mutt & Jeff lost papers and therefore, income. Smith gave it up in 1980 and amazingly — at age 78 (!) — created a new strip and tried to make a go of it. It didn't succeed and meanwhile, others took over Mutt & Jeff and couldn't reverse its decline. It ended in 1982.

Now, if you believe that strips should end when their creator dies, tell me when Mutt & Jeff should have ended.

Lastly for now, here's a message from Russell Myers, who writes and draws one of my favorite newspaper strips, Broom Hilda — which was one of those great new strips that came along in the seventies and shoved Mutt & Jeff to one side. Russell, by the way, does his strip without a whole support team and still puts in a helluva lot of love and caring. He wrote me with the following to post here…

Over the years I've heard comments about how cartoonists doing older strips should step aside and make room for the new wave. Of course it was the new wave saying that. There has been plenty of commentary about comic strips as art. What I don't remember ever seeing is an in-depth explanation that producing a comic strip is a business. Woody Allen once said that if show business wasn't a business it would be called show show. The same applies to a comic strip.

Yes, as a kid I loved the comics and always wanted to do one. Then I grew up, more or less. I got me a wife and I got me some kids. Doing a comic strip was the only skill I had and it became vital to our welfare. What's more, it was a job that had no pension plan or benefits. Having had a school teacher for a father meant I sure as heck wasn't going to inherit much, so I had to plan ahead in case I outlasted my job by a decade or three. There are a few blessed comic strip creators who make it into the rarified realm of Big Money. Most of the rest of us make a living. Some make a very good living, some barely get by. From what I understand there are several people that make a living from B.C. and The Wizard of Id. More power to them. They should do everything in their power to hang onto what they have. In case the self-proclaimed purists haven't noticed, the Money Truck doesn't come down the street every day passing out free samples.

So to those who suggest that B.C. should be folded because Johnny is no longer at the helm, I say, most respectfully, kiss my inkwell.

I concur with the above except that the Money Truck does come down my street, not every day but Monday through Friday, passing out free samples. It's one of the perks you get from living in Los Angeles. Well, that and the new Third-Pound Angus Burger at McDonald's.

I'll have more on this topic later or, more likely, tomorrow.

This is a Budweiser commercial that I believe was produced for this year's Super Bowl. For some reason, I'm a big fan of Budweiser commercials, which is not to say they've ever caused me to consider buying their product. I'm also fascinated by how, beginning only a few years ago, Dean Martin's 1960 recording of "Ain't That a Kick in the Head?" had turned up in movies and TV shows and commercials, over and over and over. I don't recall hearing it anywhere before about 1993. I don't even recall Dino ever singing that song on The Dean Martin Show, which was on for nine years. But somehow, in a kind of delayed reaction, the record caught on big, at least among those who make movies and commercials. And as you'll hear, it pops up in this ad…

Here's a stunning reversal: Tomorrow, Don Imus will not be on the radio but I will. I'm the guest on the Friday the 13th edition of Time Travel, which is heard on station WRNJ and on the station's website. The show starts at 4 PM East Coast Time and its hosts, Dan Hollis and Jeff O'Boyle, will begin ruthlessly interrogating me about…well, I'm not sure what we're going to discuss but since I'm involved, you can bet it'll be trivial. Find out more about their show and listen to some past episodes at the Time Travel website. And tune in tomorrow to hear me say something even stupider than what Imus said. I'm good at it.

Fred Kaplan on why Bush is looking for and cannot find a "War Czar" to…well, part of the problem seems to be that no one is quite sure what this guy would do besides take some of the blame for things not going well in Iraq.

I'm going to write a little more on this topic of continuing newspaper comic strips after their originator quits or dies, and this probably won't be the last post about it. An e-mail this morn from my buddy Jim Korkis made me realize I may be guilty of oversimplifying this discussion to a useless degree. First off, here's Jim's message…

Aren't there some comic strips that actually were more popular or better received after the original creator passed away? While I know that comic strip historians love Frank King's version of Gasoline Alley, I much preferred Dick Moore's version. Many prefer Burne Hogarth's Tarzan to Hal Foster's. Some don't survive as well. I preferred Stan Lynde's original Rick O'Shay to the team that took over when he left the strip.

First off, I think we ought to differentiate something. There are comic strips that are essentially team efforts, if not when they start or achieve fame, then certainly by the time their creator exits. Often, three or four people are responsible in a serious creative capacity for a strip and when the creator dies, those collaborators are probably perfectly capable of carrying on the strip as essentially the same work. The worth of the material may be high or low but it isn't plunging because one guy died so that should not be the determining factor in its continuation. There are also cases where a whole new writer-artist — or writer(s) and artist(s) — come in and the strip is carried on by a stranger or strangers. I think those are two separate situations.

Yes, I think there are strips that were better received when in the hands of someone other than the creator. Sometimes, that's a matter of the new guy morphing the strip into his own. Fred Lasswell was picked by Billy DeBeck to assist on Barney Google and inherited it after DeBeck died…and eventually Fred turned it into the highly-successful Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, with the focus wholly on the latter. Ernie Bushmiller took over the Fritzi Ritz strip and it evolved into Nancy, which many hail as a classic of the funny pages. I don't believe Bushmiller was selected or trained by the originator of Fritzi Ritz, Larry Whittington. I think he was just a guy the syndicate hired to continue a strip they wanted to keep going.

But to me, the question of whether a strip is better or worse under new hands is a false question. The question to me is whether the new version is any good…or as good as the alternative. I never thought Hogarth's Tarzan was as wonderful as Foster's but I see no reason to expect that if they'd cancelled the Tarzan strip instead of giving it to Burne, what would have been in that space instead would have been better than Hogarth's Tarzan. (That's kind of a convoluted sentence but it's as clear as I can make it this morning.) And some of the other versions — Russ Manning's, especially — struck me as very good strips. An editor of a comic page has to pick from the best of what's available and if I'd been in such a position at the time, I'd sure have wanted Manning's Tarzan on my page. It was easily the best adventure strip of its period.

For the record: I thought Dick Moore's Gasoline Alley was one of the all-time great newspaper strips even if he didn't create it. I thought Secret Agent X-9 by Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson was as good as any previous incarnation of that strip, maybe better. Floyd Gottfredson did not start the Mickey Mouse strip but for at least a decade or two, it was one of the best things in the newspaper. I'll probably think of more examples before I'm sick of this topic.

I agree with you about Rick O'Shay, which is one of those cases where a strip was handed to strangers. My inclination, and I haven't done the math on this, is to say the following: In instances where a strip is essentially a team effort — where the creator has reached the stage of working with or delegating to other writers and artists — the strip can usually be carried on without much (if any) loss of quality. In instances where it's turned over to folks who weren't already involved in its creation, it's very much a hit-or-miss decision. Then again, from the standpoint of the syndicates and newspaper editors, so is replacing that strip with a wholly new creation.

I think there are also strips that are such personal creations that it's hard to conceive of them controlled by others. I can't imagine Doonesbury without Garry Trudeau, who has done it since the start, aided only by a guy who inks and letters. I can imagine B.C. as done by the other guys who've written hundreds of gags for it and done a lot of the drawing.

I have to run out to a meeting so I'll post this and continue this discussion when I get back…or maybe tomorrow. I don't know. This may take a while. I probably need to discuss what I see as some of the intrinsic realities of the marketplace here and how it's pointless to discuss what "should" happen from a fan's point of view. See you later.

A number of websites are now offering the opinion, sometimes in the form of outright pleas, that B.C. not be continued since Johnny Hart has passed away. Here's one such plea and here's another.

I largely disagree with this wish. If I were the person making the decision, I'd ask two questions, the first being what the creator wanted. This is never a mystery. Johnny Hart owned B.C. and could very easily have left instructions that it not be continued or, like Charles Schulz did with Peanuts, that it only be continued via reprints. Hart did not. Most cartoonists do not wish that. Imagine if your father had opened a successful restaurant. Would he want closed down when he died? I don't think it's ignoble, when you create something that's very lucrative, to want it to continue making money for your family and associates. You may also just like the idea of your creation living on and remaining current.

Which brings us to the second question: Can a strip still be produced that will have a value to readers? This is really the only other consideration that ought to matter — the quality of the finished product. If you scan message boards about comic strips, you'll see occasional messages from folks arguing that comic strip creators should never have assistants; that they should do it all by themselves or not do it at all. I have a certain self-interest here since I've ghost-written a couple of syndicated strips…but even before those jobs, I thought it was a phony argument. Most of the great newspaper strips have been to some extent the work of assistants or ghosts, including a few that claimed otherwise. So what? If the strip's good, it's good. If it's not, the fact that it was done by one person doesn't make it any better.

Nor does the fact that a strip is still done by its creator. I admire the fact that Mr. Schulz did it all by his lonesome for half a century but if at some point he'd decided he needed help, I wouldn't have thought less of him. Not as long as I still liked what he and that aide produced.

Johnny Hart's two strips have long featured the participation of other writers and other artists. If those folks can keep producing a strip of the same quality, I see no reason why it shouldn't get the same reception. Let the Free Market operate. I think Blondie, to name one, maintained the exact same level of quality after Chic Young passed away…and why not? Long before he died, he had a good crew — trained by him — writing and drawing it. After he left us, the strip was being produced by almost the same creative force as before. If it was unworthy of publication after its creator died, it was probably unworthy for ten or twenty years before.

It continued on, before and after Young's passing, because people liked it and editors perceived that people liked it. I don't see that his death affected that equation…or how Hart's will necessarily make people not want to read B.C. They might if it becomes less entertaining — but that would be true if Hart was still alive and his skills were declining. And in fact, that did happen a little while he was still at it. A number of key papers decided he'd lost his funny and dropped the feature.

That's how it works with strips and how it oughta work. I don't want newspapers or the Creators Syndicate to drop the new B.C. just because it will be done without Hart's participation. I just want the people doing the strip to make it as good as it ever was…and it's the readers who can and will decide if they've succeeded.

Here we have a commercial for Soaky toys…and what's interesting about it is that it has a Walt Disney character (Donald Duck) and a Warner Brothers character (Porky Pig) in the same ad. They don't meet and I'd be fascinated to know if that was a condition of the deal…if Disney said they wouldn't allow Donald to appear in the same scene with a non-Disney character or what. It also looks to me like the two halves of the commercial have different animators and could possibly even be the work of separate studios.

In any case, here are the voice credits: Donald Duck is voiced by Clarence Nash. Porky Pig is voiced by Mel Blanc. And the Soaky Kid is voiced by Dick Beals…and by God, I think it's been a whole eighteen days since I last linked to a commercial with Dick Beals in it. I'll try not to make it so long until the next one.

One of my frequent correspondents here is a gentleman named James H. Burns. He just sent me this and I thought it belonged here…

I'm pretty sure we had been in a few of the same places, over the years. But the only time we met, was almost exactly two years ago, over at Manhattan's York Theatre, for their concert presentation of his God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

At intermission, I made my normal bee-line for the exits, looking to catch my smoke. The elevator was completely down, which didn't particularly affect me, as I'll normally do that Bataan death march of stairs, a few flights up, through the veins of the church. But I was more than surprised to find the eighty-something Vonnegut already on the stairs, ahead of me. (I couldn't help but reflect on the theatres' inherent cruelty to our seniors.)

But those of us who are addicted to tobacco will not only walk a mile but do it uphill, and I think Vonnegut and I both found it odd to be
outside St. Peter's, two guys so seperated by decades, smoking the same filter-less brand. We chatted on the sources of addiction, and how it might well be tobacco, in tandem with other chemicals, that affect some folks, and not others…and how so much of everything, might just be based on genetics. He also told me something I had forgotten, how during World War II, a soldier's mess kit, his K-rations, rather, also included some smokes. We also chatted a bit, I think, on how some people have taken their stance against smoking as a license to rudeness…

But the overwhelming effect, the presence of the man, was one of gentleness. As we spoke of other things, within the strange camaraderie of those whose addiction has driven them to the streets, I knew that he was also delighted that at that very special night in the theatre, he was able to share it with his daughter.

If the aliens ever do land, or some future sociologist — terrestrial or otherwise — tries to make sense of what was once the twentieth century, he'll find Vonnegut a particularly humanistic purveyor of the future, and worlds that a sidewise slip in time might still find a-borning.

Jonathan Cohn on why the usual arguments against Universal Health Care in this country don't hold water.

I've quoted this before but someone once asked Kurt Vonnegut to explain the meaning of life. He said…

Well, I have a son who writes very well. He just wrote one book; it's called The Eden Express. It's my son Mark, who is a pediatrician and who went crazy and recovered to graduate from Harvard Medical School. But anyway, he says, and I've quoted him in a couple of my books, "We're here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."

Mr. Vonnegut's writing helped a lot of people to get through this thing, whatever it is. It's a shame to lose him but at least we, and succeeding generations, still have the books.

Jerry Beck has the happy announcement not only that a DVD of Walter Lantz Woody Woodpecker cartoons is on its way but that it will be done right — with well-chosen cartoons properly restored. (Well, almost right: I can't help but look at the cover art and note that when I did the Woody Woodpecker comic book, a drawing like that would have prompted a polite but serious phone call from Mr. Lantz himself, admonishing the editors that Woody's eyes do not cut into his beak.)

My pal Jerry is too modest to tell you about all the lobbying and consulting and suggesting he did to make this happen. So I will.

I'm happy this stuff's coming out even though I'm not the biggest fan of Woody Woodpecker. I once was. As a kid, I loved his TV show but I think what I loved most about it was that Lantz did these little "how to draw cartoons" segments. As I grew older, I'd occasionally catch a Woody cartoon and wonder what it was I ever liked about most of them. I have a VHS tape I picked up once in K-Mart for four bucks that Universal put out many moons ago. It contains all the cartoons Tex Avery directed for the Lantz studio plus five or six good Woody Woodpecker cartoons. I used to tell friends it had every good Walter Lantz cartoon on it.

"Pish and tosh," they'd tell me. Well, not really. I don't know anyone who says "Pish and tosh." But that was the kind of disagreement I heard from animation buffs. There were many wonders from that studio, they'd insist…not just the few on my tape. Well, I'm eager and quite willing to be convinced.