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Arnold Drake, one of comics' most acclaimed writers, died this morning. We all knew he was sick. He collapsed a few days after attending the New York Comic Book Convention (Feb. 23-25) with, they said at the time, "a touch of pneumonia." Other complications were found and he never left the hospital.

During his career, he wrote all the major characters for DC Comics but distinguished himself especially with his co-creations, Deadman, The Doom Patrol and Stanley and His Monster. He was also known for long stints writing the comic book adventures of Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, most of which were drawn by the also-recently-deceased Bob Oksner.

Drake was born on March 1, 1924. At age 12, a bout with scarlet fever kept him confined to his bed for a year. He spent much of the time drawing his own comics and, though he later did do some cartooning work, he found that his primary interest was not in drawing characters but in deciding what they'd say and do. That sent him off on a writing career and he studied Journalism at the University of Missouri and later at New York University.

Then he met Bob Kane, the official creator of Batman, who happened to be a neighbor of Arnold's brother. He worked with Kane on a few projects and the artist introduced him to the editors at DC. Before long, Drake was writing for DC books including House of Mystery, My Greatest Adventure, Mark Merlin, Space Ranger, Batman and Tommy Tomorrow. Most of his new creations in the sixties came about because an editor said to him, "This comic is in sales trouble and needs a new feature."

My Greatest Adventure was down in sales so Drake, working with artist Bruno Premiani and fellow writer Bob Haney, invented The Doom Patrol, a band of misfit heroes very similar to Marvel's X-Men, which went on sale shortly after. Strange Adventures was in sales trouble so Drake, working with artist Carmine Infantino, came up with the acclaimed Deadman character. The Fox and the Crow was down in sales so Drake, teamed with Bob Oksner, fashioned Stanley and His Monster — a highly-imaginative kids' comic that preceded (but contained many of the elements of) the newspaper strip, Calvin and Hobbes.

But Drake was a feisty guy who had trouble getting along with editors. In the late sixties, he fought with the management at DC, partly over what he considered inept editorial direction and partly over business matters. He was a loud voice in a writers' revolt during which several of the firm's longtime freelancers were demanding health insurance, reprint fees and better pay. Many of them were ousted, including Arnold, and he then worked for a time for Marvel before settling down at Gold Key Comics for many years. For them, he wrote many comics including The Twilight Zone, Star Trek and a particularly long and delightful stint on Little Lulu.

Arnold wrote other things including plays, movies (Who Killed Teddy Bear? and The Flesh Eaters, among others) and novels. In the fifties, he authored a long comic book in book form called It Rhymes With Lust for a small publisher and later touted it, with some justification, as the first graphic novel. (Dark Horse will soon reissue it.) He also worked extensively with a group called the Veterans Bedside Network, writing materials to aid in the rehabilitation and nursing of men and women who'd served in the armed forces.

Very active on the convention circuit in recent years, Arnold at one point began crusading for the industry to establish something he wanted to call The Bill Finger Award. Finger, hailed by Drake and others as the unbilled co-creator of Batman, died in poverty and Arnold felt that there should be an award to shame people and companies that mistreated talent. In 2005, quite independently, a Bill Finger Award was created, this one to honor veteran writers who had not received proper recognition for their work. The first recipient of it was Arnold Drake.

Arnold was one of my favorite comic book writers of all time. Much of his early work was uncredited and I was delighted, as I learned more about who'd written what, to find him as the common thread among some of the best comics DC produced in the sixties. (The Showcase issues of Tommy Tomorrow are especially brilliant, and they were written by Arnold.) I was privileged to get to know Arnold and to spend many a convention panel and telephone conversation, hearing him discourse on his favorite subject in the world, which was creativity. At the time of his death, he had several projects in the work and the urge to write something wonderful was undiminished. We are all a little worse off that Arnold isn't writing and I can't begin to measure what those of us who considered him a good friend have lost.

In the seventies, after The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H and All in the Family redefined what a sitcom could be, there were probably thousands of attempts to reinvent the variety show. Most never got farther than pitches to networks but every year, there were at least a dozen such pilots, some disguised as one-shot specials, and a few became series. The consensus seemed to be that the day was past when you could just take someone like a Danny Kaye or a Carol Burnett and build a show around them and their versatility. That kind of multi-faceted entertainer was becoming extinct. The new ideas were mostly matters of concept — some format that allowed for songs and sketches, often incorporating elements of a sitcom and/or Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. One that tried to the latter combo was the short-lived 1971 series, The Funny Side.

It was produced by Bill Persky and Sam Denoff, and I'm not sure who else worked behind the cameras. In front of them, they had a stock company of ten regulars, five men and five women representing five different kinds of couples. The pairs were Warren Berlinger and Pat Finley as the "blue collar" couple, Dick Clair and Jenna McMahon as a more or less "wealthy" couple, John Amos and Teresa Graves as a "minority" couple, Michael Lembeck and Cindy Williams as a "young" couple and Burt Mustin and Queenie Smith as an "old" couple. The host of it all was Gene Kelly and I thought it was a pretty clever show that deserved to run longer than the three months it lasted. It would have if the show had been as funny and charming as Mr. Mustin was, off-camera.

I have a personal story here. In '71, I was nineteen years old and writing all sorts of things — mostly comic books published in languages other than English — for the Walt Disney Company. Often when I wasn't attending my classes at U.C.L.A., and sometimes when I should have been, I'd take a bus out to Burbank and spend the morning on the Disney lot, which was a much more magical place then than it is today. Back then, everyone who worked there felt like they were a part of Walt's heritage and that they had a job for life…maybe not a great-paying one but there was a sense that being part of D*I*S*N*E*Y (and having all that job security) made up for low wages. These days, it seems like everyone who works there thinks of themselves as an extended Temp toiling for whoever runs the company this week, watching their paychecks get slashed to compensate for CEO bonuses.

In 1971, I worked mainly for a fellow in his late thirties named George Sherman, who was involved in all sorts of publishing projects. We got along great and he was always recommending me for other jobs on the lot and to outside companies doing Disney projects, especially anything involving Goofy. I was his big Goofy writer. I owe a lot of my comic book writing career to that man.

George was out sick for weeks at a time (he died not long after) but when he was there, I'd sometimes spend mornings in his office, go to lunch with him and then in the afternoon, I'd walk the two blocks to NBC Studios and sneak or talk my way in to watch the taping of a Bob Hope special or Laugh-In. Some days, I could see The Dean Martin Show rehearse without Dean Martin or even watch the legendary Mr. Carson do what he did so well.

One day, George and I were lunching in the Disney commissary when a man came by and said hello. It was Gene Kelly. I have no idea how George knew him but he knew him. The great star of so many movie musicals was on the lot to talk to someone at Disney about some project. He sat and talked for a bit and told us about a new TV show he was taping over at NBC, one that wasn't yet on the air. It was The Funny Side. George told him that I was known to prowl the NBC corridors and Mr. Kelly invited me to visit the set whenever I wanted…say, later that day. I accepted and that afternoon, I didn't have to talk my way past the security guards. I was, ahem, the personal guest of Mr. Gene Kelly. Matter of fact, for the next few weeks when I went there, the guards just waved me through because they figured I was associated with him.

I'm not sure if The Funny Side ever taped with a live audience but they didn't have one that day. For most of the afternoon, I was the live audience. They spent about an hour with Kelly, who was dressed in a tux and looking just like you'd want Gene Kelly to look, doing a very simple dance routine on a conference table with the cast seated all around it. It should have taken ten minutes but there were technical snafus and delays, and you could see Kelly was getting annoyed but he kept his temper in check.

When he was done, he wasn't needed for a while so he came out to the bleachers and sat with me and we talked for…well, it must have been an hour. It was another of the many "I'd give anything for a tape recorder" moments of my life. We talked mostly about current Hollywood and how Gene (he insisted I call him that) didn't like the way it was going. He was more interested in discussing his recent work as a director — on Hello, Dolly and A Guide for the Married Man — than in talking about the MGM days, but he did tell me a long, X-rated anecdote, the point of which was that Louis B. Mayer preached core American morality to all whenever he wasn't making starlets earn their contract renewals on or under his desk. Of the film of Hello, Dolly, Gene said his great directoral achievement was to make it appear that Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau did not want to strangle each other.

Later, wearing the same tux, Gene went down the hall and taped some spots for The Dean Martin Show, some of them even with Dean. I was invited to tag along and there Kelly introduced me to Lou Jacobi, Kay Medford, Nipsey Russell and to Harry Crane, who was the head writer and as famous in the business for creating great jokes as Gene was for dancing in inclement weather. It was quite a magical day, though Gene showed no interest in continuing our casual friendship and I never spoke to him again after that. I was impressed with how much energy he had (he was 59 then) and how he truly worked hard at everything he did. I guess that was one of the reasons he was such a great performer. I felt bad for him when I heard The Funny Side was cancelled because he seemed to think it was his last chance to prove he had a place in the current entertainment industry, as opposed to the "old-timer" circuit.

Here's a little less than five minutes of The Funny Side, and it should give you a pretty good idea of what the show was like. My thanks to someone named "Wookie" who wrote to say he put this clip up on YouTube, just because I once mentioned the program here. So does anyone have any clips of Stubby Kaye hosting Shenanigans? How about Our Place starring Burns and Schreiber? Or that season of Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers that was taped in London with Marty Feldman?

Jeffrey Toobin explains all about the Scooter Libby case and about Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame and why it matters.

Apparently, theories are already starting to pop up on Ye Olde Internet that Richard Jeni didn't commit suicide and was the victim of, as they say, foul play. "Foul play" is one of my favorite euphemisms for murder. It makes it sound like someone violated the Infield Fly Rule.

Two different e-mailers wanted to know if I was suggesting that when I said there was no sign that the guy might kill himself. No, I was not. I don't know anything more about it than was in the Associated Press report to which I linked. As near as I can tell, none of the speculators have any reason at all to speculate, either…which doesn't mean this might not blossom into a great tabloid news story. I mean, Anna Nicole is kind of winding down and Britney Spears has run her course. Nancy Grace and others on cable would probably love to find even the remotest justification to introduce the "m" word into this matter. Remember: You don't need to believe there's anything to a scandal in order to cover it in the news these days. You just need to be able to say "someone" thinks something might have happened.

As a quick change of partial subject, I wanted to repeat one of the funniest things I ever heard Richard Jeni say. I mentioned it back here but to save you clicking, I'll just reprint it…

A few years ago, I was in Las Vegas and I happened to catch him doing an interview on a local show there. He was talking about his appearance in the then-upcoming motion picture, Burn, Hollywood, Burn, and he said approximately the following…

Did you ever see the movie, The Player? This is the exact same movie but without the quality. This is for the discriminating filmgoer who's been wondering, "What if The Player hadn't been a very good movie?"

I thought it was the funniest, most honest thing I'd ever heard anyone say in "plugging" an upcoming film.

Boy, I don't get this one at all. They're saying stand-up comic Richard Jeni committed suicide yesterday morning. There was no apparent reason, no apparent warning sign…nothing.

He was a very funny boy. Back here, I highly recommended his latest (and I guess now, last) HBO Special. I'd still recommend just about anything he did, though it may be a little harder to laugh at it after this. He was a very simple, straightforward comedian whose act seemed derivative of no one else. It came from nothing but his own sense of humor. On stage, he projected the image of a guy who really had a sane, common sense attitude towards the world. Which I guess is one of the things that makes it hard to accept that he did what they say he did.

Last week was the 25th anniversary of the death of John Belushi, who committed his own kind of suicide with drugs and the way he lived. I thought about posting something here but didn't get around to it. If I had, it would have been about how (to me) the most tragic part of Belushi's passing was that everyone knew in advance how it would end. In fact, it wasn't necessary to even announce the cause. When it first hit the news wires, they just said that John Belushi had been found dead and everyone just kind of shrugged and assumed, "Drug overdose." Some people thought they heard the TV and radio news reports give the cause of death hours before they actually did. It was that expected.

People talking about Jeni's death are probably going to mention Belushi and also Freddie Prinze. I knew Freddie a little bit, though not well. At the time he shot himself, I was working for the outfit that produced his show, Chico and the Man, and while I don't think anyone there expected the guy to take his own life, no one seemed all that stunned that something dark and tragic occurred. The warning signs were there.

And then you have something like this. I never met Richard Jeni. I'm not sure I ever even saw him perform live, though I know that recently, when I saw he was playing the Improv in Hollywood or the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, I thought, "Hey, maybe I'll get a group together and we'll go see him." (Let that be a lesson to me about putting things off 'til the next time.) Maybe there was a dark side that never showed itself on stage. Maybe those who knew him well aren't stunned at the news, I dunno. It's just a kick in the gut for some of us.

Elayne Boozler remembers the guy. I know I will.

In case you didn't hear, Premiere magazine is shutting down. And so, after only three issues, is the new Cracked.

George S. Kaufman reportedly once said that if you wanted to get even with someone who did you wrong, you should convince them to invest heavily in new productions of Ibsen plays. I think I'll tell everyone I don't like that it's a dandy time to start a new magazine.

Robert Kagan writes that the "surge" in Iraq has been a great success, while Glenn Greenwald reminds us how Robert Kagan has been wrong about Iraq, every step of the way.

Here's another one of those cartoons I wrote that shouldn't be on YouTube but the lawyers haven't gotten around to ordering its removal. This is "Picnic Panic," which was a fifth season episode and one of the occasional all-music cartoons we did. Lorenzo Music performed the voice of Garfield and Thom Huge did the voice of Garfield's long-suffering owner, Jon. Thom also did the picnicker at the end. I wrote the lyrics and a very gifted musician named Ed Bogas wrote the tune, did the musical score (that's mostly him you hear playing) and sang for the ants. This cartoon is full of singing ants…

My buddy Jerry Beck got together a bunch of vintage Cocoa Puffs commercials that feature the voice of the great Chuck McCann. He does both Gramps and the Cocoa Puffs bird in these spots you can view over at Cartoon Brew.

Lately, there seem to be a lot of what one might call "Something to outrage everyone" news stories — cases where we could disagree on what's happening but either interpretation is cause for anger. The case of Jose Padilla, the alleged terrorist, is one of those.

Either this guy's innocent or guilty. If he's innocent, then your government has held an innocent man prisoner for three and a half years, doing everything possible to not let him have his day in court or proper legal counsel. They've also either tortured him intentionally or just by keeping him confined the way they have, done severe damage to his physical and mental health.

Or maybe he's guilty. If that's so, then the outrage is that your government has botched his prosecution beyond belief. Many of the charges against him have been dropped or dismissed. The rest may get tossed because of his condition or because the prosecutors keep amending their account of the facts of the case or, most recently, because they seem to have "lost" the videotape of his last interrogation.

I don't know which it is. But something really stinks about this whole affair.

As we mentioned back here, this weblog has only three missions in life. They're not about stopping Global Warming or the War in Iraq or any of those unimportant, easy crusades. Anyone can do stuff like that. No, we tackle the vital issues of the day which are, of course…

1. Get the Souplantation to add their Creamy Tomato Soup to their regular line-up.
2. Get the Cadbury Adams Gum Company to bring back Adams Sour Orange Gum.
3. Get Skidoo released on DVD.

So far, we've had limited success with #1. The Creamy Tomato Soup is back at Souplantation but only for the month of March. (We trust you're websurfing via wireless connection from some Souplantation while eating this scrumptious Creamy Tomato Soup. That's where I'm posting from until April Fool's Day. I'm at one right this minute, happily regaining much of the weight I've lost in the last nine months.)

There's been no movement on #2 so we've decided to focus our energies on #3: A legal, Kosher release of easily the oddest motion picture ever to be directed by an Oscar-nominated (though not for this) director and released by a major motion picture studio. You want to know how strange this movie is? The three minute chunk you'll see in today's video link, which is from the opening of the film, is the most coherent part.

I am told that Paramount Home Video, which I once urged here to show some moxie and put this thing out on DVD, is powerless to act; that the estate of director Otto Preminger controls the 1968 film and won't let it out. I think they're making a big mistake. If you try and suppress Skidoo, three things will happen. One is that it'll still be around but the bootleggers will make the money instead of the estate. Secondly, the movie will be seen only via crummy prints that will harm its reputation. And lastly and most significantly, people will think of this movie as something that Otto must have been ashamed of and will therefore view it the wrong frame of mind.

It only works if you presume that Mr. Preminger — a skilled filmmaker, as he proved so many times in his career — knew exactly what he was doing and made exactly the film he intended to make, and that his intention all along was to create something no sentient human being could ever understand. The very same year, Stanley Kubrick tried to achieve the same goal in 2001, but he failed by not casting Groucho Marx as God or Jackie Gleason as a mobster who trips out on LSD.

Here's three minutes of Skidoo with Gleason, Carol Channing and Arnold Stang. While you watch it, I'm going back to get more of the Creamy Tomato Soup and maybe another slice of the Garlic Asiago Focaccia. Come to think of it, I believe there's an actress in this movie named Garlic Asiago Focaccia…

Jonathan Chait on two sad things. One is that John McCain seems willing to sell out an awful lot of his principles to try and get the Republican nomination for '08. The other sad thing is that he's doing it even though it doesn't seem to be working.

This year's Academy Awards, like most recent ceremonies, struck me as conspicuously devoid of star power, above and beyond the folks who were there because they might be receiving an Oscar. And the ones who were there for other reasons were seen over and over and over. It might have been a small but thrilling moment to have Jack Nicholson come out to present Best Picture but by that point in the telecast, we'd seen Nicholson eighty times in audience cutaway shots and Ellen DeGeneres had acknowledged him from the stage once or twice. So it was like, "Nicholson? Big deal."

I asked here who there is around who might have been a big deal as an Oscar presenter and I asked it in two categories. Who would have been exciting to see who represented "Old Hollywood?" And who of our current pantheon of stars would have given you a tingle if they'd suddenly been announced? Here are some of the names I received in the first category…

Jean-Paul Belmondo, Sidney Poitier, Brigitte Bardot, Karl Malden, Shirley Temple, Ricardo Montalban, Tony Martin, Sophia Loren, Olivia DeHavilland, Cyd Charisse, Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Russell, Celeste Holm, Kirk Douglas, Joan Fontaine, Deborah Kerr, Richard Widmark, Paul Scofield, Kathryn Grayson, Jerry Lewis, Betty Hutton, Lena Horne, Deanna Durbin and Van Johnson

The two most often-mentioned names were Doris Day and Mickey Rooney. Based on my admittedly-limited encounters with both, I would guess the following: That if you went to Doris Day and said, "Either you appear in front of a live audience or every man, woman and child in the state of Ohio will die," she would shrug and say, "Goodbye, Columbus." And if you put Mickey Rooney up there, he'd still be talking about the days when he was the biggest box office star in the world and you could go into the MGM Commissary and see the lovely Miss Judy Garland order a chicken salad sandwich.

A number of you also mentioned Charles Lane. I think it would be better if we waited until he got a little older.

Many of the suggestions were for interesting teams…like Sean Connery, Roger Moore, George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig all presenting an award together. Of course, that would mean taking Lazenby away from his job as a seat filler.

Other teams put forth: Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. Robert Redford and Paul Newman. Almost anyone and Paul Newman. Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Jonathan Winters and Robin Williams.

In the category of Newer Hollywood, I got very few responses, mostly duos from hit movies — Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, Mike Myers and Dana Carvey, Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, the cast of Ocean's 13, etc. I suspect the Oscars may already be doing as well as they can in this area.

A couple of people asked what I thought would happen if the surprise presenter in the Best Director category was Roman Polanski. I think it would depend on whether he was brought on in handcuffs…but the response would have been interesting. Would people hesitate to applaud a man convicted of statutory rape? Or would they have figured that if it's okay for him to win that Oscar, it's okay for him to present it? I dunno. What I think would have upset many is if he'd "appeared" via satellite link the way he testified in that libel suit he brought against the magazine, Vanity Fair.

Thanks to all of you who sent in suggestions, even the joke ones like Tony Clifton, Ron Jeremy and me. My favorite suggestion, by the way, was from the person who wanted to see Shirley Jones and Marty Ingels present an Oscar. I think that would have been wonderful. Imagine that moment when they announce Marty Ingels and every single person in the Kodak Theater gets up and walks out.

Let's take a minute and watch Bucky Beaver sell Ipana toothpaste. Most of these ads were produced by a special division that Mr. Disney had in his studio during the fifties. It produced commercials, many of them with animation and graphics that did not fit the established Disney look or quality of movement. A gentleman named Charles A. Nichols — everyone called him "Nick" — was the main director there, having earlier distinguished himself as the director of some of the better Pluto cartoons. Like many animation folks of his generation, Nick closed out his career working on Saturday morning cartoons for Hanna-Barbera. (He also directed for Ruby-Spears. Remember that story I told here recently about one of the first cartoons I wrote and how its voice director was rude to actress Janet Waldo? Well, Nick was the animation director of that particular cartoon. Had he also directed the voices, he would have been much nicer to Janet.)

Another animation vet who worked for a time for H-B was Tex Avery. In fact, Tex and I briefly shared an office at the studio. Once, I eavesdropped as he and Nick got into a friendly argument about Disney's commercial division. I wish I could recall it in better detail but basically, Tex was needling Nick, telling him that that was where Walt stuck artists because they weren't good enough to work on Sleeping Beauty or because they were in need of a good spanking…or both. Nick knew Tex was ribbing him but he still repeated, over and over, that the commercial crew was full of talented people and that it was encouraged to be more experimental. With television becoming an increasingly important marketplace, Walt wanted to see if his people could do limited, lower budget work that would be acceptable as Disney animation. (The premise, I guess, was that the commercials didn't count as Disney animation since they were commercials and since most people didn't know what studio had done them.)

Tex had nothing against doing commercials. He'd done an awful lot of them, himself, including the Raid spots like the one I posted here not long ago. He was just having fun kidding Nick and imitating an imaginary Walt Disney bellowing, "We can't put Nichols on the important stuff. Put him in the garage where we make commercials for bran flakes!" Later, when Tex wasn't around, Nick admitted to me that there was a little truth to the joke; that Walt did stick some people in that department to keep them away from the work he cared about. I'm pretty confident Nick was not one of them.

Anyway, that's what came to mind when I came across this clip you're about to watch. The announcer you'll hear at the beginning is Jimmy Dodd, who was the adult host of The Mickey Mouse Club. And the voice of Bucky Beaver is Jimmy Dodd sped up a little. Here's Bucky trying to get us to brusha brusha brusha with the new Ipana…

The last few years, I've seen a lot of things that have lowered my opinion of reporters in this country. Obviously, I don't mean every reporter but taking them as a homogenous group, it's amazing how they will try to gin up a "hot story" out of darn near nothing…and get the basic facts wrong, to boot.

And I can't think of anything that proves this better than the fact that so many papers, magazines and websites think it fits any known definition of "news" that Captain America has been killed in his comic's current storyline.