Category Archives: Uncategorized

Seymour Hersh on what's happening with Iraq and what's going to happen. I think there's something in there to worry everyone.

In the eighties and early nineties, the comic book business went through major upheavals with new companies and new distributors coming and going like lawyers for Saddam Hussein. Some very large operations went from zero to sixty and back again so rapidly that once, when I attended a distributor's national sales meeting, three publishers who'd been expected to exhibit had gone under between the time they bought display space and the date of the event…and less than a year later, that distributor had gone under. When the smoke and acquisitions and bankruptcies cleared, a lot of publishers were history and one outfit — Diamond — controlled distribution. There are other means of getting your product into comic book shops but no known success stories that prove that. If I were publishing and Diamond wouldn't carry my wares, I'd stop publishing and go do something more promising than distributing to comic shops without Diamond. Like opening a CompUSA in Amish country.

One of the unexpected survivors of all that publishing turmoil was a small line called Claypool Comics, which may be the best-kept secret in the industry. Since 1993, they've quietly been releasing 2-3 black-and-white comics per month for a small but loyal following. At a time when few new comics make it past a dozen issues, the bi-monthly Soulsearchers and Deadbeats are each approaching #76 while the monthly Elvira is nearing #153. This track record has not always been appreciated by comic book shops. Ask dealers what they want out of the publishers and the first thing you'll usually hear is "A consistent product that comes out on time every month." Great…but they will often cut back on orders for books that meet that standard so they can order more of the "hot" one-shots and heavily-promoted limited runs.

Recently, Diamond decided to lop off some of the weaker-selling books from their roster. These are probably titles that do make a small profit and for all we know, may be a reason some customers come into comic shops at all. But right now, Deadbeats and Soulsearchers aren't making the cut, meaning that unless they suddenly show a jump in sales, Diamond will decide they aren't worth distributing. That would be a shame. In those books, my pals Richard Howell and Peter David are crafting consistent, well-written tales without gimmicks or "special events." Deadbeats describes itself as a "punk vampire soap opera" and Soulsearchers is a solid super-hero spoof with supernatural themes. If you haven't tried either, it may be now or never. And if you have tried them and drifted away, now would be a good time to jump back on the bandwagon.

Diamond, of course, is well within its rights to not distribute anything it considers not worth its time. I wonder though if certain long-running projects shouldn't be grandfathered in because they do have steady followings. That's something a lot of current top-selling titles haven't been able to manage. I spoke to a friend of mine the other night who's drawing a new book for DC and the hope is that it'll do well enough to stick around for two or three years. Beyond that, no one dares dream. While the marketplace does need the top-selling books, it also needs the long-selling books…the ones that do not postulate a complete turnover of readership every year or two. I sure hope Claypool keeps all three of its titles afloat, if only to remind others that it can be done.

Here, too late to be of any use to you on Thanksgiving, are lessons in how to carve a turkey.

I should have mentioned it some time ago but my pal Steve Thompson has set up a weblog of goodies from his "pop culture" library. Everything there is of interest but he just put up this item, which is an ad for the short-lived Lorenzo and Henrietta Music Show from 1976. This was a folksy talk show with Lorenzo, his wife and some friends and it went on the air and off in record time. (Steve has the chronology slightly wrong, by the way. Lorenzo started voicing Carlton the Doorman on the Rhoda show in 1974.)

Lorenzo didn't talk about it much when I knew him. It represented a very bad episode in his life due to some personal tragedies that occurred around that time. They made it very difficult for him to do the show…and the fact that he knew he wasn't at his best on-air made him even more depressed. One time when someone asked him why the show had been cancelled so quickly, he replied, "Bad ratings, plus I was in no shape to do it."

Anyway, browse around Steve's site. Plenty of fun stuff there to look at.

Here's a link to this weekend's Frank Rich column. You may be shocked to see that it's about how the Bush-Cheney defense of the Iraq war is collapsing. Who'd have imagined Frank Rich would write of such a thing?

I was disappointed in Ed McMahon's new book on Johnny Carson. I hadn't expected anything but a love letter to his former employer but I had expected more behind-the-scenes and off-camera info than we get in Here's Johnny! An awful lot of it is "Ed" (or whoever actually wrote it) recounting funny things Johnny said and did on the air. That's nice but anyone could have written those chapters without working side-by-side with J. Carson for three or four decades. The press release says, "Now, with Johnny's blessing before he died, McMahon can finally share all the stories that only he knows." Actually, you know a lot of them if you read Ed's two previous books, Here's Ed and For Laughing Out Loud: My Life and Good Times. I'll give you an Amazon link in case you are, like me, a Carson completist. But did we really need Ed to tell us what happened on The Tonight Show when Ed Ames tried to demonstrate tomahawk-throwing? Bill Zehme is working on an exhaustive bio of Johnny and I'll bet it tells us more about his relationship with Ed than Ed did.

On the other hand, I did enjoy Alan Alda's autobiography, which is called — for reasons you don't necessarily want to know — Never Have Your Dog Stuffed. Alda grew up in an amazing family. His father was a burlesque straight man who later became a leading actor on Broadway and in films. Young Alan spent much of his early life watching strippers from the wings and later, hanging out as his dad played Sky Masterson in the original Guys and Dolls. In the meantime, his mother was going steadily out of her mind. It's amazing that the lad born Alphonso D'Abruzzo grew up into most folks' idea of a sane, well-adjusted human being.

There isn't as much about M*A*S*H as I'd expected or might have wanted. Then again, I'm glad Alda did not skip over all the non-M*A*S*H portions of his life. Unlike Ed's, this book actually feels like it was written by the guy it says wrote it, and you learn an awful lot you didn't know about someone you already felt like you knew. Here's an Amazon link and a much higher recommendation. And you can read an excerpt and listen to some interviews with Mr. Alda here.

Last Friday, I posted a photo of a cat that dines nightly on my back step. Here's a better angle on the feline in question. The caption for this picture is, "Put down the camera and fill the bowl." I suspect this caption would work on most photos of most cats who aren't asleep at the time.

Michael Kinsley on Dick Cheney's arguments for the war in Iraq and against his critics.

Up until yesterday, Pat Morita was a survivor. He'd survived spinal tuberculosis. He'd survived an internment camp. He'd even survived Mr. T and Tina.

Mr. T and Tina was a situation comedy that appeared and disappeared in 1976 faster than you could say, "Kamikaze." It was one of those shows — there are a few of them every season — that was unofficially cancelled before it ever went on the air. Networks do not always think that what they're putting on is good or even that it has a shot at being successful. They'd like everything to be one or the other (preferably both) but sometimes, there are eight holes to be filled on the schedule and all the pilots and development have only yielded six shows that anyone thinks have any promise. In '76, ABC had a couple such gaps in its fall schedule and so, since they had to put something on Saturday nights at 8:30, they picked Pat Morita's pilot. It had been produced by Jimmie Komack, who'd recently given them a big hit with Welcome Back, Kotter…so the feeling was that picking that would help the network's relationship with Komack and — who knew? — maybe there was that longshot chance that Jimmie was on a lucky streak.

No sooner was the pilot picked up than ABC's development folks went to work, figuring out what could go in when Mr. T and Tina went down. This was not a secret in the industry. Everyone knew it…except (apparently) Pat Morita.

Around this time, I went to work on Kotter, which shared facilities with Mr. T and Tina. My partner and I were given a small, cell-like office in another building and told, "Sorry…we don't have room for you in the main building, though we will as soon as Mr. T and Tina gets the ax." This was Komack's own Head of Production who told us this. About two weeks later, said ax fell and the show disappeared. I don't mean just off the tube. Word of the cancellation came down at 1:00 and by 4 PM, there was no trace of Mr. T and Tina in the Komack offices. The staff was gone. The script files were gone. The photo of the cast in the reception area was gone. Every bit of the show was gone…except for Pat Morita, who spent the next few weeks hanging around the office, using the phone to call everyone he knew all over the world to line up work. And I mean, "all over the world." He ran up hundreds of dollars in long distance charges.

We all felt sorry for him. He'd given up his regular role on Happy Days to star in his own show and it had never had a chance.

Finally, the Komack folks cut off his phone privileges, Pat Morita disappeared from the office and I never heard Mr. T and Tina mentioned again in all the time I worked there. I was very happy though that I continued to hear of Pat Morita. He worked often, especially after he got a showy role in The Karate Kid and an Oscar nomination for his performance. There were three reasons why he got hired as much as he did. One was that he was a very good performer. All those years of working stand-up, often in some difficult, out-of-the-way places had trained him to deliver a line and wring everything possible out of it. Another reason was that he was a very charming, lovable gentleman. And the third reason, which even he admitted, was that when the casting call was for an older Japanese man — or even any kind of Asian — the competition was not fierce. Go ahead. Name three other guys you could get for those parts, especially in the eighties.

In the midst of that decade, I wrote a batch of ABC Weekend Special segments. The network was in one of its "socially-conscious" fits and when it came time to hire some recognizable faces to rotate hosting, we were told to secure a wide range of ethnic types and sent a list of suggestions. Black was no problem — we got Billy Dee Williams and Shari Belafonte-Harper — but under "Asian," the entire list consisted of Noriyuki "Pat" Morita. We quickly surveyed all the available alternatives and hired Noriyuki "Pat" Morita.

The segments taped in the same studio where Mr. T and Tina had been done and when I mentioned it to Pat, he said, "I know. Why didn't you go all the way and tape in Hiroshima?" Hey, he said it. I didn't.

Mr. Morita was a delight to work with and over lunch, he regaled us with tales of some of the terrible nightclubs he'd worked on his way up. My impression of him was that he was very shrewd and quite conscious of the fact that he was getting a lot of work because of his heritage. He lamented the paucity of roles for Asians and worked to fight stereotyping. But he also figured that if they were going to hire a Japanese guy, it might as well be Pat Morita. One of his associates later told me that he never took the income for granted and invested it wisely. So that's kind of the way I'm remembering him tonight: A smart guy who overcame a racial disadvantage and learned to make it work for him…largely because he never lost his sense of humor.

I've been added to the guest list for the 2006 WonderCon, which is being held in San Francisco from February 10 through 12. Also on the roster are Erik Larsen, Gahan Wilson, Ramona Fradon, Marie Severin, Sergio Aragonés, Frank Cho, Mike Allred, Mike Mignola and some other fine folks, and there'll be more names announced shortly. This is always one of the best conventions in the country and it's a nice size: Big enough so there's plenty to see and do; not so big that it becomes overwhelming. Go to one someday.

This weekend's vintage Saturday Night Live rerun (the one they run in the wee small hours of the A.M.) is from November 22, 1986. Robin Williams is the host, Paul Simon is the musical guest and there are some pretty good sketches with Phil Hartman, Jon Lovitz, Jan Hooks, Nora Dunn, Dennis Miller, Dana Carvey, Victoria Jackson, Kevin Nealon and a few others. The opening sketch is Williams as Ronald Reagan getting the answers for a press conference via a secret earpiece…a bit that should have been rerun during the last election, when there were rumors that George W. Bush was being prompted via a hidden radio receiver. There's also a funny sketch with Paul Simon waiting on line for some event and being approached by fans who don't believe he'll remember them but he does. You'll see the punchline coming but it's still pretty good.

Okay, so you just finished that big Thanksgiving dinner and the tryptophan in the turkey is making you sleepy, right? Well, these folks say that's a myth.

Here's another photo from the other night. The raccoons are, by the way, doing a good job of destroying that fence, knocking slats out of it. I'll have to do something about this one of these days.

I have no idea where these fellows live most of the time. For a while, I thought they were spending their non-foraging hours in the crawl space and basement under my house, but I had a company called Attic Busters come in. They go over your house with a magnifying glass, locate every entrance where anything larger than a cricket can get in, and seal it up. They closed off the passageway by which I thought the raccoons were getting in and reported that while there was evidence our masked friends had passed through that portal, there wasn't a lot. Most likely, they'd gone in to look for food, found none and then left. So I don't know where they go. A neighbor says she's seen them crawling out of the curbside catch basins that lead down to the sewers, so maybe that's their main hangout. Where the possums come from, I really can't imagine.

The other day, I linked to this article by Fred Kaplan. In it, he explains in some detail the proposal by Congressfellow John Murtha for U.S. troop redeployment in Iraq. It's kind of an interesting piece because a lot of people are arguing about Murtha's plan and Kaplan seems to be the only one who actually read it. Whether this is the right course of action, I don't know but characterizing it as "cut and run" or some kind of full-scale retreat is just plain inaccurate. Based on the noises Condoleezza Rice was making today, it may just be the Bush plan with a different advertising campaign.

The latest Osama video. (No, not really…)