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I am told the entire debut episode of The Colbert Report can be watched online at this link. You'll need to have Windows Media Player installed with the sarcasm filter turned off.

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 a map of Pearl Harbor that ran in the paper the day of the infamous bombing. He later worked for the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune and for the latter, he drew a short-lived strip about a cab driver named Flower Potts. Around 1948, he began drawing for comic books and notched a 20+ year run on the Lone Ranger comics for Western Publishing (Dell, Gold Key). He did dozens of other comics for Western, specializing in westerns and — as he put it — "anything with a horse in it." His Fury comics, based on the TV series about a stallion, were especially striking and other artists used them as reference for horse-drawing. Gill also drew comics for Harvey, Toby Press, Marvel and other companies, and illustrated a fair amount of childrens' books for Western. When the Man From U.N.C.L.E. TV show was big, Gill illustrated dozens of books and activity books based on the series.

Of all his many accomplishments, Tom was proudest of his 50+ year stint as an instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York. There, he taught over 2,500 students, many of whom went on to become prominent in the field of comics, advertising design and animation. A few of them assisted him on his comic book work before graduating to their own assignments, including Joe Sinnott, Herb Trimpe and John Verpoorten. He was also justifiably proud of his work with the National Cartoonists Society, serving several terms as its vice-president. The N.C.S. awarded him its coveted Silver T-Square award in 1964 and its award as Best Comic Book Artist in 1970. (He was then primarily doing the Bonanza comic book for Gold Key. A few years earlier, he drew a few issues for the company of The Owl, a new super-hero creation of Jerry Siegel.)

I met Tom at a New York convention about ten years ago. Veteran artist Dick Ayers, who sometimes worked with him, introduced us by telling me, "You're about to meet one of the real giants of our business." He was right, but Tom sure didn't conduct himself like he thought he was a giant. He was funny and charming and genuinely pleased that I knew who he was…and when I told him how much I admired the work of some of his students, like Joe Sinnott, he beamed with pride. Last year, we had him as a Guest of Honor at the Comic-Con International and I got to spend time with him and interview him. He had a true love of art and cartooning and talent…and it showed.

Here's a link to the Reuters obit and here's a link to a recent article about Tom. He was just what Dick Ayers said he was.

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" may harm someone on their side. Also, of course, folks who defended Clinton back then are just fine with the parts of the current investigation that parallel that which once outraged them.

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, I'm still assuming it will be and that the first outing of The Colbert Report was an okay first step. I mean, someone's going to figure out that Colbert's snotty screen personality needs more "normality" to play against. Out there alone, he's like Costello with no Abbott, and the whole show plays at the same snide attitude without interruption. The correspondents on The Daily Show are funny because they have Mr. Stewart there to play straight and to represent our amazement at the bizarre things they say and do. On last night's first Colbert Report, it was the other way around: Because he's the host, Colbert's odd style becomes the norm and his guest, Stone Phillips, was the guy who was out of sync with the rest of the world. Not as humorous that way.

Based on the promos, I was expecting The Colbert Report to be more of a parody of The O'Reilly Factor and other shows where the host sells a worldview and berates all who challenge it. Perhaps that's what they have in mind. (Bill O'Reilly, by the way, is Jon Stewart's guest tonight.) I wouldn't judge a show of this kind by its first episodes. After all, it took a long time for The Daily Show to become The Daily Show. Still, I have to admit I was a little disappointed by how much of the first Colbert Report was just Colbert arching that eyebrow towards Camera One. I hope this won't be another in the long list of shows that prove some people are just better as Second Bananas.

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 direction and some just because they were on important issues. Here are the choices.

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 for being on SNL during a season everyone hated and for uttering the "f" word on live TV. This article provides a long and compassionate view of the man.

UPDATE: The above link doesn't seem to be working all the time. Here's a link to a newsgroup posting that reproduces the text.

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 of the film currently being previewed here and there. It will presumably be on the DVD and I'll be curious to see whether there's any indication of why it was cut because I think it's one of the better songs in the show. It also means that Nathan Lane has only one solo in the film — "Betrayed."

There are two new numbers — "You'll Find Your Happiness in Rio" and "There's Nothing Like a Show on Broadway." The latter is sung over the closing credits.

I'm looking forward to this film with mixed anticipation. Loved the movie, loved the show on stage…but fear that when the show on stage becomes a movie, it will be impossible to not compare it more directly to the movie. And that's a tough standard to live up to.

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 way the White House wanted it reported. Anyone besides me remember when newspapers couldn't be bought off that way?

In the meantime, Frank Rich's weekend Times column is apparently available for free there for a limited time. Go give it a read before it disappears behind the barricade.

UPDATE, three minutes later: Whoops! They seem to have moved it to the pay section even as I was posting the above. But you can still read it here.

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 when Napoleon Solo first hit NBC, his environment had the expanse and grandeur of the best James Bond flicks. These reruns had obviously been refilmed since to lower their production values — or at least, that's how it felt to me. They were still entertaining in their way — I was never a huge fan of the thing — but I remembered them as being more lavish and with fewer scenes that now look to me as having been shot in someone's tool shed with a security-cam.

There may be a couple of reasons for this change besides sheer, overrating nostalgia. One is that I now watch TV on a larger, sharper screen than I had then. Another is that having toiled some years in the TV business, I'm a little more conscious of what's costly to do on-screen and what isn't.

Lately, my TiVo keeps snaring old episodes of Hawaii Five-O, which is a show I intermittently enjoyed as a youth. I watched it avidly for a time, then got bored with the endless repetition I summarized in this article. As I watch them now, I'm struck by something I hadn't fully realized before, which is how truly awful most of the acting is…and I don't mean "awful" in the way that any TV show filmed in 4-5 days is likely to contain some line readings that would set Lee Strasberg to rotating inside his crypt. I mean that apart from the occasional guest appearance by a William Devane or someone in that category — and leaving aside James MacArthur, who was always good — that show employed some astoundingly poor actors.

In fact, I'd wager a high percentage of them weren't even actors in the sense of ever making a living at it elsewhere. Filming in Hawaii, the producers probably ran through all the good thespians in town quickly and rather than pay to fly someone in from Hollywood for a bit part, they started tapping local amateurs. What I really had not noticed when I first watched these shows — which means either they did a good job of it or I wasn't too perceptive then — is how many incidental actors are looped, and not by themselves. There was an episode on the other day which called for three or four young, beautiful women of Hawaiian extraction to loll about in bikinis. Each had a few lines of dialogue and each was overdubbed by, I suspect, the same professional voiceover actress. Obviously, with a short production schedule and a limited talent pool from which to draw, the producers couldn't find decent actresses with both the proper physiology and thespian skills. They probably didn't even try; just said, "Cast 'em for their looks and we'll loop 'em later."

An amazing number of the bit parts, I now realize, were dubbed…and some of those that weren't probably should have been. But it also was done with large roles. A few weeks ago, I caught one episode — it was one of the ones where Hume Cronyn played his recurring character — where some handsome gent of Asian ethnicity played a boss who controlled the rackets on Oahu. The actor had a hefty amount of dialogue and every word of it was supplied by voice legend Paul Frees, probably at some little studio here in Los Angeles.

At times, I wish Paul had dubbed Jack Lord and given him that fey Inspector Fenwick voice from the Dudley Do-Right cartoons. I understand why someone thought Mr. Lord was a star as he does have that insistent, intense air about him — but, boy, is he a dreadful actor. Pat Paulsen had more range of character and emotion…and maybe still has. I just watched one that guest-starred William Shatner and between him and Lord, it's a wonder there was any undevoured scenery left in Hawaii when filming was done. And yet, the odd thing is it worked. Like a trained horse, Jack Lord could do just what they needed him to do when they needed it. I can't think of any performers currently anchoring a TV series who are that limited…but then I also can't think of a current TV show that has it down to a formula in quite the way Hawaii Five-O had it, either. Maybe there's a connection.

What I'm curious about — and maybe there's someone still around who knows the answer to this — is to what extent the dubbing of inadequate actors was part of the standard production schedule. Some episodes, there are several looped parts. Some episodes, there seem to be none…and that's when you get those real terrible two-line performances that I'm sure would have been dubbed if they were going to the trouble of bringing professionals in to replace anyone's dialogue that week. It's almost like in mid-filming, they had to decide, "Are we going to spring for loopers this episode?" And finally someone's performance would be so unacceptable that they'd have to spring for a dubbing session, call in people like Paul Frees. June Foray recalls that she did a couple of them…so if you're watching and you see some native girls who sound like Rocky the Flying Squirrel, your ears aren't deceiving you.

And I really hope that the guy in charge of hiring the voice dubbers was named Dan Something. I'm imagining that they're in the middle of an episode and some untrained actor gives a performance that evokes the "Springtime for Hitler" look in everyone else on the set, and Dan runs up to the director. "Do you think we need to hire Paul Frees again?" he asks the director. And the director turns to him and says, "Book him, Danno."

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 text stock, which yellowed fairly easily. There were also at least a couple of books (probably of Sunday strips only) printed in an oblong format (trim size more like 8" x 5-1/2"). It appears HRW reissued the books in the early '70s on slightly better text stock with new, more modern covers on coated stock (cheaper than the uncoated covers).

2. In the mid-'70s, HRW reissued all the old books in a larger 7" x 10" format, incorporating about 1-1/2 books in each of the books in the new trim size, and issuing new books at that size as well. Text stock was a good white stock, not likely to yellow. About 24 books were issued of this size through 1984, the last under the Henry Holt imprint after the company was sold.

3. In 1993 or so, the books were again split up, some issued under new titles, and confusingly some under the same titles as the '70s books, even if they didn't include the same strips. Trim size was again 5" x 8", but the paper was a good white stock — however, the internal pages don't look great, because I believe the new books were shot from tear sheets of the '70s books, rather than scanned from original strips. (Also, 7" x 10" is now an uneconomical trim size to print and bind.) These are hard to come by because they weren't printed in huge numbers. When I was director of production at Holt in 1999, we discussed briefly what to do about the books, but decided they just weren't selling in great numbers to justify another reissue. I think Topper/Pharos Books (owned by Schulz's syndicator and distributed by St. Martin's Press, where I worked for most of 1985-2000) discovered that as well. Schulz's sales were down because there was so much product. He was with a few other publishers (such as HarperCollins) until 2000.

I do admit to having the idea of getting all of the strips, including the ones that hadn't been printed before, and proposing it to Holt – I'm glad Fantagraphics was able to do the job right.

So am I…and I hope the three illos I selected correspond accurately to the three series you itemize.

Too much product may have been part of the problem but I suspect a big reason that Mr. Schulz's reprint collections stopped selling was because the folks putting out the books kept changing formats and recycling the same strips in different volumes. There were also those small paperback collections from Fawcett that featured some of the strips from the Holt Rinehart books. It got very confusing to figure out which Peanuts books to buy and which to skip if you just wanted one copy of each strip with no dupes. In many companies, there's often been a tendency to divide the potential market into two categories — die-hard collectors and casual readers. The die-hards, it is thought, aren't large enough in number to warrant catering to their concerns…and they'll probably buy it, anyway. So you cater to the casuals (who don't care about completeness) and forget that there's a middle category in there. There are people who'd like to buy the series and build a little library to read and to have on a shelf in their homes.

At some point in the seventies, it got to be impossible to figure out which newly-released Peanuts books contained strips that had never been reprinted before and which were repackagings of earlier reprint books. I think there were a few that were a combo. At some point in there, I — a devout Schulz fan — threw up my hands, went "AUGGHH!" and stopped trying. I can only imagine how many of the less fanatical readers they lost. Anyway, thanks for the info, Curt. Very helpful.

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, in fact– and to be honest, if my house was burning down and I had to choose between the HR books and the new Fanta books I might very well pick the HR ones myself, even though they omit part of the opening Sunday panel and are missing a bunch of strips, etc. I think all Peanuts fans my age and older have a permanent sentimental attachment to those books.

The matter of which strips were "killed" by Schulz or anyone else for later reproduction is endlessly intriguing. Based on the fact that (as we've found out) there are significant holes in both United Feature Syndicate and the Schulz Estate's files of proofs, it's possible that some of the missing strips are missing simply because they didn't have any copies of them when they were putting together the HR books. (I particularly suspect this is the case when an entire week's worth of perfectly good strips were never reprinted.) As for the others…

I recently picked out several examples from our upoming fifth volume — strips that have never, so far as I (and, more importantly, my cadre of Peanuts experts) know, been collected since their ephemeral appearance in daily newspapers around the world nearly 50 years ago — and offered a few educated guesses as to why that might be.

Those are the ones posted at the above link and it gets me to wondering: Does anyone have any solid info on how the Holt, Rinehart books sold? And more interestingly, how did they impact the syndication of Peanuts? I know there have been cases where a top-selling reprint collection prompted a lot of editors to say, "Hey, that strip's popular. We'd better pick it up for our paper." That was a big factor in the success of Garfield and Dilbert, and I think maybe with Doonesbury, as well. Also, both Charles Schulz and Lee Mendelson told me how the popularity of A Charlie Brown Christmas (which Mendelson produced) had an astronomical impact on the merchandising of the characters. Does anyone know if the rise of Peanuts to 2600+ newspaper clients was slow and steady or if it spiked because of the books and/or TV special?

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 home.

Now, here's how you write an eBay listing.