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The current issue of Written By, a magazine published by the Writers Guild, has a one-page article about me, much of which consists of quotes from this website, accompanied by a photo from when I was about nine. I am not suggesting you plunk down money for this issue, at least because of that. But if I don't post this, I'll get a few dozen e-mails from folks asking, "Do you know there's an article about you in the new issue of Written By?" So yes, thanks, I know. And you have no idea how happy this kind of thing makes my mother. (If my Aunt Dot were still with us, she'd be happy too, but she'd have said, "All those pages and they only devoted one to you?")

One of the best letterers in comics, Bill Oakley, died last Monday…from cancer, I am told. I never met Bill but he lettered a few comics I wrote and I always admired his work. This link will take you to a page in his hometown newspaper with a brief obit. (Thanks to Tom Hegeman.)

During the second O.J. Simpson trial, and especially after as we heard more about what had transpired, I became a big fan of Daniel Petrocelli. He was the lead lawyer representing the Goldmans. He was the guy who won the case, essentially by doing everything right. Like Petrocelli, the prosecutors in the first trial had a mountain of evidence to demonstrate Simpson's guilt, but they laid it out poorly and buckled as Judge Ito allowed O.J.'s legal "Dream Team" to introduce months of diversions and Red Herrings. Petrocelli and his team took that evidence, added to it, then — abetted by a no-nonsense judge — laid it out with such clarity that no jury could get distracted. He also had the advantage of being able to get Simpson on the stand…and if you ever want to see a good example of an attorney ripping a witness to shreds, just take a look at those transcripts. I believe one juror even said that this testimony alone convinced them of Simpson's guilt.

After the trial, Petrocelli took a few well-earned victory laps on the talk show circuit, defending the verdict (mostly against F. Lee Bailey's carping) and later returned to promote his boastful but interesting book about the whole experience. I liked him a lot and even sent him a fan letter that said something about how if there were more of him around, lawyers would not have such a bad image. So I winced a bit when I heard that in the matter of Disney versus the people who control Winnie the Pooh, Petrocelli was representing Disney. And now that he's representing Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron exec who stands accused on 35 criminal counts of fraud and insider trading, I feel like recalling that fan letter.

It's not that I presume Disney or Skilling must be wholly in the wrong or that they have no right to the best legal counsel they can afford. It's just that…well, in a high-profile case like this, the lawyer not only defends the guy in court but acts as a public spokesperson. Even though he may know his client is guilty as Capone, the lawyer has to declare the injustice of his guy being railroaded, and impugn the I.Q. and integrity of prosecutors who are just trying to put a crook behind bars. Yeah, I know it comes with the job but it still makes me cringe to see someone fib like that. Petrocelli was all over the news yesterday, declaring Skilling's innocence with the same rhetoric and passion he once employed to say Simpson was guilty as guilty could be…

Jeff Skilling has nothing to hide. He did not steal. He did not lie. He did not take anyone's money and in the 60 pages of charges filed by the United States government, they don't even accuse him of these things, and it's not from lack of trying.

No, the indictment doesn't specifically accuse him of those things which is why it's a straw man argument. The indictment accuses the guy of insider trading that gained him about $62 million at a time when Enron execs were covering up the company's problems. Rumor has it that's illegal…and in any case, that $62 million had to come out of somebody's pocket. What do you want to bet that Skilling will wind up plea-bargaining and pleading guilty to a lesser charge? And that Petrocelli knows that?

Maybe it was too much to hope that Daniel Petrocelli would use his awesome skills only for the underdogs and for righting wrongs. Maybe it's naïve to think he could make just as good a living doing that…or maybe it's cynical to think Petrocelli doesn't think all his clients are the good guys. In the Disney case, he's going up against Johnny Cochran, who helped free Simpson and now represents the custodians of Winnie the Pooh. I guess I'm bothered because it's getting harder and harder to figure out who to root for.

The leaderships of the Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA have agreed to a one-year extension of their current contract with the AMPTP. In other words, instead of hammering out a new three-year contract before the June 30 deadline, the actors and producers have made a one-year deal which makes minor improvements to the contract, thereby assuring there will be no actors' strike, at least not now. They can then address the matter of the next long-term contract at a more leisurely pace. (This has to be approved by the membership of both unions but easy passage is expected.)

So the Writers Guild is now up at bat. Our contract expires May 2 and if you're wondering why the actors negotiated ahead of us…well, it seems to have something to do with us announcing that we will fight for a larger share of DVD revenues. The actors want that too, of course, but do not seem to have the necessary militancy to make it a strike issue this time out. The theory is that they made their quickie deal so they would not get swept up in any WGA-AMPTP war that erupts over DVD loot. If we make gains in that area, the actors can demand and probably achieve the same thing next year…but of course, they've also made it somewhat more difficult for us to make gains in that area. The producers would have been more frightened of a writers' strike on the matter if there was a chance it could quickly escalate into a writers' and actors' strike.

As I wrote last month in this posting, the WGA is already in a bit of disarray over a one-two punch of scandals involving its officers, and more heads may roll. I have no idea if we can pull together in time to present a unified position. We could wind up folding on this issue or we could find ourselves in a long, quagmire-style strike that will cripple Hollywood as the WGA strike of '88 did. It would be incredibly self-destructive of the producers to let the latter occur, but it was in 1988, as well. That year, the producers sadly underestimated WGA resolve and gave us a lowball offer, figuring we'd either grab it or that a strike would collapse quickly. Neither happened, and it took them months to agree among themselves to give us the kind of offer they should have given us in the first place.

One scenario that I suspect will not happen this time is a one-year extension like the actors just negotiated. Their contract now expires June 30, 2005. The current Directors Guild contract expires the next day. I don't think the producers want to extend the WGA to May 2, 2005, thereby positioning the three "above-the-line" guilds for simultaneous negotiations and (perhaps) strikes. The DGA traditionally does not strike but if the other two guilds were walking the picket lines over some issue when the directors' contract expired, there'd be no reason for them not to join in since there'd be nothing for them to direct. That would completely shut down the industry, which is why they will never allow even the vague possibility it could occur.

In other guild-type news, the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild may be negotiating a truce in a long-running battle over possessory credits on movies. That's when the director gets a credit that suggests he is somehow the sole creator of the movie…"A Film by James Cameron" or "George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead." Writers have long held that such credits, or at least the automatic awarding of such credits, belittle the contributions of others on a film. Directors have demanded them as their inalienable right. (If you'd like to read more about the two positions, this article covers some of the talking points for both views.) At one point, the WGA seemed to be threatening a strike and/or lawsuit over the matter but backed down on the condition that the two guilds would meet and try to hammer out some workable compromise. The DGA has now proposed, and the WGA seems receptive to a new plan that would slightly limit the practice. The proposal would generally ban such a credit on a director's first movie, though it could be awarded under certain circumstances. It would also slightly restrict the usage of such credits in some advertising.

The suggested "compromise" seems pretty slim to me. In fact, it sounds like something the directors might have enacted for their own benefit. Possessory credits have become so commonplace that established directors have complained they are no longer meaningful; not when a kid fresh out of film school is getting it on his first movie. At the same time, I don't sense that this is currently a big issue within the WGA; not to the extent that our members are prepared to go to war over it. So I suspect most of them will act like the DGA has met them halfway on the matter, and we'll wait to fight this battle another day.

The Spirograph was a great toy, at least for around a half-hour. After that, you had dozens of neat-looking kaleidoscope drawings and there was really nothing you could do with them..though one time, a fine comic book artist named Ernie Colón incorporated Spirograph designs into a story he drew for Creepy.. Anyway, you know where this is leading: Here's the link to where you can create online Spirograph drawings. Thanks to Scott Rosen for the tip.

Another of the many issues we're going to hear about in this Election Year is this one: That the Bush Administration has repeatedly ignored the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community when its findings interfered with their political goals. When someone reports something that does not conform to their worldview, that report has to be buried and that someone has to be replaced with someone who can get with the program. Recently, 20 past Nobel prize winners signed off on this report that decries this practice. (That's a PDF file. You'll need to have Adobe installed to read it.) No doubt this charge will link up with the charge that the White House ignored certain facts about Iraq because they were inconvenient, too.

James Fallows argues that the U.S. commitment to Iraq is exhausting our military resources. I don't know if the situation is as bleak as this article makes it out to be, but I bet we hear more about this.

Hey, do you remember that posting of mine that a fellow named Bill Stosine sent to various Letters to the Editor pages over his signature? Well, I just noticed it also got into the Chicago Sun-Times about two weeks ago. I've written TV shows that didn't get this wide an audience.

That's what's on the license plate from my 1957 Thunderbird…which, by the way, I'm still thinking of selling. (That is, I'm thinking of selling the car. Whether or not you'll want the plate too may depend on whether your name is Mark.) In any case, that's not a photo of the actual plate. It's a computer generated image courtesy of this website. You pick your state and one of its past license plate formats, enter what you want on your plate and — POOF! — it creates an image of that license plate for you. I made one and pasted it into the photo of a T-Bird. Sure beats the way they make 'em in prison.

As mentioned before here, a DVD collection of Marx Brothers movies will be available in May. Based on the announced rundown of its contents, we like this package a lot…even if it does include A Night in Casablanca. We're going to advance-order it by clicking on this Amazon link and you might like to do likewise. The selection of films was pretty obvious: It's every Marx Brothers movie currently controlled by the Time-Warner empire. But whoever assembled this thing also picked some wonderful shorts and supplementary material, including Warner Brothers cartoons and shorts keyed to the same years as the Marx films they accompany.

One thing I'd love to see some company do is to assemble a couple of DVDs that replicate the entirety of actual film programs seen in theaters…in other words, "Here's a DVD set that shows you exactly what you would have seen if you'd gone to the Bronx Bijou on such-and-such a date." They would include the features, shorts, cartoons, newsreels, trailers, etc. that went with one another. I don't think a similar DVD series would be a huge seller but it might be a way for companies to market some of the items from their vaults that otherwise would never make it to home video.

Stuttering John (of Howard Stern fame) as Leno's new announcer? Oh, great. It's not enough to do remote segments where the point is to laugh at how awkward and non-professional some people are on camera. Now we're going to have one of them in the studio every night.

Once upon a time, if you wanted to get on late night TV, the key was to be witty and professional. Today, only the host is allowed to be that and he surrounds himself with inarticulate stagehands, delicatessen owners and others who are guaranteed to never come up with an intentional funny remark. It's amazing how most of the comedians I know have gone from being not good enough to be on with Jay or Dave to being overqualified.

Yesterday, three separate people said roughly the same thing to me: "I don't know why, but I have the feeling the Democratic nominee is going to be Edwards."

Happy to hear that we're about to see a reissue of my pal Roger Stern's 1993 novel, The Death and Life of Superman. Well actually, I'm happy for you since I still have my original hardcover copy. The new one's a trade paperback that will be out in March, with new introductions by Roger, Mike Carlin and Charlie Kochman. I was not a big fan of the "Death of Superman" storyline that was done back then in the comics. It struck me as a bit loud, a bit exploitive and way overemotional, given that we all knew he was coming back. Still, I recall enjoying Roger's novelization of it, which had more depth than noise, and a really good sense of what it was that made Superman Superman.

I've read a lot of Superman stories over the years where my reaction was, "That wasn't a bad comic but Superman wasn't in it. There was a big muscular guy with an "S" on his chest but it wasn't Superman." That never happened with Roger's stories, so I recommend it even though there's no Amazon link available yet. When there is, I'll post one here, but don't wait for that.

Here's a piece by the Spinsanity crew that strikes me as a fair overview of the "Bush in the National Guard" flap. My interest in this one is low but it does fascinate me that so many folks on both sides are throwing out incomplete, arguable hunks of "evidence" and then saying, "This proves we're right. Case closed."

Here's a good profile of a very fine actor named David Paymer. I worked with David on a series a few years ago and thought he was an absolute joy.