Apparently, one feature of getting to be as old as Al Jaffee is that everyone in the news business has your obit pre-written. I was amazed how swiftly they appeared today. I call your attention to the ones in The New York Times, The Hollywood Reporter, The Associated Press and Rolling Stone. They'll tell you about his long, extraordinary life. I'll tell you about some other things…

Al was a shining example of what I wrote about here the other day; about how sometimes you meet your heroes and they're everything you want them to be. Al was friendly, kind, charming and way less abrasive than you'd expect of the guy who created a feature called "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions." Everyone loved the guy for himself, not just for his cartooning.

Al contributed to (by my count) 469 issues of MAD magazine in its original numbering which stopped at 550. MAD began renumbering after that and Al had just a few new pages in the new version including his last Fold-In, drawn but not printed a few years before. So his first MAD contribution was in 1955 and his last was in either 2019 or 2020, depending on how you score the last few. That would be impressive even if they were mediocre but Al's batting average was pretty darned good.

I regretted that in his last decade or two, he didn't do much beyond the Fold-Ins. Some of the non-foldable material was quite wonderful and I really liked some of the MAD paperbacks he did. I have them all but they should be in print for others to enjoy.

Al was one of those guys who was just born to be a cartoonist. It was hard to imagine him being anything else and he loved doing it. The last time we spoke was not long after he'd given up the notion of drawing anything and you could hear the frustration in his voice. He was still occasionally thinking of gags, though. His drawing hand may have failed him but his sense of humor didn't. I'd like to think it's what kept him around for so long.

102 years old. Made an absurd number of people laugh.

I don't think there are very many people presently involved in television and film production who would bet there won't be a long and nasty strike by the Writers Guild in the near future. By May 1, we need to either have a new contract in place or be so clearly on the way to one that the WGA won't call a strike. I am about to vote to empower my guild to call one if necessary and so are a lot of other WGA members.

I've been a member since 1976 and I don't know how many of these I've lived through. We always seem to be recovering from the last negotiation, whether it required a labor stoppage or not, and girding ourselves for the next one. I don't like it. No one likes it. But one thing you learn after you've been through a number of these is that (a) from time to time, we have to sit down with the producers and hammer out a new contract and (b) if you take a shitty deal this time, you'll be offered a far shittier one next time.

In past negotiations, I had an inside track to what was going on in the bargaining. This time, I don't know anyone in those conference rooms so anyone who comes to this site looking for insight may not find much. Still, let me say this: I have great faith that both sides know what they're doing…and it's not like the scenario is a new one.

When I did have access, my observation was that a strike was the result of the producers woefully underestimating the resolve of the WGA, making an offer that they wrongly thought we'd take, and then having trouble budging off that offer. I hope that is not the case this time.

The issues are many and complex but most come down to they want to pay us less and we want to be paid more. That's what most strikes in most industries are about and it's not an alien concept. Every time anyone makes a deal of any magnitude in any business, it usually comes down to they want to pay us less and we want to be paid more. It just doesn't usually happen all at once in Hollywood for everyone and on such a huge, production-stopping scale.

Here's hoping production doesn't have to stop and a good deal can be reached. And if we do get a bad deal, watch the hell out for next time.

Here's another one of those American musicals performed in Japan…in this case, The Producers. One might note that while the songs and dialogue are in Japanese, the sets are in English and I'm wondering if that's because the sets from some American touring production were acquired and shipped overseas. Presumably, the orchestrations were…

A few days ago here, I connected you to a clip of Dick Van Dyke performing "Put on a Happy Face" from the original Broadway production of Bye Bye Birdie. It was from an episode of The Ed Sullivan Show and my longtime e-mail buddy Jim Hill noticed something in it that I didn't. Here's Jim…

Thanks for sharing that Bye Bye Birdie clip from The Ed Sullivan Show. I know that it's likely that a significant chunk of this number was restaged so that it would then play better for the cameras. But even so, it was fun to see what much of Gower Champion's version of "Put on a Happy Face" might have looked like if you'd managed to see this show on Broadway back in the early 1960s.

Also…I didn't think that this would ever be possible, but my admiration of Dick Van Dyke actually went up after watching this clip. And it was all because of what Dick did at the end of this number.

By that I mean: Van Dyke is on live television on one of the top rated shows of that era. And Ed waves Dick over to talk in front of the curtain after "Put on a Happy Face" is done. Most actors would have made that time in the spotlight/that moment in the sun all about themselves. Not Van Dyke. He insists that the two young female dancers from the Bye Bye Birdie ensemble who performed with him join him in front of the camera with the show's host. Dick even mentions both of those girls' names. Which must have meant a lot to them as well as their families and friends watching at home.

Dick Van Dyke didn't need to do that. But he actually went out of his way to do so. Which — I think, anyway — says a lot about who this performer is as a person.

I'm occasionally asked at conventions and elsewhere about that old maxim about how you really don't want to meet your heroes because you'll be disappointed. I've been fortunate to meet quite a few of mine and I would say I've been disappointed maybe 30% of the time…and half of those were because of unreasonable expectations on my part. But several of them — including Jack Kirby, Daws Butler and Dick Van Dyke — didn't let me down in the slightest. If anything, my admiration for them went up once I got to know them relatively up-close and personal.

Maybe I'm easily fooled but I'd like to think they really were that nice and I did see that they had that little special aura of magic around them. Dick Van Dyke is 97…living proof that the good do not always die young.

In the last years of his life, Buster Keaton appeared in any number of films, commercials and TV shows that were not wonderful. In 1963, he starred in The Triumph of Lester Snapwell, a 21-minute promotional film for the Kodak company. It's basically a history of amateur photography, culminating in the modern era where everyone can own the ultimate camera…the Instamatic! As later Keaton efforts go, it's not as bad as some of them…

So you don't feel neglected while I tend to other matters, here's a replay of a column than ran here on September 16, 2013. It's the story of one of my father's several heart attacks — not his first and not his last. It's another one of those…

I was just getting out of the shower one morning when the phone rang. It was my father calling with one of those simple, declarative statements that changes your entire life for a while if not forever. He said, "I'm having a heart attack."

This was in the mid-eighties, around 1984. My mother was working part-time at a grocery store wrapping packages. He was home alone in the house I grew up in, which was located (Google Maps tells me) 4.4 miles from my residence then and now. He'd had a heart attack before and he knew the symptoms so I said, "I'm sending an ambulance!"

He screamed, "No! No ambulance! I will not get into an ambulance! You come and drive me to the hospital!"

There was a reason for no ambulance — maybe not a good reason but a reason, nonetheless. His father had died in an ambulance. His father had been stricken, probably but not definitely with a heart attack, in the Temple on one of the High Holy Days. An ambulance was called but he refused to get into it. A Jew does not ride in a motor vehicle on such days and I guess he thought being on the verge of death is not a good time to be displeasing God. Or something.

Anyway, the rabbis and other learned men urged him to get in and he refused. An argument ensued…one that was settled in a simple manner. He passed out and they just picked him up and put him in. Sadly, he was dead before they got him to the Emergency Room.

That should have been a teachable moment: When you're sick, get in the ambulance. But my father somehow learned the opposite: When you're sick, stay out of ambulances. When he phoned with his simple, declarative statement, there was no time to debate the proper lesson to be learned. "I'll be right over," I told him.

I could usually make the drive in fifteen minutes but that day, I set some world record for drying, dressing and driving…and made it there in ten. My father was not unconscious but he was getting there. I guided him into my car and then drove like Gene Hackman in The French Connection, only faster, all the way to Kaiser Permanente Hospital. I parked illegally, commandeered a nearby empty wheelchair and rushed him in through doors marked "Emergency."

The room was packed and there was a little man — Filipino, I think — doing Triage, deciding who'd be seen and in what order. I told him, "This man is having a heart attack." He handed me a long form and told me to fill it out, place it in an "in" basket on his desk and take a seat.

I said, louder, "This man is having a heart attack. He'll be seeing a doctor in one minute or you'll be seeing one in two."

The little man began telling me to sit down as he gestured to people around us with hangnails and bad coughs. "All these people ahead of you," he was saying. I raised my voice even more. I yell about once every two years and it usually has to be something like this to get me there. My father also began yelling, getting up out of the wheelchair and gasping out loud, "They're making me wait?" We were making quite a scene, deliberately so.

By now, it was about 11:15 AM. There was a doctor who'd been on the night shift and was leaving to go home. He was walking through the Emergency Room en route to his car and he saw what was going on. He hurried over and said to an attendant, "Take Mr. Evanier's father into Examining Room 2! I'll take care of him myself." In two instants, my father was led inside, the doctor followed him in —

— and I was just standing there, stunned. I went from yelling to stunned in about ten seconds.

The immediate problem had disappeared so quickly that it took me a second to wonder something: "How did that doctor know my name?"

I stopped a passing nurse and asked who that was. She said, "That's Dr. Barnett."

I asked, "Dr. Carl Barnett?"

She said, "Yes. Do you know him?"

Yes, I knew him. He was one of my best friends in high school.

I hadn't seen him since graduation and didn't even know he'd become a doctor…and by the way, at his request, I've changed the name here. It wasn't Carl Barnett. I don't know why he doesn't want me giving his name but I'm grateful enough to the guy to do anything he asks. He spent two hours past his shift time treating my father, then personally briefed the doctor who'd be taking over.

One of my most vivid memories of my father is from when I was brought into the Examining Room. He was sitting up in bed. His shirt was off but it was draped over his chest and there were wires connecting to the monitoring patches that were all over him. The doctor had told me my father was out of pain and more importantly, out of danger…from this heart attack, at least. Another was way too possible.

He was sitting there looking weak and sad, and when he saw me walk in, the very first thing he said was, "Well, it looks like I've had another heart attack. I hope this doesn't mean you're prone to them."

That was my father. And lest my friends be concerned: I have lived well past the age when he had his first one without cardiac incident and my doctor says my ticker is in perfect shape. And besides, I don't work for the Internal Revenue Service.

I walked "Carl" to his car, thanking him every possible way I could. He finally turned to me and said, "I'll tell you how you can thank me. You can answer a question for me." I said of course I would and he asked, "Do you write comic books?" I told him I did. He asked, "Scooby Doo comic books?"

I told him, yes, sometimes. Then I realized why he was asking. Several years earlier — in an issue with no credits — I'd named a number of characters after friends from high school, him included. Someone had shown him a copy and he realized all those names could not be a coincidence. As he explained, "I got to thinking, who did I know in high school who could have wound up writing Scooby Doo comic books? Then I realized! Had to be Evanier!" I've since stuck his name in a few other comics I've written.

Thanks in large part to him, my father went home a few days later. It was seven or eight more years before he had his next heart attack and a few days after that that he had his last one and he went away. I'll probably write about that some day here but not for a while.

I told you about this one because I wanted to share one memory of him so you'd understand one of the main things that was so great about my father. There he was in the Emergency Room, having just had a heart attack. And the very first thing on his mind was concern not about himself but whether his illness was a bad omen for me. See why I loved that guy? I mean, above and beyond the fact that he was my father.

What needs to be finished still needs to be finished but less of it needs to be finished than needed to be finished at this time yesterday. Rather than leave this blog looking sad and neglected, I'm posting another of my favorite episodes of my favorite TV program. It's The Dick Van Dyke Show for October 31, 1962. I remember laughing my fool head off at this when it was first broadcast and it startles me to realize I was about ten-and-a-half years old at the time.

It's a reminder of the awesome physical (along with verbal) comedy skills of the star of that series. I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone who has since starred in a situation comedy who could have pulled this off…maybe John Ritter? Watch it and see if you can come up with a name. I'll be back after the video embed to tell you an interesting (to me) thing about this episode…

The actor who played the hypnotist is Charles Aidman, who also played Rob Petrie's insurance man a year later in another episode. Mr. Aidman was one of those actors — as you may know, I love performers in this category — who worked constantly without ever becoming easily identifiable from one role on one series. Jamie Farr had that anonymous status before he became Max Klinger on M*A*S*H. If he hadn't landed that part, he probably would still have worked all the time but there'd be no way I could describe him in one sentence so most of you would know who I was talking about.

Aidman's career ran from about 1952 until his death in 1993 and his IMBD listing is very, very long and — I'm sure — very, very incomplete.

It presently lists his last job as a 1992 episode of Garfield and Friends but I know that's not right because when I booked him for it, we had to work around the shooting schedule of some movie he was working on. But I wanted him to be my narrator because he would give it a kind of Twilight Zone ambience. Aidman was so good at that kind of thing that he'd served as the narrator of the 1985 Twilight Zone revival on CBS. Pro that he was, he arrived at our studio right on time but with an attitude of "Are you sure it's me you wanted?" He did a lot of voiceover work but almost never for cartoons and certainly not for allegedly-funny ones.

I get asked, "How do you direct cartoon voices?" Here's a perfect example: You hire the right actor, show them which microphone to use and then get the hell out of their way. I don't think I gave him any more direction at the top than "Just forget it's a cartoon. Read the copy like it's a serious suspense film." And then the next bit of direction I gave him was, "That was great, Charles. Come out of the booth and sign some paperwork so we can pay you."

And yes, we did talk a little bit about some of the other things he'd done, including The Dick Van Dyke Show. Very nice man. Very good at what he did. If you'd like to see a little of the cartoon he narrated, it's online here. The other voices are by Lorenzo Music (of course), Gregg Berger, Thom Huge and June Foray. That's right: June Foray. Directing her or any of those folks was no more labor-intensive than directing Charles Aidman. All you need to do is hire the right people.

Apologies for the light posting of late. I'm trying to finish something that refuses to be finished. When it is, I'll be back in full force.

I haven't seen anything online about it but I'm told the nominations are out for this year's inductions into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame, which is kind of like the Baseball Hall of Fame except it's for people who do comics instead of pitching and throwing and running and spiking the catcher. Shockingly, my name is on this list.

This is just me but I have a lot of problems with awards of any sort. I love when they go to people who I think are deserving and who are made happy — and perhaps even given long-overdue attention — by them. I am uncomfy when I am a possible recipient which is why I didn't show for the ceremony two of the three times I was nominated for an Emmy or more than half the times I've been up for a Harvey or Eisner. I think the first award I ever got as a professional whatever-I-am was when the early Comic-Con decided to give me one of its Inkpot Awards. This would have been 1975.

I found out in advance and immediately altered my plans to attend the ceremony. Shel Dorf, who was then very visible at the San Diego cons mostly as a figurehead, spent the whole next day traipsing around the con with the trophy trying to present it to me and I treated him like a process server. He wanted to do it in a setting with an audience and applause and an acceptance speech and photos. I finally accepted it in private, took it home and didn't display it anywhere until years later when I bought my house and had walls to fill.

At the time, I told myself I was taking some sort of stand for a principle but as so often happens, I later couldn't really explain that principle. And because I couldn't, I realized I was just being a jerk about something that in my head, I'd blown all out of proportion.

I talked about it once with my friend/employer Lee Mendelson, who had more Emmy Awards than toes, and who may have been the wisest man I've known in the television business. He said, "It's simple. If you're nominated, say 'It's an honor to be nominated'" If you win, say 'It's an honor to win.'" Then find a place for the trophy and don't make a big hazari about it." "Hazari" — pronounced as "rye" with a "haza" (rhyming with "Gaza") in front of it — is a Yiddish word that means (roughly) "junk food" but a lot of folks use it to mean something that is way less important than people make it out to be.

So: To whoever nominated me…thanks. It's an honor to be nominated. And now, I have to go try and finish that thing which doesn't want to be finished. I'll be back when it is or when someone I think deserves an obit dies. I sure hope it's the former.

Jon Stewart is absolutely right. And this is not about Trump…

This post by Ankush Khardori and one or two others I've read this morning confirm my feelings that the current case against Trump could go either way and that by the time it does go either way, we might be knees deep in the next case against Trump or the one after that or the one after that. The case New York D.A. Bragg has just brought against the Trump that Trump Lovers love to love may be real old, unimportant news by the time it does go either way.

If I were D.J.T., I'd be thrilled at the fund-raising and attention-getting opportunities it's giving me…and a lot more worried about the other stuff. He seems to love every opportunity to blast anyone who isn't blindly on his side as a Trump Hater and that's one of those lies that becomes all the more true every time you say it. Tomorrow, if one of his limos got a ticket for parking in the wrong place, he'd be railing against the Trump-hating, Soros-funded meter maid.

One of the many things I don't like about this guy is how much time I have to spend paying attention to him. He's like one of those televised police chases except that he's on close to 24/7. I shall now do my best to look away for as long as I can.

You can find plenty of articles online — some of them even from legal authorities! — telling you that the case against Donald Trump is very sound or very weak. Interesting to me is that I only seem to find the latter on right-wing sites but I find some of each on sites that are middle-of-the-road or even left-wing.

Me, I figure it doesn't matter what I think. The process will decide and I gather it might not decide for some time…maybe not even until he's gone through a few more arraignments. My guess is that being prosecuted will be good for Trump's fund-raising, bad for him winning over voters not already in his camp, and that whether or not he's the G.O.P. nominee will have more to do with who gets in the race and who doesn't.

And that's about as much as I want to write or think about him for a while.

Occasionally watching the news today, I saw George Santos wading through the crowds and I thought I saw Jordan Klepper asking him something about his volleyball career. It turned out I did…

I'm watching some of the live news coverage from New York. It's great if you enjoy hearing the ten minutes of actual information paraphrased and repeated over and over for hours. Every now and then, someone gets around to noting that at this moment, none of the folks taking stands and commenting on Donald Trump's guilt or innocence actually know what's in the indictment. And every now and then, someone suggests that the actual charges might matter. I suspect they don't with some people.

I'm turning the TV off and trying to get some work done.

Andrew Farago wrote a real good article about the late Joe Giella. You will be impressed with how much Joe did in his long, glorious career.

A number of you have written to ask what I thought of this article on the CNN website by Roy Schwartz. It's about Jack Kirby and Captain America…and what I think of it is that it's pretty good. There are a few minor quibbles — like I don't think Stan Lee asked Jack to try super-heroes again in 1961. I think Jack convinced Stan it was a good idea. But my main problem is that I don't think the piece gives Joe Simon enough credit for his contributions to the classic first ten issues of Captain America.

Here's a sketch from At Last, the 1948 Show, a British comedy program that helped set the stage for Monty Python. This sketch features Marty Feldman, Graham Chapman and John Cleese. Some years later, Mr. Cleese did a slightly different version of the sketch with Rowan Atkinson which I posted here back in 2012…