I have this friend named Joe Brancatelli. Known him since the early seventies, I have. Joe has always been a reporter and back then he covered the comic book industry, such as it was. Nowadays, he covers the travel industry — the airlines, mainly. I've been reading him for a long time and I've never seen him not know what he was talking about. He can tell you why United Airlines sucks. He can tell you why Southwest Airlines is making money. He can even tell you why airlines are losing money when they charge you for checked luggage.

In this new article, he explains how the utter mismanagement of the big airlines continues unabated and why small carriers are showing some profits. I don't know the business that well but I'll bet you he's right.

Joe runs a for-pay website for travellers called Joe Sent Me, which is valuable, especially if you fly a lot on business. But I've been lax in linking to the freely-available pieces he authors so consider this a kind of "catching-up" posting. And if I forget again, go seek out his articles on your own. They're very informative.

Never one to let a little thing like his own death stop him, Kurt Vonnegut has a new book coming out shortly. It's called Look at the Birdie and the L.A. Times has published the title story from it as a little preview. They also resurrected a review that Harlan Ellison wrote of Slaughterhouse Five back in 1969. Odd to see a review of that book come unstuck in time like this.

You can advance order Look at the Birdie from Amazon at this link. They're saying it'll be out any day now but since the author's dead, he may be a little behind.

The other night, David Letterman had Don Rickles on as a guest. It was an odd appearance, especially when the topic was Mr. Francis Albert Sinatra. In one segment, Rickles talked about how Frank was his hero…someone he very much loved and admired. In another, Dave asked Don to tell the story of the night Sinatra saved Shecky Greene's life…and Rickles, somewhat reluctantly, told the following tale…

The story is…it's not a pleasant thing. Shecky was always, you know, making fun of the mob…great comedian, great sense of humor and still does. And funny, funny, funny. And one night, Frank got a little — the way I understand it — fed up and he said to the guys, "I don't like it any more. Work him over." When Frank says, "Work him over," you phone your family and say goodbye. No, it wasn't really that bad. Well, it was. So they got him, the way I understand it, backstage at the Fontainebleau or someplace and they started banging on him. Bang! Bang! Bang! And Frank walked in and said, "I think that's enough." And Shecky's like this…(slumps in chair as if knocked unconscious).

Okay now, first point: Rickles wasn't there. That is, if this even happened. Did it? Or more to the point, does Rickles think it actually happened? It's kind of a Vegas legend, and I think Shecky Greene used to tell it as a joke. "Frank Sinatra once saved my life. A bunch of his goons were working me over and he said, "That's enough."

But what's alleged here is that Frank Sinatra once got annoyed because a night club comedian was ridiculing the Mafia so he had some men beat the crap out of the comedian. Does Rickles think it happened?

If not, why does he tell the story and make his friend and hero seem like a pretty reprehensible human being? He didn't make it sound like a joke. He made it sound like it actually happened. Sinatra used to get furious with folks who said he had mob connections and acted like one of those thugs.

But if Rickles thinks it happened…well, how do you admire a guy who'd do something like that? Even if you weren't a night club comedian who routinely did the kind of thing Shecky Greene did, how do you worship a guy who gives the order to have another human being beaten-up for telling jokes?

I've paid way too much attention to the Creamy Tomato Soup that is occasionally an offering at the chain of restaurants known in some states as Souplantation and in others as Sweet Tomatoes. They have it each year for the month of March and then in October, when they have "special request month," it's available there for one week.

That week is this week. Souplantations change their menus over the weekend, depending on when they run out of last week's goodies. I just phoned the Souplantation near me and they won't have it until tomorrow. I called another Souplantation I sometimes visit and they do have it today. Each will have it until it's replaced with something else, possibly as soon as next Saturday, probably by a week from today and certainly by a week from tomorrow. If you're anywhere near a Souplantation or Sweet Tomatoes, you might want to stop in and try a bowl or two or nine. Here's a page that will tell you if there's one in your neck of the woods.

Like I said, I've made way too much about this. It's just tomato soup, people. But I thought it was a good running gag to play up my fave soup and I was curious to see if this blog could generate enough enthusiasm Out There that maybe the Souplantation people might have it there more often. As it turned out, a nice lady with the Souplantation company appreciated my efforts enough to send me a pile of coupons for free meals. A gent who works for the firm also wrote me to say he thought they oughta make my favorite soup a regular item but that he doubted the folks there who make those decisions wanted to alter their current game plan. So enjoy it while you can.

I wanted to write a little something more, not so much about George Tuska (who died the other day at age 93) as about the comic book creators of his generation. As you may notice from the incessant obits on this site, we're losing them at a good clip and that's sad on so many levels. It's not just that men like Tuska were charming, dedicated folks who did comics not for the money (there was never much of that) but for the love of the form and the pride of earning a living by creating something. Jack Kirby, for example, was notably proud that he could start his workday with essentially nothing — blank paper and some pencils — and before bedtime, he'd made something exist that didn't exist when he got up — pages that would buy groceries for his family.

Obviously, younger folks who write and draw comics have some of the same motives but it was different with guys of Jack's (and George's) era, men who'd grown up in the Depression and at a time when few imagined the stardom and rewards that would one day come with being a top comic book creator. One of the many ways it was different — and I'm going to leave Kirby aside here because he was always in his own special category — is that the George Tuskas of the world did their work with little to no clout, power or say-so in what they created or what happened to it.

If work was available at Timely Comics and nowhere else, they worked for Timely Comics. If the available work was on romance comics, they drew romance comics. If the editor wanted them to pencil, they pencilled. If the editor wanted them to ink, they inked. If the editor wanted them to pencil and for the work to be inked by someone really bad…well, it was inked by someone really bad. A competent artist today has a lot more ability to say, "Gee, I don't want to draw that strip" or "I don't feel I can work with that writer."

He or she especially does not have the problem that someone like Tuska had, which was the whiplash effect of caring passionately about creating the work and then suddenly having to not care. An artist of his era was handed a script, which he may or may not have liked in the least, and he had to go home and spend a week or two of his life making it come to life on the paper. Even a bad artist put in a lot of hours at the drawing board and I'm sure those were rougher hours because they knew that at some point, they'd have to hand their work over to a system that treated it as fodder for the assembly line. It was like, "We want you to sweat over every page and give it your all…then not mind if we have it inked by a caveman, redrawn in the office, colored by a blind guy and printed with the cheapest-possible printing. Oh, yeah…and then we're going to burn the original art." It's hard to turn pride 'n' passion off and on like a toggle switch.

Often, one sees the work of a comic book creator dismissed as "hackwork," done by someone who clearly didn't care and just slopped it out as rapidly as possible to get the check. My own observation is that in comics, that is rarely the case. Bad work is done, of course, all the time. Some people just aren't that talented and many are miscast, assigned to the wrong material with the wrong collaborators. In the seventies, I had a memorable (and troubling) lunch with one of Mr. Tuska's contemporaries who was then having trouble getting work. He had drawn many wonderful comics in the past but his current art was disjointed and full of odd staging and distortions. "I'm trying to give the editors what they want," he told me ruefully. "But no matter how many times they explain what they want, I never know what they're talking about."

This still happens in comics but not as much. Artists and writers today command more proprietary respect. They're more likely to be engaged to do what they do, not what they can't do. This changed in part because the industry recognized that customers buy because of who writes and draws the books; that an issue of Batman by Frank Miller is worth a lot more to the company than one by the next kid who walks in the door with samples. Some of the change was also because the industry just plain matured to keep up with changing times. And a lot of it was because that new generation moved in…artists and writers who didn't have quite the same attitude about their work and making a living as the folks who grew up in and around the Depression and World War II.

George Tuska worked in comics from around 1939 until around 2001. Leave aside the first few years (when he was learning his craft) and the last few (when old age impaired his work) and you have roughly 55 years of productivity that was pretty much consistent in quality and quantity. When circumstances and sensitive editors got him on the right project with the right collaborators, something very good usually resulted. That was not always the case. I'm not surprised to read pieces about him like this "take" by someone in a silly list of comic artists over at The A.V. Club…

Pity poor George Tuska. By all accounts a likeable, pleasant man, versatile and eager to please, he started out in the 1930s, and worked for every big publisher of the era, from Will Eisner to Lou Fine to Lev Gleason. It's hard to find anyone who would say a bad word against him as a man. But as an artist, his Silver Age work for Marvel Comics… Well, it wasn't exactly bad; Tuska was perfectly competent, and his art for titles like Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk is decent, though unspectacular. But his drawing was so quickly assayed, and so essentially flavorless, that he became the King Of The Fill-In Issue, hopping in to provide bland, forgettable work whenever someone else blew a deadline. He thus played an inadvertent part in setting up the Big Two's creed of speed over quality, and helped establish the Marvel house style, which nurtured some young artists, but acted as an artistic straitjacket for others. A respectable journeyman, Tuska nonetheless played the fall guy for what would become an ugly, largely detrimental tendency from the 1960s until the birth of the miniseries in the '80s.

There's some truth to that, especially if you note that the author of the above thinks Tuska drew The Incredible Hulk. Not really. The one issue (only one) that features his art was a case when he drew a story for another comic and when Marvel suddenly needed an issue of Hulk in a hurry, they took Tuska's story had another artist draw the green-skinned guy into a couple of panels and published it as an issue of The Incredible Hulk. That may have been the best move in order to get a book to press on time but George never got a chance to show what he could do on the Hulk comic. He may not have ever known he'd even "drawn" an issue of it.

The great thing about George Tuska's career is that he made a decent living for 60-some-odd years doing something he loved. The sad thing is that The System could have gotten 55 years of great comics out of him during that time and didn't. It had a wonderful asset in dedicated craftsmen like Tuska and it too often wasted them. Which is a special shame because we'll probably never see guys like Tuska again…guys who spent their whole lives giving comics all they had to give.

Monday morning on Turner Classic Movies, we get four Harold Lloyd talkies — Movie Crazy, The Cat's Paw, The Milky Way and The Sin of Harold Diddlebock. They're followed by the two compilation films that Lloyd assembled in the sixties to remind the world how good he'd been — Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy and Harold Lloyd's Funny Side of Life.

Of the first four, I like Movie Crazy the best. The Sin of Harold Diddlebock is interesting as the product of two fading careers (Lloyd's and that of director Preston Sturges) but there's something forced about it…and Lloyd had long since outgrown his own part. It's worth seeing though, and markedly better than the re-edited, shorter version, Mad Wednesday, which runs from time to time.

One of the many things that makes me optimistic about Obama succeeding with his agenda is that so much of the opposition is controlled either by looneys or by sane Republicans who are terrified of pissing off the looneys. Lately, there's been the perverse amusement of watching the teabagger crowd turn on Lindsey Graham, the senior senator from South Carolina. Graham toes the Conservative line about 96% of the time but since that 4% involves partnering with John Kerry to do something about Climate Change, Graham is a traitor, a quisling, a RINO, a sell-out, a socialist, a fascist, an enemy of the people, etc. At a recent rally, he mentioned something about negotiating on some piece of legislation (health care, I think) and a woman jumped up and yelled, "God does not negotiate!"

Well no, He doesn't. That's because He's God and there's no one to negotiate with. He's also not a member of a minority party that doesn't have the votes to advance its own agenda very far. He can get His way without having to drum up swing votes.

Fruit bats like that lady do not typify the Republican party…but she may typify the kind of voter the G.O.P. doesn't dare alienate. I don't think there's much chance that Republicans will nominate Sarah Palin in 2012…but they're probably going to have to genuflect to her (or someone else who emerges to fill the same role) in much the same way that Democrats once had to kiss the feet of Jesse Jackson. No one wanted Jesse on the ticket but no one wanted to alienate his supporters.

My friends who voted for Obama are driven up the wall by the teabagger crowd that thinks Medicare is not a government program and by the birther crowd that thinks Obama is still being born in Kenya…and I'll admit those mobs are exasperating in their way. But think how annoying it would be to have Obama attacked by people with genuine issues. Or to have the Republican leadership not genuflecting to the nutcase right. There's a very sane, non-nutcase Conservative movement out there and if it ever got control of the Republican party, it might get something done.

Which doesn't mean the Democrats should get cocky. Right now, they're like the Yankees: Winning the occasional game because of the opposition's errors.

A troop of cartoonists, including a couple of pals of mine, is currently in Germany on a USO tour of military bases. A press release tells us that their ranks include Jeff Bacon (Broadside and Greenside), Chip Bok (Akron Ohio Beacon Journal, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time and Newsweek), Bruce Higdon (Army Times, Army Magazine, Soldiers Magazine), Jeff Keane (The Family Circus), Rick Kirkman (Baby Blues), Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine), Mike Peters (Mother Goose and Grimm), Michael Ramirez (Investors Business Daily), Tom Richmond (MAD Magazine) and Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury).

It's a great effort and you follow them on Tom Richmond's blog, starting with this message. There's a slide show of a visit to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center over on this page.

Ken Levine tells you how to decode Hollywoodspeak. He knows of what he writes.