Still trying to trim that "To Do" list down to a manageable length. I'm not looking at the news much but what I see is a lot of people panicking over that "Chinese spy balloon" that seems to be drifting over parts of the U.S. — and there are reports that there's more than one and also that these have been there before but the government just kind of hushed that news up because the balloons were harmless and there was a fear people would react like…

…well, like a lot of them seem to be reacting right now. I don't have the energy to read all the articles so maybe someone has a solid take on what these balloons might be spying for and what it is we really don't want them to see that isn't visible on Google Maps.

Meanwhile: The second issue of Gods Against Groo is on sale now. Two more to go and then the next Groo mini-series will follow a few months after this one is completed. One of the things on that "To Do" list of mine is doing whatever it is I do on that series, which I shall do as soon as I figure out what it is I do on these comics.

My pal Arnie Kogen — oft-mentioned on this blog — explains what it was like to write on The Dean Martin Show…

My "To Do" list is approaching the length of the lists of George Santos Lies that some news sites are keeping. I am spending today trying to whittle my list down to size so don't expect a lot of posts here today…or over this weekend, probably. And I'm not slighting you or this blog. Some of what I'm doing involves furthering the migration of this site to its new software.

Oh! I wanted to mention this. Back on Wednesday, I posted links to three video segments from the 9/26/1974 Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The folks who oversea Mr. Carson's archives have now posted the video of that complete episode which also includes a little more with the guests plus Johnny's monologue, a bit at the desk with Ed and a sketch featuring The Ace Trucking Company (including Fred Willard). If you want to see the whole thing, here it is.

I'll be back with more stuff when I'm back with more stuff. Ciao.

Here's a backstage web video done for Stephen Colbert's show: Eight minutes of Nathan Lane reminiscing about a few of the 25 starring roles he's played on Broadway. I saw him in Guys and Dolls, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (twice!), The Producers and November. Those are the ones I actually saw on or around Broadway and I saw a few others on video. I've liked every show I've seen him in except November and I even liked him in that show. I just didn't like the show. Wish I'd seen the others…

Mike W. asks…

I'm looking for someone to agent my writing. Tell me a true story that ends with the phrase, "And that's when I knew I shouldn't sign with that agent!"

With your kind permission, I'm going to change it to "And that's when we knew we shouldn't sign with that agent." The "we" is myself and my partner at the time, Dennis Palumbo. We had accomplished something that few beginning writers were able to do. We had gotten a script assignment for a prime-time series from Norman Lear's company and we did it without having an agent. True, it was The Nancy Walker Show, which was canceled sometime during the middle commercial of the debut episode. And also true was that none of what we wrote got in front of a camera.

But at the time we got the job, it was a big thing. And suddenly, every agent in town wanted to meet with us and pitch us on hiring him or her to represent us. So in one amazing week, Dennis and I went to see nine or ten agents. The first five or six all did their best selling job, telling us how they'd get us jobs galore and fulfill our every dream about Show Business. That's, after all, what agents do: They sell. You wouldn't want an agent who wasn't a skilled salesperson.

So we go see the sixth or seventh one, already a bit weary of telling our life stories and explaining where we saw our careers going. This one agent greets us warmly, sits us down, offers us refreshments and then begins his "pitch" with, I swear to you, the following words…

"Now, I'm not good at getting you work…"

Honest. He said that. He said that to two beginning writers he was hoping would become his clients. Dennis and I looked at each other like we were Abbott and Costello in one of those monster-meeting movies of theirs meeting the monsters. It was like a guy who wants to be your dentist telling you, "Now, I have no idea how to fill a cavity…" or a pilot welcoming you on his plane by saying, "Now, I don't have the slightest clue how to fly this thing…" We were both waiting for the "but" and what would follow.

Which is when the agent guy added, "But when you do get a job, no one will get you more money."

He went on, getting increasingly animated as he said, "I will kill for you. I negotiate like John Wayne storming the beach in war movie, only I take no prisoners. I will leave them bleeding…bleeding and begging for mercy! I will hurt them for you and hurt them bad and get you every fuckin' cent there is to be gotten. I have never left even a nickel on the table…"

That was when one of us — I think Dennis — said, "Boy, you're some tipper." But the agent didn't hear it and went on for five minutes more saying things like, "Did you ever see one of those movies where the hero slaughters two dozen opponents and steps triumphantly over their bodies, all lying there in a pool of blood? That's me after I negotiate with those Business Affairs guys!"

I guess there are some writers who want that. We sure didn't, especially when we were starting out. Not that this ever happened to me at least, but you don't want to walk into your first creative meeting once the deal is set and have the producer say, "After what we went through to get you, you'd better be fucking brilliant!" If it ever happens to me, I'll probably say, "If I give back some of the money, could the goal just be for me to write a good script?"

Dennis and I made polite conversation for a few minutes with the bloodthirsty agent and we said we'd think it over and get back to him. We thought it over for three seconds in the hallway outside his office and then never got back to him.

But that moment when he said, "I'm not good at getting you work"…that's when we knew we shouldn't sign with that agent. Is that kind of what you wanted, Mike?

Things got a little outta hand on The Tonight Show for 9/26/1974 and I'm not sure how much of this was planned. On a talk show today if these kinds of things happened, they would all be planned and the host would never not know what was going to happen.

Here are three segments — one each with Dom DeLuise, Burt Reynolds and Art Carney. You may see why I think Mr. Carney was one of the five best comedians of his generation. But watch the clips in sequence…

Mitchell Senft sent me an e-mail with that subject: "How Kirby Worked" and then further asked…

Did he use any notes for the story at hand?

Did he breakdown a page either with thumbnails or on the board? If I recollect, I read somewhere that he he would just start at the top left of a page and start drawing.

I can't quite turn this into a question but I recently reread both his New Gods (the book, not the concept) and Eternals runs. The former struck me as having the rhythm of a monthly while the latter flowed much more smoothly.  Am I imagining something?  Was something going on that I've picked up??

Jack Kirby had an amazing story sense and it was sometimes hard to tell, when he suddenly started telling you a plot or a concept, if that was something he'd come up with at that moment or something he'd been carrying around in his head for some time.  I am absolutely certain that he could do both.  There was almost nothing put down on paper before he began composing a page he was drawing for publication.

Over the years, I've had dozens of people come to me and say, "Let's assemble a book of Jack's rough sketches and outlines and plot notes" and I have to tell them that there are almost none.  And the few things in the category that do exist were almost always produced because his publisher or editor insisted on seeing a "rough" or an outline.  If they hadn't demanded that, Jack would never have done one.

My then-partner Steve Sherman and I were sometimes used as a kind of "sounding board" for stories Jack wrote and drew when he went back to DC in 1970.  We'd sit in his studio next to his drawing table.  Jack would be sitting at the drawing table but not drawing as he told us the entire plot of the issue he was about to do next…and we'd make invaluable suggestions like, "That sounds great, Jack."

I would have loved to have given Jack an idea to make his story better but there was very little room for that.  What he told us was complete and it did sound great…so the few suggestions of ours that got in were pretty trivial. And one of our other big contributions was that at the proper moment — when we'd done whatever Jack asked us to do that day and he needed to focus on putting a story on paper, we'd leave. Steve and I should get a lot of credit for leaving. We were very good at it.

Jack would start committing his story to paper…and what he put down might have been pretty much what he told us. Or on our next visit when he let us read the story in pencil off the original art, we might have wondered how the heck he got from what he'd told us to what he then wrote and drew. If it was significantly different and we told him that, he was genuinely surprised.  He didn't know how he'd gotten there either.

He never wrote any sort of outline on paper for himself.  A couple of times, I wrote one down for him but only based on his ideas. When Jack did the first issue of Kamandi, Carmine Infantino (he was the head of DC at the time) wanted to see an outline first…I suspect so he could make some comments and then pretend he'd co-created the new feature. At least once or twice later on, he claimed he was the sole creator of Kamandi and when people ask me about that, I give this reply: "I did a lot more on that first issue than Infantino did and I don't think I deserve any kind of creator credit."

Basically, what I did was this: When Jack told us the plot of Kamandi #1, he had me take notes on it, then I went home and wrote up an outline which Jack then sent east for Carmine's approval. Once that was secured, Jack followed it pretty closely. As far as I could tell, the one bit of input that Infantino had was to insist on imagery of a wrecked Statue of Liberty — a fresh, clever idea if you'd never seen the movie, Planet of the Apes.

But outline or not, Jack worked from what was in his head. He would start roughing out sequences on the illustration board, designing with light figure placements, working out how the story would flow from panel to panel. He did a fair amount of erasing during this stage to get things the way he wanted. Then once he'd designed each panel lightly on the page, he would do the finished penciling right over his light roughs.

He did very little erasing in the "tightening" phase…and when he did, it was not because he thought the drawing could be better but because he decided that other things should be happening. If we were present, he might hand a page to Steve or to me and say, "Erase those three panels" because he'd decided he wanted something different in them.

He did not always start on page one. He'd start drawing sequences and then jump around and rearrange pages and fill in between those sequences.  Occasionally, he'd omit an almost-finished page here and there to arrive at the story he wanted to send in.  These were all pages where he knew roughly what each caption and word balloon would say but he hadn't written the copy in.  He would do that as the final step.

The line you read about how he'd start at the upper left hand corner and just draw from there is a line I said on a few occasions.  I was talking about him drawing one of those amazing double-page spreads he'd do.  It was like the drawing was all there already but in invisible ink which only he could see…and then as he went over those lines with his pencil, they became visible to everyone.

I hope this is the kind of answer you were seeking.  I'm not sure I completely understand the question about the New Gods having "the rhythm of a monthly" but a key difference between the work Jack did for DC then and what he did for Marvel when he went back there in '75 was that at Marvel, he was his own editor, deciding what should be in each issue.

At DC, he had the title of Editor and much latitude came with it…but Carmine Infantino had definite ideas of which of the many ideas Jack had told him should appear in each issue.  Left to his own devices, Jack would have introduced new characters and new concepts in a different order, perhaps dwelling more on one before introducing the next.  The character of The Black Racer, in Jack's mind, was a standalone comic unrelated to Darkseid and the Fourth World…but Infantino wanted it in there and he wanted it in New Gods #3 so Jack complied.

At Marvel, he got some direction — like, he was told they wanted a Hulk guest appearance in The Eternals — but he got less of that kind of order and he didn't have to comply as totally. In that case, he was able to make it a Hulk robot instead of the man/creature himself. Perhaps that kind of difference is the answer to your question.

Costco is offering this round Brilliant 0.85 ctw VS2 Clarity, I Color Diamond 14kt White Gold Ring in Size 7. It's made of 14kt White Gold (Rhodium Plated) with a total diamond carat weight of 0.85 ctw and the total number of diamonds is 55. While supplies last, this elegant piece of jewelry can be yours to place on the finger of that very special lady for only $1,112.99.

That's Costco…for when you care enough to buy wholesale and while you're at it, get her a 30-roll pack of 2-ply Kirkland Signature Toilet Paper and a rotisserie chicken.

Jordan Klepper is back visiting Trump rallies…only they're not really rallies. They're more like intimate conferences or some other name you give a rally when not many people show up.

No, I don't think all the folks who turn out for one of these Trump whatever-you-call-them are like the ones he selects to put on camera and into his videos. But I think it's kind of scary that there are people like that at all…

Matt DiCarlo wrote…

Even as a reader of the blog for years, I've found you to be relatively reluctant to talk about your current work. That means that even a few years later, sometimes we don't get the same sort of stories and insight on the level of what you did in the 80s. I know you're not doing this for self-promotion but now that we're a few years away from something, like, in this case, your collaboration with Scott Kolins on the Darkseid Special.

I'm curious if you'd be willing to discuss some of the nuts and bolts of it, how you were approached, how you broke the story, what it was like to work with Mr. Kolins, if you'd been familiar with his work prior, even just how you found producing something for DC in 2017 relative to prior years, what was easier, what was harder, etc.

There's not a whole lot to tell here.  An editor at DC, Jim Chadwick, called and told me they were doing a bunch of comics featuring Kirby characters and they wanted me to write one.  I think I had my pick of several and I picked Darkseid.  Jim lined up a Very Good Artist to draw it.  I came up with a story.  I ran it past Jim.  He told me to proceed.  I wrote the script.  Before I'd even sent it in, that Very Good Artist became unavailable so Jim called and said, "I think I can get Scott Kolins to draw it."

I'd never met Scott.  At least, I don't think I had.  But I knew his work so I said, "Oh, he's a Very Good Artist, too."  Scott drew the story.  Everyone whose opinion mattered was happy with it.  I didn't really collaborate with Scott since the script was done before he was on the project.  I prefer to have some contact with the artist but I thought it came out fine.

See?  Not a lot to tell.  That's how it is with a lot of projects.

Unless you're reading this blog post some time after I posted this, you may notice that we're still doing some redecorating on this blog. A few pages don't work properly. A few pages look odd. All the fixing should be completed in a week or two. Or three. Or I don't-know-when. But it will get fixed.

The construction work interrupted a series of posts I was doing here of my schedules at long-ago San Diego Comic-Cons so let's resume. Here's the list of panels I was scheduled to do at the 2009 Comic-Con International. I did all the panels but who was on some of them changed.

Here's an excerpt from an interview with Carl Reiner. He's talking about the decision to end The Dick Van Dyke Show in 1966. Watch it and then I want to discuss something in it…

Okay. Mr. Reiner says, referring to Dick Van Dyke, "He did Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" while he was doing the Van Dyke Show, during the summer…"

No, he didn't. After the pilot for The Dick Van Dyke Show was shot on January 19, 1961, the series went into production in June of that year and filmed its last episode on June 1 of 1966. Nobody hired Dick for a film in the summer of '61 but he shot Bye Bye Birdie during the summer hiatus in 1962, Mary Poppins and his part in What a Way To Go in 1963, The Art of Love in 1964, Lt. Robinson Crusoe in 1965 and then after The Dick Van Dyke Show finished, he took a month off and started shooting Divorce American Style.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang began filming in June of 1967 at Pinewood Studios in the U.K. But that's an easy mistake for Mr. Reiner to make…the kind we all make, the kind you find in any interview. What it gets me to thinking about though it this: What should the interviewer do when that happens?

I do a lot of interviews, often in front of live audiences. I am helped, I'd like to think, by a good memory and the ability to throw in a name or a date when an interviewee can't remember and is grasping for it. But sometimes when they get something flat-out wrong, as Reiner did in the above video, I correct them as politely as I can…and no matter how politely I do it, it throws some people off. I can feel them tense up and they sometimes lose the thread of where they were heading.

Or sometimes, I don't correct them because I'm afraid of making them uncomfy…but then down the line, things get confusing. If there's a live audience, I can see people getting puzzled by the false information.

By the way, this is not about anyone lying. I don't even think Carl Reiner thought Dick did Chitty Chitty Bang Bang while on hiatus from the Van Dyke Show. I think he just meant to say Bye Bye Birdie and out came the wrong movie title. Happens all the time to all of us.

And I'm not asking anyone for advice on how to handle this kind of thing. Obviously, it's a matter of a case-by-case basis. Sometimes, I do correct people and sometimes, it makes the conversation flow better. And sometimes I skip it and sometimes, it makes the conversation worse. I once really pissed off an important comic book creator by correcting four or five of the kind of error Reiner made in the video. I don't have a foolproof answer for this and neither do you. I just thought I'd mention that it's something I think about.

As I expected, several readers of this blog searched newspaper archives to find out if Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew had indeed mentioned the song "One Toke Over the Line" by Brewer & Shipley in a speech on September 15, 1970. If so, we'd like to know how since the song hadn't been released then.

Well, it turns out Agnew didn't. This is from The New York Times for that date. The speech was actually the day before…

LAS VEGAS, Nev., Sept. 14 — Vice-President Agnew said tonight that American youths were being "brainwashed" into a "drug culture" by rock music, movies, books and underground newspapers. He called these part of "a depressing life style of conformity that has neither life nor style." After describing himself as a "bumpkin" earlier today in San Diego, the Vice-President came to the capital of American gambling to lecture against "creeping permissiveness" and urge the election of "square" Republicans.

Mr. Agnew said in a speech to 1,000 Republicans at the Space Center Auditorium of the Sahara Hotel that popular songs such as the Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends" or the Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" were a message of drug use.

Ira B. Matetsky was one of the folks who looked up contemporary coverage of that speech. He found one report that Agnew also cited the songs "The Acid Queen," "Eight Miles High," "Couldn't Get High," "Don't Step on the Grass, Sam," and "Stoned Woman." No mention there either of the Brewer & Shipley record.

But Agnew gave lot of speeches. That was just about all he did while Veep apart from accepting bribes for past favors to contractors in his home state of Maryland when he was governor. He went around the country, often to fund-raisers, and explained how America was going to hell and the only way out of it was to elect people from his party. I'm sure glad no one does that these days.

It is very easy to believe that when "One Toke" was on the charts months later, Agnew mentioned it in some of his speeches. The quote from Brewer did not say Agnew had mentioned the song in the September 1970 speech. Ira found that the erroneous date on the Wikipedia page was only inserted a few days ago and unless further evidence is uncovered soon, he's going to have that date deleted there. Thanks also to Rob Davis, Bob Gillian and others who sent me links.

I was wondering if Mssrs. Brewer and Shipley are still performing. Their website, which hasn't been updated in a while still says, "Due to the Corona virus and concern for our fans' well being, as well as our own, we have canceled all shows for 2020." So they had bookings then and Jeffrey Morris sent me this link to a piece November of 2021 about them still performing so they went back to it.

I can't find anything online that they're out there now but the Brewer & Shipley page on Facebook was just updated the other day with a remembrance of David Crosby, which was also featured on Tom Shipley's personal website, onetoketom.com. So at least one of those guys is blogging.

We seem to be having a debate as to when the song "One Toke Over the Line" came out. I have a lot of e-mails about it but I suspect my old pal Mike Tiefenbacher has it right…

According to 45cat.com (the site to go to to determine such things for any of your future mixtape posts), "One Toke Over the Line" was issued in January, 1971. It first charted in Billboard January 30, which means it was charting locally the week of January 16th. (Like comics, the paper trade magazine cover dates are the off-sale dates, reflecting airplay dates plus the time it took to compile, publish and distribute the magazines to the newsstand; the copyright dates are two weeks prior to the chart dates).

From my personal records, it began charting in Milwaukee February 24. It peaked at #6 in Cash Box and #10 in both Billboard and Record World. One-hit wonders Brewer and Shipley issued five singles before that never charted, while three of the six issued after "Toke" charted in the Top 100, only the immediate follow-up ("Tarkio Road") hitting the top 40 (#39) in Cash Box. The album which included "Toke" ("Tarkio") came out in November of 1970 but only made the charts after "Toke" became a hit in March.

In other words, if Spiro actually made that speech in September of 1970, he was either psychically prescient, or he never mentioned this song. Or that speech came in September of '71. (It's Wikipedia, after all. Every fact has a 50% chance of being right or wrong.)

The Lawrence Welk Show is still shown every Saturday on PBS affiliates in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and I suspect it has been on PBS continuously since the late '80s, though that's only from distant observation and a memory that's become less dependable every year.

Obviously, the most likely explanation here is that the date cited for Agnew's speech is wrong in Wikipedia. Agnew gave a lot of those speeches and someone may have gotten confused as to which speech mentioned the Brewer & Shipley tune. We may find out for sure if/when one of my readers with access to old newspaper databases checks it out.

Incidentally, in the many years of this blog, I have occasionally referred to some recording artist or act as a "one-hit wonder." With the exception of the group Yellow Balloon, that always brings some very angry mail from fans of the recording artist(s) insisting they were not that. So folks, please note that Mike said that. I didn't.

I know a lot of folks who come to this site aspire to work as voiceover actors, especially for animation. I have a limited amount of advice in that area…but you know who has a lot? Bob Bergen. Bob is one of the most in-demand, works-all-the-time people in that field and only part of that is because he's really good in front of a microphone. He also understands the business — and understands it is a business — and he teaches and gives excellent advice. From time to time, he posts invaluable tips on his Instagram page and you oughta be reading them.

In fact, if you want to be an actor of any kind, follow this man. And some of what he says might even be of value to wanna-be writers, artists, poets, directors…really any creative endeavor.