Thank you for visiting this page whenever you have visited this page. And that's about all I have to say about it except that, as always, donations are appreciated. Keeping this blog up and running is costing more and more…like everything else in this world. And besides, I blew all my savings on Donald Trump NFTs.
I came across this recently on the Internet and I really liked it. It's Josh Turner and his guitar and band accompanying two fine vocalists called The Ladybugs…
More than a dozen of you have written me lately to tell me that the great writer-performer of funny songs, Tom Lehrer, has announced that he's putting his works into the public domain. Anyone is free to do anything with the songs he wrote. They don't need permission. They don't need to pay him. And on his website, it's possible to download audio files of just about anything he ever recorded and in many cases, the sheet music as well.
Thank you all for writing to tell me about this but it's not news. I covered it back here more than two years ago. But I figured if so many people are writing to tell me about it, maybe I oughta mention it again.
I recently solved two tiny problems in my kitchen. You probably never had either of these problems or if you did, you figured out how to solve them in a lot less time than it took me. But just in case anyone reading this can benefit from my silly little discovery, here goes…
I love baked potatoes, especially when they taste like baked potatoes. It is sometimes a struggle in restaurants to stop service people from drowning mine in sour cream, salsa, black beans, chili, buffalo sauce and all sorts of other toppings including eleven different kinds of cheese. I just want butter and a little salt on mine…or sometimes, in lieu of the butter, ketchup but not a lot of it.
Well, even I could figure out the solution to that: Bake your own potatoes at home, which I tried doing. But that gave me the two tiny problems I've solved…
First tiny problem: I don't want to turn on the oven for one potato, especially given how long it takes to bake one that way. So what's the alternative? The microwave, of course…
…but for some reason, neither my current microwave oven nor the one I had before it could do a decent job of baking a potato. The spuds came out flat and overcooked on the bottom even when I dutifully rotated them in mid-bake. Then I tried a few commercial products, like one where you insert the tater into a little cloth bag before microwaving. That time, the potato was overdone in places, underdone in others and the bag was charred like it had caught fire for part of the cooking time.
Solution to this tiny problem: I tried one of these and while it is overpriced considering how cheap one must be to make, it did work. In fact, it worked as advertised, even though it's advertised on television. I'm not suggesting it will work for you but it worked for me and I also use it to heat up corn-on-the-cob.
Second tiny problem: I don't like potato skins, especially Russet potato skins, and my stomach doesn't like them. But it's annoying to scoop the filling out of a baked potato, especially when that temperature of that potato is 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius). Also, you wind up not getting a large percentage of the inside of the baked potato.
Solution to this tiny problem: I bought a potato ricer. Again, I'm not suggesting this one's better than any other model because this was the only one I've tried…but it works pretty well for my purposes.
So I scrub the potato, put it in the Yummy Can Potatoes Microwave Potato Cooker and put the whole thing in my microwave and run it on full power for six minutes. Then I let it sit for 5-10 more to finish baking and to cool down enough for handling. (One problem with the Yummy Can: It doesn't accommodate the really large Russets.)
When the potato is touchable but still warm, I cut it in half and then put one half, cut side down, into the potato ricer and squeeze the bejeesus out of it. It extrudes all the delicious white interior but leaves the skin inside. You lose very little of the interior. Then I remove the skin from the chamber and process the other half of the potato. You will need a knife to scrape off the extruded innards.
The result? A dish of lovely, skinless baked potato…and you'll be surprised how much more you get out of one that way. I add salt and butter, mix it all up and it's exactly what I want. The ricer is handy for other things like making mashed potatoes or juicing lemons. What a neat tool to have in a kitchen.
Yes, I know that getting cooking advice from me is a lot like getting medical advice from a raccoon but occasionally, I stumble across something that works. And during The Pandemic, it feels like a lot of people have gotten their medical advice from raccoons.
This morning's COVID test was negative. If the next one a few days from now is likewise, I shall emerge once again from the fortress and declare myself fit to mingle with others, albeit masked. Just doing what my doctor recommends.
You get the feeling that Trump's current presidential campaign is about (a) seeing how much money he can wring out of his supporters, (b) being able to argue that all prosecutions of him and his family are politically-motivated and therefore bogus, and (c) nothing else? He never really cared about most of the things his supporters care about but now he's not even pretending.
The first issue of the new four-issue Groo mini-series comes out next Wednesday. It's called Gods Against Groo and it's of a piece with two earlier Groo mini-serieses (I've decided that's the plural of "series") we've done in the past. As always, it's drawn by Sergio Aragonés, he and I collaborated on the story and Stan Sakai lettered it. As is fairly new, Carrie Strachan did the coloring and while we were not happy to lose the services of Tom Luth — aka The Hardest-Working Person in Comics — we were fortunate to find Carrie.
I have about fifty yet-to-be-answered questions in my "ASK me" folder — questions you folks have sent in for me to address on this blog. More than forty of them are about comic books so if you have no interest in comics and want to see me write about TV or movies or stand-up comedy or the campaign to criminalize cole slaw, you probably should send in an appropriate question to this address. Thank you.
Well, it has a little to do with Christmas. Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone fills us in about some toys that caused their makers to wind up in court…
Over the next ten days, I'm going to link to my current ten favorite Christmas videos, one a day. Here's the first one…
Some years ago, back before he was on CBS, Stephen Colbert did a tune and video called "Another Christmas Song," which was written by David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger. I thought it was clever and funny and just great but his video of it doesn't seem to be online anywhere, at least in a linkable form. You can listen to the song though on this video…
Henry Kissinger recently authored this article with his idea about how to solve The War in Ukraine. Fred Kaplan says that Kissinger's plan makes no sense, cannot possibly happen and there's no reason to try it. Okay…but I never understood why there was ever any reason to try any plan that Henry Kissinger ever came up with.
A poll by USA Today and Suffolk University says that of folks who self-identify as Republican, only 31% want to see Trump run for reelection. That's not good, especially when you consider that that's a pre-indictment number. The spectacle of him selling NFTs (and insisting he was a greater Chief Exec than Washington or Lincoln) probably knocked it down another point or two.
A question I would honestly like to see someone put to Rudy Giuiani is: "After 9/11, you were one of the most admired and respected men in this country. Now, your approval rating is hovering around 30%, you're involved in a mess of lawsuits and you're fighting to keep your license to practice law. Do you think maybe you did something wrong?"
I mentioned in this recent post that back when I worked for Jack Kirby in the early seventies and he had to draw Superman, I sometimes drew Superman's emblem for him. A relic of that time has just resurfaced.
Carmine Infantino was running DC Comics. I don't think he had the actual title of "Publisher" yet but he was the guy in charge. He was the person who persuaded Jack to leave Marvel and join DC…although given the way Marvel was treating Jack then, that didn't take a whole lot of persuading. Mostly, it took a certain amount of "bait-and-switch," promising Jack one deal and then, when he didn't think he had any viable alternatives, forcing a different deal on him. But Jack was relatively happy there…for a little while.
In early 1971 (I believe it was), Infantino visited Los Angeles on business and to make an appearance on The Virginia Graham Show, a syndicated talk show hosted by Ms. Graham. She hosted a lot of talk shows, mostly of the daytime variety, in her long career.
I may be remembering another show Carmine did but my recollection is that Telly Savalas was a guest on the same episode and that he started lambasting Infantino for selling comic books full of violence to children. This would be the same Telly Savalas who had appeared in The Dirty Dozen, The Assassination Bureau, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Kelly's Heroes and a number of other movies in which lots of people were shot and killed. There at least was some program around then on which Infantino and Savalas debated violence in the media and Carmine did not do well in that discussion.
Prior to his appearance with Ms. Graham, Carmine asked Jack to whip up a drawing which he could take on the show and present to Virginia. Jack did one and Carmine didn't like it so Jack did another. I helped a little with both but I do not recall which one made it to air. I do recall that there was also a drawing by Joe Orlando which Infantino took on the program with him.
Here are the two drawings. The one at left has been around for a while but the one on the right just turned up in an online art auction…
For the drawing on the left, I did the lettering and I'm not sure but I think I inked the buildings in the background and pasted-in the stat of Jack's signature. For the drawing on the right, I again did the lettering — though Jack drew the balloons around that lettering — and I penciled in Superman's emblem and inked the sound effects that he roughed-in. Jack, of course, penciled in everything, wrote the copy, indicated where I should letter it and how large, and inked whatever I didn't ink.
It should be noted that at the time this was done, DC was horrified by the way Jack drew Superman and wouldn't allow it in their comics without considerable redrawing. But they were fine with a Kirby Superman drawing being shown on national television. If you click on the above image, you can see an enlarged version of the one on the right. It's now being offered in that auction with a minimum bid of $6000, which by coincidence is $6000 more than Jack ever received for drawing it.
Mel Brooks is interviewed by his granddaughter Samantha…
This may seem like a fairly innocuous question but answering it's going to get me in trouble with some of this blog's most loyal readers. Mark Ingraham wrote me to ask…
If you haven't written about it on your blog yet, I was wondering what your favorite game shows of all time were? (Mine tended to be Bob Barker's The Price Is Right, The Joker's Wild, and even Tic Tac Dough…though anything with Bill Cullen was extremely watchable!)
I've always been a big fan of some (not all) game shows. The ones I've liked over the years have generally had two or more of the following qualities…
First, they have to feel like the outcome is in no way controlled. That lets out shows that have an "edited" feeling either because they're seriously edited or they somehow always turn out the way I'd want them to turn out if I were the producer. I lost my interest in Deal or No Deal and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? because of that. I'm not saying they were rigged — I'm sure they weren't — but they sure felt edited and you could sometimes feel things had been built around the producers' hope for a certain dramatic ending.
Secondly, I like to see a show have respect for its contestants and to root for them, not laugh at them. In the past, you had a lot of shows that involved silly stunts or silly pranks or silly costumes like Beat the Clock or Truth or Consequences or Let's Make a Deal. Then you also had Treasure Hunt or a number of other Chuck Barris shows. The surest way to get on The Newlywed Game was for a couple to go into their audition and blurt out embarrassing things about each other and then start bickering. These days, the whole point of some shows for a younger audience is to "slime" people.
Thirdly, I like shows where the contestants have to have some smarts or cleverness. If I can answer almost all the questions, the show's too easy. Or if you can win by making lucky guesses, the show's of little interest to me. Obviously, I've always liked Jeopardy! and I really liked Press Your Luck because there was some genuine strategy involved. Press Your Luck was built on an interesting dilemma which we all face from time to time: When things are going your way, how long do you press your luck? When I was playing a lot of Blackjack, I spent a lot of time thinking about that.
Fourthly, if there are questions, they should be real questions of knowledge. "Who was the nineteeth President of the United States?" is a question of knowledge. This is not: "According to Spice Merchants Monthly, what is the most popular spice to put on pork chops?" They're not asking you what the best-selling spice is. They're asking you what one source (which you've probably never read) judged the most "popular" (by what measure?) A real question doesn't need an "According to…"
And lastly, I have to like the host or at least not dislike the host. There have been a few who were somewhat more important than the games they ran: Groucho on You Bet Your Life, Johnny Carson on Who Do You Trust?, Jan Murray on the original Treasure Hunt, maybe Richard Dawson on Family Feud…and I do like Steve Harvey on the current Feud.
I admired the hell out of Garry Moore on the old I've Got a Secret because that was a very unpredictable show and a lot of things went wrong on live TV and no matter what it was, he handled it. He was also real good at playing Straight Man for the panel and contestants. Steve Allen took over that show for its last few years and while there was much to admire in Mr. Allen, I think he had a way of turning everything he did into The Steve Allen Show.
Bill Cullen, I thought, could make even the worst idea for a game show work…and often did. (Anyone remember Blankety Blanks? Or Eye Guess?) Reportedly, at various times there were plans for Cullen to host a Tonight Show-type program but no such series ever materialized. I bet he would have been great at it.
I don't really watch The Price is Right but sometimes, I have it on because I admire the way they keep things moving and all the expertise that's involved in putting it together. If that show had never existed and you walked into a network today and pitched it, describing what they are able to accomplish taping two a day, you'd be told it was utterly impossible to mount a show that gives away so many prizes and that it would take three days to tape one hour of what you're describing.
But they manage to do it, it's never dull and — here comes what some will consider blasphemy — I like Drew Carey as the host more than I liked Bob Barker's last twenty-or-so years. Carey does not seem to be under the delusion that the audience is there to see him and that winning a car or $25,000 is of lesser importance.
I also liked The $XX,XXX Pyramid (whatever the dollar amount was at the time) when Dick Clark hosted it, Press Your Luck when Peter Tomarken hosted it and Jeopardy! when just about anyone hosted it. I also like old episodes of I've Got a Secret, To Tell the Truth and What's My Line? less as game shows than as time capsules for seeing celebrities of the past. I'll probably think of some more later and do a follow-up to this post.
No symptoms of COVID so far. I'll test again in a few days but I think the odds are pretty low that I was infected. But since they aren't zero, I shall continue to isolate from others for a while.
I was so busy here the last few days that I didn't get around to noting that Dick Van Dyke turned 97 on Tuesday. Dick has long been a great role model for being friendly and nice to people. Now he's a great role model for staying active in one's later years. Too many people I've known hit a certain age and think they have to act like…well, like Dick Van Dyke playing an old guy. He's a reminder that you don't necessarily have to surrender to the age your birth certificate says you are.
Hey, remember the piece I had up here the other day about seeing the national touring company of My Fair Lady in 1961 when I was nine years old? I said in it that "A gentleman named Michael Evans — who spent much of his career playing Henry Higgins in various productions — played Henry Higgins, while research has suggested that Liza was played by either Caroline Dixon or Anne Rogers." Well, I finally found my copy of the program book for that show and, assuming an understudy didn't go on for her, Liza was Caroline Dixon. And I see that Freddy Eynsford-Hill (the young gent who sings "On the Street Where You Live") was played by Reid Shelton. Mr. Shelton understudied that role in the original New York production, appeared in many, many stage productions and later originated the role of Daddy Warbucks in Annie. I saw him in other shows and on TV and never realized I'd seen him in my first musical.
For a long time, Amazon was saying they'd be shipping copies of the new Pogo book out on December 13…and indeed, a number of folks have written me to say they received theirs before that date. No one has told me why they're now promising delivery December 27-28 but I'm guessing they've committed their first shipment and are anticipating another shortly. Or something. In any case, it is out and you can order it here or you can order it and the previous volume in a neat slipcase here. I still highly recommend you do one or the other. Some who ordered the two volumes in the slipcase have taken delivery also.
Lastly for now: Not only am I back to isolating but I'm back to not following the news too closely. That said, I do think that the Respect for Marriage Act, while cause for some celebration, ain't all it should be. It might be all it could be. Politics is, after all, The Art of the Possible and a compromise is usually better than a total loss. But the act is still not all it should be.
My current favorite Internet Celebrity is Norma Geli, who has built her own little network on YouTube. Norma is a former hotel concierge in Las Vegas whose career now is making weekly videos about the city — where to go, where to eat, what not to do, etc. She sometimes goes on little adventures and takes us — and sometimes, some of her friends — along.
I used to go to Vegas a lot, partly because I was briefly obsessed with counting cards in Blackjack, partly because I was dating a lady in Lance Burton's show, partly because I enjoyed being around so many people having such a good time and partly because there was still a lot of "Old Vegas" there and I found it fascinating. "Old Vegas" is pretty much gone now and so is my relationship with the showgirl. Also, when I gave up Blackjack — forever, I vow — I stopped getting all those great comps for rooms, food and shows. And Vegas has gotten beastly expensive.
But I can still visit it, sort of, through Norma's videos. She's smart and funny and a very good tour guide…and she does something else I enjoy. In addition to the video guides she shoots (and produces and stars in), she goes out once or twice a week in the evening and "broadcasts" live from The Strip. With a cell phone in a hand-held steadicam, she walks around for a few hours, taking questions from folks in the chat room and showing us what's going on at that moment on Las Vegas Boulevard.
Usually, more than a thousand people are watching live and many more tune in later. She's like a walking TV network…a kind of "broadcasting" that simply did not exist a few years ago.
Here's a link to a page where you can watch one of her recent livestream videos. It's more fun to watch them live though and you can do that on her YouTube page if you catch her when she's in the mood to make one. She's usually out there Wednesday or Thursday evening starting around 7 PM Pacific Time.
And here's what I think is her most recent tour guide video. In this one, she and a friend take a helicopter trip from Vegas to the Grand Canyon and back. Usually though, she stays within the Vegas community and shows you where to eat, where to drink, what to see, etc. I think it's great that she's built up a little cottage industry for herself. She has an awful lot of imitators but I haven't seen one yet who's as good at this as she is…
Curtis Burga read this item, then sent me this…
In your article, you stated that Joe Sinnott was not working for Marvel when Avengers #4 was created. However, a year earlier, Sinnott's work was very much apparent in Fantastic Four #5.
Was Sinnott freelance? Or had he worked at Marvel and then quit? I ask because he was probably my favorite inker on many artists (he really made George Perez's artwork shine!). His work on F.F. #5 is (ahem) fantastic.
Joe Sinnott did excellent work. He was the kind of artist that editors feel blessed to have available to them. He met every deadline on every job and there were times when someone else did less-than-wonderful or less-than-complete pencil art and Stan Lee could say "Joe will save it." Sinnott was also one of the nicest men you could ever meet.
But I'm not sure he ever qualified as an employee at Marvel in any legal sense of the word. Folks are very loose with the language about this kind of thing and there have been times when comic book companies — as well as other enterprises — found it beneficial to keep things ambiguous. Joe was a freelancer most of the time, probably all of the time. He did not report to the office each day or any days for work. He worked at home, many miles away, and only visited the Marvel offices briefly every eight or nine years, if that often.
A lot of folks are confused by this because Stan Lee kept referring to "The Marvel Bullpen," suggesting that all its writers and artists worked in some sort of grouping not unlike a baseball team. While Marvel did have a few artists who worked in the office, something like 90%+ of the people who wrote and/or drew and/or lettered and/or colored comic books worked at home or in their own offices or studios. Much of the time, saying "he works for Marvel" really meant he did freelance work for Marvel, perhaps among other clients. That was certainly the case with Sinnott during the period you mention.
Around the period when Fantastic Four #5 was done, Joe was freelancing for several markets, not all of which were comic books. For comics, he worked in the sixties for Dell and did a lot for a comic book called Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact that was produced — at times, twice a month — for the "parochial" market, meaning Catholic schools and gift shops. Here are two issues that featured Joe's art on the cover…
He also inked for Archie and ghost-penciled for certain friends. And the following is kind of a theory on my part but I'll bet it's not far from the truth. Fantastic Four #1 and #2 were inked by George Klein, who at the same time was freelancing for DC Comics and sometimes other firms. Then he suddenly stopped working for Stan Lee and it's pretty easy to guess why.
A gentleman named Stan Kaye had been inking most of Curt Swan's art for DC and for a few other artists, as well. Then in 1962, he stopped doing that and, according to online sources, moved to Racine, Wisconsin to work in his father-in-law's manufacturing business. Most of his assignments thereafter went to Klein, who of course grabbed them. DC paid way better than Marvel and the company was on much firmer ground. When Klein inked those two Fantastic Four issues, there were still rumors around that Marvel would go out of business any day, whereas inking Swan on Superman might have been the most secure job in comics.
The next two issues of F.F. were inked by Sol Brodsky, who was functioning as Production Manager at Marvel then, though when I asked him when he officially got that title, he wasn't sure. Basically, he came in a few days per week to handle the artistic editorial chores that were beyond Stan's limited abilities in that area. And here's an example of how it's often hard to ascertain whether someone actually works for a company as opposed to being a freelance contributor. Sol was paid by the day when he did that work. If he inked a cover or a story during one of those paid workdays, he probably did that as an employee. If he did that inking at home — or even in the office on a day when he wasn't being paid for that day — it was almost certainly freelance work. And during this period, he also did freelance art or production work for other outfits.
See the problem? And like I said, sometimes publishers liked keeping it ambiguous. At times when it might be financially beneficial for your publisher to say they had numerous employees, you might be called an employee. But if you asked about things like sick pay or paid vacations or severance pay or other benefits that employees received, they would of course say, "You don't get those. You're not an employee. You're an Independent Contractor!" Of such fuzziness are lawsuits born.
Brodsky was busy and, as I mentioned in that previous ASKme, a slow inker…so they needed someone to ink Fantastic Four #5. So Stan (or perhaps Sol) called Joe and at that moment, Joe had time to fit the job into his work schedule. After he did that, he started inking F.F. #6 but he wasn't even a day into it when other assignments came in and he realized he wouldn't be able to make all his deadlines. So he called Stan (or Sol) and arranged to send the issue back. #6 was finished by Dick Ayers who did around 99% of it but if you look real careful, you can find the 1% or so that Joe inked on the first few pages.
Thereafter, Joe was offered other work by Marvel and he said yes to a few things — he penciled and inked five early Thor stories, for instance — but no to others. As a freelancer, you sometimes have to pick and choose based on factors like how much you think you'll enjoy a given assignment and how long it will take you and how much it pays. As mentioned, Marvel paid very low rates to its inkers. Joe told me that inking a page of a Jack Kirby super-hero story took twice as long as inking a page of Archie by someone like Dan DeCarlo but they paid about the same.
In 1965, Marvel Publisher Martin Goodman was unhappy with the art for Fantastic Four Annual #3. According to Brodsky, that made Goodman persuadable to raise the budget for artwork on the comics. The inking rate only went up a couple of bucks per page but it was enough to get Sinnott to begin inking again for Marvel. A year or two later when the rate was raised again, he cut back more on his work for other outfits.
He was so valuable that at some point, they gave him some sort of freelance contract that made him exclusive to Marvel. I suspect you'd have to read it to say that he worked for Marvel, rather than that he was self-employed and freelanced for Marvel…but there's no reason for us to make that distinction. When I said he wasn't working for Marvel when Avengers #4 needed inking, I meant that he was unavailable to do freelance work for them…and at other times, he was. It was not a matter of him quitting a job.