A few months ago on this blog, we were talking a lot about — and I was embedding — the song "Sweet Caroline" as performed by (of course) Neil Diamond. Eric Gimlin sent me the link to this video which (of course) I had to post here.
It's opening night of A Beautiful Noise, the Broadway musical based on Mr. Diamond's life and music. And the audience that night was surprised and delighted by The Man Himself favoring them with The Song. Thank you, Eric…
We've been wondering who would replace Trevor Noah as the host of The Daily Show. The answer seems to be "Everyone." They've announced there will be rotating guest hosts until Fall of 2023. I would guess that if one of those hosts really nails it, that person might be installed sooner…but maybe not. Hey, it drove up the ratings on Jeopardy!
The press release says that the lineup of temp hosts will include correspondents who currently appear on the show. I hope that includes Jordan Klepper because I think he'd be great at it. And Al Franken, who will be taking a turn in the host chair, would certainly be interesting as would Sarah Silverman. They might even be able to get Rudy Giuliani. It's looking like he's going to need a new profession.
I'm not sure I've ever told this story anywhere in public. Forgive me if I have…and please, as you read it, keep in mind that I was eighteen or so at the time. At any age, it's possible to say something off the top of your head that comes across as rude (when you didn't intend rude) and/or seriously meant (when you intended it as a joke). And it's more likely at that age when you're kind of an adult and kind of not-an-adult and not quite sure how to be either.
People always ask me what my pal Steve Sherman and I did on those comics where we "assisted" Jack Kirby, as on his Fourth World comics and Jimmy Olsen. The honest answer is "very little." We did some production work. We wrote some storylines, a few of which he used some of. Our greatest contributions might have been when we listened to him describe a story he was about to start working on and we said something like, "That sounds great, Jack!"
Once in a while, when he then wrote and drew that next story, it would even wind up resembling the story he'd told us.
I sometimes had an added duty. If Superman was in the story, Jack would usually not draw in Superman's chest insignia as he went along. He never quite "got" the way it was supposed to look. It was not the kind of thing Jack Kirby could have cared a lot about and the folks back at DC Comics in New York treated it as a major defect in the work. The inker or one of the guys they had on staff back there could have fixed all the emblems in one story in, literally, about three minutes but this was somehow a big issue.
At times, it felt like given the choice of an exciting, dynamic story with chest emblems that needed some correction or a boring, hackneyed story with proper emblems, they'd have preferred the latter. So Jack would leave Superman's chest barren until such time as he was ready to send the story off to New York.
If — and only if — it would not delay delivering the job much, he would wait for a day when Steve and I were there and Jack would have me draw in all those "S's" throughout the story. It was the only thing — and I mean the only thing — I could draw better than Jack. He'd go outside for a breath of canyon air, I'd sit at his drawing table and do it, and by the time he came back in, it would all be done.
If, however, we weren't coming out to work in the next day or two, he would draw them in by himself, ship the story off to New York and then brace himself for the inevitable phone call from someone: "Jack, you're getting Superman's emblem wrong again…"
So one day, Jack was an hour or two from finishing a Jimmy Olsen story and we were there. I was doing busy work, waiting for my moment, sneaking glances at whichever page he was working on. Jack did not do his best drawing when someone was watching. I noticed he had drawn Superman in a certain pose I'd seen him use many times before. It was the pose on the two images below and every Kirby fan reading this can probably recall other places he used it.
I opened my big, fat mouth and said, "Oh, you're using that old pose again!" It sounded funny in my head, but I realized as I said it, it sounded pretty damned smartass rude coming out of my mouth. If I'd said that to Alex Toth or a dozen other great, experienced comic book artists I've known, I would have gotten and probably deserved a scolding that began with something like "Who the f word are you to…?"
Jack said nothing of the sort. In fact, he said nothing. He just picked up his eraser, completely eradicated that lovely drawing of Superman and replaced it with another equally as fine (or maybe better) of Superman. In a different pose.
An hour or two later, I'd done my little insignia-drawing and Steve was packing the artwork up to go to the post office the next day. Jack came over to me and said in a sincere tone, "Thanks. You helped me there."
I said something like, "Hey, if you're ever ready to end your career, we could trade jobs. I could draw the story and you could draw the Superman emblems! We'd both be out of the business within a week."
Jack chuckled and said, "No, I meant about telling me I was overusing that pose. Any time you see me doing something like that, please let me know."
I think that says a lot about Jack Kirby as a creative force. There are lot of things one could nitpick about his work — the way he drew fingers, the way he drew women's hair, the way he even drew Superman's chest emblem when he drew Superman's chest emblem. But if you understood the way he approached that work, you could never say that he did the minimum effort necessary to get the check. The job did not leave his studio until he was satisfied he'd done his best work.
I learned a lot of things about comics from Jack but I'd like to think I learned even more about being a person.
Much of my house looks like this. This is — or was the breakfast room and a week ago at 2 AM Monday morning, a steady stream of water was pouring down off that ceiling fixture from a busted water pipe on the second floor. The wall you see in the back had wood paneling over dry wall and plaster and now the wood paneling is gone and much of the dry wall and plastering have been removed. My insurance company assures me they'll pay for the restoration but it's gonna be like that around this place for a while.
The trick, of course, is to go on with your life while all this is happening around you. Like most folks who read Groo, I'm not sure what I do on that comic but whatever it is, I did it on one issue this past weekend and I got halfway through a script for something else.
You may remember that for a long time, I had many phone calls a day from folks who were either contractors who wanted to work on my home or who were representing contractors who wanted to work on my home. Talk about floods…I was inundated with them. The calls finally slowed to a trickle, partly because my turndowns were so emphatic but mostly because I installed some Spam-filtering software. And I apologize that I seem to be hung up these days on "running water" terms. That's how you get when you don't actually have running water…although some of it is back on.
But this past week, I had to turn off those Spam filters. They work by blocking unfamiliar numbers and many of those unfamiliar numbers belonged to folks at my insurance company, the plumbing firm working here, inspectors, my insurance agent, etc. So I'm fielding cold calls from contractors again…and the irony is that this is a time when I actually do need some construction work. Just not from total strangers with no referrals. (I think I have someone, by the way, thanks.)
I look forward to the day when my walls are back the way they're supposed to be. I look forward to the day when I won't have men traipsing in and around my property with huge, noisy equipment. But most of all, I look forward to the day when I can turn my Spam-fitlering software again. As it is, I just got a contractor call as I was typing the previous sentence. It came in mid-hyphen — between the time I typed "Spam" and "filtering."
I love what they used to call "novelty records." There's no firm definition of the term but it mainly described a record you were supposed to laugh at rather than dance to or "make out" to. I have two examples here, both of them recorded by Fletcher Peck.
Here is just about everything I know about Fletcher Peck: He was born Adrian George Greenberg but he went under several different monikers and had different combos and groups. "Fletcher Peck" was the name he settled on when he began appearing on Broadway Open House, the late night TV show that was the forerunner to The Tonight Show. He was all over early television including appearances with Steve Allen on Tonight, which is what The Tonight Show was called when Steverino hosted it.
Fletcher Peck was also big in jazz clubs and night clubs. Like Spike Jones, he learned to play real good before he started playing real funny. And I know he's no longer with us…but that's about all I know. If the readers of this blog respond like they usually do, there will be a post here shortly in which I report some of the info that someone out there has sent me about Mr. Peck.
Here are audio links (no picture) to my two favorite Fletcher Peck recordings, which I believe were on opposite sides of one record. First up, we have "The Guy With the Voodoo"…
And here we have "I'm a Fool For Beans," which is — as you might imagine — a song about being a fool for beans. Enjoy…
The plumbers worked here all weekend and they're coming again today…and tomorrow and the day after that and probably the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and maybe even the day after that…I think one of them took a look at what remains to be done and switched his voter registration to my address.
Fortunately, I have access to all three bathrooms in my home — the one with cold water only, the one with hot water only and the one with no water. If the first two were on the same floor of the house, I could perhaps dash back and forth between the two of them and approximate a shower.
I know you have your own problems and don't need to hear about mine but it helps me to do this because it forces my brain to seek out the humor in the situation. I actually have terrific plumbers — one of them, it turns out, knew me from Comic-Con — and they'll get it all done soon. Then come the carpenters and plasterers and painters…
Changing subjects: I didn't feel qualified to write a lot about Bob McGrath but I knew who he was even before he set foot on Sesame Street. He was one of the busiest Manhattan-based studio singers, meaning he was heard on hundreds of records and commercials recorded in New York. He was even somewhere in the chorus for Songs of the Pogo, the LP that showed Walt Kelly was as good at writing songs (and singing some of them) as he was in drawing my favorite newspaper strip. Mitch Miller, when he did his TV show Sing Along With Mitch, tapped into that talent pool for his on-camera chorus and Mr. McGrath was prominently featured. What an impressive career.
A few folks in the world of comics have passed away lately. Based on my e-mail, I need to post this reminder that if I don't write an obit for someone you think I must have known, it probably means I didn't. Or it could mean I can't think of anything to say about them that dozens of others aren't already saying. It certainly doesn't mean I had some grudge against them. I am surprisingly grudge-free…which doesn't mean there aren't some people in this world I choose to avoid.
The folks who make the Funko Pop figurines finally made one of a real person that looks exactly like the real person.
If a magic genie ever gives me the power to sing like someone good, I'm going to ask to be able to sing like Bob McGrath. May he rest in peace.
Ellis Rogers-Archer wrote to ask…
You have been with both Garfield shows, Garfield and Friends and The Garfield Show, so I will ask you some questions about the latter that have intrigued me.
1. Why the sudden transition to CG? Why didn't they just keep it in 2D like it was before? Was it because of those then-recent direct to video CG films?
The two shows were produced by different companies in different countries under very different financial arrangements. Very few people were involved with both. The company that wanted to do what became The Garfield Show does CG animation and Jim Davis likes CG animation. There was, as far as I know, no discussion whatsoever of doing it a different way. There are all sorts of debates, both creative and financial, about which is preferable but this is the way they wanted to do it.
2. Why do the animals' mouths move when they have dialogue? It's harder to tell if they can talk or not.
This was a problem from the moment that Garfield was first animated. He was the star of the show so they felt he had to have a voice…but he was a cat and in his world, cats don't talk. His "dialogue" in the newspaper strips was in thought balloons. For a while, it seemed to work to have his mouth not move, therefore conveying the idea that what you were hearing were his thoughts.
But as we got into longer stories or more complex stories…or just more stories, it became harder and harder to make that distinction. It was especially a problem in a cartoon where he spent a lot of time talking (or "talking") to other animals. For a while, the rule I came up with was that in a scene with just animal characters — like if Garfield was communicating with Odie or Arlene — mouths moved. If Jon or a human was in the scene, Garfield's mouth didn't move.
This rule did not last long because there had to be scenes where Garfield was "saying" something to Odie but Jon was present…like if the pets were in the back seat of Jon's car and Jon was chatting with them while driving. The animators were sometimes confused and they animated mouths they shouldn't have and…well, we just kind of gave up. Do not harm yourself by straining to figure out the logic behind it all. There was none…or at least none consistently.
3. Why was U.S Acres excluded from the show?
For those who don't know: U.S. Acres was a second newspaper strip that Jim Davis created and which ran in newspapers from 1986 to 1989. In other countries, it was often retitled Orson's Farm because the pun in the name didn't work in other languages and they didn't seem to even "get it" in some English-speaking countries. The episodes were made with two sets of title cards — one for each name — and for reasons unknown to me — a lot of cartoons that got into syndication or onto DVDs had the Orson's Farm title cards on them.
When CBS finally, after years of urging convinced Jim to allow a Saturday morning Garfield cartoon series, he suggested U.S. Acres be a component and that was done; ergo, the title of Garfield and Friends. It was, among other reasons, a way to get more exposure for those characters. When The Garfield Show was proposed years later, U.S. Acres was no longer an active property and besides, the various buyers around the world didn't want the same Garfield series as before. They wanted something they could promote as new and different.
So we gave them a show that was all The Cat and the shows did very well — they're still doing very well — and everyone involved was happy. There were discussions about also doing a new show that would have just been U.S. Acres (or maybe Orson's Farm) but that never quite got put together. As my first agent used to say, "Sometimes, you can make a deal and sometimes, you can't."
As mentioned, my life lately has been a Cavalcade of Plumbers. I also went several days without running water in my home and as of now, it still hasn't been restored in some rooms.
Here is something I already knew but if you don't, you should. It's about how toilets work and how they can be flushed when you have no running water. You still need some source of that liquid like an outside hose or, in my case, a swimming pool from which one can fetch buckets of H2O.
If the toilet is the kind with a water tank like the one in this video, you can also pour the water into that tank and refill if you do it to the proper level. Oh — and like the man says, it doesn't only work with Froot Loops. You could probably flush Frosted Flakes or Captain Crunch or even Chex Party Mix…
This ran here first on August 24, 2014. I have nothing to add to it…
There have been times in my life when I've felt like I grew up in one of about ten American families that were not the least bit dysfunctional. I would go to friends' houses and everyone would be screaming at one another. There was very little screaming in our house and it never lasted long. More often than not, it would be immediately followed by apologies and offsetting affection.
Part of that, I'm sure, was because of my fortuitous lack of siblings. Most of it was due to the kind of people my parents were. In our household, no one ever got drunk. No one ever got into legal or financial trouble. In most of these essays, I'm telling you about the problems because, you know, there's no interesting story when the airliner lands safely; only when it crashes. I'm running out of memories of where there was trouble in my childhood because there just plain wasn't very much.
The biggest family trauma probably occurred when I was in my early twenties and decided it was time to move out and get my own apartment — a decision I probably should have made two or three years earlier than I did. My father did not want me to do that. When I mentioned the possibility, he scrunched his face, looked sad and said, "Oh, why would you want to do that?"
I couldn't tell him it was because women didn't like to sleep with a guy at his parents' house with Mom and Dad in the next room. Instead, I told him — and this was true — that I needed a lot more room for my comic book collection and my profession required a lot more workspace, especially now that I was writing with a partner. Once or twice, my father put forth a suggestion that he probably knew would never fly: I should rent an office nearby, work there during the day and then sleep at home. That, obviously, would not have solved the part of the first problem, the one I couldn't mention to him.
When the day finally came that I rented an actual apartment — one that was a good 15-minute drive away — he was very upset and we had some father/son melodramatics. But he accepted it and I moved out.
I had another reason for moving out though I didn't know it at the time.
My nose had never worked well…for breathing purposes, I mean. I could barely take in air through my left nostril and not at all through my right. When I was a small child, my pediatrician had said, "Well, maybe that will fix itself as he gets older. If it doesn't, you may have to look into surgery."
As I got older, it didn't fix itself. If anything, it got a little worse. But since I was breathing fine through my mouth, I didn't look into surgery or any other treatment. Actually, about the time I reached sixteen, I hit a prolonged spell of Good Health and didn't even have a regular doctor to call until I was well past 40.
One evening about six months after I got my own apartment, I was out on a date with a lady named Teri. We'd been to a movie in Santa Monica and were sitting in Zucky's Delicatessen on Wilshire eating Knackwursts when I was suddenly overwhelmed by the aroma of the one before me. I could really smell it. I could smell the mustard and the pickles and potato salad as if they were right under my nose instead of a foot or two away on the table. I began gasping and taking deep breaths and holding my hand under my nose to feel whatever air was rushing in and out.
Teri thought for a moment I was having some sort of attack and asked, "Mark, what's wrong?"
I couldn't quite believe it but I began to say to her, "I may be wrong…it seems impossible…" I felt like I was in a scene in a comic book and my next line would be, "…but I seem to have developed super-powers!"
Instead, what I said was, "…but I think my left nostril just opened up all the way!" A few days later, I noticed for the first time ever, a slight flow of air in my right one.
Since I didn't have a doctor, I called my dentist. He referred me to a respiratory specialist in his building who wandered around in my nose for about ten minutes, then said, "Everything seems pretty normal. Have you changed your diet lately? Anything you've stopped eating?"
I said no but I told him about moving out of my parents' house. He said, "Do either of them smoke?"
"My mother does," I replied. "Incessantly."
He said, "Well, there you are" and then did a test or two which confirmed it. Being around the smoke all those years had impaired my ability to breathe through my nose. Being away from it for six months had allowed things to partially heal.
Don't let anyone ever tell you that Second-Hand Smoke is not harmful. And when you think about it, how could breathing non-pure air not be bad for you in some way?
Sitting in that specialist's office, I remembered something. I hadn't been back to the house I grew up in for several months. My father came to my apartment to visit once a week and slightly less often, I'd meet him and my mother at a restaurant for dinner. But it had been a while since I'd been to their home and the last time I was there, the smell of cigarette smoke was uncommonly overpowering. It was most unpleasant and while I hadn't said anything, I also hadn't stayed long.
That evening, I went over there to see them. I walked in and could barely breathe. My mother, who had her 20th or 25th Marlboro of the day going didn't smell it, of course. My father didn't, either. He'd built up a tolerance or immunity to the smell (though probably not its harmful effects) as I'd once had. But mine had worn off and I could not stand to be in the house. I opened a window and stood near it as I explained what had happened. Eventually, even that got to me and I had to get out.
My mother was quite upset. She had smoked since she was 14, working her way up to somewhere between 1.5 and two packs per day. Various habit-kickers had been tried — special chewing gums and cigarette substitutes, most of which had the syllable "nic" in their names. They failed so totally that she accepted her addiction as unfixable and gave up even trying. When someone said to her, "It's going to take years off your life," she just replied, "Well, then I just won't live as long."
Other times, she'd say something like, "If it came down to living forty more years with cigarettes or fifty without, I'd pick the forty. The fifty without would be so horrible and agonizing, I wouldn't want to live."
What no one said to her — and it wouldn't have done any good if someone had — was, "The smoking might not just kill you. It might mean that the last two decades of your life before it did, you'd be going blind, you'd lose your ability to walk and you'd spend an awful lot of time being carted off to hospitals in ambulances."
After that evening when I had to leave though, she decided she had to do something. She couldn't keep fouling the air such that her son couldn't stand to visit. She was also concerned about what it was doing to her husband, a man she loved as much as any woman ever loved a man. Within days, two changes were initiated.
My old room was still sitting empty. My father half-joked with a hopeful subtext, "It's waiting for you if you decide you want to move back." What they did after I explained about my nostrils opening and the smell driving me away was to convert it into a den for my mother. The walls were repainted and decorated appropriately. Then they brought in furniture to go with my old TV set which I'd left behind and fans were installed to circulate air in and out the two windows. Henceforth, my mother would smoke only in there.
Then she tried to see how much she could cut down.
A few months earlier, I'd suggested something I'd read about. We totaled up how many cigarettes she was smoking a day. It was around 38. "Why don't you try just cutting down by one every few days? Try getting by on 37. Three days from now, try just smoking 36 and so on." She'd convinced herself she could never quit altogether and somehow that became a reason to not even try to smoke less.
Now, she got a calendar and marked it off to cut back by one each week. To her considerable amazement, she got down to 25 without too much torture. After that, it got rougher and it sometimes took several weeks to lower the daily allotment by one more cigarette. After a year or two though, she got down to 16 a day.
From there on, she concentrated on not smoking them completely. When I'd come over — and by this point, I could — she'd point to an ash tray full of partially-smoked cigarettes. She had a ruler and a little diagram and she'd show me: "See? I used to smoke them down to here and now I only smoke them down to here." It was about half the length.
"I'm lighting sixteen a day," she explained. "But I figure I'm only really smoking eight." Well, sort of. Whatever it was, it was better than before. In the last few years of her life, she got down to lighting ten a day, which she figured was really five.
All this time, her doctors — especially her heart specialist and her podiatrist — urged her to quit altogether. Her general practitioner said she had fifteen different ongoing ailments and that every one of them would be lessened if she didn't even smoke the "five." She insisted it was simply not possible.
I threatened to forbid her caregivers from buying her cigarettes. She showed me that she had phone numbers for several markets and pharmacies that would deliver…so I switched to outright bribery.
Before I offered this, I ran it past her doctor and he said, "Go for it." My mother loved seafood…shrimp, scallops, fried clams. Especially fried clams. She also loved the clam chowder at the Santa Monica Seafood company so I proposed a swap: The cigarettes for daily deliveries of clams and crustaceans. She thought about it for a moment, then passed. So I went back to threats.
She had this button she wore 24/7 around her home at night. One push would alert an operator who would notify me and dispatch the paramedics, usually in the middle of the night. I said if she wasn't going to quit smoking, I was going to quit responding. But that was a bluff. She knew it. I knew it. And she knew that I knew that she knew it.
Then came an awful four weeks of hospitalization — two weeks in a hospital, two weeks in a nursing facility. It started with one of those middle-of-the-night alarms and then while she was in the hospital, I was called in twice in the wee, small hours because they thought they were losing her. They wanted me there to see they were doing everything humanly possible to save her…and if they couldn't, to authorize them to discontinue treatment as per her advanced directive. She made it — but she became acutely aware of how close she'd come to dying…and what she was putting me through.
The day before she was to go home from the nursing facility, I went in, sat on the unoccupied bed next to hers and said, "We have to discuss smoking." She said, as she always had, "I can't give it up."
Ah, but this time, I had a new response to that. I told her, "You have."
She looked at me puzzled and I went on. "You haven't had a cigarette the entire time you've been in here. You've quit. The only question is whether you're going to be dumb enough to start again."
There was a brief silence as she thought it over and she finally said, "No, I don't think I'm that dumb."
By that point, it really didn't mean much for her health. Her eyes and her legs were never going to get better and she didn't think they would. I'm convinced the main reason she quit was because she was hoping it might mean one or two less times I'd be summoned out of bed at 5 AM to rush to her house, meet the paramedics there, follow them in to the hospital, spend half my life there talking with doctors, etc.
I can't figure exactly how long after she quit it was that I lost her. I'm guessing six months with one or maybe two late-night Emergency Room visitations in there. When her doctors would allow it, I brought her clams and crustaceans. She said, "Hey, you promised these to me every day if I quit." I told her, "You passed on that offer, remember? You should have made me shake on it before you gave up the cigarettes."
One day, and it may have been the last time I saw her, she said, "You know, I still miss smoking. It's been a long time since I enjoyed it but I still miss it."
I asked, "Do you miss smoking? Or do you miss not going through withdrawal pains?"
She said, sadly, "The second."
I asked, "Was there ever a time when you truly enjoyed it?"
She thought for a moment and said, "There must have been. But it was so damned long ago that who the hell knows?"
I currently have a houseful of men to whom I am paying good money to rip open walls and fix or install water pipes. They're using big sheets of what looks like industrial-strength Glad Wrap to "plastic off" sections of my home to keep dust confined and/or to install blowers to dry out sections of wall that are damp within.
Everything is being moved around and I'm sitting here in my office, trying to write a script with the sound of power saws and hammers around me. I'm also worried they're going to come in and "plastic" me into my little workspace and not let me out until the entire job is done. Which from the scope of it could be just in time to vote in the next presidential election. Or the one after.
In 1959, Peter Sellers starred in The Mouse That Roared, a pretty good (I thought) little comedy film based on the novel of the same name by Leonard Wibberley. Mr. Sellers, as was his wont, played three roles.
Then in 1966, the novel was adapted as a potential TV series with Sid Caesar, who also often played multiple roles. In this case, he played the same three roles as Sellers. In support, Mr. Caesar had Joyce Jameson, Richard Deacon and several other faces (like that of Peter Leeds) that were quite familiar from TV shows of that period. Mr. Deacon, of course, was available because The Dick Van Dyke Show had just ended its glorious run.
A reader of this site who calls him- or herself "Orange Apple" sent me this link to the pilot. It was directed by Jack Arnold, who directed such great films as It Came from Outer Space, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man and the Peter Sellers version of The Mouse That Roared. The script was by Frank Tarloff, who spent much of his career writing for the top situation comedies (including The Dick Van Dyke Show) often under pseudonyms because of The Blacklist. Mr. Tarloff won an Academy Award for co-authoring the movie Father Goose and he also wrote one of my "guilty pleasure" faves, A Guide for the Married Man…in which Sid Caesar also appeared.
Of special note is the unusually-long theme song for which Allan Sherman not only wrote the lyrics but sang 'em. The pilot never became a series but you might want to give it a look. I can name worse shows from that period that did sell…some for more than one season.
Brian Dreger, who sends me some of the best questions I answer here, wants to know…
You must know something about this: As a kid in Ohio we had this store that was (in my memory) like a cheap version of Sears (I know, I know…Sears is like a cheap version of Sears — rimshot!), and in the entrance way there was a machine that sold comics. It was tall (and I think it could spin around so that you could view everything in stock), and the comics were in plastic bags (several to a bag) but you couldn't look through them unless you bought a pack.
The weird thing was that they all had no covers. Was this some way to resell old comics that had poor sales? Were the publishers behind it all? Why no covers? If anyone knows, you do!
I sort of know…I think. Before the advent of something called "the direct market," most comic books were sold like any other magazines, which was on a returnable basis. Let's say you ran a newsstand. You got your magazines from a local distributor who, in turn, got them from a national distributor who got them from various publishers. (I am very much simplifying this whole process down here.)
The publisher got paid only for what was actually sold to consumers. If they printed 250,000 copies of an issue of Hypothetical Example Comics and 150,000 were ultimately purchased, the publisher would only get paid for that 150,000.
You, the dealer, would return whatever you didn't sell…or didn't want to. In most areas, you could return as many as you wanted at any time. If you got 25 copies of the new issue of Hypothetical Example and your rack was crowded or you'd notice that very few people bought that comic, you might throw ten of them in your "returns" box right away and never put them out for sale. You could return all of them. If copies of anything on that rack got dogeared or torn, as many did, you might also toss them into the "returns" box. As newer comics came in, you might throw some that had been on sale for a few weeks into that "returns" box.
And you certainly would return any unsold issues of last month's Hypothetical Example Comics when the new issue of Hypothetical Example Comics came in. A fellow who worked at the local distributor in Los Angeles told me in 1970 that he thought the average "on sale" period for a comic book was around twelve days.
Quick, possibly interesting aside: Once upon a time, publishers tried to avoid putting #1 on a new comic. DC would sometimes just leave the number off or try to start with a higher number. When they revived The Flash in 1958, the numbering started with #105, picking up where Flash Comics (starring a previous character with the same name and power) had left off when it was canceled in 1949. That was because of a questionable theory that newsstand dealers sometimes just sent back #1 issues without displaying them. Nowadays, of course, publishers love to put out and ballyhoo first issues because buyers often grab them up in bulk.
Back to our story: You, the retailer, would pay only for what you didn't return. Then between the local distributor, the national distributor, the publisher and maybe a couple of intermediaries and other parties, one of five things would happen to that 100,000 unsold comics…
Obviously, all these systems had enormous problems of waste. If the publisher of Hypothetical Example Comics managed a 40% sell-through (and some comics didn't even do that well) that would mean the only compensation that publisher received for 60% of what it had paid to produce and print was the tiny amount it might (might!) receive for the value of what was pulped and recycled.
Obviously too, there were also endless opportunities for fraud and lying and theft and even sloppy, inaccurate bookkeeping. Just reading the above, you can probably think of a dozen ways to cheat that system. One way might involve those comics that had all or part of their covers stripped. The rest of the comic was supposed to be pulped but through collusion or bribery or maybe even if you were the local distributor and willing to cheat, you might make bundles out of them and find a way to sell them.
I said there were five things that might happen to unsold comic books back then. We are now discussing #5.
In the early sixties when I was buying comic books for a nickel each (six for a quarter) at used bookstores, there was a shop in Downtown Los Angeles called Everybody's Books. You never saw so many used books and magazines in your life. And out front to attract passing customers, they had a little display of bundled comics. It was ten coverless comics, tied up with twine such that you could only see the top comic.
The bundles were 40 cents each and I took a gamble once and bought five of them, each of which displayed on top a coverless comic I did not own. I got the bundles home, untied them and found that I had three bundles with the exact same comics in them, just in a different order. The two others contained a slightly different mix. The comics were from all different publishers and there were a few overlaps. For instance, each of the five bundles contained a coverless copy of The Brave and the Bold #28 featuring the first appearance of the Justice League of America.
Similar bundles sometimes popped up in discount stores or on newsstands. One year at my elementary school, they had a big Mardi Gras fund raising event with rides and games…and there were vendors selling merchandise. One vendor had bundles of old coverless comics tied in bundles like the ones I later bought at Everybody's Books.
Also, down in San Diego, I once visited — and some friends of mine visited often — a used book shop that had for sale thousands of unbundled comics that were either lacking their covers or lacking the top third of their covers. Scott Shaw! was a customer there and he says it was called Lanning's Books and it was on Broadway near the library.
What you found in that machine, Brian Dreger, was obviously just another way someone managed to get their mitts on comics that were meant to be pulped and to sell them another way. If they'd all been from the same publisher, I might suspect the publisher had been part of the deal. If they weren't, the publishers probably never knew about it…or knew and just couldn't stop it. In some cases, it might have meant suing distributors and if you want to stay in business, that's usually not a wise thing to do…sue your distributor.
In the mid-to-late seventies, Direct Market Distribution began to nudge that system aside. With Direct Market, retailers (mainly comic book shops and other specialty outlets) order comics in advance. The publisher prints and the distributor sends out the proper amount of copies to fill those orders. There are no returns, very little spoilage. The retailers pay for all they receive and if they don't sell — or don't sell rapidly — then it's the retailer's problem. Much neater.
If you scour the Internet, you can probably find many articles about how the Direct Sales Market came to be and most will give props, though perhaps not enough of them, to a gent named Phil Seuling. But others deserve credit, as well. Among the many things to note about the Direct Sales Market is that, first of all, it saved the industry. The old system was even failing even in honest ways and was in dire need of replacement.
Also, the new system made new publishers possible. A handful of established publishers no longer had an iron grip on distribution in America, keeping most others out and perhaps sabotaging the few that did get in. Anyone remember Tower Comics? Lightning? Gil Kane's attempt to become a publisher that ended after one issue? The Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate made repeated attempts to become the publisher of comic books starring Tarzan and its other properties. They could not get national distribution.
And the new system made it more possible to pay writers and artists royalties based on sales of the comics they produced. One of the many excuses publishers used to use as to why they didn't went something like this: "We can't pay you royalties because we can't give you an honest count. We don't get an honest count ourselves!" There was some truth to that although the larger truth was that they just didn't wanna share. I do not think very many people who today do great comics would be in the field at all had that not changed.
There have been other ramifications, most of them for the better…but that's a long-enough answer to your brief question, Brian. Next time, ask a long question and I'll give you a brief answer. Thanks.