Today, I heard from three people who received an e-mail from Amazon telling them their copy of Kirby: King of Comics had just shipped…and they received the book the same day they received this e-mail. One got the book yesterday and the e-mail today. In any case, since this morning's post, Amazon has changed the listing and they now say they have it in stock. So click right here and buy your copy.

I'll be signing copies at the Wizard World Los Angeles convention March 14-16 and at the New York Comic Con April 18-20 and at a number of bookstores which I'll announce here.

Also: I should have mentioned (but didn't because I didn't know) that the photo of Jack I posted on the message before last was taken by James Van Hise. Thanks, Jim.

The last few years I've attended the Comic-Con International in San Diego, I've stayed at the Manchester Grand Hyatt, a fine hotel.

There are many things to do there. However, if I stay at the Hyatt this year, I don't think I'm going to do this.

This morning, I heard from two different folks who'd received their copies of my new book, Kirby: King of Comics. One had pre-ordered from Amazon and the other had pre-ordered from Barnes & Noble. So I guess it's out.

As of this moment, the Amazon listing still says "Usually ships within 2 to 5 weeks," which may mean they have copies on hand and no one has gotten around to changing the listing. Or it may mean that they've only received enough to fill pre-orders and are waiting for more before they switch it to say "In Stock." I am told that a second printing will be on the presses, probably early next week. For it, we're fixing two insignificant typos and one significant one (Jack did sixteen issues of The Demon, not eighteen) plus I rewrote two captions that could have been phrased better.)

But at least one person who ordered from Amazon has their copy in hand…so order with confidence. It is possible to actually receive your copy in this lifetime.

I'm pretty darned happy with how the thing came out. Naturally, there are things I wish I'd done differently — when are there not? — and with a topic as vast as Kirby, you often think of more points that should have been made, more details that should have been included. But of course. Fortunately, I have that other book on Jack in the works and I can put all that stuff in there.

Hope you like it. Hope you buy it. More importantly, I hope Jack and Roz would have liked it.

Author David Holzel wrote a real good article on one of my favorite performers, Allan Sherman.

And I'm sorry I haven't posted more lately here, folks. This "paying work" stuff gets in the way of blogging and I need to do something about it.

Today, I was over at U.S.C. teaching the class I teach there. I noticed that on a wall, someone had posted a quote from Bertrand Russell that said…

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

…but I'm not all that sure about it.

I haven't written lately about the late night TV situation. As this article in the New York Times explains, various other networks and syndicators are preparing to empty the vaults to secure the services of Jay Leno as soon as he becomes a Free Agent. Regardless of whether you like Jay or not (I do), you might get some jollies at the thought that darn near every "expert" prediction that has ever been made about this guy failing has been spectacularly wrong.

At various times since he got the job of replacing the legendary Carson, network biggies, ad agencies, TV pundits and others have forecast his demise, especially against the might of Letterman. And while it's true that Dave dominated for a while, Jay's ratings were never all that bad. The guy stayed in the game and kept at it…and he's now about to become one of the wealthiest, most powerful souls in show biz, thanks to NBC betting against him and engineering his replacement by Conan O'Brien. Not all that long ago, entertainment reporters were writing that the decision to install Leno instead of Letterman behind the Tonight Show desk was one of the dumbest moves in the history of the industry. I think it may work the other way around: Hindsight will show it as a wise notion, and the ouster of Jay will be seen as the dumbest.

Not that O'Brien won't do well in that slot. He might or might not, and the "might not" may have a lot to do with factors beyond his control. Is Jimmy Fallon really going to be going in at 12:35 after him? Lead-ins matter to some extent but so do lead-outs. There are some folks who watch Leno now because the Jay/Conan parlay interests them more than Dave/Craig. Fallon seems to me a little too low-key to command America's attention at bedtime and I'm curious as to why NBC might think otherwise.

More significantly, we may have Dave, Jay and Conan carving that 11:35 audience three ways. That was what NBC was trying to avoid when they opted to nudge Leno aside rather than allow O'Brien to hopscotch over to Fox for a competing show. If Jay winds up with an 11:35 show (or even, on Fox, an 11 PM one), NBC probably won't be very happy with the results. Not happy at all.

On February 16 on this site, we predicted that the Writers Guild contract would be approved by 93% of the voting membership.

Final vote total: 93.6%.

I didn't pay a lot of attention to the Oscars this year…and as far as I can tell, neither did anyone else. As I think we discussed here, the nominees turned out to be a lot of folks and films that might have achieved excellence but didn't generate the kind of emotional moments and issues where we really cared who or what won. To me, the biggest surprise of the evening was that they included Dabbs Greer in the "In Memoriam" montage and left out Joey Bishop. Jon Stewart, I thought, did an okay job of hosting, meaning he got some laughs and never really slowed up the proceedings. The clips from old Oscar telecasts were nice but there were times when you got the feeling someone had said, "Hmmm…we'd better remind the world what it was like to care about this event."

At least, those were my impressions after leapfrogging through the entire show in under an hour via TiVo. If you sat through every blessed minute of it, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Someone wrote to ask me what I'd do to make the Oscars interesting. Here's another one of Evanier's free brilliant ideas that no one will ever do: Leave the show exactly as it is but telecast an alternate version. Over on the ABC Family channel or some other network, run the exact same show with a live commentary track. Get together a couple of comedians — Kathy Griffin, for sure…maybe Lewis Black or Gilbert Gottfried…maybe four or five of them. Get someone who can make catty remarks about the gowns but who isn't Joan Rivers or Mr. Blackwell. Get someone like Leonard Maltin…no, on second thought, get Leonard Maltin. You need to have at least one person in this who knows about and cares about movies. Then let these people heckle the Academy Awards…or they can comment, annotate, discuss, whatever. So it's like you're watching the telecast at a real great party full of witty people.

Viewers who don't want their Academy Awards despoiled could watch the regular broadcast. Those who don't wish to see that — and they were not few in number this year — could switch over and watch the party version. I suspect there'd be a lot of them. In fact, let's find out with another one of our frighteningly unscientific polls. This one closes in one week…

This may interest someone. One of my favorite movies is The Odd Couple with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. One day in the early seventies, I was in a movie memorabilia shop in Hollywood browsing through several boxes of miscellaneous, unsorted old stills which they sold for something like a quarter apiece. Two of three of the boxes, as it turned out, contained not stills but proof sheets — and maybe in this day and age, I need to explain what those are.

When someone shoots 35mm negative film — which some photographers, amazingly, still do but which once was the norm — they usually have them processed and then turned into proof sheets, which are tiny prints (about an inch by an inch and a quarter) of the negatives. They're too small to use for much of anything except to figure out which shots are good enough to turn into…or at least, they used to be close to useless.

In the boxes that day, I found about twenty proof sheets from stills that were shot on the set of The Odd Couple. I didn't find the stills, themselves and they wouldn't have been in the quarter box, anyway. But I found all these proof sheets and they were of so little value that the storeowner gave them all to me for two bucks. I stuck them in a file folder and forgot about them.

This afternoon, I came across them and on a whim, had my assistant scan them at 1200 dpi, just to see how well they'd enlarge. Pretty well, it turns out. Modern technology makes it possible to get some pretty sharp images off these teensy photographs. Here's a low rez detail of the above frame…

I don't have anything in mind for them but suddenly, I have a whole mess of Odd Couple images I didn't have before. Also, somewhere in this house, there's a crate with other proof sheets. Some are ones I bought like the Odd Couple proofs but some are from my own work with a camera. I lost some negatives of photos I shot in the seventies, as well as the photos, themselves…but I may still have the proof sheets. That would sure be interesting. In the meantime, I just thought I'd mention this here because it may make someone think, "Hey, I've got old proof sheets squirreled away here. Maybe there are some images on them that can be scanned and put to some use."

In fairness to United Airlines (which wasn't very fair to me on Friday), our trip back from San Francisco was flawless. The plane wasn't crowded, it left on time, it got in early…and our suitcases were the first ones down the chute at Baggage Claim. Then again, my Friday problem with the company wasn't so much that things had gone wrong…it was that when something did go wrong, there was no mechanism to put it right. It all ties in with a mounting trend in a number of industries to treat Customer Service as some annoying obligation that they must handle in the cheapest, least-likely-to-serve-the-customer manner.

I have the same annoyance with computer and software companies that won't give you a Tech Support number (or worse, charge you to use it) and tell you that if you have a question or problem, send an e-mail. That enables them to hire someone cheap who may have very little to do with the company and who just sits there, checking e-mail every so often and responding with the most appropriate of several stock, pre-written replies. The stock, pre-written replies never seem applicable to my question or problem. If I have additional questions or don't understand something, that means additional e-mails…and a problem that might have been solved by a three minute phone conversation becomes a week of pen-palling with some stranger.

Several folks e-mailed me to tell me either their own airline horror tales or just the opposite. I heard from three different folks who have great experiences with United even when things go wrong. Why them and not me? Because in all three cases, they are not just Frequent Flyers but Incessant Flyers, with zillions of miles on United for business trips. One guy wrote that his company spends upwards of ten million bucks a year on airfare, most of it on United. For this, he gets services unavailable to me…including that if he isn't on a flight (his fault or theirs), he's on the next flight without question. He does not go onto the standby list with chumps like me. He gets a confirmed seat even if they have to bump someone else who has one. He also has a special Customer Service phone number that's answered in this country by someone who can actually do things for him and yes, I'm envious.

Preferential treatment? Absolutely…and I have no problem with that. If I ran United, I'd do cartwheels for passengers like that and give back rubs. I just think I'd be a little more caring about the customer who wasn't in that category.

It's like with these computerized phone-answering deals that tell you to press "1" if you want to make a payment, "2" if you need to check your balance, "3" if you'd like to order a pizza with black olives, etc. That can make things go quicker at times but too often lately, I find myself in need of an option they don't have: None of the Above. My problem is simply not on their menu. There's someone at that company who can help me and they've made it impossible (or at least, difficult) for me to get to that person. In some cases, it feels as if the system designer just plain didn't consider all contingencies. In others, you think that's the whole point of it…to avoid dealing with problems. That's sure how I felt on Friday sitting in the United terminal.

Jiggety-jig. Bad flight up and much trouble with the Internet connections at the hotel…but I have nothing but good to say about this year's WonderCon, held this past weekend in that city where Tony Bennett left his heart. Also: Carolyn and I ate almost every meal at the Canton Seafood Restaurant over on Folsom, a few blocks from the Moscone Center, and had great food. (So did all the friends from the convention we dragged along with us.)

The convention itself was so nice that I especially regretted missing Day One. I won't list all the folks I talked with because that gets boring but it was the kind of con where every time you turned around, there was someone you wanted to meet. And if you were just there to shop, the exhibit hall probably didn't let you down. I never made it to some aisles but the ones I walked were teeming with goodies. (Hey, here's a free thought that might make someone a nice piece of cash: Has anyone at a large con ever set up a booth for shipping? It would be like, "Make your purchases elsewhere, bring 'em to us and for the cost of postage/FedEx plus a small fee, we'll take care of shipping them to your home." I saw lots of stuff I might have bought but I didn't want to deal with lugging it all around the convention all day, then back to the hotel — in the rain, no less — and cramming it into my already-crammed suitcase, which was already near the airline weight limit.)

Mood of the con? Hard to say. As usual these days, there may be more interest in upcoming movies about comic books than in the comic books, themselves.

Hey, I'll make a prediction here and you can check back in a year or so and see if I'm right. My prediction is that very soon, the major companies — the ones that own or control characters of which a lot of folks would say "I loved that when I was a kid" — are going to experience a very real, impossible-to-ignore revulsion at some of the more warped interpretations. There was a time when DC, Marvel and others that took their leads from those companies were probably a little too fierce about the idea that there was one way to draw Superman, that there were certain things that Spider-Man shouldn't do or which shouldn't be done to him. Now, it feels like the pendulum has swung too far towards the notion that uglifying a character or building a mini-series out of some aberrant change in his or her mythos or life is saleable.

I'm not talking about regressing anything back to the way it was in 1964 or whenever. It is certainly possible to rethink an old concept and come up with the 2008 version, and some properties probably should exist in the "now." But what makes a great property great is a certain set of creative choices and constants…and if you make every single one of those subject to interpretation (or just plain inversion for the sake of a "stunt"), you dilute the basic concept down to the point where it loses its impact. Often, it's interesting to wring an interesting variation on the norm but if you wring enough of them, it can sometimes become difficult to even know what the "norm" is.

That's one of the things that struck me as I looked at some displays in the exhibit hall. Another was that I don't have the storage space for all the fine, hardcover art and strip reprint books I'd like to own. Yet another was that some industrious folks are producing some amazing books and art pieces and merchandise that I only see at conventions…which I guess brings me back to my idea about a service that would ship your purchases home for you.

So, all in all, a great WonderCon once we got there. I hope you got there, too. If you didn't, try to get there someday.

WonderCon, once you get to it, is a fun and joyous experience. It's a great con and when I get more time, I'll tell you about Saturday. The hotel's pretty good too, except that the High Speed Internet Connection in our room was apparently installed by United Airlines. It don't work so well so I'm currently in the bar in the lobby, blogging via a wireless connection that only works down here. The bar is packed with folks from the comic book business and every now and then, one comes by and says, "Wow, I read your blog but I never thought I'd see you actually working on it!"

Let's see who's around here. Image co-founder Jim Valentino just ambled past, and Batton Lash (creator of a fine comic called Supernatural Law) is pointing at me and grinning. Master comic book shop operator Joe Ferrara is hovering about and a somewhat tipsy Marvel artist who shall remain nameless, and who seems unaware of how loudly he's speaking, is hitting on a lady who looks about as likely to prance off to his room with him as I am to book my next few flights on United. Over in the corner, I see someone who's either Bruce Timm or the winner of a Bruce Timm look-alike contest and this isn't very interesting, is it?

Okay, so I'll tell you a little more about Saturday. Packed hall. Big stars. Lots of people in great costumes. We had a great Jack Kirby Tribute Panel with Herb Trimpe, Mike Royer, Darwyn Cooke, Kurt Busiek and Paul Dini. Then later, I did a one-on-one with Herb…a fascinating, gifted man who talked about working at Marvel "in the days when it was fun." I sometimes get the feeling it hasn't been that way at very many comic companies for a long time.

I signed a lot of copies of Kirby: King of Comics for folks and would have sold more but the one dealer who had them, Comic Relief of Berkeley, sold out rather quickly.

I need to get out of this bar and go back upstairs to write in peace 'n' quiet so I'll wrap this up. More later, if and when I get a working Internet connection.