The late/great comic book artist Wally Wood was an amazing creative talent who didn't always work on material worthy of him. His friend and collaborator Bhob Stewart has a weblog that sometimes remembers Woody and on it, he's posted a piece about an Alka-Seltzer print ad that Wood did to much acclaim. He also has a link to a video of a TV commercial based on that ad. Go read it…but also read Stewart's comments on how Wood wasted so much of his talent on unimportant, quick-money jobs. The guy was so much better than so much of what he produced.

A couple of you have written to me, aghast at my remark that "…the Oscars oughta be hosted by a movie star." They are horrified that I seem not to be aware that Johnny Carson, who was not a movie star, was one of the most successful of all Oscar hosts.

Yes, I know. In fact, I thought he did a very good job when he hosted. I still think the Academy Awards ought to be emceed by someone in the motion picture community.

To the seeming contradiction, I would point out a couple of things. One was that Johnny was a TV star in a way that no one else is or perhaps ever will be. He was such a big TV star that it transcended the fact that he was not a movie person. No one around today is on that level. He was also Johnny Carson, a position in show business that remains sadly unfilled since his retirement, despite hollow claims that Dave or Jay or someone else was The New Johnny Carson.

To put it another way: I thought Johnny was wrong for the position but he did it so well that it didn't matter. He did a lot of things that you can't honestly expect anyone else in show business to be able to do these days.

And this is not one of those issues that I feel so strongly about that I'm prepared to defend it to the death. It's just a feeling and no big deal.

Back in January, that Bush guy in the White House promised us The Surge would achieve a lot of things. So, uh, what did he promise and how much of that has come to pass? Answer: He promised a lot and almost none of it has happened. As this article explains.

But maybe we have to give it another six months. And then another six months. And then another six months…

When Amos 'n' Andy was a radio show, the main roles were played by the program's creators, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll. For more than thirty years, these two white guys played beloved black guys on the radio.

In 1951 when it came time to turn it into a TV show, Gosden and Correll stepped aside — what else could they do? — and cast the series with black actors — or "colored people," as they were then called. This was quite a big deal at the time because America loved Amos, Andy and their cronies on the radio, which meant that Gosden and Correll had to convince the viewers that the characters wouldn't be ruined; that they'd still be the same, popular folks. (Another reason that the characters couldn't change is that Gosden and Correll were continuing to do them on the radio, though for a declining audience.)

To this end, the first TV episode started like this. It runs about five minutes and it's Gosden and Correll introducing the actors to an audience that came in to watch the first show and to have their laughs recorded. (This is all explained in a graphic at the beginning.) The casting was actually quite good…especially Tim Moore, who played the Kingfish and stole every single scene in which he appeared. So changing actors wasn't a problem and the show did rather well in the ratings. The problem, which caused it to be yanked off the air after two years, was that the nation was changing in its attitude about minorities, and a lot of folks weren't happy with how the show depicted blacks. The series stopped production at the end of its second season and had a checkered presence in off-network reruns for a short time before disappearing completely.

Here's the film of Gosden and Correll introducing their players. Unfortunately, it doesn't include the explanation that they gave the audience about why they were recasting the parts. We all know why they did it but it would be interesting to hear the phrasing and the rhetoric they used.

As I think I may have predicted here, Jon Stewart has been invited to host the Academy Awards next year for what will be his second time. A few webloggers are asking why, noting that the ratings for the year he hosted were not huge. I suspect the answer is that the folks behind the Oscars don't see a lot of connection between the host and the ratings. Much more relevant to the numbers is how much viewers of a given telecast care about who wins and/or anticipate dramatic, memorable moments. In a very real sense, faulting the host when the Oscars don't get a huge rating is like blaming the sportcaster when he has to call a dull game that no one cares about.

I still think Stewart isn't a great choice but only because he isn't a movie star, and the Oscars oughta be hosted by a movie star. If one doesn't care about that, he's probably the best pick they could have made. Actually, based on his performance at that Mort Sahl Tribute, I'm convinced that Jay Leno would amaze everyone with how well he could handle the job. But Leno has reportedly turned down the gig several times and they probably don't even bother asking him anymore.

On the way home from my appearance on Shokus Internet Radio, I stopped off at a supermarket for a few items and I was shocked at what I saw there. It's bad enough that they're selling Dry Cat…but they're even selling Canned Cat. In fact, they had a whole aisle for it. This is just barbaric. I suppose the mini-marts are selling small packages of Kitten.

Hey, take a look at what time it is right now. If it's between 4 PM and 6 PM Pacific Time (7 PM and 9 PM Eastern), then I'm live on Shokus Internet Radio right this minute, talking animation with my fellow cartoon buff Earl Kress and our cheery host, Stu Shostak. You can hear us if you tune in to Stu's Show, which you can do by going to this page and selecting an audio browser. Log in, listen…you can even call in and ask a question. Don't miss this golden opportunity. I may not be back on the radio for quite some time if I wind up going on my killing spree.

Over on Marvel's website, editor Tom Brevoort (Hi, Tom!) picks a whole batch of his favorite Jack Kirby covers. I would have picked some of those and wouldn't have picked others but, hey, it's Tom's list and he has pretty good taste in comics.

Then over in his column, Steven Grant (Hi, Steven!) takes off from Tom's list and discusses Jack's approach to covers. I think it's a perceptive discussion. Grant's right that Jack could be repetitive with designs like that, and that the overriding concern was sales. Back when comics were sold on newsstands, as opposed to the current-day comic shops, a "grabber" cover was much more important than it is today. In fact, there were those in the biz who thought the cover was just about all that mattered; that if you got a good one, the insides were of little importance. Grant's piece is well worth your attention if this kind of thing interests you.

I should also clarify something. Steven writes…

I'd heard on several occasions that Joe Maneely, who drew many '50s Atlas Comics titles (for those who came in late, Atlas is the after-the-fact collective name for Marvel publisher Martin Goodman's publications of the 1950s), was Stan Lee's favorite artist, so I've occasionally wondered what would have happened if Maneely had lived (he died in a freak subway accident in the late '50s) to see the dawn of the Marvel age. Would Stan have recruited him instead of Jack to draw Fantastic Four? (Or however it happened.) I've always though it a good bet but my friend and Kirby acolyte (and that's not hyperbole either) Mark Evanier has pointed out that what kept Atlas from bellying up before they could even get to the Marvel age was Kirby's return to the company and the subsequent upswing of sales of Atlas comics, particularly the "monster" books (like Tales of Suspense and Journey Into Mystery sporting Kirby covers. For Mark, this suggests that Goodman, ever cognizant of sales, would have insisted Stan go with Kirby for the fairly experimental (for Goodman) F.F. book, even if Maneely were available. Certainly Maneely's more restrained and obsessive style would have had trouble drawing in anywhere near the number of readers Kirby's in your face, balls to the wall style did.

Me again. There's a limit to how productive these "What If?" exercises can be but I'll take this one this far…

First off, if Maneely had lived, Atlas/Marvel would have been a very different company. Actually, between him and Kirby and Ditko (Stan's other favorite artist), there would have been little room for anyone else to draw for the firm. It's apparently true that rising sales on Kirby-drawn comics — the ones Steven mentions but especially the western, Rawhide Kid — encouraged Goodman to keep publishing comics at a time when he was considering the abandonment of that marketplace. As I wrote in a recent Jack Kirby Collector, "Would it [Rawhide Kid] have gained readers if Stan had put Maneely on the book? Who knows? Sometimes, it's not a matter of having a good artist but of having the right good artist and the right chemistry."

But then, you get to the moment when Goodman reportedly said to Stan something like, "Hey, DC's getting some good numbers on this Justice League of America thing. I want to try a book like that…a bunch of super-heroes." And at that point, a lot of different things could have happened if Stan had done the illogical thing of trying to develop such a book with Maneely. (It was illogical because Maneely had almost no track record for super-heroes, whereas Kirby was an acknowledged master of the genre.) What I can't imagine them doing is coming up with Fantastic Four without Jack. It's a lot like asking what you'd be like if your mother had married someone else. The first difference is that you would have been a completely different person.

The Lee-Maneely team would have come up with a completely different comic. Would it have sold as well and spawned a new Renaissance in super-hero funnybooks? Again, who knows? Maybe it would have bombed, Goodman would have shut down his comic line, Stan would have gone into politics and by 1968, been in a position to be elected President of the United States…while Jack decided to become a doctor, got his medical license in six months and then found a cure for The Common Cold. I wouldn't have been surprised by any of this.

Three weeks ago here — in this item — I linked to this op-ed article in The New York Times. In it, seven infantrymen and noncommissioned officers who were serving in Iraq said that from their vantage point, the war was going poorly, was being mismanaged and was making things worse for Iraq instead of better.

While this op-ed was being prepared, one of the seven soldiers was shot in the head. He is expected to survive but not without lasting damage. On Monday, two more of the seven were killed in a vehicle accident.

Here, from one of the Cartoon Voice Panels at this year's Comic-Con International, is vocal magician Maurice La Marche doing many of his roles…though not his most famous. We wanted to save his Orson Welles simulation — which he used for The Brain on Pinky and The Brain — for later. But he did a whole bunch of others and demonstrated why he's one of the top guys in the biz. The voice you'll hear at the beginning asking him to save it is me. The others are all him.

I forgot to mention it here before but our pal Floyd Norman is about to be designated as an official Disney Legend. This is an award that the Disney outfit bestows on a select number of folks who've made great contributions to the company that Walt guy started. This is a great honor and the best part is that Floyd will be inducted at a ceremony along with Michael Eisner, subject of at least a thousand unflattering Floyd Norman gag cartoons. Can't wait to see the photo of the two of them being enshrined together.

Fred Kaplan thinks today's Senate grilling of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker had more substance than yesterday's softball game in the House. It probably did but the end-result will be the same: We're staying in Iraq, keeping as many troops there as we have available for that purpose, until someone other than George W. Bush can rethink this thing.

Yes, I'm doing it again. Tomorrow, my chum Earl Kress and I will be the guests on Stu's Show, the gold standard program on Shokus Internet Radio, which is the gem of the Live365 network of web-based broadcasting. Our enthusiastic host Stuart Shostak will be grilling us about animation history and about our dubious careers as writers of cartoons.

Now, get this straight: This is not a podcast. You can't log in and listen to it at your leisure. This is because Shokus Internet Radio pays the proper fees for music use so they are not allowed to make the shows available for download. They can only stream them so you have to log in and listen, just like any radio show, at the appropriate time. The appropriate time for Stu's Show is 4 PM Pacific (7 PM Eastern) and we'll be on tomorrow for two hours. The show will replay, usually at the same time, until next week's Stu's Show so you can also listen then. But listen tomorrow when we're on live. You can even call in and ask a question or answer one of Stu's incredibly-easy trivia questions to win a rather nice prize.

You can hear this tremendous show by going to the website for Shokus Internet Radio and selecting an audio browser. And let me suggest that you go try that right now to (a) see how easy it is and (b) see what's on right now. You'll find that it's a fun channel to listen to even when Earl and I are not on it. Take a look at the schedule over there, too.

Internet Radio is fun to listen to while you're at your computer. Open a window, tune in a channel, then minimize it and go on balancing your checkbook or playing Sudoku or browsing this site or whatever you do at your keyboard. And Shokus Internet Radio is a fun thing to listen to, especially when I'm on it.

Alan Woollcombe writes, regarding this video link from the other day…

A little bit of film trivia here: the universal reaction in our household to your Jack Benny/Liberace clip was "Hey, that's Richard Wattis!"

Who?

Well, speaking from a British perspective, we didn't have Jack Benny or Liberace on our TV screens in England in the 60s (though most knew who Liberace was). What we did have was the tail end of a great British film comedy boom, and one of the principal character actors was Richard Wattis, who makes a fleeting appearance in your Benny/Liberace clip here as the butler. He did a great line in exasperated officialdom (he was in the St Trinian's films as a man from the Ministry of Education) as well as snooty butlers. When British comedy migrated from the big screen to the small, Wattis largely disappeared from view — at least to British audiences. Interesting to see that he made it onto American TV. Was he a regular on either Benny's or Liberace's shows?

If you have any more Wattis clips — with or without that showoff piano player or disgruntled violinist — do let us see them. The man was an unsung genius at what he did.

I don't have any other clips. I don't even have that one. I just linked to it on YouTube, where I believe it's a preview of an upcoming DVD release of Liberace's TV work. Mr. Wattis certainly wasn't a regular on Benny's shows and I'm not familiar enough with Liberace's to know if he made appearances in other episodes. (For that matter, I don't know if the program was taped here or in Great Britain. In the late sixties and seventies, a lot of American TV shows taped over there for no other reason than that it was cheaper.) In any case, Wattis sounds like my favorite kind of comic actor. I'll keep an eye out for him elsewhere.

George F. Will thinks The Surge has failed and that there's no rationale for the current U.S. military strategy in Iraq. And frankly, I'm getting sick and tired of America-hating Liberals like him wishing for our nation to fail.