Next Sunday, BBC4 in the U.K. is running In Search of Steve Ditko, a film by Jonathan Ross. I'm told it'll turn up on YouTube and other online sites soon after that and I would imagine that DVDs and such will make the rounds. This page gives you the broadcast times in case you can get BBC4 where you are. I spoke with Jonathan about it at the Comic-Con and it sounds like a "must see" for those of us interested in comic book history.

Nevertheless, I'll quibble with some of the rhetoric on that web page. It says, and I quote…

Ditko is a recluse and has never revealed why he left Marvel Comics. He has never been interviewed and won't allow his photograph to be taken.

"Recluse" seems a bit harsh to me, suggesting as it does a person who never associates with other human beings. What we have in Ditko is a very gifted gentleman who refuses interviews and convention appearances and wide interaction with the comic book community and personal publicity. But dozens of folks from that community (including me, years ago) have visited him in his studio or spoken with him in comic book company offices and such.

Yeah, he's never been interviewed in the accepted sense. That's if you don't count a couple of brief Q-and-A things he did for fanzines many years ago. Also, a few years ago, two separate individuals were telling people they'd recorded long phone conversations with Ditko, and they were guardedly letting out tapes. I wouldn't count those as interviews, either. (And don't bother asking if I know where you can get copies. I don't. I refused to accept one because I thought, and still think, it's a slimy and probably illegal thing to do.)

But the man has certainly discussed with others why he left Marvel Comics, even if he has sometimes claimed in print that he hasn't. He was unhappy because he believed Marvel's then-owner was reneging on certain promises about sharing in the revenues of the characters Ditko co-created, Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. He was upset with the way his comics were then produced, feeling that he was doing most of the writing work on the comics he did with Stan Lee, but that Lee — as dialogue writer — was getting too much of the credit and money. (Marvel's two other best artists of the period, Jack Kirby and Wally Wood — both good friends of Ditko's — felt the same way.) There were also personality clashes between Lee and Ditko — they didn't speak for the last eighteen months or so of their "collaboration" — and Ditko was displeased by many of the creative choices Stan was making, treating Spider-Man as a morally-confused, troubled protagonist. Ditko, as was obvious from his subsequent work, didn't like heroes who didn't rigidly adhere to his own interpretation of good and evil, black and white. But Stan, of course, was the editor and had the last word.

Ditko told me all that in his studio in 1970, not long after he quit. He's said it to others and I also think it's pretty easy to perceive in his other comics and in the occasional essays he's written for the fan press. He may write things like "My reasons are my own and I've never divulged them to anyone" but we don't have to believe that. Besides, what other reasons could there have been? He didn't quit Marvel in 1966 because he didn't like the ties Stan was wearing in the office.

Jonathan Ross is quite a brilliant man so I'll presume his documentary doesn't presume there's some dark, unfathomable mystery why someone walks out of a company and refuses to ever work for them again…a vow Ditko kept until 1979 when Charlton, the main company that employed him after Marvel, cut back on buying. (Even then when Ditko returned, he steadfastly declined to draw his old co-creations, Spider-Man or Dr. Strange. Many tried to convince him and a few writers even snuck them into scripts for a panel or two, only to have Ditko politely refuse.) In any case, I think it's time to bury this myth that Ditko's reasons for quitting are unknowable, even if he says they are. They were pretty much the same reasons that anyone quits a job like that.

By the way: I went to look up one Ditko fact on Wikipedia and spotted an error there. I don't know how to correct an entry so I'd appreciate it if someone else could fix this line in their page on Ditko…

In 1968, Charlton editor Dick Giordano moved to DC Comics. Steve Ditko, and several other artists and writers in Giordano's stable, moved with him.

That's the way it keeps getting reported and it's wrong. Ditko was hired by DC before Giordano. The editor of Ditko's first comic for DC (Showcase #73, the first Beware the Creeper) was Murray Boltinoff. In fact, it was in part because Ditko gave him a recommendation that DC management decided to hire Giordano, who then joined up and became editor of several comics, Ditko's among them.

Fred Kaplan reports on today's testimony by Petraeus and Crocker. I agree with him. It was all about as predictable as me linking to a Fred Kaplan article.

Okay, another Jack Benny clip. This is from a 1969 TV show hosted by Liberace. It's not a great bit but it's always interesting to watch Benny, even in a not-great bit. He takes his time. He works the pauses. He keeps his attitude perfectly intact. One of the things that makes it play is that the director wisely did it all in one take with no edits and so didn't monkey with the performers' timing. The minute anyone started to monkey with Benny's rhythm, it threw everything off. Even on his own show, they didn't always know that and there were some horrendous edits in the ones he did on film and in his later specials that were done on tape. Nice to see that someone was smart enough not to do it in this segment…

I started to write a post about today's Iraq testimony and then I came across this paragraph from the famed blogger, Atrios…

This has been said a million times in a million different ways, but the whole point of this exercise is to ensure that Bush's war continues until it's time for him to cut brush permanently. The surge can't have worked because then it could start ending, and the surge can't be not working because then it would a tragic waste of lives and money, so the surge is working just a little bit…but might work a little bit more soon!

That's it, really. The folks arguing what we should do there — especially the ones who want us to stay — don't really care that much what happens to Iraq. Most of them wouldn't know a Sunni from a Shia. George W. Bush decided we should be in Iraq and no force on Earth can get him to admit that might have been a mistake. So it's all about keeping us there until someone else gets us out and Bush can say, "It would have worked but my successor chose to cut and run."

The Phil Spector/Lana Clarkson murder case has gone to the jury. Spector has denied that he told a reporter that his fate was "in the hands of twelve people who voted for George Bush." I guess that means he's not too confident of the outcome.

In the meantime, I'm getting concerned. It's been a little over forty minutes and we don't yet have a verdict. I'm going to continue planning my killing spree. Just in case.

General David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker will testify before Congress and report on how things are going in Iraq and how they recommend that we handle matters in the future. I'll bet George Bush is worried sick that they won't say that The Surge is showing definite signs of progress and that we need to give it more time.

It was revealed on a panel at the Baltimore Comic Convention so I guess I should post it here. DC Comics, as you may know, publishes a fine comic that continues the adventures of Will Eisner's The Spirit. Darwyn Cooke has been writing and drawing it but he's departing the book. That's all old news. The new news is that while its next artist has not yet been announced, the writing will be handled by Sergio Aragonés (the plots) and me (the words). I'll tell you more about it when there's more to tell.

Also, I recently completed the script for a new eight-page story of Crossfire, the comic that Dan Spiegle and I did for several years. Dan is currently drawing the story which will appear in a forthcoming anthology comic. I'll fill you in on it shortly.

And while I'm plugging my comic book projects: The 25th Anniversary Groo Special — the first Groo in quite some time — will be arriving in comic book shops this week. It will be followed in short order by a mini-series called Groo: Hell on Earth, which will run four issues. And then that will be followed by the long-awaited "Groo Meets Conan" mini-series. I don't know what we're calling it officially but that's pretty much what it is. Groo's going to meet Conan and may the best barbarian win!

Robert Spina, who often sends me great links that I can pass on to you folks, called my attention to this video. What can I say? It made me laugh.

Senator Larry Craig, who will soon be just Larry Craig, is filing papers to have his guilty plea overturned. According to this article, "He said he was under stress and pleaded guilty only to put the matter behind him."

So, uh, how'd that plan work out?

My friend Len Wein sends this amazing bit of synchronicity…or whatever it is…

Under the category of "Truth is inevitably stranger than fiction", I went to check out the New York Times article you linked to today with the slide show showing us all the places where Stan Lee has lived in his life, and I was astonished to discover that the apartment building he and brother Larry lived in as teens, specifically 1720 University Avenue in the Bronx, was also the same building where I lived for the first seven years of my life.

Now what are the odds of that?

Better than even money, I'll tell you that. What an amazing coinky-dink. (For those of you who don't know, Len is a writer-editor who followed in Stan's footsteps to the point of writing many of the same characters — like Spider-Man, Thor and The Hulk — and serving for a time as editor-in-chief of Marvel.) Len writes a longer account of the above on his weblog.

And you're probably thinking what I was thinking…and the answer is that I called and asked him and we don't know if it was the same apartment. The Weins moved when Len was seven and he doesn't even recall what floor they lived on. But he's going to ask an aged relative and maybe we'll find out. That would be just too weird, even for comic book writers.

Curtis Burga, a reader of this site, writes…

I agree that it's always good policy to download your email to your hard drive. This ensures you have your own copy of emails sent to you (as well as copies of what you have sent! also important!) But I have found it a good policy as well to leave copies of mail on the server as well. I have had to change/upgrade/repair many a PC and hard drive over the years, and if you don't have backups of your mail, a lot of important attachments, letters, etc, go bye bye.

Curtis suggests that you engage the option that most offline e-mail programs have that allows you to download your mail and leave a copy on the server. I have what I think is a better idea. Get yourself a free e-mail account with a service like GMail. In fact, GMail works great for this. You would use this account only for e-mail backups.

With many Internet Service Providers, there's an option to have your e-mail go into a "box" on their server but to also be forwarded or copied to another e-mail address. Set this option to copy every incoming e-mail to this special GMail account and just let the backups pile up there. They may come in handy for obvious reasons if your hard drive crashes. They may come in real handy if you accidentally delete a message you need. And there will probably even be a moment when you're out and you need some information from a recent e-mail but you can't access it since it's on your computer at hand. You can log into the GMail account and read it there. It's a nice safety precaution and it doesn't cost you a cent.

About once a month, someone writes to ask me if there's a great piece of software for writing comic book scripts. My stock answer, which I've been cutting 'n' pasting into replies for many a year now goes something like this…

No, I'm afraid there's no software out there I can recommend for the writing of comic book scripts. I work in Microsoft Word using a set of macros that I wrote for myself years ago. They're not perfect (neither are my scripts) and I don't give them out to anyone because I'd have to write a long set of instructions on how to use them and you still wouldn't find them to be ideal.

I answered the question again tonight and it got me to wondering: Am I outta date on this? Is there great software that will automate the task of funnybook scripting? And if there isn't, why isn't there? I don't think it would be a hard thing to craft, especially if you did it as a Word template and knew how they work. Movie Magic Screenwriter, which is what I use for the writing of TV and movie scripts, has a comic book script template but it's not very useful for that purpose. It doesn't automatically number pages or panels, for instance.

Oddly enough, in all the years I've been writing comics and hanging around with others who do this, I can't recall a lot of discussion about software…and none at all in the last fifteen years or so. Anyone have a thought on this?

As I occasionally mention here, I feed a veritable zoo of stray creatures in my backyard. Above is a photo I snapped a little while ago of two of the four cats who turn up nightly to enjoy the complementary offering of Friskies.

The cat on the right is a slow-moving, elderly animal who seems to have trouble seeing and who somehow got an awful gash on the side of his/her head. It seems to be healing but the cat has a heightened sense of danger. If I so much as cough within earshot, it sprints for the hills. It has never been particularly friendly but I don't think it was that nervous before the injury.

The kitten on the left was equally antsy when it began showing up in my yard around the end of June. It was tiny then. As it's grown larger, it's gotten a bit more friendly and actually allowed a bit of petting one night last week. For the most part though, it acts terrified of everyone and everything.

Two months ago, the kitten had quite an ordeal. The morning my friend Carolyn and I left for the Comic-Con in San Diego, I was loading my car in the garage when the kitten wandered in. It saw me, panicked and ran for a hiding place behind some debris in a corner. I chased it out, continued loading the car and then when we left, of course, the garage door was closed and locked. I was unaware that at some point, the kitten snuck back into the garage and hid. When we left, I was unaware I was trapping the kitten inside.

That was on Wednesday morning. Sunday evening when we returned and put the car back in the garage, we noticed that a bottle of water I'd left on a counter was now on the floor and empty. There was also cat excrement about. The kitten had been in there for about four and a half days.

There was no food available to it in my garage — actually, there were sacks of grub but they were in the packaging and in a cabinet — but fortunately, I'd left a bottle of drinking water out with the top loose and the kitten managed to knock it off the counter and dislodge the cap. In spite of a lack of chow, the little cat did not seem harmed by the experience. It was panicked when we found it in the same hiding place it had used on Wednesday and it ran madly around the garage, eventually finding the open door. We immediately put out a large dish of food which was quickly devoured.

The kitten — we won't be able to call it that much longer — still comes around every night and some evenings, it seems to be acting as a kind of Honor Guard or Protector to the older cat. I don't see any family resemblance between the felines. I think it's just a cat thing.

One of the New York Times magazine sections is featuring a "slide show" of past residences of Stan Lee. Of special note is Photo #7, which is of Stan writing in his backyard. The caption says he's about 30, which would make this photo 1951, which I don't think is right. Looks later to me. Anyway, thanks to Tom Galloway for letting me know about this.

The 2007 Chabad "To Life" Telethon airs this evening in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and on this website, where I bet the streaming video won't stream so well. Chabad Telethons aren't the same without Jan Murray as host but they still put on a darn good show for a worthy cause. Here's a two minute commercial for tonight's extravaganza…