Still cutting in and out. It's kinda frightening how it slows up my entire life. Repair guy's due between 3:00 and 5:00 this afternoon, they say.

My Internet connection has been cutting in and out all day. I'm connected. I'm not connected. I'm connected. I'm not connected. A man is supposed to come tomorrow to figure out what the problem is.

While I'm connected, I thought I'd post something to just mention that I may not be posting much here until this is cleared up. E-mail may also not be as voluminous as I might like. But all will someday be well.

And now I'd better hurry and post this before I get unconnected again.

Hey, how about an encore from Tom Lehrer? This is "National Brotherhood Week," also with one line changed from his original recording.

I'm hearing from several sources that the Popeye DVD set is selling quite decently. This is good to hear as it may inspire more studios to haul classic animation from the vaults for home video release and (big AND) spend the bucks to fully restore the material. This is not only great news for us consumers but it's beneficial to film fans as yet unborn. Over the years, a shameful percentage of the movies made have been lost. Negatives were allowed to rot and prints were lost because current management — whoever was in charge at the time — didn't see an immediate financial benefit to restoration and preservation.

That has changed in the era of home video, DVDs and digital storage. The negatives to the Fleischer Popeye cartoons can rot, fire can destroy the vaults, every 35mm or 16mm can of film can be thrown away…but the material will endure. I'm happy to have this collection but even happier to think that no matter what happens, they'll never be unavailable and they'll never look any worse than they do on this new DVD set. And like I said, they look pretty darned good there.

Remember that silly article by Journalism Prof Michael Skube in which he said that bloggers don't do anything that approaches real reporting? Well, here's Jay Rosen to take that argument apart, piece by piece.

Since I'm seen briefly in an interview on it, I keep getting wonderful compliments on the new DVD collection of early Popeye cartoons. I'm happy to accept all accolades even though I couldn't have had much less to do with the project. Many folks, some of whose names are unknown to me, all worked with the common goal of showing the world how this kind of DVD should be done.

It starts, of course, with superior material…and the Popeye cartoons produced by the Max Fleischer Studio were about as good as any cartoons ever produced anywhere. Later Popeye cartoons by others make it easy to forget this, but there was a creative energy in that studio that is still amazing: Gags piled on gags piled on gags. I find a lot of the non-Popeye Fleischer shorts to be a bit on the hollow side — everything moves and everything's funny but all that action is a bit spineless, hung on premises and characters that don't quite deserve it. But the squint-eyed sailor (and later, when the Fleischers got hold of him, Superman) was more than up to carrying a story…at last, a star worthy of all that animation.

Also making it easy to overlook the Fleischer Popeyes has been a general unavailability…and when you do come across them, you usually see chopped-up, washed-out prints. One of the stunning things about this new DVD set is the sheer quality of the imagery. I'm not sure if these cartoons looked this good when they were originally shown in theaters but I know they've never looked this good on TV or previous home video releases. "Restored" doesn't begin to describe what has been done to these cartoons. I can't recall another home video release that has more delighted animation buffs.

So, uh, anyone know how it's selling? I haven't heard and I'm worried. Popeye hasn't been as visible lately as some cartoon characters…and like I suggested above, even the folks who know him are more familiar with his lesser adventures. They just plain don't know how good a good Popeye cartoon can be…and if this thing doesn't sell decently, we all lose out. There are a lot of us who lobby home video companies to unlock the treasures of their film vaults, to present those treasures in a complete offering, to spend the time and money to restore the material to the best-possible condition, and to create commentary tracks and other extras. If this Popeye DVD doesn't yield a significant profit, we're going to hear that it can't be done for other material because "that Popeye DVD didn't do well." That won't be the reason but it'll be the excuse to not bring other home video releases of classic animation up to this standard.

If you're like to order the best animation package ever put out on DVD, click here.

I dunno about you but I'm getting pretty weary of folks who go to Iraq for 48 hours, most of which is spent taking a well-guarded tour that has been carefully planned by their hosts…and then they come back and claim expertise on how the situation in Iraq is going. To me, that's like having a condo salesman show you the model unit and then deciding you're an expert on how the whole building was constructed.

This applies to folks who come back saying the war is going great and the soldiers there are all behind it just as much as it applies to those who report that it's a total disaster and every person in a uniform told them so. It's anecdotal reporting that has everything to do with where they went, what they were shown, who they spoke with, etc. I'm much more interested in the views of people who've been there for some length of time and went, not as tourists to be shown around but as working grunts, be they troops or reporters.

This op-ed in The New York Times is by seven infantrymen and noncommissioned officers who are completing 15-month tours of duty over there. They don't think much of the war effort or the optimism that its supporters are touting in the press…and while their views are hardly inarguable, I think they're a lot more significant than the likes of Joe Lieberman, reporting how well things are going after he spends a day or two over there, being shown areas that will enable him to come back and say it's a trip to the Westfield Mall. So read that piece and then read what my man Fred Kaplan has to say about it.

Here's Tom Lehrer — he's appearing here all week, don't forget to tip your waiters — with his "Pollution" song. There's a line change from the version on his album. In the original record, which I believe was recorded in San Francisco, he sang "The breakfast garbage that you throw into the bay / They drink at lunch in San Jose." When Mr. Lehrer performed the number in other cities, he would always adjust the geography to correspond. In this film, he does a more generic version.

Several folks, starting with Nat Gertler, have sent me the credits on the new Marvel stamps. I think one or two are still wrong but most of them have been corrected as per the information posted here. This is a good thing and those of you who helped with the identifications have reason to be proud.

The Marvel Super Heroes stamps that we discussed back here (and here and here and here) are now out from the U.S. Post Office. Has anyone seen a sheet of them yet? I'm told they have artist credits on the back and I'm wondering if anyone made all the necessary corrections on the original list they issued.

Barbara Boxer is one of my two senators, which is not to say I've ever had much enthusiasm for her. I do though agree with this article in which she warns of a Republican move to change the way California's electoral votes are distributed. It would shift us to a system which (surprise, surprise) would benefit Republican presidential candidates. I can't believe this won't be defeated and it should be defeated. But it just points up how silly the whole electoral college is — as if the 2000 election didn't prove it by "electing" the candidate who got fewer votes.

Back in 1962, Metal Men was my favorite comic book for about an hour and a half. It was the creation of a prolific writer-editor at DC named Robert Kanigher who was often hailed as the fastest writer of comic books who has ever lived. His speed may have been because of his unique approach to writing, which was to sit down at the typewriter and just start filling the paper with whatever came to mind. That, he often insisted, was how a truly brilliant writer created his work. An inferior writer — like, for example, anyone else who wrote comic books and was not Robert Kanigher — would have to "plot" — i.e., figure out where the story was heading.

Or at least, that's how he explained it to me on two of the four or five separate occasions when we met, and also in some of our letters. We corresponded for a time in the late sixties and in a moment, I'll be excerpting one of his stream-of-conscious epistles for you.

I never knew how seriously to take Mr. Kanigher's diatribes and pontifications. It was especially hard to separate the self-loathing from the genuine arrogance he often seemed to voice towards others. But his writing did have a certain energy that a friend of mine once likened to careening out of control down a hill. It always got you there and there was a certain excitement to the journey, even if it ended with you crashing into a brick wall. It didn't always. Some of the best comics ever done have been created at a breakneck clip with more instinct than careful planning. When Kanigher was on-target with an idea — and maybe even when he had a solid notion of where he was heading, in spite of his claimed abstinence from "plotting" — he wrote some superb stories, mostly for DC's war comics. Then again, when he didn't have an idea, he wrote it, anyway. For around twenty years, he scripted Wonder Woman and it was one of those comics I collected because I collected everything…but I found most of them unreadable. Or sometimes, when he crafted a great creation like his Enemy Ace series, he'd then keep writing the same story over and over until either he or the readers got sick of it. Usually, it was the readers.

In spite of all this, I admired Kanigher's writing greatly, especially when he came up with Metal Men. Over at Comic Book Resources, Brian K. Eason has a brief history of the comic and I wanted to add the following to the historical record. This is an excerpt from a letter Kanigher wrote to me in 1968. He's referring to how the strip made its debut in Showcase, which was a "try-out" comic DC published at the time. I'll add in a few notes so you can understand what the man is saying…

Showcase was supposed to be a place to test new ideas. It turned into a place to test editors in hand to hand combat. Each of us in turn [had to] come up with a new comic to fill it and woe unto you if yours was no hit. In editorial meetings, I.D. [Irwin Donenfeld, the company's editorial director and son of its owner] would proclaim your latest entry as a flop. No numbers were given, just a general thumbs down. This was meat for the others to pounce upon and so would come the lambastes of the other editors with [Superman editor Mort] Weisinger leading the I told you sos. Woe unto you. Your book failed and you failed or so said all the other editors who had never created a success.

One day I.D. comes into my office. Showcase has an emergency. The book for the next issue was unpublishable. The editor had failed before his book had even gone to press and there were legal problems. I.D. says he has to send a Showcase off to press in two weeks and there is nothing drawn. There is no idea. I am the fastest writer in the office so it's up to me. Whatever I want to do will be the next Showcase.

I have many ideas that could be in it and I have a free hand to do whatever I want. How often is a writer in that position? I run through some possibilities and realize I have painted myself into a corner. My ideas are too innovative and too different for Showcase where readers have been trained to expect the predictable. Take an old failure, dress it up in new clothes and call it a new idea. I had done that with Flash and it had rejuvenated the company. I should do it again but cannot bring myself to but I also cannot bring myself to throw away one of the truly innovative ideas into that arena. It might not sell and then [would come] the meeting with everyone celebrating the failure of R.K.

I move to the middle ground. It will be a new idea but not a new idea. I.D. said that readers liked robots on covers so I began to build robots. I became Dr. Will Magnus building robots and soon they got away from me the way Magnus' robots got away from him. I had one night to write the script and did, then I sat back and read it to discover what I had written. The parallels told me I was on to something. The robots had gotten out of my control just as they had gotten out of his control.

I should next have called in my fastest artist, [Joe] Kubert. Instead, I called my slowest, Ross Andru. The robots in my mind looked like they had been drawn by Andru so it had to be him. I told him I needed the book drawn in a week. Andru, a frightened man, told me it could not possibly be done and then proceeded to do it. The robots had taken control of him as well. They took control of I.D. demanding more issues of Showcase. Usually a new book got three issues because by then you knew if readers were taking to it. Metal Men got four. The sales on the first were so strong that I.D. could not believe them and ordered the fourth just to make sure. I already knew and had added a new Metal Men comic to my schedule. The robots were in control as they will some day be in control of us all.

The four Showcase issues of Metal Men were Kanigher at his finest and so were the first ten or so of the ongoing Metal Men bi-monthly that followed. But then the other Kanigher kicked in and he ran out of ideas, writing the same story over and over, turning cliché characters into ever-greater clichés.

DC issued a hardcover collection last year that presented, in color, the four Showcase issues and the first five issues of the Metal Men comic book. They're about to come out with a big black-and-white volume that will contain the four issues of Showcase, the first sixteen issues of Metal Men and one odd issue of The Brave and the Bold in which they teamed up with The Atom. You might want to give one collection or the other a peek. It's pretty good stuff up to a point.

Tom Lehrer favors us with another tune…

This article in the L.A. Times is all about the "slabbing" of comic books…sealing old issues in plastic so that their condition will not go down and their value will go up. Within the hobby, it's a controversial endeavor, though the "con" side seems to not go much past the notion that if something is designed to be read, it's a shame to render it unreadable. Maybe so. But if I owned a pristine Action Comics #1 and I had a sudden yearning to read it, I don't think I'd go pawing through that copy. I think I'd make do with a reprint.

What I think bothers some about slabbing is that it really institutionalizes the idea that rising back issue prices are mostly smoke 'n' mirrors. If you pay a thousand dollars for an old comic — let alone tens or hundreds of thousands — it's already not a reading experience. It's an investment experience predicated on the hope/knowledge that someone else will pay more some day for your copy. Ever since a mint condition Superman #1 topped a hundred bucks and we all marvelled at anyone paying even that much for one, that's what that part of collecting has been all about. Slabbing merely means we have to admit it.

Though why anyone would ever slab a copy of Groo the Wanderer is beyond me.

Ken Levine makes a fuss here and again here about one of my good friends, a lovely writer-person named Treva Silverman.