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…

1. They would wind up in some warehouse somewhere in the publisher's control and that publisher (or someone) would figure out how to sell them overseas…but now and then, publishers tried repackaging them — perhaps in plastic bags — and selling them through discount outlets.  There wasn't a lot of money to be made no matter what they did because someone had to be paid to sort through all those returns and pull out the ones in decent condition, which by this time might be a small percentage.  Bagging and redistribution cost money too so the bulk of the returns wound up being pulped and the paper was recycled in some way.
2. Since it cost money to ship comics back to that warehouse somewhere, some local distributors didn't.  As per an agreement with their national distributors, they would have a bunch of paid-as-little-as-possible workers rip the covers off.  The rest of the comic would be pulped locally and the covers would be shipped back to the national distributor as proof that the comics had not been sold.
3. Some local distributors would just strip the top third of the cover off and send those back.  This option had all the same problems. Someone had to deface the comics. They had to be counted on both ends of the transaction…though sometimes, they would just weigh the crates of covers or partial covers. This was not the most accurate way to do things.
4. More and more through the sixties, many went to the "affidavit" method.  The local distributor would arrange for all the returns to be pulped and they would just inform others up the chain of how many they'd sold (again, sometimes by weight) and how many they'd pulped, and the national distributor and the publisher would just have to take their word for it, relying perhaps on spot checks.

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.

As I mentioned here, I'm having some emergency repair work done on my house owing to a water pipe that seems to be exactly 13 years older than the current President of the United States. There will be workers and insurance people and general chaos here for a period probably exceeding this weekend…plus I have two scripts I need to finish. So I shall have very little time at the keyboard here and what I will have needs to go towards those scripts.

Given the wonderful response I got from You Folks Out There when I asked for donations a few months back, I feel some guilt when I'm not posting new content here. But I have some "encore" pieces I can post and a few inventory things I've written…and video links, when I don't wax poetic about them, take very little time. Oh — and I have a long post about comic book distribution in the old days that I can probably finish if I can devote twenty minutes to it. So there'll be some stuff here; just not as much as I'd like.

Thank you for understanding. And as Alton Brown says when he tells you how to spend three days making a pot roast, "Your patience will be rewarded."

Johnny Carson did his last Tonight Show on 5/22/92 and it was not in his usual format. The night before, he did his last show in the traditional format and, taking no chances, he brought in the two surest-to-score guests he could think of — Robin Williams and Bette Midler. Here is what Mr. Williams did that night. He did not disappoint…

CBS Television City is, at least for now, on the corner of Fairfax Avenue and Beverly Boulevard here in Los Angeles. James Corden occasionally does these things called "Crosswalk Musicals" where he and a cast of actors run out onto Beverly and do scenes from musical comedies while the light is red for east and westbound traffic at that intersection. I live close enough to where they do this that the traffic jams they create sometimes impede me getting somewhere.

There's kind of an unwritten rule in this town — or maybe it's even written somewhere — that if you're making a TV show or movie, you're allowed to inconvenience anyone you need to inconvenience. Where you have to get to…what you have to do…could not possibly be as important as filming an exterior shot for a TV program.

On 11/6/22 on this blog, I wrote about Mr. Corden's little street theater and I made up a little map to show you which intersection it was. I took an image from Google Maps and added his head to the map, thereby creating this graphic…

I don't know if me doing that was the cause…no, let me rephrase that: I'm pretty sure that me doing that was not the cause — but Google Maps has now added an identification of that intersection to their map…

It has been announced that Corden will leave The Late Late Show in Spring of 2023. I have heard absolutely nothing about who might replace him…or even if CBS might try a different form of programming in that time slot. All I know is that his successor will probably not be darting out to Beverly Boulevard to perform a scene from Cats while I'm trying to get someplace.

That's if his or her show is even done at TV Television City or whatever is there in the future. It's being turned into some sort of huge entertainment and retail complex. I've lost track of exactly how big it will be and what will happen there but it sounds like a monster in size…and traffic. In a way, it's a shame that Mr. Corden is leaving…

…because the way things are likely to go, he and his merry band of thespians could probably go out onto Beverly then and do the entirety of Les Misérables with full sets and costumes. Because none of the cars will be able to move anyway.

Oh — and thanks to Google Maps, I also know that in the last couple of weeks, no one has given an online review of the SureStay Hotel By Best Western Beverly Hills…which is not in Beverly Hills.  But that's okay because they're across the street from "Television City in Hollywood" which has never been in Hollywood and, as noted, may not be anywhere for much longer.

And though I've never been any closer to the SureStay than buying gas at the 76 station across the street, I know one thing about it. I'm reasonably sure that it's usually full of outta-towners hoping to get on The Price is Right and win something.

I was up half the night reading Donald Trump's tax returns. A $600,000 deduction each year for bronzer as a business expense? Good luck with that.

My posting schedule, like my sleeping schedule, will be all askew for the next week or three due to sudden construction work needed on my house. If there's suddenly a dearth of new posts here for a while, you needn't write and inquire if I'm okay. It's just construction work. It can have that effect on anyone's life.

There are actual copies in the United States of Volume 8 of Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips. Amazon says they'll be shipping them December 13 and they'll also be shipping the box set of Volumes 7 and 8. We sent this thing to press a long, long time ago and it took forever to get them printed and twice as long to get the books bound and shipped to this country. I believe they had a dolphin swimming them over to us, one copy at a time. Order with as much confidence as you can muster.

The first issue of the new 4-issue Groo mini-series — Gods Against Groo — will be in stores in three weeks…and when the construction workers allow it, I'm working on the first issue of the next 4-issue Groo mini-series today. I hope to not be able to draw any inspiration for our usual jokes about incompetence and destruction from those workers.

Jeremiah, don't write and ask me where on the Internet I found Donald Trump's tax returns. It was a joke. For now.

A few years ago, the Snopes site fact-checked the story about Billy Joel giving away front row tickets to avid fans. They say it's Mostly True. Thanks, Bob Gillian.

The world premiere of the movie Grand Hotel was at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood on May 2, 1932. Here from that evening is newsreel-type film that has recently been restored and colorized. Amazing…

So far today, I've come across this three times on different social media sites. I don't know where it's from but it feels like it's true. I hope it's true…

Singer Billy Joel was disappointed that the best seats at his concerts were always full of unimpressed rich people.

"The guy's there with the girlfriend…'Okay, Piano Man, entertain me,' and they don't do anything. It was a drag and you'd hear all the kids yelling in the back and you know they didn't get a shot at those tickets," Joel explains.

That is why he decided to create a new policy for those front seats. He now holds the tickets and sends his road crew to the back of the room to bring people from the worst seats to the front rows.

"This way you've got people in the front row that are really happy to be there, real fans," he added.

Assuming it's true, good for Billy Joel. It's especially impressive when you consider what those seats in the front could sell for.

I've lately been using my otherwise-dormant Instagram account to just post images of the covers of comic books I remember owning 'n' loving as a kid. I'm not sure what the cut-off date is for when I stopped being a kid…or even if I've reached it yet. But I won't be posting anything published after the vast majority of 32-page comics went from costing twelve cents to fifteen. It's as good a dividing line as any.

Some companies had flirted with fifteen earlier, then looked at the sales figures and scurried back to twelve. The industry-wide move to fifteen started around March of 1969 at DC and was followed a few months later by Marvel and other publishers. The only exception was Gilberton with their Classics Illustrated line which had always kind of been published in a different reality with different means of distribution. As it happens, the first comic I've posted today in the gallery on Instagram is a Classics Illustrated.

Also, I've started to receive requests from folks that I post certain issues they remember. No. This is not about the comics you remember. It's about the comics I remember. There's nothing stopping you from using your Instagram account — or even opening one — and posting the ones you remember.

I am though trying to make some point about how there was a time when comics were not as much about heroic adventure and had more talking animals. That point could be made clearer if I also posted some romance comics or hot rod comics (Charlton had a number of hot rod comics) but I wasn't a follower of them back then and I didn't buy many war titles or westerns. Just imagine more of these in the mix.

I post two a day and the images above are the ones from yesterday. It's not always the case but I do remember where I acquired many comics from my childhood and there's a bit of a story about each of these two.

I've written before here about the Don't Give Up the Ship comic book. The other comic book came into my possession in a swap with a friend of mine named Rick. This would have been around when I was eight. Somehow, I had gotten two copies of an issue of Action Comics that Rick didn't have and he had two copies of this issue of Jimmy Olsen that I didn't have.

Would that all trade agreements were that simple. A year or so later, Rick decided he was too old to be reading comic books — My God, he was almost eleven — and I bought his entire collection — about two hundred comics — for a nickel each. Rupert Murdoch has probably never felt as proud of an acquisition as I did. And on a percentage basis, mine may have been more profitable.

Yeah, I know: Not much of a story. Sorry. I may have some better ones about some of the other comics I post on Instagram. You can view the gallery at this link. Do check in often.

This is another song for which I had to rewrite/launder lyrics when it was performed in a talent show at my school. It's "Young Girl" by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, a group that for no visible reason often wore outfits that were a cross between "flower power" hippies and Union soldiers in the Civil War. I don't understand it and I don't think I need to.

Wikipedia says this about this very, very successful song…

The song is sung from the point of view of a man who has become distressed upon finding out that the girl he is with, contrary to the first impression she had made upon him, is actually younger than the legal age of consent. He is asking her to leave before things go any further: "Get out of here / before I have the time / to change my mind / 'cause I'm afraid we'll go too far."

So that's why I had to rewrite lyrics for it to be performed onstage at University High, even though at lunch hour every day, you could hear the original version blasting out from transistor radios all over campus.

What makes this record work, I think, is that Mr. Puckett had — and reportedly, still has as he's still performing in his seventies — one of the best voices singing this kind of music then. And lest you watch the video below and think he's lousy at lip-sync, I believe this is one of those cases where someone took the film of a live performance and laid the record over it. That's why they don't match very well…

Back in this message, we discussed the announcement that The Phantom of the Opera — the longest-running musical on Broadway now and probably forever — would close February 18, 2023. And in that post, I said…

It would not surprise me if this announcement sparks a surge of folks who want to see it again or even for the first time. And it would not surprise me if that surge caused the closing date to be delayed.

And today we have this in The New York Times…

The Phantom of the Opera is going to continue haunting Broadway a while longer. The musical — the longest-running show in Broadway history — announced in September that it would close in February, ending a storied run shortly after celebrating its 35th anniversary. But immediately after the closing was announced, ticket sales spiked. And last week, when Broadway was bolstered by Thanksgiving travelers, Phantom enjoyed its highest-grossing week ever: $2.2 million.

Thanks to Rob Rose for alerting me to the news. I am, of course, unsurprised.

Did you see this?

Frontier Airlines will no longer let customers call a phone number in order to speak with a live agent. And while the budget airline is known for its cost-cutting measures, most major airlines still operate customer service lines. Customers will instead have to rely on other ways to contact the airline: a chatbot on its website, a live chat available 24/7, its social media channels and even WhatsApp, according to Frontier spokesperson, Jennifer De La Cruz, who confirmed the news to NPR on Saturday.

There are several possible reactions to this news. One is that anyone who flies Frontier oughta know that getting the absolute lowest price gets you the absolute lowest level of service. Another is that this development isn't that surprising. Almost every company I've dealt with for years seems to be figuring out ways that the Internet, cell phones and other technological marvels can enable them to hire (and therefore, pay) fewer human beings.

Back in February of 2008, my dear friend Carolyn and I spent an agonizing day at LAX because we missed a flight and The System — this was United Airlines — didn't work for rolling us over to another flight. There was a Customer Service Desk at the airport. There was a Customer Service phone number I could call.  But overall, the experience probably wasn't that much different from what I'll experience if I fly Frontier Airlines without Customer Service. Which I probably won't do.

The problem is that no matter how well the programmers consider every contigency and build it into their system, something will happen that their planning doesn't anticipate…and it will probably happen to me. When I call some companies to complain about something that's gone awry with an order, there's usually an online, don't-talk-to-anyone way of reporting one bad employee but not a problem with the company itself. I don't like this trend. And I'd complain about it but the way they're set up, the system won't allow you to complain about the system. I assume that's deliberate.

So I clicked on the details to tell me how to get 4 bottles for $5.00 and there were no details there. There was no explanation of any kind. So I don't know how to get 4 bottles for $5.00 and I'll have to pay $1.25 each for them.  Damn the luck.

I still see a lot of online discussion, especially in forums favored by comedians, about Leo Gallagher, the member of their profession who died November 11. Everyone seems to agree he was thorny and sometimes abrasive, and that he had an awful lot of negative things to say about most other comedians. Where there seems to be a fair amount of disagreement is over how good a comedian he was and whether his act was, at times, racist and sexist and a few other "ist"s.

I didn't see him in the last few decades so I don't feel qualified to have an opinion on some of this. As I wrote here though, I was real impressed with a performance of his I saw a long, long time ago.

I am amused though that some are saying that, for good or ill, there was no one else like him. There actually was someone almost exactly like Leo Gallagher. There was, for a time, a second Gallagher. His brother Ron cloned the look, feel and some of the material and toured as "Gallagher Too." At first, it was authorized, then it wasn't, then it was the subject of a long, bitter court battle and the two brothers not speaking for years.

Marc Maron has put online the podcast he did with the first and genuine Gallagher in 2011 — the interview that got so heated, Gallagher walked off it. I listened again to some of it and I thought Maron was being a bit too harsh with his guest but the guest was pretty harsh before it got to a two-way harshness. Maron may not keep this available for free listening forever so if you wanna hear it, hear it here and now.

But you want to know what Gallagher was really like? Really, really like? Well, my buddy Bill Kirchenbauer knew him as well as any non-relative could. A few days after his pal died, Bill spent a half-hour talking about the guy. This is about as accurate a picture as you could ever get of the late Leo…