Contrary to recent rumors, we're now hearing that the ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood (which includes my fave place to see a movie — the Cinerama Dome) will not be reopening this year. They're now saying "the latter part of 2023." Drat.

I've been watching old stand-up routines by comedians I like. Here's Jeff Ross from 1998…

The longest-running Broadway musical ever, The Phantom of the Opera, has announced its final performance will be February 18, 2023. 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. But the end is probably in sight.

As we noted here, the next longest-running musical — the revival of Chicago — is 3,643 performances behind Phantom. At eight performances a week, that means it would take a little more than 455 weeks (or close to nine years) after Phantom closes for Chicago to tie that record.

Very busy today. The next installment of the Blackhawk history will be along tonight or maybe tomorrow.

This week, I lunched with former blogger Ken Levine. He's shut down his fine and fun long-running blog but (a) he's still doing his weekly podcasts and (b) the blog is still online and you can still browse it and enjoy that which you read before and that which you missed. Also: I've long resisted requests from people — usually strangers looking to plug something — to do "guest posts" on my blog. I still resist that but if Ken has something he needs or even just wants to say, I'll make an exception for him. And I've added a link to his podcasts in my right-hand margin.

Thanks to all of you who sent in suggestions for my iPhone problems. Some good ideas there and maybe some of them will even work. A few of you reminded me of a guy who used to write me every time I posted a computer problem here. I'd say the "v" key on my keyboard was sticking and ask what to do. This guy would write — and this was his solution to everything — "Throw out that crappy P.C. and buy a MAC, the only decent computer that has ever been made." Sometimes, he predicted that all the makers of P.C.s would be outta business within three years…and he started saying that in 2003. And today, that man is Mike Lindell…

Lastly for now: A few folks overseas have written to ask how they can donate to this blog since they somehow can't do it via PayPal. Well, you could send a check to me at the address over on this page. And again, I thank everyone who gave any amount via any means.

You've probably all seen this clip of Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show interviewing a Trump supporter a few years back. The gentleman thought it was very suspicious that Barack Obama wasn't at his desk in the Oval Office on 9/11. If you haven't seen it, it's in here…and maybe a dozen other places on YouTube. It gets rerun a lot. It was all over social media on the recent anniversary of that awful day.

I think Mr. Klepper owes it to us and to that guy to track him down for a follow-up interview. It shouldn't be hard if he signed a release which contained contact info. Give the fellow a chance to admit he was wrong or to present some hard evidence that Obama was too president when 9/11 happened. Or at least, give this clueless interviewee a nice thank-you present for all the use you've gotten out of that footage.

I like TV theme songs, especially from kids' shows and I like a cappella barbershop-style singing so I like this video by the Ashatones…

• The nice thing about Lindsey Graham is that if you don't like some political position he takes, just wait a while. Sooner or later, he'll say the exact opposite.

Before you read this, you might want to read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3…

George Kashdan left his job as a DC editor in early 1968, just as Editorial Director Irwin Donenfeld was hiring a new editor — Dick Giordano, who had previously been the executive editor at Charlton Comics. Giordano took over some of the comics Kashdan had been editing including Blackhawk. One of his many immediate problems was what the heck to do with that comic. The story arc that turned the combat team into a super-hero team had clearly not worked.

The first day in his new job, Dick was sitting at the desk he'd inherited from Kashdan and…well, wait. I'll let my friend Marv Wolfman tell you what happened. Marv was not yet a professional comic book writer but he soon would be…

I was a huge Blackhawk fan and was livid when they changed the characters into what they called, and we all agreed, were "the Junk-Heap Heroes." I was still a fan producing only fanzines but decided to show them "how it should be done." Julie Schwartz had sent me several comic scripts because I wrote letters to his books. Thanks to them, I knew what a script looked like so I wrote up a story. Yes, I was a part of the MBGA movement — Make Blackhawk Great Again.

I sent it to the comic's editor, knowing for sure it was great. And I never heard back. Weeks went by. No letter back. Continents rose and sank. No letter back.

A year or so passed by and still no response. Eventually, the editor on Blackhawk was replaced with a new editor, Dick Giordano, and on day one, he found a never-opened manila envelope in the back of his desk drawer.

Dick opened it and it was my script. He had met me at a comic con and I had sent him my fanzines so to some extent, he knew me. He called and asked if I still wanted him to read it and I said yes. Dick liked it and bought the story but he assigned the dialog job to Bob Haney, who if memory serves was the current writer on Blackhawk. Still, it was my first sale and I was thrilled.

To this day, I have no clue why the previous editor kept the still-sealed envelope with my script in his desk but never opened it. If he wasn't interested in reading it, why didn't he throw it out?

Marv's script was a really impressive first sale. It was Blackhawk done the way folks like me who loved the old Blackhawk wanted to see the new Blackhawk done.

But Giordano had a problem getting it drawn. The comic's regular artists, Dick Dillin and Chuck Cuidera, were no longer available to him. Dillin, for reasons I'll explain in the next chapter, was now being assigned to super-hero books at DC. I'll also tell you in the next part what became of Chuck Cuidera. A new artist was needed.

Giordano had a thought: The best Blackhawk comics of the forties and early fifties had been drawn by Reed Crandall, who was now living in Wichita, Kansas and doing the occasional art job for Warren's Creepy and Eerie magazines and for a Flash Gordon comic book published by a small firm called King Comics. King had recently shut down so, Dick thought, Mr. Crandall might be in need of work. Dick called Crandall to see if he was available and interested.

Mr. Crandall was both so they agreed on what he would be paid and on the deadline by which he would deliver the finished art, and Giordano mailed the script to Kansas. He was very pleased with how things were working out…and confident that the book, one of the first he was assembling for his new employer, would be very impressive.

And then like Marv Wolfman, he waited. And waited. The deadline came and went with no artwork arriving from Reed Crandall.

With the printer deadline growing near, Dick kept phoning, trying to reach Crandall to find out when he'd be getting the pages. After several days, Crandall finally answered the phone and when Dick told me this story — still trembling a bit from the memory — he said, "I really didn't understand why but he hadn't started on it and was not going to. So I was in deep trouble." Dick was in deeper trouble when he realized that he didn't have a copy of the script — or if he did, couldn't find it…and Bob Haney didn't have a carbon copy either. This was way before computers or even cheap copiers.

First things first, he needed an artist. This was also before FedEx and Dropbox so it would help if the artist lived somewhere near Kansas. That is, assuming Reed Crandall could be persuaded to mail the script to that artist. Dick remembered that while he was in charge at Charlton, there was an artist who lived in Texas who had done some amazing deadline-saving jobs. That artist was Pat Boyette and he lived in San Antonio, a little over 600 miles from Wichita.

The fastest mail at the time was Special Delivery which would take a lot less time to get the script to San Antonio than it would to get it back to New York where the DC offices were located. Dick called Pat, who immediately agreed to drop everything else in his life and to pencil, letter and ink the story as fast as humanly possible. Fortunately, he was a fan of the old Blackhawk comics and had some around so he had reference on the characters.

Also fortunately: When Dick called Reed Crandall, Crandall agreed to send the script via Special Delivery to Pat. While he waited for it to arrive, Pat drew a cover for the book based on Dick's over-the-phone description of the villain and what kind of scene he had in mind. Pat even designed a new title logo for the comic, though the lettering at the bottom was done in New York by Gaspar Saladino.

How long did it take Pat Boyette to draw Blackhawk #242? Marv remembers it as a weekend. Dick thought it was about four days. When I asked Pat about it once, he said, "I have no idea. I just knew I didn't eat or sleep much. It might have been three or four days." To give you some measure of how fast that was, there was another fine artist who worked for Charlton and later worked for DC. His name was Jim Aparo and he would pencil, letter and ink one page a day. He was not considered slow. That was about average.

For that issue of Blackhawk, Pat had to do the cover and a 23 page story. There were two half-page ads in the story and one third-page ad so it was really 21 and two-thirds pages…but even that seems humanly-impossible. And remember: This was a comic about seven heroes plus Lady Blackhawk and a whole lotta villains and airplanes. It wasn't about one guy wandering through the desert.

And yeah, you could see in places it was rushed…but I remember buying this comic and thinking it was terrific. The next issue, which Haney wrote and which Pat had some time to draw, looked even better. That was #243 and it was the last issue of Blackhawk at the time. Marv Wolfman wasn't involved with that issue but having "broken in" with the previous one, he was now positioned to do more for DC Comics…which he did, for Giordano and other editors there. He's had a fabulous career since and it all started because George Kashdan didn't fully clean out his desk.

Axing Blackhawk when they did meant that DC management did not even wait for sales figures on the new "old look" before terminating the book. They just looked at the numbers of the last few super-hero issues and said, "It's done."

Dick did not recall those last two selling well enough to reverse that decision. I have a belief that during this period, DC Management was way too quick to give up on a new comic or even a new version of an old one. One tepid sales report and they'd cancel a book like Anthro or Bat Lash or Secret Six without giving readers a chance to discover all that new wonderment. The return of Blackhawk to its roots might well have been another example of that.

It was, of course, not the end of Blackhawk. It was just the end of Blackhawk for eight years. Our story will continue.

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Dark Horse Comics has announced the release dates for the next Groo mini-series…

The bumbling barbarian Groo has made quite a name for himself, traveling the land and cleaving a path of destruction and cheese dip. He is either so greatly feared or favored wherever he goes, Groo's earthly reputation causes a Groo deity to arise in the heavens! While Earthbound Groo hungers, his Divine Groo alter ego unleashes chaos! Plus, Sergio's legendary back cover Rufferto strips return! Groo: Gods Against Groo #1 (of 4) will be available at comic stores on December 21 2022.

And then you get #2 in January, #3 in February and…well, you can figure out the pattern.

As usual, Sergio Aragonés draws, he and I collaborate on the story and Stan Sakai letters. Groo remains one of the few comic books published today which is lettered the old-fashioned way: A talented calligrapher with pen and ink letters right on the same pieces of illustration board on which the artist draws. No computer involvement. We also have a letters page, which is something you don't see in many comic books these days.

Not so "as usual" is that this mini-series is the first one colored, not by Tom Luth who has been doing that Herculean task since 1983 (!), but by our new colorist, Carrie Strachan. Tom has retired from Groo coloring to pursue other, saner interests and we thank him for his long, superb service. The last Groo story he colored — and I hope it isn't the last ever — is the eight-pager that's appearing in the Comics For Ukraine benefit book. We hate to see Tom depart but we're really happy we found Carrie.

The four-issue Gods Against Groo mini-series is of a piece with two previous Groo mini-serieses — The Fray of the Gods and The Play of the Gods. All three will probably wind up in a big hardcover collection at some point.

Of possible interest is that, while there are a few different ways to count, Gods Against Groo seems to end with the 200th all-Groo comic book. We did eight issues for Pacific Comics, one special for Eclipse, then two graphic novels and 120 regular-sized issues of Groo for Marvel's Epic Line. That's 131 publications that had naught but Groo in them. Then we did twelve issues for Image Comics, which brings us to 143.

We moved to Dark Horse Comics in 1998. Not counting the mini-series which bows in December, we've done ten four-issue minis for them, one twelve-issue series and one anniversary special. If my math is correct, that takes us up to 196 Groo comics. So the last issue of this new four-issue series will be the 200th Groo comic book.

Now, there are other ways to figure this. We're counting the two graphic novels the same as regular-sized comics. We're ignoring the six issues of The Groo Chronicles that Marvel/Epic released since they were mostly reprint and we're ignoring all the paperback and hardcover reprints and reconfigurations of this material. We're also not counting all the short Groo stories that have appeared here and there in other publications and we are counting the Groo/Conan mini-series and the Groo/Tarzan mini-series. But no matter how you figure it, it's a whole mess o' Groo.

Another weird one from The Muppets on The Ed Sullivan Show. This one was from November 24, 1968…

…but not forever. Well, come to think of it, it will be forever in the sense that I, like most non-commercial blogs, always have a link somewhere so people can thank us by helping out with the expenses of maintaining a blog like this one. I'll probably always have a link there but donations are approaching a nice target number that will cover the costs of maintaining newsfromme.com for the next twelve months…I hope.

Once we hit that number, I'll stop posting little reminders like this one. It's not far off…

• For years, the rallying cry for anti-abortionists was "Let the states decide." And now that some states aren't deciding their way, they've decided we suddenly need a federal anti-abortion law.

Before you read this, you might want to read Part 1 and Part 2.

Sales on DC's Blackhawk comic book declined throughout the sixties. In 1967, its editor George Kashdan was told the comic was heading towards cancellation and something had to be done to change that trajectory. He had several meetings about this with Carmine Infantino, who was more and more calling the creative shots at DC. Infantino had been hired as Cover Editor, then upped to Art Director…and even before he formally had the title of Editorial Director, he was directing all the editors.

Also in those meetings was writer Bob Haney, who was among a handful of writers who'd been scripting the book lately. The last few issues had been written by longtime DC (and Blackhawk) writer France "Eddie" Herron and his exclusion from these meetings presumably had something to do with the fact that he passed away around this time. When I reminded Mr. Kashdan of that, he said, "Eddie was spared seeing what we had to do to that comic."

From out of those meetings came the decision to turn Blackhawk into an unabashed super-hero comic. The cover of #228 showed Superman, Batman, Flash and Green Lantern discussing the Blackhawk team and declaring that they were "washed-up" and Batman even called them "Junk-Heap Heroes." That set the stage for those team members to each adopt a new costumed identity two issues later. This was probably a bad idea even if they hadn't come up with some of the silliest costumed identities ever seen in a comic book.

One member of the squad, Chuck, became "The Listener," an expert in eavesdropping clad in a super-hero suit with ears all over it. Olaf, the team muscle-man, became "The Leaper," dressed no better and now able to bounce and leap about like he could fly. Andre, the suave French member of the squadron, became "M'sieu Machine," an expert in technology. The rest looked just as dumb and the stories read like Haney was studying current Marvel Comics and learning all the wrong lessons about what readers liked about them. (Haney showed better understanding of the Marvel dynamic when he'd co-created and wrote Metamorpho for DC but that comic, after initial strong sales, had nosedived and was in no better sales shape than Blackhawk.)

I'm guessing a lot of its readers looked upon the changes as I did: With the facial expression of the opening night audience watching Max Bialystock's new Broadway show, Springtime for Hitler…though we never got as far as the part when we began to find it funny. A few years earlier, I had finally started buying Blackhawk comics and developed a fondness for the property, not so much because of its current issues but because of the older ones I was finding at second-hand bookshops. In fact, the older an issue was, the more I generally liked it. When I finally got my mitts on some from the 1940s, I became a huge fan of the series. Until they donned those ridiculous costumes.

The Blackhawks' new identities did nothing to stop the bleeding in 1967, and Kashdan told me the new look may even have hastened the descent. In early '68, the comic's frequency of publication was cut from monthly to bi-monthly and it stopped being George Kashdan's problem because he was let go as a DC editor. He had worked for the company as a writer and then a writer-editor since 1947.

So what happened next to Blackhawk? Well, the comic did not survive for long but before it went away for a while, an interesting thing happened. Kashdan's replacement got his desk and one day, he opened a drawer and found something odd. I'll tell you about it in the next part.

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• Today was another very good day to not be Alex Jones. Tomorrow is looking like an even better day to not be Alex Jones.

Like you, I didn't watch the Emmy Awards last night. Really, the only thing I've liked in the last few years there is John Oliver's annual win. This time around, it went like this…

And I guess I also liked seeing him make the rounds of the press after he got the statuette. He really is a funny and surprisingly humble man, even when he's being asked the same question again and again and again…