Michael Scott, a reader of this site, recolored the George Reeves pic to put Superman in his traditional tones. Several of you have written to me to say that the costume Mr. Reeves wore in the black-and-white episodes was grey and brown, and I think I've seen that costume. There seems to be some disagreement as to whether he had a couple of different ones and what their colors were, but I'm pretty sure that the pic I posted with the goldenrod outfit was a matter of some lobby card stylist screwing up.

A couple of folks wrote to ask if the action and violence in the Superman TV show were toned down because of the Wertham-fanned horror comics scare or because the sponsor demanded it or what. Both were probably factors but my understanding is that the decision was primarily a matter of investment. After the series went on the air, the stations that bought it were primarily programming it as a kids' show in terms of time slots and the kind of commercials they sold for it. I believe there were even cities that folded it into an afternoon block of programming anchored by a kiddie show host. (In Los Angeles, around 1960, "Engineer Bill" Stulla had The Adventures of Superman on his Channel 9 show, right after episodes of Spunky & Tadpole, Q.T. Hush and Colonel Bleep.) And of course, Kellogg's cereals — which bought heavily into the show — was primarily interested in the younger audience. So as the show found its market, content was adjusted to match…and I think they also toned down the action because it cost more to shoot, and the producers had adopted a "cheap as possible" approach to the budget.

In 1968 or so, I spent one afternoon in the office of Whitney Ellsworth, who was the former editor-in-chief of DC Comics. In the mid-fifties, the company sent him to Hollywood to supervise the Superman show and to drum up other TV projects, and he stayed out here and in that post, long after he'd outlived his usefulness. What I recall from our conversations is that Mr. Ellsworth was terrified of saying the wrong thing to me. Somehow, he feared that if he said "You know, I don't like red on comic book covers" to a 16-year-old comic fan, it would get back to his superiors in New York and they'd use it as an excuse to terminate whatever financial arrangement he still had with the company. But what he did talk about, over and over, were the high costs of production. He had not been able to get numerous DC-related projects off the ground because of how expensive everything was, he insisted. And if I asked him anything about the old George Reeves series, the answer was always money, with the implied fear that the show would be cancelled and everyone would be thrown out of work if they went a dime over budget. This is only a slight exaggeration of the way it went…

ME: I never understood why you rarely saw Lois Lane taking notes when she was covering a story.

HIM: My God, do you know what a notepad cost then?

So I gather that the answer to most questions about that Superman show is, "Because it was cheaper." Whatever it was. I think it's amazing how watchable even the latter episodes were, given that they were trying to do the show for a buck-ninety.

I'm still on a dial-up connection which is not faster than a speeding bullet, so I've gotta run here. There will be more posting on this site when the Comcast people make me whole again.

My cable modem has picked a splendid time — the July Fourth weekend — to malfunction so I'm in on a dial-up connection. This will limit posting here a bit until Tuesday afternoon when a technician is supposed to come make it well again…although the last few times the cable went out, I made an appointment for a service call and then, six hours later, I was able to cancel it because the thing began to miraculously work again. Each time, of course, was after they'd assured me that they'd done all they could from their end and that the problem had to be on mine. They're saying that this time, too, so maybe it'll right itself before then.

If not, not only will posting be so lethargic but I'll be even farther behind on e-mail than I am now. Forgive me if yours is languishing in my "to be answered" folder. It's in good company in there.

Several folks have written to ask about the photo of George Reeves I posted earlier…why Superman is gold, did I change it, did some stupid person color it, what? I was going to color-correct his uniform to blue but then decided to leave it the way I'd found it. It's a cropped pic from the lobby card from Superman in Scotland Yard, and I did a little Photoshop Magic where something covered part of his arm. I copied a hunk of the other arm, flopped it and pasted it over to complete the Man of Steel's manly elbow. But I didn't change the coloring.

In the black-and-white episodes — one of which that was — Reeves wore a costume that wasn't colored properly but it "read" on film as the right shades. Sources conflict as to what the hues of that actual uniform were, and how many times they changed but I don't think they were ever quite these colors. I think the person who assembled the lobby card took a photo of Reeves in the not-blue suit and enhanced its colors but, deliberately or not, didn't change the main color to Superman's traditional blue. So they took the wrong colors and made them more wrong. If anyone has more info on this, let me know…but don't expect a reply until after Tuesday.

These are all over in The New York Times but these links should not require registration. (If they do, don't complain to me. Just register. It's free, it takes about thirty seconds and it doesn't do a bit of harm.)

• Frank Rich compares the new War of the Worlds movie to Bush's recent prime-time speech. It's a bit of a stretch but I think he's right that Bush is losing the war of public opinion on Iraq.
• Stephen L. Carter discusses how nice it would be if we could get politics out of Supreme Court appointments. And he's right, although I kinda, sorta don't think that's gonna happen, soon if ever.
• Anthony Tommasini tells us that the forthcoming July 4th New York Pops concert on NBC is a sham.

You can't get it until the middle of October but Warner Home Video will soon be bringing out the first season of The Adventures of Superman on DVD — 26 episodes plus special features. There were 104 in all, so assuming this one sells, we'll probably see three more volumes spaced out over the next few years.

If you have to buy one set though, this is the one. Over the five years the series was in production, it got increasingly sappier and chintzier, becoming more of a kids' (only) show, filmed increasingly indoors and relying on stock "flying" footage to supply all the action. They got away with it because the title character was so appealing and because George Reeves was so perfect in the role. So were Phyllis Coates and Noel Neill as Lois Lane and Jack Larson as Jimmy Olsen. (Noel replaced Phyllis after the first season, but I somehow saw all the Noel Neill episodes around eleven times before my local TV station ever reran the Coates shows…so Ms. Neill will forever be my Lois Lane.)

So the first 26 were generally the best. Partly because of the mood and partly because they were in black-and-white — but mostly because of the background of the folks who worked on them — these episodes have that old "movie serial" feel. Later, when the producers seemed to want to see how many of the scenes could be set in the Daily Planet offices, it felt more like a cheap, studio-bound TV show. It's interesting that while they were saving every possible dime on the last 52 shows, they did spring for the extra money to shoot those episodes in color. This showed amazing foresight since at the time, there was no market for the show in color. The negatives were just locked away and those episodes were syndicated in black-and-white until such time as it became economically feasible to go back into the vault and strike off color prints.

As soon as they're offered, I intend to order the first DVD release. And, to be perfectly honest with you, I'll probably order however many sets they bring out, even the last seasons. But I'll betcha I play Volume One more often than all the others combined.

Here's an article about Paul Winchell's life. And here's another and here's another and here's another. And while we're at it, here's one more.

We are edging towards the day when many of us will be wishing aloud that the Comic-Con International in San Diego could be postponed a week or two. But it's coming, it's coming. The Thursday Programming Schedule is now posted but you don't need to read it since you'll only be going to my panels.

In a few days, I'll post a list here of tips to help you enjoy/survive the convention but in the meantime, you can start by reviewing this.

In the meantime, the AccuWeather people are forecasting partly sunny conditions with a high of 72 degrees and a low of 64 for the convention weekend. Sounds like a pretty typical San Diego climate.

They had a problem at DC Comics in the mid-sixties: Sales on everything except the Batman books were inching downwards…and Batman was only doing well because of the TV show. At the same time, sales on the new Marvel line were going up. In fact, the Marvel books were gaining at almost the exact same rate the DC books were losing. DC's head honchos began to study the Marvel books, trying to figure out the reason for this aberration of the marketplace.

In later years, some of them would deny it but others say it was true; that the DC execs thought the Marvel books were horrible — bad art, bad stories, bad characters, bad everything. DC artist Mike Sekowsky used to do an impression of the company's publisher throwing down a Marvel book and gasping, "This is garbage! The readers have no taste!" At some point, an explanation began to emerge for the ghastly sales trends. Obviously, it went, readers were getting confused and were buying non-DC books thinking they were DCs. It was decided that something had to be done to make their covers more distinctive and identifiable. Editorial Director Irwin Donenfeld would later receive the credit/blame (pick one) for adorning DC's covers with a hideous checkerboard pattern across the top. They called them, I'm afraid, "go-go checks" and it was the ugliest thing anyone had done to comics since Dr. Wertham called them "blueprints for delinquency."

No, they didn't help sales. Matter of fact, DC's slide hastened…and while there were certainly other reasons for that, it was suggested that the go-go checks had made things worse. "Readers could now spot the DC books much quicker, making it easier to avoid purchasing them," was how Sekowsky put it. After eighteen months, they got rid of the checks and not long after, they got rid of Irwin Donenfeld, which was quite a firing since his father had founded the company. So I guess you could say that "go-go checks" across the top of a cover was a pretty awful idea…

…which is why I was amazed to see TV Guide try it recently. One wonders if someone there did it as a kind of inside joke for those who remember the DC experiment. Yeah, maybe the Nascar theme suggested a checkered flag motif but the reference there to "Dynamic Duos" also invokes the 1966-1968 Batman comics. Either way, they're lucky that they only did it for one week. If they'd put go-go checks on their covers regularly, they'd be out of business in a year.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if George W. Bush could and would nominate a Supreme Court Justice who'd win confirmation 100-0? It's been done many times before. But Bush and his more rabid supporters aren't interested in that person. They want the justice who'd be confirmed 51 to 49 or 55 to 45.

A short preview of Bob Woodward's new book on his relationship with Mark "Deep Throat" Felt.

Back in the sixties in the pages of Marvel Comics, Stan Lee would occasionally award some lucky (?) reader what he called a "no prize." It might be in a letter column or it might be in the house ad section called the Bullpen Bulletins. The reader might have made some extraordinary contribution to the cause of Marvel, or he might just have found some dumb error in an issue and called it to Stan's attention. Whatever the location, whatever the meritorious conduct, it warranted the same reward: A "no prize," as in, "You get no prize." I gather this was kind of a running joke on the old Jean Shepherd radio programs and Stan kept it going, but I never heard enough of Mr. Shepherd to know the derivation for certain.

Anyway, some readers were gleeful that Stan had awarded them a "no prize," and some didn't understand and they'd write in and say, "I haven't received it." Around 1967, I'm guessing, Stan took the joke to the next level and began actually sending out…well, I'm not sure if you could say he sent out "no prizes" because there was no such thing. But he sent out empty envelopes that said they contained your no prizes. Above is a pic of one of these envelopes — a later version, judging from the return address — which sported lettering by Marvel's ace letterer at the time, Sam Rosen. Someone wrote and asked me about them so I thought I'd post this for all the world to see. There was something very charming and clever about the whole concept, and it was part of what made Marvel Comics feel like a company run by your buddies.

We've made a few time changes in the schedule, mostly a matter of shifting a couple things up a half-hour…

GSN, the former Game Show Network, is airing a tribute to Paul Winchell tomorrow and Friday morn — four episodes, two each morning, of What's My Line? in which Paul was on the panel. The most interesting is probably the first, in which the Mystery Guest was Mortimer Snerd…or more correctly, Edgar Bergen working Mortimer Snerd. This one reran on GSN just two months ago.

The press release from GSN is confusing because of that old convention, which is to refer to shows that air before around 6 AM as being part of the previous night's programming. The first two episodes, they say, run at 3:00 AM and 3:30 AM on Wednesday, June 29. But if you set your TiVo or VCR to that date and those times, you won't get the show in question. In the reality-based world, they're airing early the morning of Thursday, June 30. You'd think they'd give the real date since most people are probably recording the shows and not watching them live, and even the folks who are watching live can figure out when Thursday morning begins.

The What's My Line? episodes that were supposed to air the next two days were ones from July of '57 — one with Julius LaRosa as Mystery Guest and the other with Robert Sterling and Anne Jeffreys. If GSN does what they usually do, they'll just skip rerunning these and not bump them later. Assuming that's how they operate, the rerun early Saturday morning will have Jayne Mansfield, the one Sunday morning will have Edie Adams and Jane Russell, and the one on Monday will have Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Here's the best article I've come across about Bush's speech last night and our current dilemma in Iraq. It's by William Saletan, and he likens the U.S. position of open-ended support of Iraq to domestic welfare programs that promise ongoing support to those who won't help themselves.

By the way, there's a very good reason why, as Saletan notes, members of the new Iraqi government are not "standing up." It's because when they do, they tend to get assassinated.

Canadian cartoonist and puzzle master Owen McCarron died on Monday at the age of 76. He was a longtime employee of the Halifax Herald Limited, which featured his cartoons and games in several newspapers published in Nova Scotia. He also published on his own, countless commercial giveaway comics and puzzle collections that featured his work.

American comic fans will know McCarron best for a flurry of puzzle comics and books he did for Marvel in the late seventies and early eighties featuring their characters. They included a monthly comic — Fun and Games Magazine, which lasted for 13 issues commencing in 1979 — a short-lived Sunday newspaper strip and several dozen activity books. McCarron wrote, drew and designed most of this material, and also did a few ink jobs for Marvel's superhero comics. His work was clever and well-drawn, and I recall being very impressed with his puzzle-making ability.

There's a short article over on Slate about what they do when the voice of a cartoon character passes away. I was among those interviewed for the piece.