House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has been indicted in what is being described as his participation in a campaign finance scheme. I have no idea how strong or weak the evidence is against him. Lots of folks get indicted and then the case has a way of evaporating. And of course, lots of people get indicted and then cop a plea or go to prison.

However, it's kind of amusing to scan the political weblogs and discussion groups right now. To the folks who want to see him convicted, DeLay is as good as in the slammer and this is just the start of a domino effect that will bring down many more Republicans and attendant cronies. And to the folks who want to see Republicans prosper in Congress, it's obvious this is just a partisan prosecutor ginning up a case against a political enemy, and of course DeLay will be vindicated. Wishful thinking from both factions.

I always liked the suggestion of a friend of mine who thought all elected officials (without exception) were crooks. He felt we should only elect convicted criminals. He said, "It'll save time if they come to us, pre-indicted."

This will only interest you if you're really into the real minutiae of comic book history. It's a P.S. on that Get Smart sample I posted a few hours ago that I said was by Steve Ditko and Sal Trapani.

The weblog of someone who calls himself "Sleestak" has reproduced more of it over here. And now that I see the other panels, I see that it's not pencilled just by Steve Ditko. There's at least as much work on that page by Eric Stanton, who was then sharing a studio at 8th Street and 48th in Manhattan with Ditko and occasionally another artist or two. While Ditko was drawing Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, Stanton was drawing comics of women with huge breasts who had a tendency to wrestle and tie each other up. Stanton, in interviews shortly before his death in '99, claimed that he helped Ditko with his sixties' Marvel work and even suggested the idea of Spider-Man's web-shooters, and that Ditko helped him with the fetish comics. Ditko has denied both counts.

The timeline here is interesting to consider. Get Smart went on the air in September 18, 1965. The first issue of the comic book was cover-dated June, 1966. That meant it went on sale around March of '66. Generally speaking, a comic of that period would have a four month production period — one month for script, two months for art, one month for production and printing. This is all educated guesswork but what's likely here is that after the TV show went on and became a hit, Dell made the deal to do the comic. So it was probably written in late October or November and then it went to an artist to draw. And you know why that's interesting? Because Ditko quit Marvel the week of Thanksgiving, 1965.

Before around 1963, Ditko had freelanced for both Charlton Comics and Marvel. As Spider-Man and the other Marvel super-hero books grew in popularity, and as Marvel raised pay rates a bit, Ditko cut back on his Charlton work. Then in his last year at Marvel, he began drawing again for Charlton, primarily on a revival of Captain Atom, a super-hero he'd done for them from 1960 to '61. He must have been drawing at an incredible clip in '65 because he was plotting, pencilling and inking 20 pages of Amazing Spider-Man a month for Marvel, plus covers, plus the story he did for that year's Spider-Man Annual. He was also plotting, pencilling and inking 10 pages a month of the Dr. Strange strip in Strange Tales. That would be a pretty full workload for any artist, but he was also making time to pencil Captain Atom. One might assume he figured he might not be at Marvel much longer so he was re-establishing his relationship with Charlton.

Then he quit Marvel and right after that, his work for Charlton increased and he also began drawing for the two Warren magazines, Creepy and Eerie, and for Tower's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. Suddenly also, he was ghosting a lot of Sal Trapani's work. There were two stories for DC's Strange Adventures (in the May, 1966 and June, 1966 issues), a number of jobs for ACG comics like Adventures Into the Unknown and Unknown Worlds (credited to both) and the work with Trapani for Dell on Get Smart and a superhero book called Nukla.

Anyway, that Get Smart page was probably one of the first things Ditko worked on after he left Spider-Man. It also may have been one of the last things done in the Stanton-Ditko studio. The two men moved to separate workspaces some time in 1966 and yes, I know this is real trivial stuff. But some of us can't get enough of this kind of thing.

As you may recall, the New York Times is now charging half a c-note per year for special web access that incudes their opinion columnists. As you may also recall, I was curious to see how "available" they'd be to folks who hadn't subscribed, and I was using Frank Rich's weekend column as a test case.

A couple of weblogs posted it, and I assume the Times will let them know they shouldn't do that. It was also posted to a few newsgroups. The Times will have a hard time stopping that but it's also not a reliable source. To find a "real" website that makes the Frank Rich column available for free, one has to go all the way to Taiwan.

So I don't know what to do about my trial subscription. If these columns had been wholly unavailable, the choice would be easy. If a number of reliable, established sites had posted them, the choice would also be easy and in the other direction. Instead, it's somewhere in-between. I have until 10/4 to decide.

The passing of Don Adams brings questions about the Get Smart comic book. Here is everything I know about it: It was published by Dell Comics from June of 1966 (cover date) to September of 1967. There were eight issues, although #8 was an exact replica of #1, except that the price had gone up from 12 cents to fifteen by then.

We do not know who wrote all the issues, though Alan Riefe seems to have done the bulk of them. The artwork for the later issues was handled by Henry Scarpelli but the first few were assigned to Sal Trapani. Often, when one hears that Sal Trapani was the artist of some comic, that would mean one would have no idea who'd penciled it. Mr. Trapani was a fine inker and he was credited with penciling a lot of comic books during his career…but his modus operandi was to farm that part of each job out to someone else. Among those who did his work for him at different times were Dick Giordano, Jack Abel, Steve Ditko, Chic Stone, Bill Molno, John Giunta, Charles Nicholas and just about everyone who ever did a lot of pencil work for Charlton. In the case of Get Smart, the first issue was ghost-penciled by Giordano and the next few were obviously done by Mr. Ditko.

(A mystery some comic historians might like to ponder: Trapani liked to hire others to pencil his jobs and then he'd do the inking. But what of those assignments where he was hired to pencil only, like his run on DC's Metamorpho around the same time as these Get Smart comics? I asked Dick Giordano, who was Sal's brother-in-law and frequent ghost penciller, and he said he's pretty certain someone else must have drawn those issues for Sal. He even added, "I may even have done some work on them, although I don't remember for certain." I keep meaning to haul out my copies and see if I can figure out whodunnit, but I probably won't get around to it for a while. So if anyone else would like to take a whack at it, be my guest and let me know what you think.)

Ditko and Trapani did a nice job on the art in their issues of Get Smart, though Don Adams was apparently quite difficult to caricature. Everyone in the world could do his voice but no one could do his face. Mort Drucker and Jack Davis both did promo posters for NBC and — basic rule of thumb — if Drucker can't draw you, you can't be drawn. Davis did an okay job and I'll see if I can find a decent copy of it to post. Anyway, the above piece of unfinished art is by Ditko and Trapani and it's been floating around the original art market for years without explanation. It's apparently some sort of "audition" piece they did but which Trapani never completed. It'll give you an idea of what the insides looked like.

Fred Kaplan explains what's wrong with the proposed Iraqi constitution — or at least, what he thinks is wrong. If anyone can point me to a reasoned "opposing view" of this situation, please do. It sure sounds like Iraq is about to vote in a constitution that will make things over there worse, not better. The only upside may be if it enables our leaders to say "Our mission there is accomplished" and bring our troops home. That might be an upside for us, at least. I don't think it'll stop the every-other-day bus explosions.

Operation USA is the preferred charity of this website. This is in part because I've met some of the folks who run it and seen that they do not use your donations to buy themselves big homes and cars under the guise of "administrative costs." They really put the money to good use. The other reason I like them is because, from tracking news reports, I can see that they do it well.

Today in the L.A. Times, its president, Richard Walden, has an article suggesting that giving to the Red Cross is not as good as giving to organizations like his. It's obviously a self-serving message but I think it's also correct. Or to put it another way: I can't imagine anyone else doing more with donation money than Operation USA does. [Thanks to Vince Waldron for calling my attention to the article.]

Members of the Screen Actors Guild have elected a more "militant" slate of officers and so have the members of the Writers Guild. The new WGA officials have begun by dismissing John McLean, who has functioned as the Guild's Executive Director since 1999. The news reports may not tell you this but Mr. McLean was perceived by many in the Guild leadership as being too reticent to confront Management, too eager to accept mediocre contracts rather than go to war. His ouster is definitely a sign than the new board wants to take a harder line, even at the risk of striking.

We have some time before either SAG or the WGA has to negotiate a new contract. But I'll bet we start to hear the low rumblings of a couple of separate but similar major confrontations…and maybe before that, some small skirmishes over the interpretation and enforcement of the current contracts.

Sony Pictures has refused to release a new feature by Albert Brooks so it's going elsewhere. Patrick Goldstein has all the details.

A few folks have sent me additional thoughts about the Comic-Con International. My pal Earl Kress recently penned this article for the newsletter of the Animation Union and I believe it speaks for a lot of folks. I'll post a few more over the next few days.

A couple of folks have reminded me of one other TV show Don Adams did. From '85 to '88, he starred in a sitcom done in Toronto for Canadian TV with limited distribution in the United States. It was called Check It Out! and in it, he played the manager of a supermarket. It was based on a British TV show called Tripper's Day. Now that others mention it, I vaguely remember seeing an episode or two.

Veteran Hollywood reporter Bob Thomas has written an excellent obit on Don Adams for the Associated Press, hitting all the key points. One biggie, which others are omitting, is the extent to which Adams' career was molded by Bill "Jose Jiminez" Dana, who wrote a lot of Don's early monologues and routines which set his on-screen character and even introduced many of his catch-phrases. Then in 1963, Adams played a bumbling house detective on The Bill Dana Show, a short-lived sitcom set in a hotel, and there was an obvious direct line from that character to Maxwell Smart two years later. Get Smart was not created with him in mind but he was such a perfect fit that everyone assumed otherwise.

Adams was a good comic actor when the material was tailored to the one thing he did well. He made Get Smart work and even members of the crew who detested him personally (there were some) admitted that he could wring every laugh possible out of a joke. After Get Smart though, he appeared in one hastily-cancelled series (The Partners in '71) and an awful lot of unsold pilots. The problem was evident, at least to me as a viewer, around '76 when he starred in a sitcom pilot called Three Times Daley that should have/could have become a series. All it really needed was someone else in the lead role besides Don Adams. It was about three generations — grandfather, father and son — trying to live together in the same house. Adams played the father and he was absolutely blown off the stage by a great character actor named Liam Dunn, who played Grandpa. The trouble was that Adams's part was written for a real human being and he was still playing Maxwell Smart. That was about all he could play. It is not a coincidence that Don's only other successful jobs were voicing cartoon characters — Tennessee Tuxedo and Inspector Gadget. A penguin and a robot…never a human being with any feelings.

He had one other series which almost no one remembers and which is not in any of the obits I've seen. In the early seventies, Adams made the rounds of talk shows and often brought out-takes from Get Smart, mostly of him and Don Rickles. They were hilarious and the reception gave him the idea to do a whole series showing out-takes…or bloopers, as they're sometimes called in a quasi-trademarked way. When he tried to put it together, he discovered that the union contracts made it prohibitive; that he'd have to pay or negotiate with dozens of people for each 30-second clip. In fact, the Screen Actors Guild told him that he technically shouldn't have been airing the Get Smart footage without paying actors, directors, writers, etc. Years later, the union rules were changed in a way that made the Dick Clark "Bloopers" shows do-able but at the time, it killed Adams's plan. Trying to figure out a way around it, he came up with the only possible solution: Create new out-takes just for the show! So in 1975, he hosted Don Adams' Screen Test, a kind of talent competition where the idea was to get aspiring actors, pair them in scenes with established stars and then have a lot of things go wrong. It didn't last long because, I suspect, the out-takes just didn't seem real. Which they weren't.

After that and a few more failed pilots, it was mostly Get Smart revivals, commercials and cartoons and the occasional Love Boat voyage for Mr. Adams. The one time I actually spoke to him for any length of time was at the Playboy Mansion, where he seemed to be in semi-permanent residence. We were both Waiting for Hef, which is pretty much the main thing one does at the Playboy Mansion despite what you may have imagined. I had an appointment to discuss a sketch Hefner was going to do on a show I'd written. Adams had just dropped in because he needed to talk with The Man about his marital problems and he seemed so worried, I almost felt like I should offer to let him go ahead of me.

We talked about what I thought was his best comedy album, Don Adams Meets the Roving Reporter, which I don't believe has ever made it as far as CD. We talked about his appearances on The Steve Allen Show where he repeatedly did a sketch playing a lawyer in a courtroom summation scene. ("Your honor, for the last thirty minutes, I have sat and watched as my worthy opponent, the District Attorney, has stood up here and made a complete jackass of himself. Now, it's my turn.") We talked about The Bill Dana Show and about Tennessee Tuxedo and about his brother (a fine character actor named Dick Yarmy) and I think he liked the fact that I never asked him anything about Get Smart. I base that on the fact that someone else later walked into the room and immediately began peppering him with lines from the show and questions about 99's real name and what kind of car he drove in the opening. Adams smiled in that polite, "I have to go through this all the time" way.

Hef finally appeared — pajama-clad, of course — and hurried through his meeting with me so he could get to Don. The last thing Mr. Adams said to me as I was going out and he was coming in was, "Thanks for taking my mind off the end of my marriage."

Fifteen years later, I found myself around him at an autograph show. He was not well — didn't look well, didn't seem to remember a lot and didn't even sound much like Don Adams, the easiest person in the world to impersonate. At one point when he seemed somewhat aware, I said something to him that began with, "You won't remember this, but…" It turned out he didn't remember at all when we'd sat and talked for what must have been at least an hour. Trying to jog his memory a bit, I said, "You were there for some advice from Hefner because your marriage was breaking up."

He paused, thought for a moment and said, "You wouldn't happen to know which wife this was, would you?" I'm pretty sure he meant it as a joke. Even if he didn't, the delivery was vintage Maxwell Smart and comedically perfect.

To the surprise of no one who'd seen him the last few years, Don Adams has passed away. I have to run out to a lunch meeting but I'll write something later today. And I promise: No "Would you believe…" jokes.

Over in Slate, Edward Jay Epstein offers an overview of the escalating war between Comcast Cable and DirecTV. The article is okay as far as it goes but I think this is one of those "Battle of the Titans," so familiar to readers of Marvel Comics, wherein two powerful forces slug it out based on a false premise. For instance, I don't think "Video on Demand" will ultimately be driven by allowing people to pay to see Desperate Housewives whenever they want and without commercials, nor do I think it will thrive by delivering current major motion pictures. I think most people will come to adopt the attitude that the big, mainstream material will always be readily available. If you don't catch it today, you can always wait for a rerun, especially if you have a TiVo or similar device and know how to program it.

Epstein writes of the head of Comcast, "His ultimate VOD goal is to release new movies at the same time as they are released on DVD." I dunno…if you're going to pay to see a new movie, wouldn't you rather have the DVD? Even if it means waiting until your next trip to Costco… when it'll probably be cheaper? Once you have physical possession of the DVD, you really "own" that movie. It's not going to get deleted off the hard drive of your Personal Video Recorder or lost if there's a crash. You can watch it whenever you want it on any TV in your house that has a DVD player. You can take it to a friend's house and watch it there. You can look at a little shelf of DVDs in your library and say, "I own those" and feel like you really got something for your money. This could get into a long discourse but basically, I think the new age of cable and the Internet is disabusing people of the idea that you pay for content. A lot of people feel that they're not stealing if they download a bootleg of a new movie. They'd never think of stealing a DVD or a VHS tape of that film but just moving a copy to their harddisk is different. That same, dubious distinction is what I think will discourage people from paying to have a new movie delivered to their PVRs when they could be getting a tangible DVD for their bucks.

What I think VOD is going to have to do is to offer people programming they can't go and buy at Sam's Club. I'll pay to add new channels to my DirecTV subscription because that increases my viewing choices. But I've never bought a pay-per-view offering because I've never seen an ad for one it would bother me to miss. If I cared about sports, that would probably be different.

The business model for VOD may not be in TV. It may be established by Howard Stern's pending move to Sirius Radio: How many people will buy the units and subscribe to hear Howard, for the first time, unexpurgated? (My guess: Not nearly as many as Sirius is projecting. I think a lot of people will never accept the idea of paying for radio. And as Stern's show gets dirtier, it's going to be more frustrating to listen to it and not be able to see. Betcha that within three years, he moves the whole thing to HBO or Showtime…or to VOD, where it would indeed be something you couldn't get elsewhere or buy at Sam's Club.)

Lastly, Epstein's article is wrong that "[Rupert] Murdoch's satellites reach about 90 percent of the American population. Everyone (including Roberts' cable subscribers) in this vast footprint can receive Murdoch's 500 channels with a small 31-inch dish and digital receiver." An awful lot of people can't because they live in apartment buildings and housing projects that won't let them put up dishes and/or where they have no unobstructed view to the South. (I had to have someone come out and cut the top off a big tree in my neighbor's yard with his permission.) Another large chunk of people in that 90% are simply scared of the technology. To my mother, having cable installed wasn't that much different from using the old roof antenna that had brought her TV for years. Ask her about having a "satellite dish" on her house and she won't get past the idea that this is something that you have to work for NASA to operate. I love DirecTV but it'll never be as popular as cable because it'll never be as simple.