I am told by several sources that Paramount is about to announce a DVD release of the 1959 Li'l Abner movie (the one we all want) for April 19. It'll have a new, crisp transfer but probably no extras apart from the theatrical trailer. If I hear anything more, I'll let you know.
Early Wednesday Evening
Hello, everyone. The computer is fixed (thanks, Bill) but I'm way behind on things, so there won't be a lot of postings here the next few days.
A lot of you are sending me long, thoughtful letters about Will Eisner. They are all interesting to read, but please share them with the world by posting them somewhere. The message boards at Newsarama, Comic Book Resources or The Comics Journal would all be good places. And if you're looking for info and other obits, I couldn't possibly assemble a better batch o' links than Tom Spurgeon has.
(Well, I will mention one: Shane Shellenbarger sent this link to an hour of streaming video of Will lecturing at some sort of Library of Congress function about graphic novels.)
My apologies to all those who've written lately, only to have your e-mails languish in a folder on my hard drive. I'll get to as many of them as possible in the next few days.
Early Wednesday Morn
So this morning, my high-speed Internet connection suddenly begins cutting in and out, mostly out. The Comcast people were of no help on the phone and they're currently planning to send out a repair person next week, assuming they can find one. But that wasn't a total crisis since I still had my dial-up connection, and I had a good idea how to fix the high-speed connection from my end.
My repair job was so flawless that I not only did not fix the high-speed connection, I wiped out my computer's ability to make a dial-up connection and busted my home network setup. Well, even I'm not that incompetent. I had help from a particularly nasty spyware infection that somehow got on my computer and made it deep into my system registry. My resident computer expert, Bill Goldstein, is making a house call later today to try and undo some of the damage done by the spyware and my inept attempts to fix things.
Around an hour ago, my high-speed connection mysteriously began working again. I'm not confident this is a permanent condition but as long as it's on, I'm able to log in and check mail and post this. I have oodles of messages about Will Eisner, like this one from Bob Foster…
I always knew Will Eisner, just like I always knew Carl Barks and Harvey Kurtzman. I grew up on their work. But it wasn't until I was an adult, working in the comics and animation business that I actually did get to know each of them.
In the early 90s I was living in Denmark and attended all the comic conventions and book fairs in Europe on business. It was in Angouleme, France that I seriously approached Will with the idea of teaching the art of graphic storytelling to a bunch of eager, out-of-work animators in Dublin, Ireland. The company I was working for in Copenhagen was recruiting new artists and writers, and Dublin was a fertile source. Will agreed.
He spent about 2 weeks teaching, and he was an inspiration! He'd arrive punctually and I had to force him to take a break or go to lunch. Otherwise he would keep blabbing away about story, character, acting, drawing, all the while demonstrating with great sketches. After 8-10 hours of teaching and talking and drawing and sharing anecdotes, we'd go out to a local pub and eat and drink, and he'd tell more stories and discuss every aspect of comics and their history until Ann forced him to stop and get some sleep. And the next day he'd do it all over again. Will was the kind of guy you wanted to spend time with even if he wasn't famous. I had a hard time keeping up with him, and he was 26 years older than me! Perpetually vibrant, hilarious, nourishing, inspiring. Boy, will he be missed.
Let me say something about his fantastic wife, Ann. What a kick! Always a bundle of energy with more great stories to tell, and with a great sense of humor. She always held her own at the pubs, too. She'd jump right into the conversations with her own opinions and recollections, making the evening a pure pleasure. Another inspiration!
None of this surprises me…or anyone who knew Will. His sheer creative energy was to be envied, and based on the occasional seminars and talks I was able to catch, I suspect he was a very good teacher. He was certainly open to all approaches and most encouraging about artists developing their own styles instead of aping his.
I'll post some more messages about Will and some more thoughts over the next few days. I lost too many hours today to this silly computer problem and to just feeling depressed about losing another of the greats. Good night.
Slow and Steady
If I look a little slow for the next few days, it's because the high-speed Internet connections in my area are stammering — on for ten minutes, off for an hour, on again, off again. I'm on a primitive, moves-like-molasses dial-up connection right now and may be for some time. So posting will be lighter here, and I'll be even farther behind on e-mail than I usually am. Please forgive.
Will Eisner, R.I.P.
Above, we see Will Eisner in his natural habitat: At the drawing board, and probably producing one of the most innovative pieces of comic art of its day, whatever day it was. Eisner, who died Monday evening due to complications following his recent heart surgery, was one of the most important architects of the American comic book…a medium that took life and form about the time he got into it. He was 87 years old but boy, seeing and talking with him at conventions, he sure didn't look it. Didn't draw his age, either. I recall Frank Miller paging through one of Will's recent graphic novels, looking up and saying, "Isn't it embarrassing that a man in his eighties is kicking all our asses?"
I can't improve on the biography of Will posted here so I'll just add a couple of thoughts. Will was among the most envied craftsman in his field…admired for both his skill as a writer and artist but also for having a certain business acumen. The latter skill escaped most of comics' great creators but Eisner had enough to retain ownership and control of most of his creations. He also (and this may not be completely unrelated) never stopped drawing, never stopped pioneering in a field that could and did easily burn out its top talents. We can look at his work from the late thirties and see that it is wonderful and ground-breaking. Then we can look at what he's done the last decade or so, blazing the trail with graphic novels, often on very personal, low-concept subjects…and see that those are wonderful and ground-breaking, as well. Only when you stop and consider that those two bodies of work came from the same guy, and were part of a 60+ year pattern, does his full impact begin to dawn on you.
Like many of my generation, I first heard of Will Eisner in the mid-sixties, when he was away from mainstream comics, producing comic-type material for other venues, most notably the Army. Then his friend and former employee, Jules Feiffer, wrote glowingly of him in The Great Comic Book Heroes, and even included a Spirit reprint to prove Eisner worthy of such praise. Soon after, the Harvey comic book company launched a brief, unsuccessful Spirit reprint book which the guys in my old comic book club all devoured. It was like, Gee, comics can also be this! In 1968, we voted him or that comic some kind of award, and since I was the club's president and had his address, I wrote him a clumsy letter telling him this. Mr. Eisner quickly sent back a polite thanks and at the bottom of his note, he took the time to draw a little sketch, which I just ran through my scanner. It looked like this…
Needless to say, we were all thrilled and when I showed the letter at the next club meeting, a near-riot broke out on the question of whether the physical letter belonged to me or to the club. Somehow — don't ask me how — I managed to get out of that meeting alive and with that piece of paper.
Thereafter, it was a joy to become better acquainted with the man's work and, somewhat later on, the man who'd done it. He was always gracious, always glad to talk about any aspect or era of comics. He favored the future but his memory was razor-sharp about the past, and a lot of us historian-geeks gladly exploited that fact. You could not learn more about comics' past than by talking with Will Eisner, just as you could not learn more about their future than by reading his work.
It is not just a hollow honorific that the major awards in the comic book field are called The Will Eisner Awards. And I'll bet I speak for most/all of those who've won a couple when I say that the best part of receiving one is that when you go up to the stage to get it, Will Eisner hands it to you. Or did. He would always be there to hand you the plaque…always standing. Everyone used to joke that he shouldn't be on his feet for the marathon, drags-on-for-days ceremony; that he should be seated in a throne. One year, Kurt Busiek and Frank Miller (I think) arranged to rent one from a local prop house and early in the festivities, they happily carried it onto the platform.
Will was gracious enough to sit in it and complete the joke…but only for a minute or so. When the next award was announced, he was back in a vertical position to congratulate the recipient, not as royalty but as a peer. You never saw so much perfect symbolism at a convention: A newer generation trying to tell Will Eisner he could rest on his laurels…and Will happily declining. That's how you get to be that age and still produce vital, significant work.
A year or two after that, a Will Eisner award went to…Will Eisner. He won for one of his recent works and the next day, we were joking about how finally, at long last, he had done work that lived up to the standard of Will Eisner. He was genuinely proud to have his name in two places on the award, but I told him he'd missed out on the best part. He didn't get to have Will Eisner hand it to him. Sadly, from this day forward, everyone else who wins one will have to do without.
TiVo Coming Through
As many have written me, the TiVo folks have finally started releasing "TiVo to Go," which is a new feature for most Series 2 TiVos. If you have your machine networked with your computer, you can record a show on your TiVo and then transfer it to your PC. (A Macintosh version is somewhere in the future.) From your computer, you can then — with additional software, soon to be released — burn the show to a DVD. If you go to this page, you can find out all about the process and even sign up, as I just did, for a "priority upgrade," which means they move you up on the list to receive the new software.
I look forward to this upgrade but a tiny part of me resents having to wait in line. I owned one of the first TiVos made, and have continually upgraded and purchased new models, and I think they should cater to "charter subscribers" before they service Johnny-come-latelys to the wondrous world of TiVo. It's odd — and yes, I know it's probably not healthy — to have an emotional connection to a product. I think TiVo is the best thing to happen to television since Chuck Barris retired. If nothing else, I find it so liberating that I never have to fret about being home on time to watch a certain show or to hassle with setting the VCR. I can go about my life, comfortable in the knowledge that the latest broadcast of The Daily Show will always be there to watch when I'm ready to watch it…and I can pause it or rewind it or watch part and then stop and go get lunch and watch the rest tomorrow. It makes you feel like you own your TV instead of the other way around.
Kelly Freas Services
Funeral services for Frank Kelly Freas are being held tomorrow afternoon in Canoga Park, California at 1 PM. If anyone wants the information, drop me a private note and I'll forward what I have.
A Better Idea
The other day, I suggested that a good place to send your money for disaster relief was the Red Cross. This is still a good idea but I have a better suggestion.
If you have money to send and you want to see it used by an organization that truly puts it where it'll do the most good, give it to Operation USA This is not a well-known outfit but I know some of the folks involved in it and, trust me, they work their butts off to help others and take nothing for themselves. For years, Operation USA has quietly been feeding and caring for people who need both, often in venues that the more famous causes cannot get to. They have my highest recommendation as a force for good in the world.
Frank Kelly Freas, R.I.P.
Frank Kelly Freas, the acclaimed science-fiction illustrator (and delineator of Alfred E. Neuman) passed away quietly this morning at approximately 4 AM. He was nominated twenty times (a record) for the Hugo Award for his artwork and won ten times (another record) as Best Professional Artist. His artwork graced the covers and/or insides of books by virtually every major science-fiction author, including Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, A.E. Van Vogt, Poul Anderson and Frederik Pohl. Still, many knew him best for the seven years he spent as the main cover artist of MAD Magazine.
Freas was born in New York in 1922 and raised in Canada. In college and in the Army, he started out to explore both Medicine and Engineering as possible vocations but kept getting lured towards artwork. After the service, he got a job drawing for an advertising agency in Pittsburgh and began taking night courses at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. In 1950, he produced a fantasy painting for one of his art classes and at the urging of his friends, submitted it to Weird Tales, the prestigious pulp magazine. When it sold, he was on his way…and there were few honors or important assignments in the field that never went his way. You can view some samples of his work at his website or browse his MAD paintings over at Doug Gilford's MAD Cover Site. (The Kelly Freas covers start with #40 and continue, with occasional interruption, until #74. #70 was actually the last one he painted but they didn't publish them in the order done.)
A frequent, friendly presence at both comic and s-f conventions, Freas (pronounced "freeze") was a charming gent, always available to talk to his many fans on any subject. I recall he once interrupted a conversation we were having when a young, aspiring painter came over to show him a sample of his work. Freas caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye and his immediate reaction was akin to, "Sorry, Mark…but this is an emergency." The kid had great talent, Kelly thought, but was in dire need to being set straight on some of the basics. I eavesdropped for about five minutes as the aspiring painter received solid, no-nonsense advice about all that he was doing wrong. You could almost see the kid becoming a better artist, right before your eyes…and he hadn't even painted anything new yet. Later, Kelly made an unnecessary point of seeking me out to apologize and finish our discussion. As I said, a charming gentleman.
A memorial service is planned. I'll let you know if I hear anything…or you let me know.
First Day of the New Year Thoughts
Seems like a mostly-lovely day out my Los Angeles window. We've had a lot of rain lately but it always seems to clear out just in time for the rest of the world to watch the Rose Parade and resent us.
Didn't see Regis Philbin filling in for Dick Clark last night. Did see some of The Tonight Show, which aired live in the East and on which the lead singer of Motley Crew yelled out the "f" word. Will the fact that it was after Midnight spare Mr. Leno from a Michael Powell fine? If it doesn't, will he link arms with Howard Stern and raise a ruckus?
Trio is gone from my DirecTV. In its stead at the moment is one of those messages that shows you why lawyers shouldn't be allowed to write things of this sort: "TRIO is no longer available on DIRECTV. While NBC Universal continues to evaluate the future of TRIO in relation to its overall digital strategy, we have exercised our option to discontinue carrying this channel." Someone got paid for composing that last sentence.
Speaking of my TV: The TiVo folks once promised to roll out their new "TiVo to Go" feature (which will allow you to transfer shows from your TiVo over your home network to your computer) in "Fall of 2004." It is no longer Fall and it is no longer 2004, and "TiVo to Go" is still a no-go. I'm not mad, since I assume it's just a matter of it taking longer to perfect the software than they'd anticipated, and that's not unusual in this high-tech world of ours. But I wish companies would err on the side of pessimism when they estimate when such things will be available.
If you've been thinking of ordering any of the wonderful comic book fonts from our friends at Comicraft, now would be an excellent day to do this. They're running their annual New Year's Sale and until Midnight, their wares are as cheap as they'll ever be.
Here's hoping we got all the big disasters out of the way last year, and that '05 is relatively free of them.
Still More Abner Stuff
Hey, remember that awful 1940 Li'l Abner movie I keep mentioning here? The one you can buy on DVD for a buck in some stores? Well, you can get it even cheaper than that. Over at www.archive.org, where they offer a lot of public domain stuff for download, you can get it for free…which is still overpaying, as far as I'm concerned. Here's a link to the download page where it's available in an array of formats. (Don't be surprised, by the way, if this site is difficult to reach. It gets a lot of traffic and is often overloaded.) Thanks to William Stiteler for tipping me off.
By the way, I just noticed one more bit of dishonesty about the Digiview Li'l Abner DVD. As reported by Jim Bahler, the cover says the film on the DVD not only features stars who aren't on it but says it's 114 minutes in black-and-white. The 1959 color version was 114 minutes but the 1940 version, the one on that DVD, is 78 minutes. This suggests to me that the folks at Digiview didn't even bother watching the entirety of the movie they were selling. They just sent someone to the Internet Movie Database to look up its length, and that person got the wrong Li'l Abner movie. Maybe that also explains why they billboarded the wrong stars, though that smells like a less innocent mistake to me.
Phil Seuling and Red Sonja
Around 1970, when I got into the comic book business, the consensus was that there wouldn't be a comic book business for long…and not because of me. The traditional method of distribution — comics sold on a returnable basis to newsstands around the country — was failing, or at least it was failing comic books. The biggest distributor, Independent News, was making large sums off more expensive, adult publications like Playboy and Penthouse, and some there suggested that newsracks were no longer a place for kids or low-priced periodicals. Since comic books were low-priced and largely for kids, this was a pretty ominous suggestion, especially when you considered that Independent News not only distributed DC Comics but was a part of the same company. In other words, DC's wares were being sold by an outfit that no longer believed there was a future in selling comic books. With that attitude, there couldn't be much of one.
The "returnable" part was what was really hurting comics. Marvel would print 500,000 copies of an issue of Spider-Man and would get paid only for those that actually sold. So if the racks were crowded (or the distributor trucks filled with an extra-thick issue of Playboy that week), 50,000 might not make it to the racks at all. Many more copies would get damaged and returned with all the unsold copies for credit. 300,000 might actually be sold and the rest would get pulped…obviously, not the most efficient way to do business. In the past, the ratio had not been that bad, and a publisher could make a tidy profit…but by the seventies, the numbers were closing in on the comic book industry.
To the rescue came not Superman or Batman but a Brooklyn school teacher named Phil Seuling. Phil ran the big comic conventions in New York for years so he knew the fan market and its buying power. Around 1973, he began proposing to DC and Marvel that he sell their comics in a different manner, by-passing traditional newsstands and getting them directly to comic book dealers and shops. He would pay slightly less per copy to the publisher but he'd be buying the comics on a non-returnable basis, so a sale would be a sale; no printing five copies to sell three.
At first, publishers rebuffed his proposal. The "direct market," as it would come to be called, did not seem lucrative enough to warrant the attention, to say nothing of how it might further destroy the old method. But before long, it became apparent that the old method was being destroyed, with or without selling books the Seuling way, so DC, Marvel and other companies tried it. Within a year, around 25% of all comic books were being sold via "direct" distribution, through Seuling's company and about a dozen others, with 75% still on conventional newsstands. Within ten years, those percentages were reversed. Today, the "direct market" is the primary market…though Phil, sadly, did not live to reap the full benefits of his idea. He died in 1984 at the age of 50.
That's Phil in the above photo, second from the left, holding a stack of comic books. The man at the far left is talk show host Mike Douglas, and this is a still from his popular afternoon show, air date July 28, 1977.
Seuling was a guest on that episode to discuss comic book collecting and conventions and such. He was asked by the producers to bring along "a superhero" to surprise the audience…and Mike Douglas. They apparently expected Phil to find a guy in a Batman costume or something, but Phil had a better idea.
The character of Red Sonja was then big in Marvel Comics. Developed by editor-writer Roy Thomas from a brief appearance in one of Robert E. Howard's stories, she was one of the sexier characters around. Some of that was due to the way Roy wrote her and some to the way she was depicted by her illustrators…most notably, Frank Thorne. But a lot of it was because she began turning up at comic book and science-fiction conventions…in the flesh. There were many young women who seized on the inspiration to fashion an appropriate costume and to parade about the aisles and masquerades. None of them drew more stares or attention than Wendy Pini.
Today, Wendy is best known as the talented artist and co-creator (with her husband, Richard) of the Elfquest series. Millions of copies have been sold of Elfquest graphic novels, prose novels, comic books, calendars, art folios and other items from that wonderful fantasy world…but in '77, Elfquest was just beginning. To most comic fans, Wendy was that lovely lady who dressed up as Red Sonja at conventions, often performing a little show with artist Frank Thorne.
So when Phil Seuling was invited to appear on The Mike Douglas Show and asked to bring along his own superhero, he brought Wendy. Neither Mr. Douglas nor his co-host, Jamie Farr, saw her before she burst onto the stage at the close of the segment. (Douglas was concerned that her costume — or lack of one — might offend the show's female viewers. There's no report on what Farr thought, but he probably wished he had an outfit like that.)
That's really all there is to this story. I wanted to run the photo because it's so wonderful, and because it gives me the chance to tell you about Phil. And I also wanted to mention that, much to Wendy's amazement, I have actually located a tape of that episode of The Mike Douglas Show for her. I haven't yet discussed it with the programming folks at the Comic-Con International in San Diego, but I'll bet we can find some event at the 2005 convention where we can show that segment to everyone who wants to see it. It's a great moment.
P.S. Since I posted this, several folks (including Gary Sassaman and Steve Thompson) have pointed out to me that 1977 was the year that Phil Seuling's big New York comic book convention could not find hotel space in New York, so it moved to Philadelphia. Philadelphia was where Mike Douglas taped his show.
Gifted Animation
I had nothing to do with it…but I laughed out loud at The Twelve Days of Christmas, Garfield style.
More Abner Stuff
Dave Mackey, who knows this kind of stuff better than I do, says that when the Columbia Li'l Abner cartoons were released on VHS a few years ago, they were not what one would expect. Instead of transferring color prints of these cartoons (which were originally made in color), someone did a tracing job on black-and-white prints. I don't have time to explain the technical end of this process so just trust me: It ruins the cartoon. Instead of seeing the work of talented animators, you're seeing what happens when minimum-wage employees trace their work, and not even every frame of it. In this case, says Dave, they were tracing material that wasn't so wonderful in the first place. So avoid those tapes, too.
Quick Response
Here's the great thing about having this weblog: Yesterday, we discussed what was up with the announced "new" episodes of Whose Line Is It Anyway? that ABC Family has announced they will begin showing on 1/17/05. Today, I hear from Jim Ellwanger who says…well, here. Read him for yourself…
I've been closed-captioning the new Whose Line Is It Anyway? episodes over the past month or so. As far as I can tell, so far it's all leftover material from tapings for the later seasons (all with a 2000 or 2001 copyright date)…in fact, one of the episodes I captioned was material from the one taping I went to, in late 2000 or early 2001, from which I think they had already gotten two or three episodes.
They're edited as regular episodes, not as "best-of" compilations or anything like that. Last I heard, there are supposed to be somewhere between 22 and 29 new episodes, but don't hold me to that number, since I don't directly deal with anyone at the production company or ABC Family.
These are not episodes that were ever slated to run on ABC; we captioned the last batch of episodes for ABC in the first half of 2003, and I think all the episodes from that batch have already aired, either on ABC or ABC Family.
I don't know anything about the "lost" episode. It would have already been captioned in advance of its originally scheduled air date, so I'll be very surprised if it shows up now for me to work on.
Thanks, Jim. I've set my TiVo to grab these, and I'll try watching them with the captions on.