The situation in Iraq with regard to torture is so ghastly that even George W. Bush, a man not known for ever saying he's sorry about anything, this morning said he was sorry about something. Could it get any worse over there in terms of the U.S. being perceived as trampling the basic human rights that we are supposedly there to uphold? Well, sure it can get worse. We're sending John Negroponte over as our new ambassador. Take a look at what he did for the U.S. in Honduras and ask yourself if there's a worse choice for the job.

This obit is a little late but I have just learned that one of the first comic book artists, Fred Guardineer, passed away on September 13, 2002 a month shy of what would have been his 89th birthday. Guardineer was best known for the character of Zatara the Magician, a rather close knock-off of Lee Falk's Mandrake the Magician…and Guardineer didn't stop there. He did a couple other similar magician characters for other publishers, most of whom also looked like Mandrake. Fred was born in Albany, New York on October 3, 1913 and acquired a fine arts degree in 1935, by which time he was already doing illustrations for a number of New York-based pulp magazines. In 1936, he went to work for the shop of Harry "A" Chesler, whose studio was producing stories and artwork for some of the earliest comic book publishers (his main strip was a thing called Dan Hastings).

Shortly after, he began freelancing for Centaur and also for DC Comics where he did Zatara, Speed Saunders and Pep Morgan, as well as many striking covers. He drew for other companies including Marvel, ME, Hillman and Lev Gleason, often whipping out Zatara clones like Tor the Magic Master, which he did for Quality. When the industry hit a slump in the mid-fifties, Guardineer decided the time had come to get out and he went to work for the post office.

He remained effectively out of comics the rest of his life but in the sixties, comic historian Jerry DeFuccio (then the associate editor of MAD) tracked him down, interviewed him and became the first of many collectors to pay what Guardineer considered tidy sums to re-create some of his old covers. After a time, Guardineer again lost contact with the comic art community but in 1998, comic fan Dave Siegel located Guardineer in Northern California and got him to attend that year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. I was pleased to have him on two panels, one of which was a gathering of every surviving person who'd had a hand in the creation of the historic Action Comics #1. I also got to present him with the convention's coveted Inkpot Award, which meant a lot to him. Fred was confined to a wheelchair by then but with great effort, he insisted on standing as he made a brief but eloquent acceptance speech. Later, Dave got him to a WonderCon in Oakland and again, Fred had a wonderful time meeting people who treasured his work. A nice man and a good artist…sorry to hear he's no longer with us.

The Writers Guild has scheduled an "informational meeting" for next Monday evening at the Sheraton Universal. Since they're holding it there, they obviously expect a pretty large turnout. The rumor mill says that we will have a "final offer" from the Producers by then, one which will include slightly better numbers in the Health Plan category and pretty much nothing in the other key areas. (There may be one of those face-saving, mitigating promises to appoint a committee to study the issue or something of the sort.) If the offer is as bad as some expect, our leaders will probably announce Monday night or before that they intend to seek a strike authorization vote from the membership. Obviously, everyone is hoping it doesn't come to that.

Writers Guild strikes — I've lived through many — are unusual critters. They bring together, at least in theory, a lot of disparate folks with widely different careers. Suddenly, a guy with one or two small sales is going to war alongside screenwriters who make two million per picture and TV producers who make that much a month.

Folks in both categories think they are the ones making the supreme sacrifice in a work stoppage. The writers who aren't working much are inclined to say…

We're the ones suffering in this strike. I desperately needed that job I might have gotten next week. The rich writers aren't suffering. They have millions in the bank. They're receiving residuals. They can fly off to Europe and have a nice vacation or write a novel or a spec script, confident they'll have work the minute the strike is over. Losing a couple of assignments isn't going to cost them their homes.

At the same time, the folks who work a lot are inclined to say…

We're the ones suffering in this strike. We're the ones walking off real jobs, having real projects cancelled. We're the ones the studios are furious at for not crossing the picket lines. The guys who aren't working usually have other sources of income. They're not losing anything by being on strike for three months because they weren't likely to be working those three months, anyway.

Each of those positions is true up to the point where it denies the other. Everyone does suffer and of course, there are the ancillary pains of production assistants who are laid off, crews who don't work when shows are shut down, businesses that don't do business, etc. My gut feeling is that while no one ever really wants a strike, both sides in the current negotiation are even more horrified than usual at the prospect of one. On the other hand, the details we know of that negotiation suggest logically that we're heading in that direction. The Guild cannot allow its Health Plan to be whittled down to the point where all it gives its members is a couple of band-aids and a medium sized bottle of Bactine. My guess here is that the Producers have made their lowball offer in this area for strategic reasons. They figure that just as we're poised to strike, a slight improvement in the Health Plan offer will be so meaningful that we'll forget about the other areas.

That strategy, assuming it's the strategy, might work. Then again, the claim that they can't pay another nickel on DVD revenues is so bogus that the Guild just might walk over that one. We'll see…

Okay, Michael Moore is complaining that Disney is trying to block distribution of his new movie about the Bush family. Does anyone anywhere think that this movie won't get released by someone? Or that this controversy won't help it at the box office?

No "spoiler" warning. By now, if you care about the Gasoline Alley newspaper strip, you're aware that Uncle Walt is alive and has attended the funeral of his spouse, Phyllis. Some folks on chat boards seem upset at how writer-artist Jim Scancarelli dragged out the reveal of who had died, or just feel baited-and-switched. I found the storyline fascinating. There's also something nice about a strip that has been often dismissed as old-fashioned managing to keep its readership completely off-balance for two weeks. (Some also found the cheery funeral home lady annoying or unrealistic. Given the disposition of the woman I dealt with when my uncle died, I found it a very reasonable characterization.)

So what now? Scancarelli is going to have to deal with the secret of how Skeezix was abandoned 80+ years ago. It's been so well-teased that it now has to be revealed, so I'll presume we're in for a bit of adjustment by Walt and then he'll either find a letter that Phyllis left behind or someone will show up who knows the tale and can tell it to him. I'll predict a multi-week flashback in which Walt and Skeezix learn the truth and I sure hope it's revealed in a way that makes clear Phyllis arranged it and made certain she couldn't carry the secret to her grave.

Which brings us to the question of how long Uncle Walt Wallet will survive his beloved Phyllis. Fans of the strip note that he is logically around 105 years old. This kind of thing has never been an issue in ageless strips like Snuffy Smith or Blondie but Gasoline Alley gained fame as a comic strip in which characters aged in something approximating real time. It was so notable that Harvey Kurtzman even built his legendary MAD parody around that aspect of the strip, so I guess some of us still expect it even though Scancarelli — and Dick Moores before him — obviously slowed the process down considerably. One could certainly make the case that longtime readers of the strip would rather have Walt around than go through the pain of losing him, and Scancarelli may not want to sadden them. (He also may not be calling the shots on this. I think the syndicate owns the strip.)

More to the point, Scancarelli may feel he can get some good story mileage out of Walt as widower, learning to cope without Phyllis. There are older men in this world who find themselves in this situation and I can't recall anyone ever really addressing it before in a newspaper strip. The other day, I thought it would be touching if Walt learned the secret and then passed on to be reunited with Phyllis…but the more I think of it, I like the idea that older people don't have to die when they lose a mate. I've seen a number of cases where one person dies and everyone else is then ready to bury the spouse, assuming his or her days are numbered. (One of the things I admired about the late Julius Schwartz was that he put the lie to all such predictions when his wife died. I think he survived her by around eighteen years. At the time of her death, I don't think any of his friends would have bet on eighteen months.) Not that "what I'd do" matters much but I think that if I were in Scancarelli's place, I'd just decide Walt was in his eighties and keep him around long enough to establish that a person's life needn't be over in such a situation. That might be a lot more valuable than some supposedly more dramatic scenarios.

I am back to being highly pessimistic (up from mildly pessimistic) about the current negotiations between the AMPTP and the Writers Guild of America. Today, the WGA put out a couple of announcements that summarize a pretty bad situation and make you wonder what anyone has been talking about in the 'round-the-clock negotiations that have been transpiring the last week or so. For the benefit of those who are wondering what it all means, here's a quick summary as I see it…

The old contract has expired and in addressing the matter of the new contract, the WGA indicated a number of areas wherein it felt there should be improvement. There's a long list of them but the three main ones are…

• The Health Plan – Health costs are going up and like almost every work-related entity that supplies health insurance to workers, the WGA has found it necessary to reduce benefits and to rewrite its rules so that fewer folks qualify. The WGA Health Plan is facing further downsizing and cutbacks if the Producers do not up their contribution.
• DVD Money – The market for DVDs is becoming far more lucrative than anyone ever imagined. Writers feel entitled to a slightly larger share of the revenues when shows and movies they authored are released on home video.
• Expanded Jurisdiction – There are a number of areas where the Guild has little or no representation. Writers of so-called "reality shows" were once covered by the WGA but Producers have done a legal end-run around the old system so that they can have their shows written non-union. The WGA has made some inroads into representing Animation Writers but at many studios, writers are without basic representation. There are a few others, and the Guild wants to expand the areas in which it represents those who write.

There are other issues but I doubt anyone would be talking Strike if those three were addressed in some manner. The offer currently on the table from the Producers offers a modest, insufficient increase in contributions to the Health Plan and nothing whatsoever in the other two. The Guild has countered with an offer to make a one-year deal (as the Screen Actors Guild recently did) instead of the customary three-year pact. The WGA is essentially offering to table its main demands and to discuss them later in the interest of not calling a strike at this time, thereby enabling "the town" (as we lovingly call it) to keep on working.

I'm guessing this is primarily a p.r. offer from our side, made with the idea that if a strike does occur, we'll be able to say, "We were willing to keep everyone working. It was the Producers that forced a strike." I don't think a one-year deal is really in the interests of either side. From our standpoint, you have to ask, "Why would they give us anything we want in one year that they won't give us now?" They would also have a year to prepare for a strike, stockpiling scripts and getting some shows ahead in production. From the Producers' side, a one-year extension would place our renegotiation date close to when the current Screen Actors Guild deal expires (June 30, 2005) and the current Directors Guild contract expires (July 1, 2005). It's hard to imagine they would want to have to juggle all three demanding Health Plan increases and more DVD money at the same time.

What will happen next? Presumably, if the AMPTP bites on our proposed extension, all of this is deferred for a year. It's possible but I doubt it will happen. If they refuse, our Board of Directors will ask the membership for a Strike Authorization vote. I honestly don't know what the mood of the Guild is in this regard. If the Board gets a vote of 80% or above, we might be able to mount a credible strike threat and force the Producers back to the bargaining table with a little more flexibility. If we get a strike vote of 65% or less, we'll either see a short strike or no strike and we'll end up taking the current rotten offer, perhaps with a few minor or cosmetic improvements. A vote between 65% and 80% is more uncertain. I don't know what will happen but like I said, I'm back to Orange Alert on the Pessimism Scale.

Nice article on my favorite standup comedian, Lewis Black.

Michael Moore has this new movie he's made all about alleged links between the Bush family and the Saudis. And now it's being alleged that the Disney organization is trying to kill the film's distribution so as to not endanger certain tax breaks that the company receives, especially in Jeb Bush's Florida. Read all about it.

Someone is selling the contract that Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy signed to authorize the publication of the Laurel and Hardy comic book that came out from St. John in 1955. Here's the link and here's some history. What's interesting is that the contract is written as if this is a new relationship and the St. John folks are about to begin creating the material. In fact, St. John had published three issues of a Laurel and Hardy comic book in 1949 and the only thing issued under the terms of this 1955 contract were reprints of those three issues. It may all have been a matter of timing for St. John. The firm launched a rather successful Abbott and Costello comic book in 1948 and — I'm guessing — grabbed up the rights to Stan and Ollie figuring they might do just as well.

But in '49, Laurel and Hardy were pretty cold. Their last major American movie (and maybe their worst), The Bullfighters, had come out in May of '45. By 1949, the act was so inactive that Hardy went off and made a movie, The Fighting Kentuckian, without Laurel. They still had their own production company — the entity with which this contract was made — but it never actually produced anything. And their comic book obviously didn't do very well. In 1949, if a comic lasted three issues, that meant that the publisher cancelled the book after seeing the earliest sales reports on the first issue.

By 1955, the St. John comic book company was in serious decline but Laurel and Hardy were actually enjoying an upswing in fame, especially among youngsters, due to their movies being released to television. I'll speculate here that Mr. St. John noticed this and thought it would be a cheap gamble to reprint the old issues. At the time, reprints were frowned upon by both readers and distributors but he probably figured the first go-round had gone so unnoticed that no one would realize he was recycling. I'll further speculate that he had someone just retype the 1949 contract and got Stan and Oliver, via their current reps, to sign it again for another payment. Perhaps if we could see the middle page of this 3-page contract, which is not on the auction site, we'd know more. I'd be curious to learn how much they were paid but that info was presumably on Page Two.

The comic probably didn't sell any better in '55 than it had in '49. St. John was pretty much out of business the next year. None of the subsequent Laurel and Hardy comic books from other publishers (there were several) sold well either, even when the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series of The Boys was on the air and the comic was a tie-in.

The three St. John issues were primarily drawn by an animator named Reuben Timmins, sometimes credited as Rube Timinsky and other permutations. His career stretched from working on Betty Boop for Max Fleischer (1931) to A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) and the animated Star Trek series (1973). He passed away in 1994 and apparently did very few comic books, all for St. John, beyond the three issues of Laurel and Hardy. A pretty good artist. [Thanks to "Paskegren" for calling my attention to the auction.]

When I travel, as I just did, I take along a modular phone cord so I can hook my laptop into a telephone line. I've been using ones with little reels like the one above. They're handy when they don't break, but they break too often to suit me. The little plastic tab that you press to release the plug from its socket is always breaking off mine. This happened to me in San Francisco and it's happened to me too many times before.

When that little tab breaks, it renders the whole thing largely useless unless I want to haul out my modular plug crimping tool and put on a new one, which I don't. Does anyone make one with unbreakable modular plugs? Say, made out of metal? I'm really tired of being in a hotel and having one of these snap on me.

My friend in the Washington press corps writes to say he thinks this article in Salon is one of the most important pieces he's seen. It's about how a lot of folks close to George W. Bush have been deceived by a man named Ahmed Chalabi who has a definite personal agenda for Iraq.

Reader Jon Weltz writes the following with regard to our recent discussions of the current continuity in the Gasoline Alley newspaper strip…

I followed your link and read it and I'm glad I did but it's very frustrating that they're arranging funeral services and actually having the funeral and they haven't told us yet for sure who died. Over on his blog, Peter David said he thought this was "bad writing." You seem to think it is good writing and since you and Peter are two of my favorite writers, I am intrigued by the different views. Could you elaborate? And can you tell me how you would have handled this story?

Well, I'm not sure it's good writing. Unlike my pal Peter, I'm waiting for the payoff before I say it's bad, and he may turn out to be right. The writer-artist, Mr. Scancarelli, seems to have something deliberate on his mind and I'm as curious as anyone as to what it is. (Actually, one might argue that anything that gets people to go out of their way to read Gasoline Alley, a long-ignored strip, is good writing but I assume that's not the kind of "good" we're talking about here.) How would I have handled it? I have no idea how I would have treated the whole notion of killing off Walt and/or Phyllis. I wouldn't have done it the way Scancarelli is going about it, but that certainly doesn't mean he's wrong. For one thing, he knows these characters a lot better than I could ever pretend to, and he's probably been planning this for years. However, if I suddenly had to take over right now and plot the ending, here's what I would do…

Let us review. Years and years ago, in the defining moment of his life, Walt Wallet adopted an abandoned baby named Skeezix. Walt later married Phyllis and they've had a very long, happy life together. By some estimates, Walt is pushing 105. Finally, Phyllis says it's time she tells him the secret of the abandoned baby…a secret she has somehow kept from her husband for 83 (!) years. Despite his coaxing, she says she'll tell him tomorrow…and then in the middle of the night, we have the death of someone or maybe two someones, and we haven't seen either Walt or Phyllis since then.

If I had to pick up those plot threads now, it would turn out that Phyllis died. If Walt died, then he died without his beloved wife telling him an important secret, revealing something vital she knows about his past. That's very unsatisfying. It's almost like she did something cruel to him by drawing it out and not telling him sooner, knowing full well that either of them could go at any minute. So what I would do is say that Phyllis died in the middle of the night and Walt made the mysterious phone call in the middle of the night to Skeezix.

Then Walt himself had to be hospitalized because of grief or shock or illness, which would explain why we don't see him in the funeral sequence now being played out in the strip. I would have someone, probably Skeezix, go from the funeral to his bedside and say, "It was a lovely service. Too bad your doctor wouldn't let you attend." Or maybe I'd have a shot of him in a wheelchair at the graveside and indicate he's been in the hospital for the last few days and was let out briefly to attend the funeral…and then he has to go back to his hospital bed.

Either way, you then have to have someone tell him the secret of how Skeezix was abandoned. Scancarelli has set it up for revelation and it would be very mean to the readers not to reveal it…which means that regardless of who died, the surviving characters in the strip have to learn it. If Phyllis died, she had to have left behind a diary or a letter or someone who was authorized to tell Walt in case she predeceased him. It would have been very thoughtless for her not to have done that. So in my version, someone comes to Walt's bedside and says, "Phyllis left this letter with me, just in case" or "Phyllis wanted me to tell you…" Perhaps another child of Skeezix's mother could come see him, thereby introducing Skeezix to a sister or brother he never knew he had.

Then the secret is revealed of how and why Skeezix's biological mother abandoned him. Once he learns this secret, Walt can pass away in peace, thereby reuniting him with his beloved Phyllis. (Some have suggested that it will turn out that by some incredible machinations, Skeezix is actually his biological son. But I can't imagine Phyllis keeping that a secret from both of them for 83 years because of a promise to an outside party, even the mother.)

This is the only logical ending I can envision to what's recently happened in the strip. If Walt died, then Phyllis would have to live with the guilt that she didn't tell him sooner. That would be an awfully negative way to end one of the happiest marriages in the history of comics. If Phyllis died and didn't make provisions for him to learn the secret then she did a heartless thing to the love of her life. Again, a bad way to end that. If both died together, then she still didn't tell him something he needed to know. The only thing that makes sense to me is if she died, Walt learns the secret and then he joins her.

Which is not to say this is how Mr. Scancarelli is doing it. Several comic strip websites seem pretty sure that Walt has died and they sound like they have inside information. What I have here is not a prediction. It's just the way I see the storyline wrapping up. In a day or two, we'll see what actually happens over at this website.

Robert Kagan has been a big backer of the War in Iraq and the general "neocon" worldview. So his current position — that Bush is letting that war be run by people who are botching it up beyond belief — is more than a little interesting.

And as a companion piece, you might want to read Seymour Hersh on reports of Americans torturing Iraqis. There are some pretty brutal photos there but you can read the article without seeing the pics if you prefer.

Lastly for now, Terry Jones (who is inevitably referred to as "Terry Jones of Monty Python fame") has a clever article about the terminology of the current war.

Okay, I'm back home now from a very good convention. Sunday afternoon, I wandered about for a while chatting with folks, then moderated a panel remembering the late Julius Schwartz. Mike Friedrich, David Spurlock and I told stories. Members of the audiences told stories. Julie would have liked everything about it except that he wasn't on the panel.

WonderCon is moving to February next year, swapping weekends with the APE, which is the Alternative Press Expo, a smaller Bay Area convention that focuses on small press publications. Try and be there.

And yes, I got to meet Sid Haig. He turns out to be a very nice man, which makes me all the more impressed with him as an actor. You see, he usually plays very nasty men so convincingly that you figure maybe he's not acting. Here's a link to his website so you can see his picture and go, "Oh, yeah. That guy."

The C-Span website currently has among its online videos, a one hour speech that Jim "Garfield" Davis gave recently at the National Press Club. They rotate these videos so it may not be there for long. If you'd like to view it, this direct link to the video should work for most browsers. If it doesn't, go to the C-Span website and look on the first page.