I agree with this editorial in the Washington Post on why Donald Rumsfeld's policy decisions have led to the current reports of torture and human rights violations by American troops.

George W. Bush says he has no intention of firing Donald Rumsfeld. He seems to have no interest in firing George Tenet or Paul Wolfowitz, and I think we still have Ahmed Chalabi on the payroll.

Is there anything you can do in this administration that will get you fired? I mean, besides tell the American public and Congress what things are really going to cost?

Yes, as several people have pointed out to me, there's an older man who lost his wife in the comic strip, For Better or For Worse. Forgot about him…but it's still an interesting "character situation" for Walt Wallet of Gasoline Alley. Uncle Walt was getting somewhat disoriented in the strip and seemed to be having trouble taking care of himself. It could make for a very nice continuity if he learns how to cope with the loss of his mate.

Someone wrote me that he's 105 years old and ought to be shuffling off this mortal coil. Yeah, but 105 isn't 105 in a comic strip unless the cartoonist says so. It's just something we accept and the fact that the characters in Gasoline Alley once aged doesn't mean they have to age, or have to age at any pace other than that dictated by the guy doing the strip. You see that at work in the new Peanuts collection, displaying that strip's early years. Lucy started out as a baby compared to Charlie Brown, then grew up to approximately the same age. Linus was then introduced as a tot and grew up to almost the same age, and Snoopy was originally a pup. Everyone's ages "froze" when Schulz got them where he felt comfortable with them. Would that we could all make the same decision about ourselves and everyone around us.

The episode of The Late Show With David Letterman that airs the evening of Friday, May 14 will be taped earlier that day…much earlier. For some odd reason, Dave is taping at 4:00 in the morning.

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.