The body of author Katherine Lawrence was found March 27 by a group of hikers along the San Pedro River. She had been reported missing to Tucson police days earlier. Exactly what occurred is not known, nor is her age, but she was a relatively young woman in (I'm guessing) her late thirties or early forties. Many people reading this knew her under the name of Kathy Selbert when she was pursuing a career in television writing. She wrote for, among other shows, Dungeons and Dragons, Conan the Adventurer and Hypernauts and was active in a number of our attempts to get animation writing covered by the Writers Guild…a movement that has finally, slowly, achieved some real progress.

I did not know Kathy well. She was a quiet type who preferred to express herself in her stories. Still, the news comes as a shock and a lot of us are very sorry to hear it.

Here's a website that will tell you everything you want to know about The Avengers. And I'm talking about the British TV series, not the Marvel comic book.

I have in my hand a hot-off-the-presses copy of the most eagerly-awaited comic strip collection I can recall. It's Volume One of The Complete Peanuts, reprinting Mr. Schulz's immortal strip from Day One. This is an important project not just because it's an important strip but because it's chronological and complete. Despite the ubiquitous presence of Charlie Brown reprints at one time, a great many Peanuts strips have not been seen since their one, disposable newspaper appearance, and a lot of them are in this first collection which takes us from 1950 through 1952.

Fantagraphics Books has done a splendid job. The physical book is smaller than I guess I was expecting…but then it struck me that they weren't wrong, I was. Peanuts was a small-format strip and the book has the dailies at precisely the size they were meant to be seen. Many strips appear to have been "restored" but the restorers did about as fine a job as anyone could expect. There's an introduction by Garrison Keillor, an afterword/analysis by David Michaelis and an interview with Schulz. I know some have complained about the cover and design, which were done by the cartoonist, Seth. I'd have preferred a bit more Schulz and a bit less Seth in this regard but this is a minor quibble, especially when there is so much to love.

One of the things I love is that you get to see Charles Brown and Charles Schulz mature together. Schulz's strip was professional from its inception and if he'd never advanced beyond what he was doing the first year, it would probably still be well-remembered, occupying a place in Comic Strip History somewhere between Nancy and Family Circus. That he ascended to a high place in American pop-culture had to do with a sensibility that you can just see beginning to blossom in this first edition. The changes are subtle, advancing like the hour hand on a clock, but there is unmistakable movement…and it's fascinating to watch it occur, in large part because it's all Schulz. It isn't so much that he never used assistants on his lettering or backgrounds as that he never used anyone else's sensibilities. You can almost hear the wheels turning as he takes the occasional misstep in developing the characters and hurriedly course-corrects. You can see the art begin to get quirkier as the characters get quirkier and begin to demand more expression. It's going to be fun to collect these books and watch Schulz hit his peak…and of course, we'll all be arguing about just when that occurs. (I have a friend who thinks it occurs about halfway through Volume One, and then it's all downhill from the moment Snoopy learned to think aloud.)

On this page, I have repeatedly urged you to go to this link and order the book directly from Fantagraphics. This has prompted several of you to write and ask why, for the love of God, I want you to do such a fool thing. From the publisher, it's $28.95 and I don't get a commission. If you order from Amazon, it's $20.27 and I do. Why do I want to cost us all money? Well, the answer is that, first of all, you'll get it sooner from the publisher. But more important is that you'll support them directly. I'd like to see this project do well so that…well, you know why. It's so there'll be more collections of more strips, done with the completeness and care of this one.

Nevertheless, if the price makes a difference to you, here's an Amazon link to order this first treasury of Schulz. Better you should get it that way than not get it at all.

A few hours ago, I posted a couple of weblog entries here which have disappeared due to a glitch. Did anyone here perchance capture them? Maybe you still have them in your Temporary Internet Files cache. If you do, please upload them to me so I can repost. I'm looking in particular for anything posted last night between 8:00 PM and Midnight, but especially a long, gushing review I wrote of the first volume of The Complete Peanuts, which I received today. Thanks!

If you haven't seen it yet, go watch the new adventure of Jerry Seinfeld and Superman. Yeah, it's an American Express commercial and, yes, Superman is a little silly. But it's clever enough to make you overlook those little things. Go to this page and click on the can that says "uniform." (The other cans are also worth your attention.)

Recently, the Los Angeles Times ran a gloomy assessment of work prospects in the Hollywood animation community. Here's a slightly-abridged version of that article, which I believe to be frighteningly correct.

Yes, I know this site has been down a few times today. Not my fault.

A Superior Court judge has thrown out the lawsuit against the Disney organization regarding unpaid royalties on Winnie the Pooh. The ruling states that the plaintiffs (the company that controls licensing rights) had unlawfully obtained certain documents. I have no idea if that's so but I did wince when I read this quote from Daniel Petrocelli, the lead lawyer for Disney…

After 13 years in the courts, the Winnie the Pooh case is finally over. Disney's position has been vindicated in its entirety. We're obviously extremely pleased with the outcome and we think it was the only appropriate one.

Uh, no. First off, the case may not be over because it will be appealed and may be reinstated. No case is over until appeals are exhausted.

But more to the point, this case was about one party, Stephen Slesinger Inc., claiming that it was owed certain royalties. The Disney position was that under the terms of the contract, they did not owe these royalties. Today's ruling doesn't go anywhere near that area of the dispute, so how could Disney's position be "vindicated in its entirety?" If this decision does hold up, they'll have won because the Slesinger folks did something unlawful in obtaining some papers, not because the claim of royalties was without merit.

I find this disappointing because I really admired Petrocelli for his work on the second O.J. Simpson trial. What a shame to find out that underneath all that heroism, he's just another lawyer.

Bill Sherman reminds me (and you, I suppose) that when Lester Maddox walked off the Cavett show, the event inspired Randy Newman to write some songs about rednecks.

Last night, writing about the witty guests who frequented The Dick Cavett Show, I wrote but deleted a partial list which started with Peter Ustinov. I never got to see as much of Sir Peter as I would have liked, but every time I saw him on anything, he made me laugh, almost always by saying or doing something that no one else would have said or done. He was, of course, a playwright and an actor and an author of books and a director and an educator and a humanitarian and he even, on occasion, displayed an uncanny flair for impersonations. Most of all, he was a funny man. Here's a link to one of hundreds of obits that are on the web today.

John Ashcroft isn't the only one feeding the Bill of Rights into a shredder these days. There goes that nonsense about the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.

A couple of folks wrote to ask about the famous incident where Georgia governor Lester Maddox walked off The Dick Cavett Show. Here's what I recall about it: It was a night when the other two guests were author Truman Capote and football player Jim Brown. Cavett asked Maddox a question that suggested that some of the famed segregationist's political support had come from bigots. The conversation veered off and wasn't answered, then Cavett threw to a commercial. When they returned, Maddox demanded an apology for "calling all the people of Georgia bigots" and said, "You've got one minute to apologize or I walk out of here." Cavett responded he'd said no such thing but then said, "If I called anyone a bigot who isn't a bigot, I apologize." (I'm writing this from memory so the exact words may have been a bit different.)

"That's not good enough," Maddox announced and bolted from the stage. The audience gasped and then Capote said, "You know, I went to his restaurant [in Georgia] and the fried chicken wasn't finger-licking good."

Cavett then said, "I'm sorry the governor left before we had a chance to talk about the beauty of the South." Someone in the audience yelled out, "Don't back down" and Cavett responded, "Shut up! I'll tell you when I'm backing down." He then pointed out that Maddox was a canny politician who knew the value of TV air time, choosing to walk off a scant 88 minutes into a 90 minute show.

The show got a huge rating that night, especially in the South, apparently due to Maddox's people alerting the media. A few weeks later, Maddox returned to the show, came out onto the stage and then Cavett walked off. Maddox picked up a hand mike and, as planned, began singing "Georgia on My Mind" or "Stars Fell on Alabama" or some other Southern-themed song. Cavett came back out and joined him for a chorus, and that was the end of the feud.

The whole event felt to me like Maddox decided it would get attention and garner support in Georgia to do what he did, but that he went a bit out of his way to be offended on behalf of the people of his state. A lot of folks though thought he'd "evened the score" for a time not long before when Jerry Lewis was guest-hosting Mr. Carson's show and announced that whenever he flew cross-country, he enjoyed "going to the bathroom over Mississippi." The telethon didn't get a lot of donations from the South that year.

One of the more insensitive moments I've ever seen on a TV interview show occurred on the old Tom Snyder Tomorrow program when he was chatting with Dick Cavett. I thought they were the two best interviewers of their day but all broadcasters occasionally phrase things wrong and that night, Snyder did. Cavett's late-night show had gone off the air and Tom, trying to ask how Dick felt about that, actually asked him, "How does it feel to be a flop?" Cavett's various programs were on ABC for almost five years, won numerous awards, and often finished a strong second in its time slot to Mr. Carson.

Cavett answered the question about as you'd expect, but I wish he'd asked Snyder, "Do you really think five years on the air to great critical acclaim constitutes a flop?" I'm sorry anyone remembers that show in a negative light because it was a wonderful program, crammed full of interesting guests. I can't think of anyone prominent at the time who didn't sit with Cavett, sometimes for the full 90 minutes, and he was good at jarring them off the same old anecdotes they told on every show and getting them to be candid and fresh.

His show was cancelled in increments. Top execs at ABC were unhappy to not be winning the time slot so someone there came up with a lame idea called ABC's Wide World of Entertainment, which was a series of rotating elements, nicknamed within the industry, "ABC's Wide World of Indecision." One week out of four, Cavett did his show but the smell of death was in the air and it was no longer the same. Another week out of the four, a disappointing talk show was hosted by Jack Paar, who came out of retirement but not out of the sixties, and the other two weeks were a jumble of pilots and low-budget specials that also failed to lure viewers away from Johnny Carson. After less than a year, it all went off…and the buzz around ABC reportedly was that they'd have been much better off to leave Cavett in place since they had nothing there until years later when the hostage crisis begat Ted Koppel and Nightline. I wish they had kept Cavett on longer…and I wish someone would re-air those old programs.

I'm currently watching C-Span 1 where they're running a 1971 Dick Cavett Show on which John Kerry, then a Vietnam activist, debated a fellow Navy veteran, John O'Neill. The thrust of it is that Kerry charges that a vast amount of war crimes were committed in that conflict by American forces, while O'Neill is there to charge that Kerry is wrong. It reruns (I think) later tonight at 12:30 Eastern and 9:30 Pacific. And if you miss it there, there's a RealVideo file on the C-Span website.

It's kind of an interesting reminder of the tensions of that time. I think history has not been kind to the claim that the war protesters were generally in the wrong but it also has not supported a lot of their specific charges, and Kerry's charges of extensive war crimes seem to be among those. One of the things that made the protests so ugly and unconstructive was the gross exaggeration and the unwillingness of both sides to acknowledge the slightest nugget of merit to the other faction's position. I was, at different times, on both sides of that debate. And in both cases when I marched, I marched among people to whom "the enemy" meant not the Viet Cong but other Americans who saw the war differently. In both cases, I was among people who got hysterical if you suggested that the other side was, say, only 99% wrong.

I presume this old program is not being resurrected because someone thinks America now wishes to revisit that debate. I presume it's on now because someone thinks it tells us something about John Kerry. I don't know that this is true or that it has any more to do with the guy currently running for president than revisiting George Bush's days of cheerleading and drunk driving tells us about the guy running for a second term. But it's fascinating to see this program and I wish some channel would buy and rerun all those old Dick Cavett Shows.

On the other hand, I've just seen a great example of the problem of discussing important issues on network television: In his opening statement, O'Neill called Kerry a liar and every other insult just short of traitor. But then before they could get to Kerry's response, Cavett had to stop for a commercial from Calgon Bath Oil Beads.

Why was U.S. pre-war intelligence on Iraq, particularly about Weapons of Mass Destruction, so stunningly wrong? This article in the L.A. Times tells why. Assuming this report is true, it's amazing how our top officials put so much trust in a third-hand account by someone they didn't even know.