The folks who bring you The Price is Right are looking for a new announcer to replace the late Rod Roddy. They've tried a few gents out and are now running a poll on the CBS website to ask who should get the job. If you have a moment, do me a favor and go over there and vote for Randy West. He's a good guy and the right man for the job.

I sort of agree with Dahlia Lithwick on the practical side of dealing with the issue of gay marriage. I know I agree completely with the notion that two adult human beings, regardless of gender, should be able to marry but I also don't believe enough of America is ready to embrace that concept. So what this article proposes may be the best bit of common sense on how the matter stands at the moment, or should stand.

This one's in The Los Angeles Times. And today, I helped a gent who is putting together a segment that is tentatively planned for next Sunday's CBS Sunday Morning. I'll let you know if it looks like it's going to get on.

We're in the Golden Age of DVD Collections of Old TV Shows, we are! Here are some of the ones I plan to purchase when they come out. And note that some of these listings are linked to Amazon where you can advance-order them. If you do so through our links, this site gets a tiny commission…

• The Dick Van Dyke Show, Season 3 – My favorite TV show of all time. What can I say? And the third season was really when it started to get good. (The fourth season comes out a month or two later.)
• Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Vol. 2 – I watch these on the Trio network which, despite rumblings to the contrary, is still available via DirecTV satellite. Amazingly, they hold up pretty well.
• I Married Joan, Vol. 1 – I don't know why but I always liked this old sitcom, which featured Joan Davis trying to be Lucy, and Jim Backus doing a great job of being Jim Backus. No link yet for purchasing.
• The Flintstones, Season 1 – And it was the best season, done when Hanna-Barbera was still laboring under the apparent delusion that they were doing this show for adults. It was on at 9:00 Friday nights and sponsored sometimes by Winston cigarettes. It was not a kids' show, though this kid sure loved it.
• SCTV, Vol. 1 – Just announced is a five-disc set that, happily, will not start with the crude, half-hour first seasons. Instead, they're going to start with the 90-minute shows, which are easily the best. And some of the best sketch comedy ever done on TV. No link yet for purchasing.
• The Amazing Spider-Man – This is the 1967 animated Saturday morning series. This six-disc set includes a mini-documentary on the history of the show, including interviews with Stan Lee and (as a supposed expert on such matters) Yours Truly.
• The Complete Jonny Quest – I also helped out with a documentary that will be included on the upcoming release of a DVD collection that features all 26 episodes of the 1964 Hanna-Barbera series created by Doug Wildey. No link yet for purchasing.
• The Jack Paar Collection – Shout! Factory, which is the company formed by the folks who used to be the nucleus of Rhino Records and Rhino Home Video. They have a three-disc set that includes the recent PBS special on Paar, three complete hours of the prime-time show he did after The Tonight Show, and some moments from what little of his Tonight Show work survives. No link yet for purchasing.

A complete collection of the prime-time Jetsons episodes was announced and advertised but it seems to have disappeared from the websites that were soliciting advance orders. Also, later this year we'll have the second volume of Rocky & Bullwinkle and the first of a show I worked on, Garfield and Friends. When they're getting down to shows I wrote, I have to think that eventually, every show that has ever existed will become available.

Jimmy Breslin doesn't like George W. Bush and he doesn't like New York's mayor very much, either.

Voice artist Tony Pope died yesterday due to complications during leg surgery. Tony, who was born in 1947, was one of the many students of the late Daws Butler to go on to a successful career doing animation voices and voiceovers. His cartoon career included The Transformers, Zorro, Spider-Man, Tale Spin, S.W.A.T. Kats and The Adventures of Teddi Ruxpin, to name just a few of many, and he did several voices (including Goofy) in the movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Most of his work was narration gigs, radio commercials, announcing and especially looping, meaning that he was brought in to add voices and redub other actors in live-action movies.

You heard him many, many times and it's sad that you won't be hearing new work from him. The voiceover community is in mourning tonight.

Here's a link to an interesting article about gun control. It's of interest to me because of what it has to say about finding a middle ground between the notion that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of some psycho to own a Howitzer and the view that the government should (or even could) confiscate every gun in the country. I've long felt that as long as the debate rebounds between those two extremes, it can never truly be discussed, let alone resolved. This article suggests it can move to another level. Maybe.

My pal Larry Steller inexplicably calls himself "Mr. Grooism" and operates his own weblog. Reading the Julius Schwartz obit I linked to in the Telegraph, Larry noticed something that went right by me. It was this line…

Julius Schwartz was born in the Bronx, New York, on June 19 1915, and educated at Hebrew school where he was awarded a gold watch presented by the then Governor of New York, Eleanor Roosevelt.

Eleanor Roosevelt was the Governor of New York? No, she wasn't. Her hubby was. And I just looked it up and noted a tiny flaw in Julie's tale of receiving a watch from the wife of the then-governor in 1928. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected Governor of New York in 1928 but didn't take office until 1929. So maybe Roosevelt wasn't yet Governor or he was Governor-elect when Julie got the watch. Or maybe Julie got it the following year. But I'll bet you the part about him getting a watch from Eleanor Roosevelt was true…even if she wasn't the Governor.

Well, I haven't plugged a new book I have coming out for at least nine hours…so I might as well mention that my third collection of POV columns will be available in the middle of May from the fine folks at TwoMorrows Publishing. This one includes pieces on bad convention panels, cheap comic fans, my infamous "unfinanced entrepreneurs" essays, stupid mistakes in comics, obits on Pat Boyette and Curt Swan, and more. It also includes (and this was planned some time ago) a very long essay on Julius Schwartz…who alas, is now the late Julius Schwartz. Some of the book's new, some is reprinted from the column I did for years for Comics Buyer's Guide and a lot of it is old columns which I've gone back and fiddled with, taking out some of the dumber things I said and inserting all-new dumb things in their place.

And of course, it features a cover and loads of interior illustrations by Sergio Aragonés. You can advance order your copy here and be assured of getting your copy fresh from the printer. (And to answer a question I get a lot: No, at the moment, no one has any plans for a book of my essays about TV and show business. I'd like to do one and have actually been approached by real publishers…but every time, the deal falls through. Maybe one of these days…)

Here's a link to the New York Times obit for Julie Schwartz. (One minor quibble: The 1956 Flash revival started with scripts by Robert Kanigher, not Gardner Fox.)

Also, there's an obit in Newsday and one in the Telegraph.

Also: Since folks are still writing to ask, I want to repeat: Donations can be made to the Julius Schwartz Scholarship Fund c/o DC Comics, 1700 Broadway, New York, NY, 10019.

And another thing we're going to hear a lot about during this election is Halliburton, in particular whether Dick Cheney's former (more-or-less) company sold weapons to Saddam Hussein and/or has been gouging the U.S. on its wartime services. This article in The New Yorker lays out some of the more serious allegations.

In 1983, a new super-hero group debuted on the comic rack, the co-creation of Yours Truly and a superb artist named Will Meugniot. It was called The DNAgents, though an awful lot of people referred to it as "DNA Agents." Will and I had a lot of fun doing the series and then after he went on to other things, I had a lot of fun doing it with a number of other fine artists, and I did it until it stopped being fun and the publishing company got into trouble. (Those two things occurred at roughly the same time and were not unrelated.) It also yielded a couple of spin-off comics including one called Crossfire that I did with yet another terrific illustrator, the one named Dan Spiegle.

Ever since we stopped doing the books, I've been receiving requests to revive and/or reprint them and that's finally going to happen this year. Nat Gertler of About Comics will soon issue the first in a series of paperback collections that will reprint DNAgents and Crossfire in glorious black-and-white. Each volume will contain 176 pages (or around six issues of the original comics) in a 7.5" by 5.5" page format and include an afterword by me and leftover sketches by Will and others. Retail price will be $9.95 for each, and the first DNAgents will be out in June with the first Crossfire collection to follow not long after. I'll post a link here when it's possible to order them, and I hope you will.

I like to try and identify what's going to be "The Big Story," especially in politics, before it becomes "The Big Story." Right now, it's Bush's National Guard service, though it seems to be morphing into a Conservative attack on John Kerry's Vietnam record. Both onslaughts bother me, partly because they seem so irrelevant to possible future presidential actions and partly because the accusers (and often, the defenders) tend to so readily misrepresent old quotes and evidence. There may be something shameful in each man's past but it's not to be found in trying to zero in on which Tuesday in 1972 Bush was on or off the base, or locating a photo of Kerry in the proximity of Jane Fonda.

Between now and Election Day, I'd bet we're going to go through a cycle of recriminations on what actions George W. Bush took on the morning of 9/11…or didn't take. We will hear in righteous condemnation that even when there was clear info that hijacked airplanes were heading for populated buildings, Bush was no leader; that he sat there and read goat stories to children and then was "out of the loop" for hours, allowing others (mainly, Dick Cheney) to make his decisions for him. I don't know if there's a lick of truth to this — and neither do most of the folks who'll be charging or denying this — but we're going to hear an awful lot about it.

In anticipation of that controversy, I refer you to this article by Gail Sheehy. It's primarily about the flight attendants and air traffic controllers on 9/11 — what they knew and when they knew it — but it gets to the question of how government agencies responded that horrible morning. And it raises more questions about just what weaponry the hijackers brandished that enabled them to get through security, then seize control of four airliners.

You know what I heard today? "Classical Gas," the 1968 hit record by Mason Williams. There was a month there, at least at University High School in L.A., where you couldn't take three steps without hearing "Classical Gas." I decided to find out what I could learn about that song and I quickly found a whole website about it.

I will be among the guests at the Wondercon in San Francisco, April 30-May 2. This link will take you to a page crammed with details and you'll note that another guest is my frequent collaborator, Sergio Aragonés. This means we will probably be doing a Groo Panel, as well as another rousing game of "Quick Draw," in which Sergio and several other fast cartoonists act upon the odd challenges I throw their way. You'll want to be there for that event alone so make your plans now. Should be a great convention.