My mention that I once sat for Mr. Hirschfeld brought mail. Glenn Hauman, Phil Fried and Shelly Goldstein* all asked that I tell the tale of sitting for The Line King and/or that I post the resultant drawing. I have done this before so I'll refer you all to this posting. There you will be greeted by a portrait of a man with three Ninas in his hair. That is me.
*Chanteuse extraordinaire
As we all know, the Martin Beck Theater in New York has been renamed for the great caricaturist and Nina-hider, Al Hirschfeld. Here's one of the few news reports I can find about the renaming that includes a photo of the new marquee.
It's a lovely gesture for a lovely man. (I had the honor of sitting for Mr. Hirschfeld a few years ago when he sketched me and just to be in his presence for a few hours was a joy.) But why couldn't they have done this when he was still around to see it?
I'm sorry. That's the last time I'm going to whine about this.
Michael Kinsley explains the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action. Quick summary: Nothing's changed. Everyone's still double-talking.
Sorry…I'm behind on these. In my recently-released book, Mad Art, I praise many of the "new generation" of artists who have joined The Usual Gang of Idiots in MAD Magazine. One of the most impressive is a gent who is quite worthy to have his caricatures appear alongside those of Jack Davis and Mort Drucker…and that's about the best compliment I can give a guy who draws silly likenesses of people for a living. His name's Tom Richmond and you can see a sample of what he does so well over at his website.
I just read Sidney Blumenthal's book, The Clinton Wars — which like most book titles that are underlined on the Internet can be ordered from Amazon by clicking its name. I may say more about it here later but I have been saved the task of writing a review now since Richard Cohen has written one that summarizes my feelings exactly.
While I'm at it: I'm currently working my way through An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek. Portions of it are a little dry, especially as it works its way through bare bones historical details. One thing that does interest me is Dallek's account of Lyndon Johnson accepting the vice-presidential nomination in 1960. All the other books I've ever read have said that L.B.J. was dragged kicking and screaming into the second position on the ticket and they quote various Democratic officials as bracing him and telling him that for the good of country, party and Nixon-defeating, he had to accept what he considered a humiliating offer. Dallek however has Johnson manuevering to be picked, telling a friend that taking the veep slot was the only conceivable route for him ever to become President. I dunno if this is the truth or if the other version is correct — and with Johnson, it was not out of the question for two mutually-exclusive facts to be true — but this intrigued me.
More details have been posted about the July 31st book signing in Glendale, California. This is the unveiling of a new book of scripts by the late, great voice actor Daws Butler, Scenes for Actors and Voices. Several of Daws's fine students will be demonstrating what these scripts sound like when expertly performed.
Spinsanity looks at the skewed rhetoric on both sides of the debate about those alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction.
…but I do know that they rerun everything forever. So I wasn't worried that I didn't set the TiVo for their big 2-hour special on the history of super-heroes last night. It runs again several times this coming weekend. A hint if you're going to try to catch it: Some airings list it as Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked and some list it as an episode of a show called History's Mysteries. My guide says it's on Saturday at 5:00 PM and 9:00 PM and Sunday at 3:00 PM. Depending on your time zone and cable company, things may vary.
Vince Waldron (who was, by the way, the first person to respond to my fishing for donations so I'll plug his website) writes to ask…
Nice of you to note that the powers that be in the big apple finally got around to renaming the martin beck to honor the recently departed Al Hirschfeld. But this begs the question, who was Martin Beck, anyway? By the way, didn't Broadway just displace some other guy to make way for the Neil Simon moniker on one of their other marquees a few years back? Sheesh, but they're fickle.
Martin Beck was a vaudeville promoter and businessman. The theater was built in 1924 and he died in 1940 so he had 16 years of seeing his name on the place. But he was a pretty obscure theatrical figure so it's kind of amazing they didn't decide to rename the place long ago. The Neil Simon Theater was originally the Alvin, named for two producers — Alex Aarons and Vinton Freedley.
Maybe I'm sensitive to this point because I have a last name few can pronounce…but it seems to me that getting a business named after you is partly a function of having a simple name. "Martin Beck" is a simple name. It sounds like it belongs to someone of great importance. "Neil Simon" is a name everyone can remember and pronounce — "Driver, drop me off at the Neil Simon."
"Al Hirschfeld" is a good name. Anyone who could possibly have any interest in going to the theater can remember "Al Hirschfeld." But supposing that instead of international relations, Zbigniew Brzezinski had gone into the theater and been just as important as Martin Beck or Mark Hellinger or John Golden or any other person who got their name on a theater. Do you think anyone would have ever named a theater for Zbigniew Brzezinski? Would you tell a taxi to take you to the Zbigniew Brzezinski? Could you call Directory Assistance and get the number of the Zbigniew Brzezinski?
Just a thought.
Back in the sixties, Western Publishing Company (Gold Key Comics) began to have increasing problems getting their comics distributed. All the publishers were having this problem but it was most acute for Western. DC and Charlton owned their own distribution companies so they were able to push a little harder and at least they were paying their distribution fees to themselves. Marvel was distributed by DC until they jumped to a company owned by the same conglomerate that owned Marvel. The other companies, like Archie and Harvey, were hurt…but they (like DC and Marvel) were largely using their comic book publishing as a loss leader for the merchandising of the properties depicted in their comics. DC didn't consider it fatal when sales on the Batman comic went down since they were making money off Batman t-shirts and games and spatulas and such.
Western, however, did not control their own distribution, nor did they make any money off the merchandising of most of the characters in their comics. They had the Disney properties, Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, etc. — all properties owned by others. The few comics Western did own did not yield any real licensing money.
So they began hustling to find a way to sell comics in other venues — bookstores, toy stores, anywhere. They explored other forms of distribution and to this end began experimenting with different sizes and shapes of comics. Long before anyone at DC or Marvel was ready to break from the conventional funny book format, Western tried oversize comics, paperback comics, comics bundled in plastic bags and a few other ideas. Some received limited test marketings or never made it that far. Others came out and were widely ignored. The one thing that did well for a time was the digest comic — a little paperback about 6 and 3/4" tall with (usually) a little under 200 pages. Today, the Archie people have done quite well with their digests and the rumor is that other companies are gearing up to try them — especially for "funny" comics, whose less-detailed pages suffer less when reduced in size.
I don't believe this format will ever catch on big. Archie's success with it has largely been a matter of skillful (and expensive) marketing. They've managed to get excellent display in airports and at supermarket checkout counters. It often costs a lot of money to get your wares into those locations…which can accept very limited amounts of product. I also think there's a fundamental problem with the format in that its very size makes comics look cheap and unimportant.
One thing that some publishers seem to have missed is a lesson that Western learned when they were the only publisher doing them. When the digests were successful, they were only successful in stores that were completely isolated from regular-size comics. If a store had both sizes, no one bought the digests. If a store didn't carry regular-size comics but the one across the street did, no one bought the digests. I forget the actual sales numbers I was shown but it was something like this: When no regular-sized comics could be purchased nearby, a store that carried the digests might expect a 75% sale, which was very good. If the same store had regular comics, the digests would sell 10%. Therefore, Western was in the odd position of trying very hard not to distribute one of their products to some outlets. This they did until the digests died out in the early-seventies — about the time DC and Marvel were both enjoying some success with larger-than-normal comics. Western's distribution was crashing anyway by then but I've often wondered if the appearance of the tabloid "super-size" comics made the digests just look so puny that they helped finish them off.
Here's a long, interesting discussion on what it could mean if the drive to recall Gray Davis succeeds. There are more pro-and-con arguments on both sides than you might think.
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That was the wind-up. Here comes the pitch…
I am about to make a large purchase not on eBay but on a similar service. For reasons too complex to explain, I would like to finance as much of it as possible through donations to this site…so I'm asking for money. A lot of websites have been doing this lately, saying that the proprietor may not be able to continue supplying free content if the site doesn't bring in some cash. I'm not saying that. I'll keep doing this, either way. I just want to see if all the hours I spend doing this can get me a piece of high-tech hardware I want to purchase.
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It's been way too long since some hysterical newspaper decided to not run a Doonesbury strip or made some sort of editorial "correction." We hear that The Westchester/Rockland NY Journal News deleted Bill Bennett's name (and therefore, the entire point) from today's installment. Knowing Bennett, he probably bet they'd run it intact.
Here's a news item I just came across. In case you don't want to click and read the thing (you don't have to), here's the first paragraph…
An anti-pornography campaigner, who heads France's broadcasting authority, has been accused of attending sadomasochistic orgies and conniving in the murder of a transvestite prostitute who threatened to expose him and other pillars of the establishment in the city of Toulouse.
Of course, I have no idea if this guy is guilty or is being framed or what. But doesn't this kind of thing come out about an amazing percentage of anti-pornography crusaders? Must be all that research.
In an earlier post, I gave Don Giller all the credit for organizing a field trip of Letterman fans. Don writes…
I didn't organize the get-together; that was handled by two women named Traci and Renee. They've been doing this for four years now, and all credit should go to them.
So all credit (and my apology) to Traci and Renee. Everything else I said about Don is true.