Is there a better renderer of classy comic book covers than Brian Bolland? I don't think so…

Michael Tomasky writes a good essay on the tactics of the outgoing Ari Fleischer, and at the way the Bush administration has changed the "tone" of politics.

A group of his fans have launched a drive to earn a posthumous pardon for Lenny Bruce, who was once convicted in New York for obscenity. Here are the details.

At the moment, it's book reviews written by highly-interested parties. Wasn't there a belief years ago that a formal review should be penned by someone who doesn't have a horse in the race? And if so, what happened to that policy?

The new book by Clinton cohort Sidney Blumenthal, The Clinton Wars, is presently being reviewed all over the place — and rarely by someone who doesn't have a vested interest in the book being totally believed or disbelieved. A large part of the work calls the New York Times coverage of Whitewater inept and dishonest…and the New York Review of Books assigned one of the men behind that coverage to review Blumenthal. (He did a pretty poor job of discrediting it and, as Joe Conason notes here, made some amazing errors in his review. Here's a link to that review.) The New York Times commissioned two reviews — one by another reporter whose coverage is criticized by Blumenthal. The New York Observer assigned Andrew Sullivan, a former editor of Blumenthal's who has invested a lot of column space perpetuating a version of the Clinton scandals that Blumenthal's book seeks to debunk. Vanity Fair is running as what may or may not be its only review a piece by Christopher Hitchens, who is called a drunk and a backstabber in the book — also a man who has wrapped a lot of his career around a lot of "facts" that Blumenthal says are not so. Slate ran two reviews today — one by Michael Isikoff, who is soundly criticized in the book; the other by Timothy Noah, who is a close friend of Blumenthal's.

Why does it have to be one or the other? I'm not saying these folks shouldn't have had the opportunity to write about the book and rebut whatever they felt warranted rebuttal. But wouldn't it be nice if some of these differing versions were evaluated by parties that weren't already wedded to one in particular? Who couldn't be accused of looking to settle scores or defend their own work?

I always come to these disagreements with the assumption that both sides are at least somewhat full of manure; that there are fuzzy memories and distortions and outright fibs emanating from all directions. Someone who has a stake in the matter may write with more outrage or passion but their reviews pretty much come down to "Don't believe a word of this dishonest book" or "Believe every word of this candid account." You'll get the occasional admission of one or two minor points just to look reasonable, but otherwise it's all or nothing. There is no one to impartially weigh whatever evidence exists and tell us which portions of the book stand up to scrutiny and which don't.

Once upon a time, that's what a reviewer was supposed to do. But these days, all we get are a lot of wrestling matches.

I love it when you stumble across a website that answers a question you've had for years. Like at least a few of you, I have long been curious about those huge fiberglass advertising figures you occasionally see adorning roadside businesses. They usually have their hands in a position that suggests they were designed to be Paul Bunyan holding an ax, but that someone adapted the mold to make them into someone else holding something else — like a muffler or a set of tires.

If you don't know what I'm talking about — or especially if you do — you'll want to visit this page and read all about what they call "Muffler Men." There's an interview with a guy who made a lot of them, plus a nationwide index to their location and the many variations and…oh, just go look. You'll understand. And many of you will go, "Oh! I've seen those things!"

The extremely wealthy Warren Buffett explains how the tax-cutting strategies of the Bush administration benefit the extremely wealthy. Read about it here.

As you'll recall, a group that claims to be promoting "family values" has been trying to get folks riled up over the fact that the recent Motor City Con had a few ladies on the premises who'd posed undraped for magazines, and also had some dealers who sold such magazines. Here's an e-mail from Janet Harriett, who was actually there…

I really enjoyed your blog comments on porn at cons, and I got a kick out of reading the con report you linked to. That organization seems to be among the many that exist for the sole purpose of being offended.

Last weekend, we attended the Motor City Con in Novi, Michigan, which also had an auction to benefit Make-a-Wish, former Playmates (who, incidentally, do not look half as interesting fully clothed and in person), and several vendors selling Playboy and a few more explicit magazines and videos in close proximity to non-adult material. As a rule, the adult material is well marked in separate boxes, which vigilant parents can easily keep their children from viewing. Many parents do not have a problem with their children and teenagers being exposed to seminude images, and those who do can certainly engage in a bit of parenting to keep their children out of those boxes or away from the booths that sell them. After all, there is no rule saying one must look through the wares of every vendor.

And as far as the presence of Playmates goes, every con we have attended that had Playmates advertised that fact heavily in all its promotional material, and it is rather difficult to purchase tickets without knowing if one or more might be there. It is not as if parents get their wristbands and suddenly find out that there are women there that make their living by selling photographs of themselves in various stages of undress.

Those who are not actively trying to be offended can get through cons by choosing to not spend time at the vendor and guest booths with adult material. Those who are might do better to choose not to attend at all and leave us our weekend of fun.

Agreed — especially with the line about organizations that exist to be offended. I think we sometimes don't pay attention to how much of our national dialogue is driven by sheer opportunism. A lot of us have a tendency to take viewpoints at face value and to debate them on that basis. One of the reasons I stopped listening to Talk Radio is that I heard one too many hysterical people of whom I thought, "That person would not care about that issue — or at least, not care that much — if they weren't on the radio with a need to keep it interesting." I don't mean they're always lying. I mean, I'm sure a lot of the authors of Clinton-hating books really do hate the Clintons. I just think they wouldn't hate them so much, or find so many reasons to, if Clinton-hating had not brought them fame and fortune. Mr. Bush seems to slowly be developing a parallel industry of folks whose incomes seem to hinge on being outraged.

The folks going "Shame, shame" towards comic conventions are trying to drum up a controversy, at least in part because that's their business. The cry that someone is forcing smut on our children is almost too easy for the crusaders to resist. Certainly, a lot of the Werthamesque persecutions of the fifties, as well as the occasional busting of comic shops these days, was/is based on the Easy Target principle. At the same time, I think the stores and convention owners need to recognize that to the extent these campaigns work at all, they work because they tap into a real concern out there. Some parents are flustered by how often sexual imagery is unavoidable; how their children see it and ask about it — or perhaps worse, see it and don't ask about it. Either way, it's an issue, and one that can be successfully exploited by those with a reason to do so.

A couple of folks wrote to me to say, "Playboy Playmates have no place at a comic convention. They have nothing to do with comics." I think that's also an unrealistic way to view the situation. The day of the pure comic convention is pretty much behind us. As anyone who's been to a Comic-Con International in San Diego can attest, the word "comics" has come to represent a certain energized concept of art and storytelling in an array of media — film, television, animation, gaming, etc. It no longer has to be printed on newsprint to be "comics" — a concept, by the way, that Jack Kirby was predicting in 1970. TV stars are flocking to comic conventions to sell autographed photos. Movie studios are engaging publicists who'll specialize in promoting their wares at comic conventions. The Playmates and porn stars can make money at them so they've become a part of comic conventions. That is the new reality, and convention organizers are going to have to deal with the zoning problems it creates. It may mean carving up the exhibitor space politely but firmly, designating certain portions as okay for the tots. It may mean going further to educate the public that a "comic book convention" just might have adult film stars lurking about. I agree with Janet that parents have to be pretty dumb to not know that kind of thing may be there, but dumb people do a lot to keep these so-called "pro-family" groups solvent. If convention owners and book store proprietors would be a little more attentive to this issue, they might not seem like such Easy Targets.

I don't like a lot of the recent attempts to take comic book characters who were designed for stylized line art and turn them into fully-rendered, close-to-realistic paintings. Most strike me as boring and forced, especially when long-established super-heroes suddenly start looking like the artists' friends who posed for reference. That said, there are about three exceptions and the main one is Alex Ross. He has an amazing way of making the characters still look like the characters and to keep the excitement intact. His website is full of examples. As you'll see.

Here's a link to a pretty good interview with comics legend Gene Colan. Gene is another example of how the best artists are sometimes the nicest guys.

Here's a link to the final part of Bob Rozakis's history of Cancelled Comics Cavalcade. Thank you, Michael Kilgore.

In 1978, the then-new management of DC Comics decided to embark on an expansion plan they called "The DC Explosion." New books were created, new back-up features were written and drawn, production was hastily increased…and then suddenly, it all fell apart. In what some (inevitably) dubbed "The DC Implosion," the new projects were cancelled and a lot of completed material was "written off," meaning that they decided never to publish it. But they did publish some of it in two very-limited editions reproduced by Xerox. The two issues of Cancelled Comics Cavalcade contained little in the way of wonderful material but were so rare as to evoke mega-prices and great curiosity.

That's the short version of the story. A longer explanation has been written by my pal Bob Rozakis, who was working for DC at the time. Here's Part One of a series of columns he wrote detailing the history of one of comics' scarcest publications. And since there don't seem to be any links on that site to take you from one installment of Bob's column to the next, here are links to Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, and Part Eight. I think there are other parts beyond those but these are all I could locate.

If you'd like to see these "lost" comics, there are bootleg copies sold from time to time at conventions. Scans also seem to turn up from time to time on the Internet. At the moment, this website is displaying many of the stories, at least until some DC lawyer suggests that ain't a good idea. A few of the stories are pretty good, and the worst are no worse than lots of stuff that made it into print at the time. Interestingly, the comic from that period that seems to hold up better than any others for me is Joe Simon's Prez. The book was quite controversial at the time, inexplicably hated by a number of comic fans who didn't like that DC was wandering into the domain of humor comics. In hindsight, it may have been the cleverest, freshest thing the company published for years. The fifth issue never made it to real publication but was included in Cancelled Comics Cavalcade and demonstrates why Prez is on my list of comics that were considered flops but which I think the publisher just gave up on too soon.

I didn't think it was possible but William F. Buckley Jr. actually makes me feel sorry for Bill Bennett.

I think Buckley is wrong, by the way, about Bennett's public career being through. If all those guys caught lying and covering-up in the first Bush administration can come back in this one, Bennett can come back. He can certainly get more books published and purchased.

I also think Buckley and all the pundits are wrong to even talk about which invasions of privacy are off-limits in politics. Nothing is, these days. It's nice to say that some areas should not be subjected to public scrutiny but that's no longer how it works in the real world. In the age of Drudge and various anti-Drudges, if you have dirt on a political opponent, you make sure it gets out. You may throw it yourself or you may arrange for it to be leaked in a manner that will keep your hands clean. But there is no such thing in politics as someone saying, "Yes, I know this information will wound my opponent but out of respect for his right to privacy, I'm going to withhold it." It should happen but it just doesn't.

No online seller seems to be taking advance orders for it yet, but we are told that Columbia-TriStar will on August 12 release Rocky & Bullwinkle: The Complete First Season on DVD. It's a three-disc set for $39.95 and I have no idea what episodes are in it, or even what they define as the first season, since the first bled rather seamlessly into the second. I'm guessing they're including the other cartoons in addition to the Rocky-Bullwinkle segments. By the way, the first Rocky-Bullwinkle storyline, which was all about a jet fuel formula and a Mooseberry Bush, was nowhere near as wonderful as what was to follow.

The show originally debuted on ABC on November 29, 1959 as Rocky and His Friends. In 1961, it moved to NBC as The Bullwinkle Show and later was marketed under both those names and as The Rocky Show or Rocky & Bullwinkle. In total, there were 326 Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons which formed 28 separate serials. There were also 91 Fractured Fairy Tales, 91 Mr. Peabody cartoons, 39 Aesop and Son, 39 Dudley Do-Right and a whole mess of interstitial shorts (39 of Bullwinkle's Corner, 50 of Mr. Know-It-All, and 10 sessions of The Rocky & Bullwinkle Fan Club). Crunching numbers, I'm figuring that to put all of this out on video would take at least 42 hours of media. I may be wildly off on my math since, after all, I grew up watching cartoons instead of studying.

Anyway, the fact that it's coming out is the good news. The bad news is how much this will eventually cost us but, hey, we all spend money on stuff that isn't half this good. And there may be some bad news in the announcement that the first release will include a booklet and a Bullwinkle hand puppet. This sounds like another of those ungainly packages that won't fit neatly on my DVD shelves.

A couple of "pro-family" groups are currently trying to gin up a crusade against comic book and science-fiction conventions as hotbeds of "pornography."

I put those two terms in quotes since those are their terms, and I don't consider them accurate. "Pro-family" is one of those labels you adopt to put a noble, responsible face on what is generally a reactionary, restrictive view of what families are or should be. An awful lot of soft bigotry is marketed under the brand name of "pro-family," much of it doing more damage to the concept of family than good. At the same time, most of those groups have a definition of "pornography" that is hysterical, utterly out of touch with mainstream America, and often indicative of a pretty ugly attitude towards sex.

The American Family Association is one such crusading organization, and their current campaign against comic conventions (exemplified by this report on a recent con in Pittsburgh) is pretty silly. A lot of it has to do with the fact that Playboy magazine and some of the women who've appeared in it can be seen at cons. You wonder if these people have been out in public lately. Playboy is pretty mild, given some of the forms of titillation that their kids can't help but see in stores, airports, on commercial TV, etc. Recently on some website, I saw someone say — and I'll bet this is true — that in spite of products that claim to restrict access, any kid who's smart enough to navigate the Internet is smart enough to locate hardcore porn and to hide that from their folks.

One gets the feeling that the current attention paid to comic conventions and the Playmates therein is merely a matter of someone looking for an easy target. Like Harold Hill getting the people of River City needlessly worried about the presence of a pool table in their community, the con-man needs his alarmist cause. Certainly, groups like the A.F.A. need to constantly broadcast alerts to keep their name in the newspapers and the donations rolling in. (One of my big complaints about anti-porn crusaders is that they favor the defenseless, easy target. They'll go after the corner newsstand for selling one magazine but not after Time-Warner for distributing it. And when was the last time you saw an anti-violence crusader mention the name of Rupert Murdoch?)

One also gets the feeling that the campaign against comic conventions will not amount to much. If any parents are prompted to keep their kids away from them as a result, the drop in attendance will more than be offset by those who will show up in the hope that the cons are as decadent as advertised. I am reminded of back in the late sixties and the science-fiction convention scene in Southern California. The cons were at hotels where the pool would occasionally be the scene of some very brief skinny-dipping by people you really didn't want to see naked. Nevertheless, reporters sometimes mentioned it so at every con, you could spot a few attendees who'd showed up just to be around when and if that happened.

The one way in which campaigns like the one the A.F.A. is mounting might hurt comic conventions is if they manage to intimidate facilities into not renting to the cons. This will probably not occur with conventions held in private hotels. I mean, the Marriott chain makes a lot of bucks off the hardcore "X" movies people watch in their rooms, so they're not about to go kicking cons out just because there's a Playmate on the premises. But a lot of conventions are held in "civic" or city-owned convention centers. Unless the convention is extremely lucrative for local businesses, as the big one in San Diego is, it's possible that pressure can successfully be brought on such venues to oust the comic conventions — or, more likely, get them to become stricter about what can and cannot be displayed.

It would not be the dumbest thing in the world for convention organizers to become a little more sensitized to this issue. Buried somewhere beneath the hysteria and myopia of the A.F.A., there's probably a legitimate parental concern. Sometimes, the X-rated magazines and starlets at conventions are uncomfortably close to where they're selling the Archie Comics. There are comic book shops that want to have it both ways: To be the family-friendly place where parents feel it's safe to let the kids browse for Scooby Doo funnybooks, but also to have porn stars in to sign their wares. It would not be censorship if these conventions and stores remembered that some patrons might not want to see, or want their children to see the lady with her breasts sticking out of her Vampirella costume. Respecting such feelings might just be a matter of courtesy, but it could also be good business. And a way of not inviting needless trouble.

Les Miserables closed last night on Broadway after an amazing 6,680 performances. That number is even more impressive when you consider how few shows get over the 4,000 mark — let alone all the way to six thousand and change. Les Miz lasted more than twice as long as the original Fiddler on the Roof, which at one time held the record. Here's how the top ten currently breaks down in terms of number of performances…

1. Cats (7485)
2. Les Miserables (6680)
3. The Phantom of the Opera (6382 and still running)
4. A Chorus Line (6137)
5. Oh! Calcutta! – Revival (5959)
6. Miss Saigon (4097)
7. Beauty and the Beast (3704 and still running)
8. 42nd Street – Original Production (3486)
9. Grease – Original production (3388)
10. Fiddler on the Roof (3242)

Some might argue that some of those shows lasted as long as they did because of clever promotional deals — and perhaps they did, but that's part of how the game is played. The revival of Oh! Calcutta! was around for 13 years, at least in part, because they staged it in a small theater, got the running costs down to where they could make a profit when half-full, and offered packages to tour groups that wanted to see something naughty without braving New York's famed porn palaces. (I once heard a lady who was in the show say that it probably also set some sort of record for walk-outs, as well as for playing to charter busloads of Japanese tourists.) In any case, there are theater buffs who argue that it shouldn't be eligible for lists like this.

If it isn't, the next in line would be a non-musical — Life With Father — that hung in there for 3224 outings. Filling out the Top 20 would be Tobacco Road, Rent, Hello, Dolly, My Fair Lady, the current revival of Chicago, Annie, the original Man of La Mancha, Abie's Irish Rose, and The Lion King. Three of those are still running but I don't think anyone thinks that any of the above shows but Phantom has a chance of beating out Cats for the top slot. The Lion King, for instance, would have to run another twelve years and three months to achieve that.

One other thing I noticed as I just looked at a whole list of Broadway shows and how long they ran: I think the funniest musical ever done was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and I think the funniest non-musical was The Odd Couple. And I just noticed that the original productions of these two shows each ran exactly the same number of performances: 964. I'm sure that doesn't prove anything but isn't it kinda interesting? No? Okay, I'm going to bed. Good night.