As mentioned here a few days ago, acclaimed photographer David Baker has created an awesome photo mosaic of Mad/Groo cartoonist Sergio Aragonés. Well, here's your chance to own your very own copy. Sergio was photographed in his soon-to-be-vacated studio and then David fashioned over 90 of those photos into an 18" by 24" mosaic poster. From afar, it looks like a picture of Sergio's face. Up close, you see the images of him posing in his unnatural habitat. (Click here to see the whole poster.)

Only 200 prints have been made and many are already gone or spoken-for. Each poster is numbered, embossed with an authenticity stamp by the photographer, and then personally signed by Sergio. The price? Only $75.00. Shipping is included on U.S. orders. For foreign sales, inquire of Dave at david@ojaiimages.com. That's also the PayPal address if you'd like to pay that way, or send your check or money order to David Baker, 300 Running Ridge Trail, Ojai, CA 93023.

Sidney Blumenthal's forthcoming book is #9 in the sales rankings at Amazon.

Harry Knowles has just posted that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby will receive a creator credit on the upcoming Incredible Hulk movie. He spoke with Avi Arad, who currently runs Marvel, and says the credit will probably read, "Based on the Marvel Characters as created by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby." Very good news.

Here's another, more detailed article on the battle to save the old Hanna-Barbera building. I still don't know who owns the place and I wonder why this highly-relevant information seems to be excluded from the discussion.

Here's why no one takes Matt Drudge seriously. The other night, he posted this report (that link will expire soon but should be good for a while) bashing Sidney Blumenthal's new book. Blumenthal is an old nemesis of Drudge, and the new book is supposed to give a pro-Clinton insider's look at the Clinton Administration.

Naturally, Drudge is eager to declare the book a failure. He says that print outlets have "taken a pass" on printing excerpts, and that as of Sunday night, the book (which is not even out yet) was only at #23,588 on the Amazon Best Seller list.

I think he typoed and meant Saturday. When I checked on Sunday evening, The Clinton Wars was at #500 or so. As I write this, it's at #17. Wish I could get Matt Drudge to say that my books aren't doing well.

In the meantime, despite the claim that print outlets are declining to excerpt Blumenthal's book, a chapter of it is in the current Washington Monthly. Here's a link to that.

Over at his fabulously-fun website, Ain't It Cool, Harry Knowles is expressing shock and dismay at reports that the forthcoming Incredible Hulk movie will carry no creator credit for Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. I'm not sure why Harry is surprised by this. The comic books carry no such credits and with the exception of the short-lived Silver Surfer cartoon show, I can't think of any Marvel TV or movie adaptation that has said "created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby" on it. Certainly, the first X-Men movie did not. Stan was, of course, credited as one of the Executive Producers. Jack's name was buried very deep in the end credits with a kind of unspecified acknowledgment like you'd give to a location that allowed you to film on its property. A lot of folks probably didn't notice it at all. At the screening I attended, I was literally the only one left in the theater by the time Jack's name rolled past in the smallest typeface.

Marvel has a long history of not crediting Jack Kirby for his contributions, and often not crediting Stan in a creator or co-creator capacity. This history has endured through many regime changes at Marvel and while many execs have talked about "doing the right thing," they have a way of leaving the company before they can make it happen. That credit on the animated Silver Surfer series was authorized by a gentleman named Joseph Calamari who was then the President of Marvel. He personally assured me that this was the new policy; that henceforth all Marvel movies, TV shows and even comic books would carry creator credits, such as DC routinely does on its key books and the adaptations of them. And soon after that, for reasons I assume were unrelated to that decision, Joe Calamari was no longer at Marvel. Well, at least he got one credit placed before he was out. Some of the others who've said they wanted to institute creator credits didn't even manage that.

Several e-mails asked (or lectured) me about my use of the word "lyrist" to denote the person who writes the lyrics for a Broadway show. I have always subscribed to the theory that anything you can find in any real dictionary is fair game. More recently, I have come to believe that the Microsoft Encarta World English Dictionary on my computer is the definitive authority when I don't feel like getting up to consult actual books. Anyway, Encarta says it's either "lyricist" or "lyrist" so one can use either.

Since "lyrist" can also apply to a person who plays the lyre, I would ordinarily decide to use the unambiguous "lyricist." However, my favorite person who had that occupation, Alan Jay Lerner, used to always insist that "lyrist" was the proper word for what he did. So after I read that, I began to use that word.

Interestingly the Encarta dictionary actually has "Alan Jay Lerner" as a listing and he is described thusly: "U.S. playwright and lyricist. He collaborated with Frederick Loewe on several musicals including My Fair Lady (1956) and Camelot (1960)." There's also a listing for Loewe.

Real good interview with Carl Reiner over at Harris Online. It's a little more than a half hour but well worth your RealPlaying.

Mr. Reiner is out making the rounds, promoting his autobiography, My Anecdotal Life. You can purchase a copy from Amazon by clicking on that name. I haven't read it yet but I find it hard to believe it won't be a joy.

I spent an hour or so this afternoon fiddling with the design of this page, changing the main type font and making it adjustable for your browser, and doing other little alterations. If you logged in here during that time, you may have seen some odd layouts. It wasn't your screen. It was just me not being quite finished. I think I am quite finished now. If anyone has any serious issues with readability, please let me know.

Peter Stone, the Tony Award-winning librettist who wrote the books of the Broadway musicals Titanic, Sugar, My One and Only, The Will Rogers Follies and 1776 (and a few others) passed away April 26 at a hospital in Manhattan.

There's a saying in the theater that there can be no great "book" writers in a musical; that the songs and dances are of such paramount importance that the person who writes the story and the spoken dialogue must continually subordinate his craft to that of the lyrist and composer. The songs carry the peak emotional moments, not the stuff in-between.

With all his shows, but especially with 1776, Stone sure proved that adage wrong. Here's an obit.

Here's a link to an article over at BBC News about Joe Barbera's letter to the City Council to try and save his old studio building. And here's a clarification by me: It's incomplete and maybe misleading to say that Hanna-Barbera was sold to Warner Brothers in 1996. That, coupled with the almost-true statement that Bill Hanna worked every day up until his death, makes it sound like Bill and Joe kept the place going on their own until '96. The history is that they sold out to a company called Taft Broadcasting in 1966, though they continued to run most aspects of the firm. Taft was acquired and reorganized as Great American Broadcasting in 1989 and that company was acquired by Ted Turner in 1992. What happened in '96 was that Turner merged his company into Time-Warner. So all that time, you have H-B (and therefore the building at issue) being handed around from company to company with no one saying, "Hey, we have to preserve the place where Wacky Races was produced!"

It's also misleading to say, as the above-linked article does, that the City Council wants to tear the place down and put up apartment buildings. I don't think the city owns the property, nor does the council make that kind of decision. More likely, the building is owned by some private company which is going curiously unmentioned in these reports. That company is considering several development proposals for its investment, some of which would raze the old H-B building, so Barbera and others are asking the City Council to step in and designate it as some sort of historical marker and/or configure the zoning of the land to encourage a plan that would maintain the building. Perhaps city funds will need to be coughed up to compensate the present owner for what it would lose by not replacing the birthplace of Peter Potamus with condos.

Not that my support matters one iota but I think, before I got behind any such move, I'd want to know who owns the property and what kind of taxpayer dollars might be spent to keep this building intact. And someone ought to ask the question of why, if it's so important to the history of the Hollywood cartoon, Time-Warner (which owns so many of them) isn't footing the bill to put a museum or something in there.

Thanks to "Destiny" (master of this weblog) for the link.

Good profile of Bernadette Peters.

Frank Rich in The New York Times. Worth a click.

Jim Hanley writes…

By the way, when you say, "But saying that anti-war folks want to see soldiers killed is just plain misrepresenting a political opposition," you are correct in most instances. There is, however, a minority of the far-left anti-war movement that does things like marching under banners that say, "We Support Our Troops When They Shoot Their Officers." I have been dismayed that the anti-war version of the Big Tent doesn't make any attempt to distance themselves from such.

You're right. As I always say on rare occasions, every political movement has its idiot element. (And I sometimes add that if you can't see the idiot element in your movement, you're it.)

I have seen some of the responsible anti-war leaders try to distance themselves from such clucks, but not enough. In any case, I do think that trying to characterize the anti-war movement by the wackos is just what I said: A misrepresentation of the political opposition. I also feel this way when the gun control folks try to pretend everyone who owns one is a super-paranoid militia member, when those who oppose women's rights try to paint every feminist as a dyke, or any of a dozen other extreme caricatures we could all name. Maybe there ought to be a slogan that goes something like, "When you have to define the other side by its looniest participants, it's because you're afraid to debate honestly with their rational ones." Preferably, something a bit wittier…