Of course you want to help. You're a human being, you're horrified by the destruction here in Los Angeles and you want to do what you can to help the folks whose homes, jobs and lives have been damaged by the fires. So once again, I refer you to my favorite charity, Operation USA.

There are many fine agencies out there but I know some of the people behind this one and I know that they spend very little on administration and themselves and that most of what you send them will be put to good and immediate use.  That's where I send whatever I can afford to give. Here's their ad banner. Use it in good health and spirit…

Skywald Comics was a short-lived comic book company that went into business in 1970 and out in 1975. It was an alliance between Sol Brodsky (former production manager and occasional artist for Marvel) and Israel Waldman, a publisher specializing in low-budget periodicals including (at times) comic books. Waldman's main venture into comics previously has been with a company called variously I.W. Publications, Super Comics and I think some other names. To quote Wikipedia, they issued "…in the late 1950s and early 1960s…unauthorized comic book reprints for sale through grocery and discount stores."

Brodsky had had a major falling-out with Marvel publisher Martin Goodman and left the company. He teamed up with Waldman, they published some comics (mostly on the cheap) then Brodsky pulled out and returned to Marvel after Goodman left.

And now, following up on my follow-up to this question, Rob Allen asks…

Following up on your post about why Jack never worked for Western, I wonder about another path not taken.

Did Jack consider joining Sol Brodsky in his new venture with Israel Waldman? It seems likely that Skywald couldn't afford Jack's page rate, but if they could, the possibilities seem enticing. I think the Fourth World would have sold better than the Western comics that Skywald did produce. And Skywald had more success than DC in black & white magazines. Jack and Sol left Marvel almost simultaneously; did they talk to each other about their plans?

Nope. They weren't quite as simultaneous as that in their departures and Jack probably wouldn't have left without an offer than would pay him as well or better…which, as you note, Skywald was unlikely to do. There was also something chintzy and crooked about the company and Jack didn't like that, which is why he rejected the occasional suggestions of Steve Ditko that he work for Charlton.

Simon and Kirby had briefly done some work through Charlton and had never been paid-in-full. Jack once said of that company something like, "The guys who run it don't belong in comics…or anywhere that's not a prison." That's an approximate quote. He liked Sol Brodsky but Sol never made an offer and Jack recalled how Waldman had reprinted Simon & Kirby material without their permission.

Just to head off further questions about other companies then publishing comics: I don't think there was anyone besides DC and Marvel that had the stability and the budgets that Jack felt were mandatory. He either didn't trust other publishers because of past dealings or knew they weren't interested in the kind of material he did or just knew (roughly) their page rates. He was approached by a few different people who wanted to get into the business but none of them seemed to have the start-up capital, an understanding of the industry or the connections to get decent distribution.

He'd also heard stories from Wally Wood about how he (Wood) believed Tower Comics had been sabotaged. Going with an unestablished publisher was not a gamble Jack was prepared to take. In a very real sense, he was trapped working for DC or Marvel…and I don't think either one treated him very well. Maybe they would have later but not then.

Since I've been writing about Mike Schlesinger here, I thought I oughta post this photo that was taken on September 29, 2019 at the Cinerama Dome Theater. That was the theater in which It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World opened — a theater literally built to show it — and a bunch of us were there that day to see it for the umpteenth time on that amazing screen. The pins we're wearing were to commemorate whatever anniversary it was.

Dave Woodman is a fine cartoonist and Mad World historian.  The other three are Mad World historians who are heard on the commentary track for the Criterion DVD and Blu-ray of that movie.  Paul Scrabo is a producer and jack-of-all-crafts in the TV and movie businesses.  Collectively, the four of us have probably seen this movie three jillion times.  After the film, my lady friend and I left but Mike stayed around outside for an hour answering questions about the film for all who had just enjoyed it.

Last night, we showed you our pal Mike Schlesinger talking about a favorite movie, 1776. Mike noted how in its initial release, the film endured some unfortunate cuts because of pressure from the administration of Richard Milhous Nixon, a man who no longer holds the title of being our most sinister president. This morning, I awoke to this message from Steve Bacher…

I'd like to know if the version of the movie 1776 currently available on YouTube (at 2 hours and 45 minutes) is the restored version or the one with the Nixon-mandated cuts as described in the trailer.

It's the restored version and here it is…the whole thing, including the song "Cool, Conservative Men," which was the main thing Nixon wanted out. The cut version runs 148 minutes. As is the case with these YouTube uploads, they are sometimes free, sometimes free with ads and sometimes they cost money to watch and some of them change back and forth. Don't ask me why.

My friend Mike Schlesinger was a frequent contributor to Trailers From Hell, a series of videos which use the trailer for a movie as an excuse to discuss the movie. Here's Mike talking about one of our favorite films, 1776…

In the next day or four, we'll be doing some of the software upgrading that your generous donations helped pay for. You don't notice any difference on this blog from your end but you may notice it being offline for five or ten minutes now and then. Do not panic. The changes will prevent longer outages.

My pal Mike Schlesinger died this morning…and movies have lost one of the best friends they ever had. I'm not sure I ever met anyone who loved them more…or knew more about them…or got so angry when they were mistreated.

When I first met this boy from Dayton, Ohio, he was an executive at Sony out here and was very much responsible for liberating many films from their vaults, restoring them, getting them released for home video or to revival cinemas, etc. We bonded over our shared love for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World — and with Paul Scrabo, did the commentary track for its Criterion release. We agreed on that film but debated — always friendly — when our tastes differed. Mike actually was heard on a lot of home video commentary tracks and I was honored that he asked me to join him on several.

He was a fixture at a wide number of film festivals, screenings, lectures, interviews of stars and filmmakers (often, he was the interviewer) and he also made movies. After he left Sony, he wrote, directed and produced the Biffle & Shooster shorts and had recently made his first feature length comedy — Rock and Doris (try to) Write a Movie. It was a semi-remake of George M. Cohan's play Seven Keys to Baldpate, updated all the way to the sixties, starring Marilu Henner and Joe Regalbuto. It is, so far, unreleased. The last few times I talked to Mike, as he complained about various medical problems he was having, his biggest concern seemed to be that not feeling well was getting in the way of him hooking up with a distributor.

Then the medical problems got worse, he was hospitalized…and this morning, cancer took him at the age of 74. His friends (and he had many) owe a special thanks to his friend Catherine Dickerson who took so much loving care of him, especially in his last weeks. I am so very sad to lose a good friend like Mike…and like I said, movies never had a better one.

Please stop sending me photos and videos of burned-out houses, people crying because they lost everything, wide-spread destruction, the Magic Castle ringed in flames, etc. I'm not watching the news because it only saddens me to see this stuff. I know it's happened and if I want to look at such images, I have access to this thing called "The Internet" that has almost as much of that as it does of porn. It's almost like some people are thinking, "This horrifies and depresses me…I'd better send it to other people so they can be horrified and depressed, too!"

While we're at it: If you injure yourself, I will believe you injured yourself. You don't have to post bloody/bruised photos. Thank you.

Micki St. James wrote to ask…

You posted at 8:09 AM that you had no electricity and then at 9:03 PM that you were posting by thumb-tapping on your iPhone. What I want to know is, since you couldn't plug your phone in to recharge it, how did it manage to keep its charge for more than 12 hours? Mine doesn't last that long.

Mine doesn't either so I bought a couple of those portable phone chargers and I keep them charged so I can charge my phone with them. Also, there's this wonderful invention…

You see that thing there? That's the Duracell 2000 Lumen Tri-power Lantern and mine came in so very, very handy during my recent power failure here in L.A. "Mine" in this case is plural because I have several of these and I was glad I did.

What does it do? It's an LED light and you can set it to various levels of brilliance or make it blink. You can also plug a cell phone or other small electronic gizmo into it and recharge that gizmo. And how, you may ask, do you charge your Duracell 2000 Lumen Tri-power Lantern? Well, you can plug into the wall to recharge it or you can stick four "D" cell batteries into it or you can leave it outside in the sun and the little solar panel on top will charge it.

I got a batch of these from Costco and they still have them…for $21.85 and they occasionally go on sale for around fifteen bucks. The last time they were fifteen, I bought a dozen or so and have been giving them out to friends but I had five left — one opened, four unopened. They come fully charged so I opened 'em all up and put them to good use when my house went dark. By the way: Amazon sells them for $29.95 and Walmart sells them for $34.50.

There's less wind this morning, at least in my area and — according to the National Weather Service — most. Hopefully, all the fires will soon be controlled and then extinguished…but we're going to be moaning and shivering about this for a long time. And no, I don't know what you say to someone who lost everything.

With sadness usually comes anger and there is — and there should be — plenty of anger at the folks trying to make bogus political points off a tragedy like this. I'm trying to not read or watch a lot of the news coverage because it depresses me to no good purpose. But I came across Elon Musk's stupid statements and I also came across Kevin Drum debunking everything Musk is saying. This is the kind of thing we'll be seeing even more of in the next four years.

I may have underestimated the Department of Water and Power. They said my electricity would be restored by 10 PM and it came back on at 9:53. Wish it could be that simple for everyone.

It's a terrifying night in and around Los Angeles…and please forgive any typos in this as I am thumb-typing on my iPhone in a house that has been sans electricity for almost 24 hours. Soon, they say, there will be light, "they" being the L.A. Department of Water, Power and Questionable Time Estimates.

The fire is still far, far from me. I should say "fires, plural" as they keep popping up like new Shake Shacks. The latest new blaze is currently threatening our beloved Magic Castle and I'm hearing of too many friends who are evacuated and huddling somewhere, wondering if they'll have homes to return to. A couple of friends already know they will not. There's a very scary sky filled with smoke in many directions and so is the air in every direction. It's cold, it's windy, it's smokey and it's all around us. A day or two ago, all it was was cold…then outta nowhere, all this happens.

And here we were all hoping 2025 would be a better year.

I'm not sure why I'm posting this…maybe to show friends and acquaintances that I'm fine. And I am if you can be fine with feeling that your face looks like Edvard Munch's painting of "The Scream." Or maybe to let folks who feel that way know that they're not alone and that things will get better. They'd kind of have to.

The fires that are ravaging Southern California are still nowhere near me and likely to stay that way…but we've been without electricity since 8:54 last night and I sense my area is way down on the repairfolks' "To Do" list. Which is fine. Others need help way more. I just thought I'd tell you why you may not see anything from me here for a while. Things will be normal again…just not right away.

There's an awful fire burning in Pacific Palisades. I have many friends who live there and I sure hope they and their homes are okay.

I've had a couple of texts and e-mails asking if I've been evacuated. I appreciate the concern but I'm pretty far away from Pacific Palisades or from a couple of other locations where smaller fires have erupted. The Palisades fire would pretty much have to burn through the entirety of West Los Angeles and Beverly Hills before it got anywhere near my neighborhood.

Following-up on our previous ASK me, Gene Popa wrote to ask…

In response to Andrew Paquette's question, you said (and I paraphrase) that Jack's preference when he went to DC was to produce his issues himself (with his own staff), and submit the completed work to the publisher. I'm curious, in 1969 (when he left Marvel) or later in '75 (when he left DC) did Jack give any thought to offering himself to Gold Key?

Considering that producing complete issues from story to art to lettering and coloring is precisely what Western used to do for Dell, I wonder if they would have been receptive to allowing Kirby to provide such service to them? Granted, the market beyond the Big Two was rapidly shrinking in that period, but Gold Key still seemed to be holding its own as an important publisher (at least for the time being). I'm tantalized by the idea of covers for New Gods and The Eternals being painted by the likes of George Wilson and Jesse Santos!

Well, I started working for Gold Key (Western Publishing, actually) in 1971 and at that point, I don't think anyone there really knew who Jack Kirby was other than he was the guy who drew all those hit books for Marvel that they, Western Publishing, didn't want to emulate. And they probably thought those were all Stan Lee creations.

One thing that some folks don't get about the "credit" thing with Marvel was that while Jack was a little upset that readers thought all those books were wholly created by Stan, he was really angry that that was the understanding of those in the comic book industry who had hiring power and the power to set page rates. That included the new people who were running Marvel as of 1968-1969, many of whom didn't see why Jack Kirby was any more valuable than anyone else drawing for the company or even the next kid who walked in the door with samples.

Carmine Infantino, when he was in charge at DC, was a rare exception. I do not think he or his company utilized Jack well but at least Infantino understood that Kirby was more than a guy who could draw neat-looking pages.

The Western Publishing I worked for was as resistant to outside studios as any company then in existence. They made a kind of halfway-exception for only one comic that I can think of. They briefly had a comic called The Little Stooges (Larry, Moe and Curly Joe as kids, basically) that was largely put together and drawn by Norman Maurer…but Norman controlled the rights to the Stooges and had a long history of working with Western. Western also wasn't going to pay anyone, including Jack, anything near what DC or Marvel paid Jack.

When he left Marvel in 1970 (not '69), it was because he felt he couldn't work there any longer and DC had made what seemed like a real good offer. When he left DC in '75, Western was a failing company with serious distribution problems. I knew the folks there and they had no interest in spending what it would have cost to get Kirby and launch a whole new line. In fact, they were even more timid than DC was about investing in anything different.

Jack had actually approached Western Publishing once, back when they were doing comics for Dell. This was in late 1958 or early 1959, a time when many comic book companies were going outta business or at least cutting back. Almost all of them were turning away writers and artists because they had more than enough freelancers to fill all their comics. Jack went up to their New York offices and was told that. The editor he met there — name unknown to me and probably not anyone we ever heard of — scolded him because of what horror and crime comics had done to the comic book industry. Wally Wood told me a very similar story but later on, he did do some work for Western.

I don't think Jack ever thought the door was open there and it probably wasn't. Sadly, from about 1957 until the end of his career, he was pretty much trapped into working for DC or Marvel…and I don't think either one treated him as well as he deserved. If either had, I believe that company would have been way more successful.   But thanks for the question, Gene, and here's that box again…