To the surprise of almost no one, there will be no Comic-Con in San Diego in 2020. The official announcement — I told you one would be coming — can be read here.

Johnny Carson was famously angry at NBC for not preserving the tapes and kinescopes of the first ten or so years of his Tonight Show. The other day here, we linked you to an excerpt from one of the few shows from that era that has survived and it's mentioned in this article from the Library of Congress about their collection of Carson programs.

Things are fine here in Mark's Fortress of Solitude where I'm amply-stocked with the necessities of life. I have enough to not worry I'll run out but not so much that I fall into the classification of Hoarder. A few neighbors and I are sharing our respective inventories and I passed out a few masks to folks who needed them.

I'm not paying a whole lot of attention to public debates about when the country should "reopen" but it strikes me that a lot of those advocating for doing it soon and hard are forgetting something. Governments can lift "shutdown" orders but they can't (or shouldn't) force businesses to reopen if their proprietors think the customers aren't there yet. Just because a movie theater is open doesn't mean moviegoers will come flocking in. A lot of us are going to be avoiding crowds for a while.

Tonight is that online conference I'm doing with special guest Marv Wolfman. I have a lot of e-mails asking if I'll record it and put it online. Yes to the first part. I haven't decided on the second yet. I'm going to wait and see just how big a fool I make of myself. My plan now is to do more of these over an array of topics but I may experiment with some other platforms that will make the shows available to all, at least for their live webcast. Zoom is great for conferencing and I'm using it well for business-type meetings but I think I need something else.

There are some days when you just have to re-watch certain scenes from certain movies…

I've been watching — and I hope you have too — Stars in the House, a twice-daily web series featuring everyone in the Manhattan theater community talking and singing…and they even offer some sound, non-hysterical medical advice. It's a fun show and it's raising loot for the Actor's Fund which, as they explain in every episode, doesn't just come to the financial rescue of actors.

Sometimes, the webcasts stray from Broadway to television. They've done "reunion" episodes chatting with cast members from shows like Frasier and Taxi and Glee and Young Sheldon and many others. Last night, they spoke with four cast members from SCTV: Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara. If you loved that show as I did, you'll want to watch that episode, which you should be able to do below…

As mentioned here, tomorrow night I'm doing a live Zoom Conference on the subject of comic books and I'll be joined by my longtime friend, Marv Wolfman. By "longtime," I mean I met Marv in person (following a bit of correspondence) in the DC offices in New York on Monday, June 29, 1970.

It happened in a hallway outside an office inhabited by editors Julius Schwartz and Dick Giordano. I noticed a kid around my age being yelled-at by an older gent and I figured out that the older gent was a certain longtime DC writer who had a strong dislike for any other DC writer but especially a young kid who might displace him. I also figured out the kid was Marv. Once the older gent stormed off to find someone else to yell at, I introduced myself to Marv and we've been pals ever since.

Access to this online conference is by invite only and I've already sent them all out. If you requested one, you should have received it by now and if you haven't, it might be in your spam folder. I sent myself one as a test and that's where mine wound up.

So check your spam folder and if you don't have your invite by — let's say — Midnight tonight, send me a message at the same address and I'll try again. If you didn't request one before I posted this, I think we're full but you'll get your chance. Wait until I announce the topic and guest for the next one, probably in a few days.

Here's a great bit of video from The Tonight Show. The folks at Johnny Carson's company that put it on YouTube say it's from 10/04/65. Johnny had brought his show out for a week or two to Hollywood…and considering that he started on The Tonight Show only three years before, this may have been their first such trip.

His guests as you can see in it, included George Segal and Carol Andresson. Mr. Segal was not that well known as an actor then and Ms. Andresson was even less well-known. The whole idea of taking the show to Hollywood (Burbank, actually) was to get superstar guests so I'm a little curious about the bookings.

If one looks at the Internet Movie Database — which as I just mentioned is not always accurate — one finds a listing for The Tonight Show for 10/05/65 and the guests are listed as Bill Cosby, George Segal, Carol Andresson, and Paul Revere and the Raiders. I can explain the discrepancy in dates. Those times when Carson brought his show out here, it aired for some technical reason on a one-day delay. This installment was probably taped on 10/4 and broadcast on 10/5. (When Joey Bishop launched his competing talk show in 1967, it was always on a one-day delay.)

Johnny's show stopped being on a one-day delay whenever it emanated from Hollywood on February 9, 1971. That morning, there was a 6.6 earthquake in the city and Johnny called NBC Mission Control (or someone) and said they had to go "same day" that evening so the show could talk about the quake. Whatever had to be arranged was arranged and Johnny came out that night and started his monologue by announcing, "The God is Dead rally has been canceled," a much-quoted joke that has been credited to Pat McCormick, who was then on his writing staff. Thereafter, the show always aired the day they did it.

So that explains the date thing. Mr. Cosby presumably left before this clip starts and Paul Revere had presumably played. What I can't explain is why the IMDB listing does not mention that Groucho Marx did a "surprise" walk-on…and not a short cameo, either. He was on for twelve minutes. This is Groucho still in his prime and, as opposed to his screen appearances and quiz show, appearing with no script or pre-written "ad-libs."

In my lifetime over one in-person chat and two phone conversations, I only spoke to Johnny Carson for about twenty minutes total. The night before one of those phone conversations, he'd had a "surprise" walk-on on his show, I think by Bob Hope. I somehow asked Carson, "How many times were you ever surprised by a surprise walk-on on your show?" He instantly said, "Never," then added, "Well, sometimes I'm not sure quite when they're walking on but I know they're coming out." Then he further added, "Maybe in the earlier days, it happened once. And there was one time I was really pissed when Danny Thomas did it."

I think I know the Danny Thomas incident. He walked on holding his daughter Marlo's record album, Free to Be You and Me. He plugged it, plugged something else she was doing, plugged some special he had coming up and where he was appearing live, then walked off. You could tell Johnny was furious and he muttered something about having NBC send Mr. Thomas a bill for sponsoring the show that night.

Anyway, here's Groucho just dropping-by as planned. And in there, there's also a commercial for the Jolly Green Giant's corn in butter sauce. Yes, that's Paul Frees voicing the little man in Giant Land…

Let's do two of these because the first one is short. A person who for some reason wanted his name withheld wrote to ask about a book in which my friend Harlan Ellison published his draft (not to be confused with the script they actually filmed) of the episode he wrote for the original Star Trek…

In the late 1990s, I considered buying a hardcover of The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay but I already owned Six Science Fiction Plays, the 1976 paperback that included the first publication of Ellison's original draft, so I passed. Today, I finally happened to read the long segment of Ellison's introductory material readable at Amazon's page for the Kindle edition of this book, and I see that he names you first in his "no particular order" list of the "soldiers and scavengers and hustlers and shotgun-riders who helped get this book into your hands." So in what way did you contribute?

What did I contribute? Absolutely nothing. I don't know why my name was in there — in first position of all places. I not only didn't aid the publication of that material in any way, to this day I have never seen that episode or read that script or even obtained a copy of that book it was in. I can admit that now that Harlan has left us.

I have a vague memory that Harlan realized he'd neglected to thank me for some contribution I made to a previous book of his…probably answering some research question he had when he decided, as he often did, that it was easier to phone Evanier than to get out of his chair and find the answer in some book. I think he tried to right that teensy wrong by thanking me in the next book he did.

But I contributed zero to that book. In this world, you're often not acknowledged for the things you do but that's partly offset by the times you get acknowledged for things you didn't do. I was also not a puppeteer on The Muppet Movie and it took me until just recently to convince the Internet Movie Database that I wasn't. They thought I was the one who was wrong.

Our main story tonight, as John Oliver would say, is this question from Chris Gumprich…

For cartoon voice recordings, are they usually done individually (one actor at a time) or in a group? I don't mean someone like Mel Blanc or Paul Frees who would be the only voice actor for an entire cartoon, but I've heard some cases where only one actor at a time records (such as Jason Alexander on Duckman) and others where the entire group records at once, like a radio show (The Simpsons is a good example).

Is there a standard? Is one way "better" than the other, or does it depend on the show?

First off, recording actors separately is called "recording in splits" and getting them all in the same room is called "ensemble." Is one better? I would guess that if you polled everyone in the voice business including actors and directors, you would find about a 95% preference for "ensemble" for TV show work. In some cases — and Jason Alexander on Duckman is as good an example as any — you feel some actor is so valuable to a series and so busy with other commitments that you have to record him when he's available and consume less of his time.

They do "splits" on most feature animation, partly because they employ so many otherwise-busy actors, partly because they usually want eighty takes of every line and partly because you're not going to do an 80-minute script in one session anyway. Tracks for features are often recorded over a long period since the film is produced over a long period. You bring Alec Baldwin in to record half his part and then you bring him back months later to record some more of his part including new lines that have been added or changed in the sections you did before with him.

Most actors prefer "ensemble" because they can feed off the energy of the other actors. For silly technical reasons, I once had to redo a scene with Stan Freberg and June Foray and I had to record them separately on different days. When June read her lines in the original session, she was responding to the lines as delivered by Stan. When she read them in the pick-up session, she was responding to those same lines as read by me. Stan was a great voice actor. I am a rotten voice actor. June was a pro and she gave a wonderful performance both ways but it was a tiny bit better when she was reacting to the great voice actor.

Also, getting everyone together in the same room is a lot more fun. If the director isn't a tyrant (as a few have been), it's almost like a party and the actors do better work when the atmosphere in the studio is supportive and not oppressive. And as a writer-director, I like hearing the actual exchanges because the way some actor reads Line 18 may cause me to change what another actor says in Line 19 or my idea of how Line 19 should be read. In such a situation, you can't change Line 19 if it was recorded before Line 18.

Quick story. One time, I voice-directed a cartoon with a prominent guest star actor who shall remain nameless. Let's just call him "Jeffrey Tambor." His agent said he could only spare an hour so I had to record his lines all at once, then record the rest of the cast after…so the rest of the cast just waited in the lobby, which is something you'll do a lot if you ever become a professional voice actor.

I finished recording this nameless actor in about 40 minutes and told Mr. Tambor he could go run off to do The Larry Sanders Show or wherever he had to be and it was then that he told me, "I don't have to be anywhere." I told him what his agent had said about him having another booking. He said his agent had fibbed and that he was looking forward to recording with other actors because he hadn't done that much before. The few times, he'd done animation voicing in the past, he was usually recorded in "splits."

So I brought the other actors in, we took it from the top and we didn't use any of the lines I'd recorded with him alone. He was fine doing it that way but even better working with the rest of the cast. Most actors are.

Actually, these days there are recording sessions done a third way…everyone's separate in their own studios but they're doing it simultaneously, connected via a video conference. Some shows started doing that before we all went into quarantine but there's a lot more of that now. Even after all this isolation is no longer necessary, that may become the dominant method of recording. We shall see.

Also: The Simpsons was ensemble when it started but I believe these days, some performers have moved outta-town or gotten busy so it's not as "ensemble" as it used to be.

And to bring this full circle, I once cast Harlan Ellison in an episode of the cartoon series, Mother Goose & Grimm. He played a magic mirror that sounded like an old Jewish insult comedian. I wrote it when I thought I could get Shecky Greene in to play the part but when it turned out I couldn't, Harlan was my next choice. He was probably better than Shecky would have been.

Some kids in France perform — with proper social distancing — a number from the movie Grease. I found this thanks to my friend Susan Buckner, who was in the original number in the movie…

I've still experimenting with Zoom conferencing software. The other day, we did a 90-minute (or so) confab with invited readers of this site logging in to ask me questions. I'm doing another one this Friday Evening, April 17 at 6 PM Pacific Time.

This time, we'll narrow the topics down to the comic book business — and I expect we'll be talking way more about content and history than about business. My longtime friend Marv Wolfman will be joining in so you can hurl questions at either of us or both. You're also invited to log in and just watch and listen. The way this will work is that everyone will be automatically muted except Marv and me.

This is not to silence anyone. As I've learned with this software, if more than about four people talk at the same time, no one can hear anything. If you want to ask or say something, you "raise your hand" (click a little icon that indicates you want to be recognized) and I as host will call on you when it's your turn and unmute you. That seems to be the only way this works.

You'll need to have Zoom software on your computer and a free account with them. You'll also need a webcam that will show your face and a microphone that will transmit your voice and you'll have to know how to make this stuff work. Zoom is pretty easy to operate as a participant in an online meeting and you may not need a tutorial but if you do, there are about ninety of them on YouTube, all of which will tell you a lot more than you need to know.

You'll also need the meeting number and the password. If you got an invite to the first one of these, I'm already sending it to you. If you didn't and would like to be added to the list, drop me a note at this address (and only that address) and tell me. If you don't hear back from me, don't take it personally. It probably just means we're already over our limit.

If you've been invited, just go into Zoom on your computer or cellphone or tablet when it's 6 PM on the West Coast, click "Join" and enter the meeting number and the password. And I intend for this to be about comic books, not politics…though I admit it's getting harder and harder to tell them apart.

From his apartment in New York, Neil Sedaka attempts to brighten up your day. He's posted a bunch of these if you want to hunt them down…

Here's another number from that great production of Li'l Abner that I saw back in 2014. Daisy Mae was played by Madison Claire Parks, Marryin' Sam was played by John Massey, choreography was by Kay Cole and it was all under the direction of our buddy Bruce Kimmel. More info on this production can be found here…

Boy, I wish I had more interesting things to report here but I suppose that's the nature of isolation. Yesterday, I got a DoorDash delivery of food from my favorite Italian restaurant. I ordered several items, one of which was a meatball sandwich for which I was charged seven dollars. Instead, they brought me one meatball. They're still trying to figure out how to credit me for that.

Despite my best efforts to avoid him, it's hard to be on the Internet or turn on your TV without seeing Donald Trump, desperately trying to maintain his "we deserve an A-plus for every single thing we do" posture. I have friends who are very frustrated that the man's obvious lying and incompetence doesn't cause his base to turn on him but it makes some sense if you think of it this way…

These people don't necessarily want Donald J. Trump. They want Republican control of government and backing Trump seems to be the only way to hold onto that. If he disappeared tomorrow, there's no one else who could step in and give them what they want. And they see him as a hero for achieving it.

But I'm sick of looking at the guy. I'm not even watching Stephen Colbert because I don't want to hear the Trump jokes and watch the clips of Trump acting like Trump. I know I'm going to be obsessing on this when we get close to the election. I don't need to think too much about him now.

What I am missing on the news now are the wonderful stories of people helping each other through this crisis, people being strong and caring and assisting one another. I was already in awe of good doctors and nurses and emergency personnel. This has only heightened the awe.

Alan Alda has a weekly podcast. 74.4% of the people on this planet now have a podcast so why shouldn't Alan Alda? This week's is 43 minutes of him chatting with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. How can that not be wonderful? You should be able to listen to it in the player below…

From Micki St. James comes this question…

How do you keep up with your peer writers?  I'm curious, for example, of what you think of Marv Wolfman's Dick Grayson, Robin in the Robin 80th Anniversary Super Spectacular. Do you read or skim such contemporary works? Do you ever find yourself cribbing devices from their writing in your own?

You write a lot of funny stuff, does any of it derive from your current reading?

What I write has to do with everything I've seen, everything I've read, everything I've absorbed. Like most writers who would like to believe they have a little integrity, I don't look at someone else's work and think, "Hey, that's good! I'll copy that!" But it's disingenuous to think that my output is wholly unaffected by my input.

I don't keep up with other writers in comics, nor do I evaluate anyone to whom I am in even the vaguest sense a competitor.  Marv Wolfman is one of my best friends and I've read a lot of comics he's written…though not lately. I don't connect all that well with most current comics. I'm not always sure who their target audience is but I know I'm not it, nor do I connect with many of the current depictions of once-favorite characters.

I'm not putting anyone or anything down; just saying too much of it is not for me. I liked much of what Marv wrote long ago and assume I'd like what he's doing now because I've always thought he was a talented guy…but I don't even know who Dick Grayson is anymore. I don't follow the current Batman mythos enough to not be totally lost in it, or even to know if Dick Grayson is still part of it. (Do not write me and try to explain it.)

I'd get up to speed on it if someone offered me what sounded like an interesting project but I've turned down most comic book jobs I've been offered lately. No one has offered me anything in the DC or Marvel universes that grabs me.

But even before I gave up on most current comics, I gave up on having opinions of other writers. I respect doing work that pleases many even when I am not among the many and I applaud anyone who can do it but I have no opinion of the work itself. If I haven't read it, I of course have no opinion but even if I have, I also have no opinion…or if I do, I keep it to myself. There is the question of professional courtesy but there's also this…

In the half-century I've been writing comics and attending conventions, I've heard many of my peers voicing negative opinions of other writers' work and those almost always sound like emotional responses tinged with jealousy or resentment or the kind of personal insecurity where you have to put down your competitors to feel better about yourself. They may not always be that but they always sound like that. I don't want to sound like that.

Understand this: I'm not saying a writer doesn't have the right to criticize or belittle the work of someone who in some sense competes with them. Freedom of speech and all that. I'm just saying that I think that most people who do it look real, real bad doing it. And I'm also saying that I don't really have many opinions of current writers.