Confession, some say, is good for the soul. I'm about to test that by admitting to something I did a long, long time ago and which I've felt guilty about for that long, long time. Call it an act of fraud. Call it a deception. Call it false advertising…whatever. Please though remember that at the time, I was young and naïve. Now that I am old and naïve, I know better.

When Jack Kirby left Marvel and joined DC Comics in 1970, he urged the company to experiment with new formats for comics. Comics these days come in different sizes and shapes, including many that Jack proposed…but at the time, DC was resistant to those ideas — or at least to gambling money on them. They kept saying they would try them but saying that and actually publishing were two separate things. Many of his ideas went unattempted and the few that they did try were watered down, dumbed down and produced with the smallest possible investment. One of these was a line of magazines (not comic books) the first and almost last of which was called In the Days of the Mob.

Jack wanted it to be slick and in color and thicker and filled with the work of many different writers and artists. What resulted was in black-and-white with cheap printing, a low page count and no one writing or drawing it but Jack. DC had so little confidence in it that they didn't even put the famous DC name on it.  Instead, they hid behind the moniker of Hampshire House Ltd., which (someone told me) was a dormant sub-company once used by some sister outfit that put out puzzle books.

Almost no one bought it. That was because almost no one saw it. DC, through its Independent News division, had perhaps the best distribution company in the business but they were unable to get this magazine — and the second one Jack did called Spirit World — on very many newsstands. A basic rule of any business is that you can't expect people to purchase your product if they don't know it exists and couldn't find it if they did. Jack also did a never-published-then magazine of stories about people in the throes of divorce.

My then-partner Steve Sherman and I helped Jack put these magazines together. We were all pessimistic about them selling at all, given what DC turned his proposal into…and when Jack saw finished, printed copies of In the Days of the Mob and Spirit World, he knew for sure. We finished up second issues of these but DC never published them. Some of the material for Spirit World went into other DC books. Most of what we did for the magazine projects has been printed in hardcover collections in recent years.

So now you're probably wondering just what I'm confessing to. Here is a chunk of one of the very few ads that DC arranged for the first issue of In the Days of the Mob…

I call your attention to the promise of a "free" (!) Giant Authentic John Dillinger Wanted Poster.  The magazine did indeed contain a pull-out poster that one might call a "John Dillinger Wanted Poster" but it was not particularly giant and it was about as authentic as a George Santos résumé.  Here — take a look at that poster.  The photos of Mr. Dillinger are his actual mug shots but does the rest of this thing look real to you?

Of course not. It looks like something that a 19-year-old kid would whip up on the drawing board in his bedroom in his parents' house. And seeing how it was done in 1971 before we all had computers with infinite fonts, he probably created the text by using rub-on lettering from some company like Letraset or Transfer Type without ever even seeing a genuine John Dillinger wanted poster. You can probably guess who that 19-year-old kid was.

This poster was not my idea. As I recall, DC head honcho Carmine Infantino phoned Jack and said he wanted the black-and-white magazines to have pull-out posters because that would make them thicker on the newsracks and it was way cheaper than adding more pages to the magazine. (Warren's Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella magazines were 50¢ and each had 64 pages. Ours were 48 pages for the same price — yet another reason ours didn't sell.)

Jack told Carmine the poster in In the Days of the Mob #1 would be a wanted poster of John Dillinger. I'm not sure if he said "authentic" or not but the ad they designed in New York said it would be and we were unable to find a real one…just the mug shots in some book we located. So Jack told me to make one and I made one. In more than half a century since this magazine came out, no one has ever mentioned to me what a shoddy fake it was but I still felt some guilt about it.

There's one other thing in that ad excerpt that I might mention. When DC tried to launch this line of comics in magazine format, it brought some intra-company complaints from Bill Gaines, publisher of MAD. He didn't like that another division of the same firm was publishing magazines that were the same size and shape as his…and he really didn't like that they'd be carrying work by MAD mainstay Sergio Aragonés and that MAD was mentioned in the ad. I don't know if this contributed to the distributors' lack of enthusiasm for the line or to their swift termination. But it sure didn't help.

Making my confession here though did. I feel a lot better about it now. Thank you for listening.

First, here's a link to Part 1 in case you need a link to Part 1.

Now then: In the last twenty-whatever-number hours, quite a few of you have sent me e-mails to tell me about your favorite Superman artist and that's fine.  I never argue over favorite Superman artists.  But I was probably negligent to not mention some other gentlemen who drew The Man of Steel for a long, long time.

To me, the Third Great Superman Artist was Kurt Schaffenberger, who most folks of my generation probably think of as "THE Lois Lane artist."  That job, of course, meant drawing Superman a lot and Schaffenberger turned up in the other Superman family of comics often and I thought he was terrific. If his work was ever dull, it was because the scripts were but even then, he drew them very well.

I liked a lot of the other artists who drew Superman for short periods and I'll mention one other who did him for a long time: Ross Andru.  Ross was another artist who — like Bob Oksner, who I mentioned here — was not fully appreciated at the time but is maybe now getting some of his due. Maybe one of these days, I'll talk about some of the other artists who I thought drew a great Superman, unfortunately not for as long a time and Swan, Boring and Schaffenberger.

Right now, I have to tell you about something that turned up in some Superman story I read when I was maybe nine or so. I don't remember which issue it was — they did this several times — but it was the first time I recall reading something in a comic book and thinking, "Wow, that's really stupid!" Here's one of the times this happened in a Superman-connected comic book…

That panel was from a way earlier issue but it's the same scene: Lois Lane, having some reason to need to contact Superman, decides the best way to do that is to jump off the roof or out of a very tall building. Obviously, this was before it was possible to send a text.

Like I said: I was nine or so when I saw her do this in a story and for a moment there, I wanted to haul my entire comic book collection to a store that would pay me two cents each for them and then use the money to take up stamp collecting.

It was, like the caption in the above panel says, downright madness.  What if Superman is at that moment being held prisoner in an interplanetary zoo on the planet Glurp twenty-seven-zillion miles from Earth?  What if he's battling a phalanx of Kryptonite Deathray Robot Monsters?  What if he's saving thousands of people from a volcano whose eruption was triggered by Lex Luthor?

What if just as Lois is plunging, he's rescuing someone in Greenland who happens to be falling off a building?

You could look at the covers of most issues of Superman or Action Comics and see Superman being trapped or engaged in cosmic battle…busy with something that would prevent him from getting to Metropolis in the ten seconds before the Lady Reporter becomes an ink stain on the cement below.

As a kid, I could accept the premise that there was this man who could fly and lift up Chevrolets and he could see and/or burst through walls and let bullets bounce off him like Nerf Balls.®

I could accept the notion that he came from the planet Krypton — which could be found in no science book I ever saw — because his daddy stuffed him into a rocket and sent him into space just before that world exploded. (I could even rationalize it not being in any of those science books because, after all, it had exploded.)

I could accept that he had a superdog named Krypto and a super-cousin named Supergirl, and that he hung out in a group called the Justice League of America with, among others, a guy dressed as a bat, an Amazonian Princess, a guy with a magic green power ring, a man from Mars, a police lab guy who could run around the world eight times in a minute…all that stuff.

But I couldn't buy that Lois Lane, a seemingly intelligent woman smart enough to work for a great Metropolitan newspaper, could be that all-fired, brain-dead, I.Q.-devoid, styrofoam-headed dumb.

And she didn't do this once or twice. She contacted Superman that way more often than I pick up the phone to call my cousin David. She even did it in the second Superman movie when she was Margot Kidder and Superman was Christopher Reeve. That, though, was many years later. All I could think of when I was nine was "That woman's ca-raaa-zy!"

Like I said, I don't remember which comic book I first saw her do it in but it was the first time I grasped that my imagination, which could be stretched pretty damn far when I was nine, had its limits. This morning online, I spotted the panel I've placed directly above this paragraph and I'm not sure if this was from the comic I read then or not but it's very similar to what I remember. It's also from a comic book drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger…my Third Favorite Longtime Superman Artist. It's a stupid scene they made him draw but, of course, he drew it very well.

This is a video called "John Mulaney Replies to Fans Online." It involves John Mulaney replying to fans online…

I was probably seven or eight when I first discovered Superman. I loved him from the start because…well, because he was Superman. How, at least in those days, could you not love Superman? In later years, various folks who had creative custody of him complicated his basic premise with elements and plots that were supposed to make him more contemporary. Some attempted to make him more relevant to some odd interpretation of the real world at that particular moment. I understood from the get-go that the whole point of Superman was that he didn't exist in anything resembling a real world.

I think I first saw Superman in the George Reeves TV show which ran at least once a day on Los Angeles TV and then I think I saw the Superman cartoons — the ones the Fleischer Studio made in 1941-1943. Engineer Bill ran them from time to time on his kids' show on Channel 9. But I might have seen the cartoons before the live-action show. I'm only sure the Superman comic books came third. Between what came out each month on the newsstands and what I could scoop up in second-hand bookstores — five cents each, six for a quarter — I soon had a lot of them. A lot.

Everyone who loves Superman has their favorite version of the character and it's usually the first version they saw. Mine was kind of an amalgam. I loved a Superman that existed in my imagination: If the George Reeves show had been able to do the super-feats (and more convincing flying) of the Fleischer cartoons. The comic books, I thought, were all over the place with some stories that, even in my single-digit years, I thought didn't do right by him.

There's a quote that I heard years later attributed to Mort Weisinger, the editor of those comics and the most powerful force in the Superman industry until about 1970. He allegedly said at some time in some context, "Superman is invulnerable. Even bad scripts can't hurt him!" I dunno if he really actually said that but he should have. He certainly at times seemed to be testing out that premise.

Fortunately for The Man of Steel, certain elements of his mythology were constant even if there were occasional deviations. And fortunately, there were some good artists who could make him look like Superman even when he wasn't being written like Superman. For folks in my age bracket, the two main artists were Curt Swan and Wayne Boring, and I have seen grown men arguing as to which of them got Superman "righter."

When asked to cast my vote in this debate, I usually say, "In terms of drawing the character right on covers and in pin-up type poses, Curt Swan was easily the best…but most of my favorite stories were illustrated by Wayne Boring." Once in a while, I even go off the board and pick Superman's artistic creator, Joe Shuster or the artists at the Fleischer Studios who did such a fine job aping his style.

Having made a few enemies in the previous paragraph, I would like to say that I've loved a lot of different interpretations of that guy from Krypton and that while I don't follow the current comics as closely as I once did, I sometimes see a real good Superman in one of them. They are, however, all drawn by transients. Boring worked on the character from about 1942 to 1967 (with a guest appearance or two later on). Swan first drew a Superman story in 1948 and last drew part of one in 1996.

I doubt anyone in the future will ever be "THE Superman artist" for one decade, let alone several. And most kids today, if they have an idea of who Superman is, probably got it from the movies or recent animated adventures, not the comics.

I remember the first time I read something in a Superman comic book that struck me as really ridiculous. I don't remember which issue it was because they did this a few times and each time, I felt my intelligence was being insulted. I was probably eight or nine and didn't have that much that was insultable but insulted I was. I'll tell you about it in the second part of this blog post tomorrow.

In 1934, the Three Stooges made the first of their 190 short comedies for Columbia. Actually, when Woman Haters was first released, it was not a Three Stooges film. It was just a short they were in. The opening titles on this print which declare it a Three Stooges short were added years later when the boys were popular and the film was re-released.

It's an odd little film with everything done in rhyme and with some forgettable songs…but the Stooges stood out and went on to things that were bigger, better and non-rhyming…

I got this a few weeks ago from Barry Wallace who wants to know…

Thank you for the brief visit with Daws Butler and it is wonderful to hear that such a wonderfully talented man was so nice. A recurring topic on your blog is the good fortune you had to meet and even work with performers who you watched as a child and it must have been great to have a friendship with the voice of Yogi Bear. But I have to ask if anyone you ever met in this sense was a disappointment to you. Was everyone as nice as you hoped they'd be?

Pretty much, yes…and that goes for comic book creators as well as folks I knew of from television. I have mostly good memories of the ones I first knew from television and then later in real life. There were a few who in comics who were exceptions (to me) and maybe a half-dozen in the comic book industry. Each of those fields had about a 2% Asshole Factor and I'd rather not name names here. And that word you used — disappointment — that's exactly what it was. Not anger, not contempt…just a sense of "Gee, I wish I'd had a better experience with that person."

One of the things that happen when you meet the person is that you're meeting a real person. You may have loved their work but they may have bad memories of what happened on that project…what they were paid…what it did or did not lead to. They may not be working much these days and might have anger or deep worry about that. (Some people can be very touchy when complimented about long-ago work because they think you're suggesting they haven't done anything good or successful lately.) Some of them may have family or relationship problems.

Getting to know them better might mean getting to see the aspects of their life that you might have preferred not to see. Those, I'm pleased to report are rare but sometimes not rare enough. So I guess the answer to your question, Barry, as to whether everyone was nice as I hoped they'd be is "Not everyone but most."

Trump's tariffs are unsettling many industries but none more than the publishing biz which depends a lot on getting books and magazines printed outside the U.S. Those who traffic in books in and around the comic book field have had another body blow with the announced bankruptcy of Diamond Distributors, the folks who get their wares from Point A to Point B, Point B being the stores that sell the books to customers.

To put it simply, all publishers who serve that marketplace are going to suffer and the smaller publishers — because they haven't the clout to demand not to be paid last and because they are more likely to depend on last month's receipts to fund the printing of next month's books — are in the most trouble. Some of them literally will not get paid for books of theirs which sold in recent months.

I feel for all of them but am here taking up (and talking up) the cause of TwoMorrows, a small firm which since the mid-nineties has been publishing some of the best magazines and books about the glorious history of comic books. It started with The Jack Kirby Collector but soon expanded to include Alter Ego, Comic Book Artist, Draw!, Back Issue, Comic Book Creator, Retrofan and many more…and those are just the magazines. Many of these and many of their books have won Eisner Awards and other trophies.

They've signed with a new distributor — Lunar — and if you treasure any or all of these publications, now would be a good time to support them. How can you do this? By doing one or more of the following.  TwoMorrows has posted this list…

Order something at www.twomorrows.com!
Anything you purchase directly from us — print or digital — will help us stay in business, and avoid disruptions to our upcoming releases. Get our new 2025 catalog here for easy ordering.

Subscribe or purchase our next few issues!
Retailers could miss some items during our switch to Lunar Distribution, and new tariffs may result in price increases. Save by pre-ordering upcoming items from TwoMorrows now, and subscribe or renew your current print or digital subscription.
Check out our Rainy Day Sale for:
• Full 8-volume sets of American Comic Book Chronicles hardcovers at 30% off!
• Rare Kirby Five-Oh! unnumbered hardcovers!
• One-of-a-kind complete runs of File Copies of our magazines, Modern Masters books, and more!

Tell your comics shop to switch their Diamond orders to Lunar!
Diamond cancelled orders for all new items starting with the ones below. Use these Lunar Codes to re-order at your local comics shop by February 10!

1224TM832 Alter Ego #192
1224TM833 American Comic Book Chronicles: 1965-69 (new printing)
1224TM834 American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1980s (new printing)
1224TM835 Back Issue #158
1224TM836 RetroFan #37

TwoMorrows Contributors Offer!
Have you contributed to our publications and need more copies of your work for your files, or for family and friends?
• Any magazine issue you contributed to is $3 each plus shipping.
• Any book you contributed to is $5-15 each (based on cover price) plus shipping.
Email store@twomorrows.com or call 919-449-0344 to order.

This is me again and I have little to add to this. TwoMorrows produces excellent publications which do the good work of uncovering and preserving the history of comics. Their publications and important and excellent and deserving of your support. They're not asking for handouts. But if you've been thinking of ordering some of their excellent magazines and books, here's your chance to do so and help them keeping doing the fine work they do.

Everyone oughta see this. It's Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announcing his nation's response to Trump's new tariffs. And here's a link to Paul Krugman telling us what all this may lead to…

I've received this question a number of times and answered it privately so I thought maybe it should be answered here for all to read. This time, it was from John R. Troy…

I have a question based on reading your blog for over two decades. Most people who blog tend to not to write as much as you do, and many bloggers end up having a sporadic schedule, and give up, with the exception of professional columnists who are using a professional blog like Substack.

With the amount you regularly post, I am curious why you bother to make posts letting people know you are busy. There's the mushroom soup can which means you have to focus on paid work, and there's the Sorry notice which covers all other cases. The latter I get concerned about because in some cases there's been serious issues and we don't get posts for several days.

But in the former case, you post so frequently that I wonder why you bother putting up the can? We tend to get at least 1 daily post from you, in some cases several. Usually when I see the can the next day there's a new post. So I was curious if you have your own personal quota, posting schedule, or goal you set for posting articles, and this is just a way to compensate if you don't make that quota. Knowing this is a personal blog, I've never expected a quota of articles, I don't know of any specific schedule you have, and while you accept donations, it's not a Patreon with any sort of set standards. Outside of the "tradition" factor of the can, is there any other reason for the notice?

I post whenever I have the time and something I think is worth posting. I don't think of it as any obligation but I guess I've created a certain sense of expectation in those who come here. When I don't post when they expect me to, I get a lot of concerned e-mails and phone calls asking me if I'm sick or dead or sick and dead. Or maybe I've been arrested. Or I've decided to quit blogging because I haven't done it in eighteen hours.

For some reason, no one ever thinks, "I guess Mark is busy" or even that my computer might be broken, my Internet connection might not be working, my electricity could be out, etc. I don't like people worrying about me so it's easier to post something than to answer those worried messages.

In case anyone's interested: There are currently 32,566 posts on this blog of which 264 are "Encore" reruns. I started this blog — it had a different name then — on December 18, 2000, which was 8,814 days ago. So I'm averaging about 3.6 posts per day. When I started at this, a more experienced blogger I knew advised me to never post more than once a day, which is what he did. He said that way, followers of the blog would get used to visiting it once a day and would suffer no disappointment if there was nothing new there.

I didn't do that because I like the immediacy factor of a blog…but I guess by posting at all hours, I've developed some amount of visitors who come here more than once a day and I hate the idea of disappointing them. So let me apologize in advance for the next time I go a few days without posting.

It's Frank, Dino and Bing performing the "Style" number from their 1964 movie, Robin and the Seven Hoods. It's a film I wish I liked more than I do but this is a pretty good number. Bing Crosby was a last-minute cast replacement. His role was originally supposed to be played by Peter Lawford but he and Sinatra had a falling-out, after which they not only never appeared together but never even spoke.

It had to do with a planned visit to Los Angeles by then-President John F. Kennedy. J.F.K. was going to stay at Sinatra's home, which was a big, proud deal for Frank. But then Bobby Kennedy got worried that Sinatra's ties to Organized Crime (or at least, Organized Criminals) would taint the President's good name. J.F.K. wound up staying instead at Bing's home and while Sinatra obviously didn't blame Bing, he was furious at Lawford who, he believed, had the connections to stop this from happening and didn't.

Anyway, I don't think it's a great movie but I like this scene…

Hey, while I've got your attention: Did you know that Rupert Holmes and some other folks turned the movie into a musical that never made it to Broadway? It was full of songs by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen. The two of them wrote the score for the movie (including "Style") but the stage version ditched all the numbers in it except for "My Kind of Town" and substituted other hits from other sources by Cahn and Van Heusen.

The musical tried out in San Diego at the Old Globe Theater in 2010. It was there during Comic-Con that year and if I'd known, I would have made time to go see it but I didn't know. As far as I'm aware, it went nowhere after that so maybe they should have left "Style" in. Here are some moments from that try-out…

P.S., ADDED A FEW HOURS LATER: It just dawned on me that I put up the clip of Frank, Dean and Bing before…a few years ago here. Forgive the duplication. It's worth seeing again.

This is being posted all over Facebook and other dens of social media. I found it interesting and decided to put it here. This is by Prof. David Honig of Indiana University…

I'm going to get a little wonky and write about Donald Trump and negotiations. For those who don't know, I'm an adjunct professor at Indiana University-Robert H. McKinney School of Law and I teach negotiations. Okay, here goes.

Trump, as most of us know, is the credited author of The Art of the Deal, a book that was actually ghost written by a man named Tony Schwartz, who was given access to Trump and wrote based upon his observations. If you've read The Art of the Deal, or if you've followed Trump lately, you'll know, even if you didn't know the label, that he sees all deal-making as what we call "distributive bargaining."

Distributive bargaining always has a winner and a loser. It happens when there is a fixed quantity of something and two sides are fighting over how it gets distributed. Think of it as a pie and you're fighting over who gets how many pieces. In Trump's world, the bargaining was for a building, or for construction work, or subcontractors. He perceives a successful bargain as one in which there is a winner and a loser, so if he pays less than the seller wants, he wins. The more he saves, the more he wins.

The other type of bargaining is called integrative bargaining. In integrative bargaining. the two sides don't have a complete conflict of interest, and it is possible to reach mutually beneficial agreements. Think of it, not as a single pie to be divided by two hungry people, but as a baker and a caterer negotiating over how many pies will be baked at what prices, and the nature of their ongoing relationship after this one gig is over.

The problem with Trump is that he sees only distributive bargaining in an international world that requires integrative bargaining. He can raise tariffs, but so can other countries. He can't demand they not respond. There is no defined end to the negotiation and there is no simple winner and loser. There are always more pies to be baked.

Further, negotiations aren't binary. China's choices aren't (a) buy soybeans from U.S. farmers, or (b) don't buy soybeans. They can also (c) buy soybeans from Russia, or Argentina, or Brazil, or Canada, etc. That completely strips the distributive bargainer of his power to win or lose, to control the negotiation.

One of the risks of distributive bargaining is bad will. In a one-time distributive bargain, e.g. negotiating with the cabinet maker in your casino about whether you're going to pay his whole bill or demand a discount, you don't have to worry about your ongoing credibility or the next deal. If you do that to the cabinet maker, you can bet he won't agree to do the cabinets in your next casino, and you're going to have to find another cabinet maker.

There isn't another Canada.

So when you approach international negotiation, in a world as complex as ours, with integrated economies and multiple buyers and sellers, you simply must approach them through integrative bargaining. If you attempt distributive bargaining, success is impossible. And we see that already.

Trump has raised tariffs on China. China responded, in addition to raising tariffs on U.S. goods, by dropping all its soybean orders from the U.S. and buying them from Russia. The effect is not only to cause tremendous harm to U.S. farmers, but also to increase Russian revenue, making Russia less susceptible to sanctions and boycotts, increasing its economic and political power in the world, and reducing ours. Trump saw steel and aluminum and thought it would be an easy win, BECAUSE HE SAW ONLY STEEL AND ALUMINUM — HE SEES EVERY NEGOTIATION AS DISTRIBUTIVE. China saw it as integrative, and integrated Russia and its soybean purchase orders into a far more complex negotiation ecosystem.

Trump has the same weakness politically. For every winner there must be a loser. And that's just not how politics works, not over the long run.

For people who study negotiations, this is incredibly basic stuff, Negotiations 101, definitions you learn before you even start talking about styles and tactics. And here's another huge problem for us.

Trump is utterly convinced that his experience in a closely held real estate company has prepared him to run a nation, and therefore he rejects the advice of people who spent entire careers studying the nuances of international negotiations and diplomacy. But the leaders on the other side of the table have not eschewed expertise, they have embraced it. And that means they look at Trump and, given his very limited tool chest and his blindly distributive understanding of negotiation, they know exactly what he is going to do and exactly how to respond to it.

From a professional negotiation point of view, Trump isn't even bringing checkers to a chess match. He's bringing a quarter that he insists on flipping for heads or tails, while everybody else is studying the chess board to decide whether it's better to open with Najdorf or Grünfeld.

This reminds me of so many people I've encountered in this world. Sometimes, they've been haggling with someone over the selling price of an old comic book or a piece of artwork. Sometimes, they've been arguing with me or my agent over what I'm to be paid for my services. But they're very into this concept of "winning." They aren't fond of the deal where both sides go away pleased with what they got because in those deals, they didn't get to beat someone.

I've met people who would rather make a hundred dollars in a deal where the other party went away in tears than a thousand dollars with both sides going away happy. It was for them more of a sport than a business deal and there were sometimes very blatant ego problems showing…or anger. When the Writers Guild has one of its weekly strikes — okay, so they aren't weekly but they feel that way — there are always members who have vast amounts of anger against The Producers and The Studios. And those members don't want a deal that works for both sides. They want a show of power than leaves the other guy bleeding and begging for mercy…which is never gonna happen.

I get worried when I hear someone suggest that Donald J. Trump is trying to run international negotiations the way he ran his casinos. We all saw what happened to those casinos.

A gent named Jim McCawley was at one point The Most Powerful Man in Show Business, at least insofar as wanna-be stand-up comics were concerned. He was the main person who could put an act on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson back when that was the main route to comedy stardom. When McCawley walked into The Comedy Store or The Improv or anyplace up-n'-coming comedians could be found, you have never seen so much butt-kissing in your ever-lovin' life.

That stairway to stardom no longer exists and it barely existed the last year or two that Johnny was on the air. Back when it was at its full power, the Tonight Show stage was one of the few places a new comedian could prove himself. And if he did, if he scored there, he was well on his way to the thing most new comedians back then wanted more than anything else: Their own sitcom. Almost all of them wanted to follow in the well-paid footsteps of Freddie Prinze, Gabe Kaplan, Drew Carey, Jimmie Walker, et cetera, et cetera…

These days, most of them seem to want to follow Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., Bill Burr, Kevin Hart and other concert-hall fillers…and talk show appearances won't get you there. To the extent anyone today can turn a new comic into a superstar, it's probably a top-level booking agent.

Anyway, I never got to know Jim McCawley too well. When I saw him at a comedy club, his time was monopolized by aspiring comics. We became slightly friendly one day though in the NBC Commissary. I was lunching with someone he knew, he joined our table and began talking about a comedian from Canada he was trying to book for The Tonight Show. Johnny was hesitant and so were the comic's agents…all for reasons I couldn't understand. McCawley was certain the comedian was headed for stardom and wanted to get him on Johnny's show before that happened so the program would get some credit and keep its star-making image.

And not long after that, the comedian did get on The Tonight Show and did go on to much bigger things. Here was his first appearance…

In this video of new TV shows on ABC in 1969, there were clips from The New People, a revolutionary — and maybe a bit ahead of its time — series created, under a bogus name, by Rod Serling. My old pal Buzz Dixon found it as intriguing as I did and he wrote about it here on his blog.

Yes, I know there's a new lawsuit over the rights to Superman, this time from the nephew of co-creator Joe Shuster. No, I won't be writing about it, nor will I be explaining why I'm not writing about it. But if you want to read what's generally known about the suit now, here's a link. A lot of news sites have written pretty much the same things about it and some of them even spelled Joe Shuster's name correctly.

By the way, I don't know how many people know this: Saturday Night Live had a very fine writer in its early days named Rosie Shuster. She was married to Lorne Michaels and the Saturday Night movie is a lot about her. She was (and still is) the daughter of Frank Shuster, who was half of the Canadian comedy team of Wayne and Shuster, and she's a cousin of Joe Shuster. Yes, that Joe Shuster.

Lastly for now: I seem to have been officially announced as a Special Guest or a Featured Guest or whatever they call us for WonderCon Anaheim, which takes place the last weekend in March about two blocks from the ass-end of Disneyland. I expect to be doing a buncha panels at the con, many of which will be about the history of the comic book business during the years I've been reading them and — God help us — writing them. Tickets are on sale now

Billy Suratt wants to know…

I'm curious if there are any particular tools you find useful for writing, especially given the mix of mediums in which you work. Do you typically just fire up Microsoft Word and stare at a blank page until words start falling out of your head, or do you use some kind of more purposeful writing software like Scrivener?

Do you use different tools for different kinds of projects (comics script, TV script, screenplay, book, etc.)? Are there any particular tools you find useful for helping organize research (especially for longer-form projects like books) and keeping track of ideas for possible future use?

I've been trying to get acclimated to Scrivener for years but it's never completely took. I think whoever said it's "like Photoshop for writing" was right, but just like Photoshop, it's got a pretty steep learning curve at first. I relied on Evernote for saving and organizing research and jotting down ideas for years, but I don't trust the company that acquired it a few years ago and have been trying to figure out a better solution (Microsoft OneNote being one possibility).

I used Evernote for a while and even recommended it on this site. At some point, some upgrade or something new I wanted to do with it made pointlessly complicated so I switched. I now use the basic iCloud Notes program which does everything I need including syncing my notes between my PC, my iPhone and my iPad.

Years ago, my pal Steve Gerber wrote a template for writing comic book scripts in Microsoft Word. I used his for a while and then wrote my own which Steve switched to at some point. He was talking with someone in the software industry — I know not who — about developing an actual program based on my template (with me getting a cut) when he took ill and that was the end of that. Steve, sadly, did not recover from that illness and I still miss the guy.

Somewhere along the way, my template stopped working with newer versions of Word. I've managed to forget everything I learned about how to edit templates so…well, it works at times and doesn't work at others and I've given up trying to fix it. But I write my comic book scripts in good ol' Microsoft Word with or without my template helping me. I also use Word for all my prose writing. (I am, by the way, a P.C. guy and I don't mean Politically Correct.)

Years ago, I began writing TV, movie and animation scripts on a program called Script Thing. It was then new and going through a lot of Beta birthpains and I struck up an e-mail correspondence with its author. He turned it into a very good program. And I especially liked it after I persuaded him to include a feature which would output a dialogue script for animation — a script with just the dialogue and each speech numbered and I showed him how to format them.

He later sold Script Thing to its current owners who renamed it Movie Magic Screenwriter and did further improvements on it…but (big grin) they kept my animation script format. You have no idea how much easier that has made my life when I've been writing and voice-directing cartoons.

Movie Magic Screenwriter is great for screenplays but I've never been comfy using it for comic book scripts. One of these days, I may try it again for that and another funnybook-writing friend recommended I try Final Draft. Again, "one of these days."

Most blog posts (like, say, this one) are written in the online entry screen for WordPress, which is the software that powers this website. Once in a while, I'll do a first draft of one of the longer posts in Microsoft Word or even a plain Text Editor, then paste that text into WordPress.

But these days, that's what I use for writing. I've never tried any of these programs that purport to help you organize your thoughts or which analyze your writing and offers suggestions. I'm always afraid they'll scrutinize my writing and suggest a career in Motel Management. I hope this answers your question, Billy. Thanks.

Over in the right-hand margin of this page — if you read it on a full-screen desktop computer — you will probably find a column of links which look like ads. On a smaller screen, they might wind up anywhere but they should be somewhere there. And they are ads, I guess, though I don't charge anyone when I place one there, nor do I place them because someone asks. You'll see links to comic conventions and friends and places where you can spend money that might trickle my way…and I've just added a few new ones.

I just put up three links to fact-checking websites — The Washington Post, Politifact and FactCheck.org. I have found these three to be generally accurate in correcting public figures who are sometimes not accurate. Some of those public figures are spectacularly not accurate and some of them, I feel, don't even try to be. They just say whatever advances their campaigns for money and/or power and try to get you to trust them over sources that don't lie or spin their way.

It is always good to not trust any news source blindly. These next four years would be an especially good time to do this. You may even find out on occasion that the people you see as being on your side are, intentionally or not, not giving you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.