A person who, as you'll see, wished to remain anonymous wrote the following…

I'm shy so I'd be happier if my name stayed out of it. I decided to take your advice on Tuesday evening, take my mind off current events and, I watched Blotto. And, no kidding, I believe I've just watched my first Laurel and Hardy short. Ever. And I'm nearly fifty.

I had never wanted to watch Laurel and Hardy before. Virtually all the clips I'd seen related to their shorts involved Hardy looming over Laurel, growling something like "Here's another mess you've gotten us into," as Laurel cringes or worse. That never really attracted me.

Now, I'm not going to say that Blotto absolutely converted me — I'm not really a serious comedy fan, some works for me, and a lot doesn't — but I liked this short, but maybe not for the reason a lot of folks might.

What really got my attention, was the friendship that was evident between our two leads, and in the short they snuck out a moment of freedom and bliss, and even if there was some chicanery involved, that moment was welcome. And I really appreciated the explosive ending! But is this short closer to the general Laurel and Hardy formula than those overbearing clips led me to believe?

Well, the underlying theme of their films is that these two guys are friends forever and that no matter what happens, they're inseparable. We don't really know how they met and in most films, we don't even know if they work together or what…but they need each other. That wasn't true of their earliest films (many of the silents) but after they figured out their screen characters, that was who they were. In some films, they were married men and their wives were not consistent. In some, they were in other countries in other time periods. But the relationship was the same…

…except for occasional departures the same way brothers can fight but they remain brothers. It's not there in every film and it wouldn't be there in clips because clips are usually of the visual comedy, not the "relationship" scenes. But their inseparability (there's a word I don't recall ever using before) is a key component of who they were on film.

Can you spare an hour? If you liked Blotto, you'll probably like Sons of the Desert, a short feature which a lot of us Laurel 'n' Hardy fans think was their best movie. They made this three years after Blotto and in some ways, it's an expanded version of that film…

Michael Paulson discusses how audiences seem to be overdoing it with standing ovations. The main problem I have with them is the same problem I have with the words "legend" or "legendary" which now seem to be applied to just about everyone and everything. I happened upon a clip of Andy Richter on The Masked Singer and he was referred to as a "late night legend."

Now, I happen to think Andy Richter is a very funny guy who was very good in the earlier years of Conan O'Brien's show. But if you describe him as a "late night legend," what term do you use for Johnny Carson or Steve Allen? And if you give a standing ovation to a C+ show, how do you show heightened approval for one that you think merits an A?

Corey Liss sent these two queries…

I've heard that, at the beginning of his career, Jack Kirby worked briefly for Will Eisner in the Eisner/Iger shop. Is that true? More generally, what was Kirby's take on Eisner's work? Did they ever talk or was it more like what you described with Carl Barks, two people in the same field who just didn't cross paths much?

Kirby definitely worked in Eisner's shop for a time. This was very early in both their careers and Jack often cited it as a great learning experience — not only learning from Will but from the other talented artists who worked there including Lou Fine. Once Jack left there, he didn't have much contact with Eisner but they got reacquainted in the seventies on the comic convention circuit, especially the Comic-Cons of San Diego.

Jack respected Will as both a creator and as one of the few guys in the field who knew how to write and draw a good comic book and — and this was the rare talent — knew how to get paid for its publication without getting screwed. But there was absolute respect between the two men and there were a couple of joint interviews in which this was mutually expressed.

Here's Corey's other question…

You've talked about how, when writing for animation, you often have a specific voice actor in mind that you're writing for. But, as you've also observed, a good voice actor can bring something to the character you didn't necessarily anticipate. When writing a long-form series, how much does that affect your writing of the character over time?

Or, to put it another way, by the end of Garfield and Friends, how much were you writing lines for Garfield and how much were you writing lines for Lorenzo Music playing Garfield — and how difficult was it to adjust when you started writing The Garfield Show?

On Garfield and Friends, I wrote for the voice of Garfield, which happened to be Lorenzo's own voice. So to write for one was to write for the other. There was never any separation in my mind.

When we later did The Garfield Show, Lorenzo was gone and Jim Davis had picked Frank Welker as the cat's new voice. Frank could have done a dead-on replication of Lorenzo's voice but that would have meant we'd be getting an impression, not a performance. So the goal was to have Frank do a voice that wasn't horribly unlike Lorenzo's but also didn't hinder his own ability to deliver lines in his own manner.

When I wrote for the character on that show, it took me a while to stop hearing Lorenzo in my head and to hear Frank instead. I don't think I ever really got there until we had some semi-completed episodes that I could see. That would have been about two-thirds of the way through writing the first season.

I swear to you, I wasn't going to post another thing under that header for a while. I really am trying not to think a lot about the election and to instead focus on all this work I have to do. But it's beastly hard to go anywhere on the Internet without glimpsing a "How Trump Won" essay. I was afraid to play Wordle this morning because I was afraid there would be a couple of 'em on that page. And what I glimpsed meant I had to post the following…

Maybe someone has said this — like I said, I'm avoiding all these discussions — but it seems to me that there's an overriding reason why the people who love Trump love Trump: Because he won. They loved him before he won because he was the only person on their side who had a chance of winning and they thought he had a damn good chance. They love him after he won because he won and because he dragged an awful lot of the Republican Party along with him.

Yes, inflation had something to do with it as did immigration and abortion and The Economy and gay rights and every other issue you can name. But the way I see it, the overriding reason is that all these people wanted to be able to yell, "THIS IS OUR COUNTRY AND WE RUN IT!!!" And if you can yell that, you don't worry too much about the individual issues.

I shall now return to not wanting to think or write about this stuff for a while. If I were you, I wouldn't bet on me being able to do that.

Time for the latest installment of Everything You Need To Know About Saturday Night Live. We're up to Season 16, nearing the end of what I thought was the best period for the show after the initial five years…

Andrew Farago did a deep dive into the life of our friend, the late Bob Foster. Well worth your time to read.

This is the long-delayed Part 9 of a series about Western Publishing and Gold Key Comics. Even if you followed this series many months ago when the previous installments appeared, you still may need to refresh your memory, which you can do by re-reading Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.

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Now then: As I mentioned eons ago in some part of this, back before a lot of their artists drew on computers, comic book companies would often supply drawing paper with the panel borders printed in light blue (and therefore, non-reproducing) ink. Here is a piece of a page that Western Publishing was supplying to its artists back in the early seventies when I worked for them. I have tweaked the image to make the blue ink darker — so you can see it better than it is on the actual page. If you click on the image below, you can see it larger on your computer screen. It's the bottom part of one page…

This paper was printed up by the New York office of Western Publishing for use by their artists and the ones working for the Los Angeles office. As you can see, it specifies how the word balloons should not touch the panel borders. The editors in the L.A. office told their artists and letterers to ignore "that stupid rule" (their term for it) and let balloons touch panel borders.  The New York office generally wanted this rule followed though once in a while, they didn't.  The Little Lulu comic, which came out of the N.Y. office for some reason changed back and forth.

A few others changed and I know not why but most N.Y. books stuck to this rule. Even when sales were plunging to the level where the entire comic book line was about to go under, no one there looked at what was selling for DC and Marvel and said, "Maybe we ought to not constrict our artists as much as we have."

The page is ruled off into six panels — three tiers of two. It was never intended that any artist just fill in the six panels the way they are. Generally speaking, they could rule each tier off to one, two or three panels (or even four) of varying width. But they were generally expected to layout a page in three separate tiers.

It is my opinion that Western was too rigid in its page formats and that at times, DC and Marvel were too loose with them. I think there was some terrible story-telling in comics with triangular panels and too many "montage" page layouts. An imaginative arrangement of panels can be wonderful and can serve the story well. But you oughta be able to easily figure out which order the panels are to be read in.

This also may be of some interest…

For many years in the industry, the vast majority of comic book art was done to an image area of 12" by 18" or sometimes 12.5" by 18.5". In 1967, both DC and Marvel switched over to an image area of 10" by 15". These were the image areas, not the size of the piece of art board on which the page was drawn. The exact size of that didn't matter. What mattered was the image area. A 10" by 15" page image area was usually drawn on a piece of art board that was 11" by 17".

And what I wanted to point out here was that Western stayed with the larger size after DC and Marvel went to the smaller size. The page I scanned to get the above image had an image area of 12" by 18". That difference meant a lot, pro or con, to some artists.

The "balloons don't touch panel borders" principle was tried on a number of comics at a number of companies.  During the years that Carmine Infantino was in charge at DC, they tried it now and then and, because they did it without resorting to square balloons, I don't think a lot of readers noticed.  It often crowded the art though.  I think of it as a well-intentioned bad idea that happily never caught on.  Western Publishing was the only place I know of where it was tried for an extended period but it was just one of the many points of friction between the two offices.

One of the days, I may think of some others to write about here…and also some of the other things that Western did that other companies didn't. But this is the final installment of Border Crossings for now. Sorry it took so long to get it all here on the blog.

Have you ever seen Andy Huggins do stand-up? Well, I guess with him, it's sit-down but he's a funny guy either way…

Comedy writer and cartoonist Jack Mendelsohn was a good buddy of mine. We presented him with the Bill Finger Award in 2014 and then sadly, just three years later, I had to write this obit of him. In there, there's a video of him accepting the Finger.

I just came across this interview online that will tell you more about this amazing man.

You probably won't see much of that header here in the coming weeks. Trump and his gang are passing into the category of "Things I don't like but I can't do anything about at the moment." Before last Tuesday, there was about a three-hundred-and-thirty-millionth of a percent chance that I could contribute, if not to a G.O.P. defeat then at least to the group dialogue on why there should be one. Now there's not even that in the near future and keeping up on politics at all means reading all sorts of articles that I don't want to read and don't think are helping.

One kind is the "Why Trump Won" pieces which are now crystal clear on all the reasons that were in place before Election Day but the person who wrote the article is just now noticing them. Too little, too late, I'm afraid. The other kind would be the "Here's the one reason" articles and while I'm not sure of much about this election, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of different reasons. It's like when they give out the Oscars and someone says, "Oh, they gave Best Actress to Meryl Streep because they all thought she got robbed when she didn't get it for that movie she made last year." The people voting did not vote in lockstep with the same one viewpoint.

One thing I'd like to think is that there won't really be a Mass Deportation. My guess is that there'll be an ongoing deportation not that much greater than what Obama and Biden oversaw, though Trump and his backers will be a lot louder and prouder of it and will make it seem like a Mass Deportation. I can't imagine Big Business in this country urging Trump to get rid of their lowest-paid, I'll-take-any-job-for-any-salary laborers. Trump doesn't think employers should even pay overtime to employees who work overtime.

This article by Kevin Drum is probably worth reading and saving. President Trump will doubtlessly brag that he solved the problem of Runaway Inflation but as Drum notes, that problem has already been solved. He'll say he solved the problems of Illegal Immigration and Economic Strength and Imports From China and Oil and Gas Production and the Murder Rate but all those are already trending in the right direction.

If you forced me to pick one reason why Trump won, I'd say it's because the Democrats failed to get the mass public to realize things were trending like that and the Republicans did a good job convincing that public that if they did hear such facts, they shouldn't believe them. You know…the same way even the Right Wing Press couldn't find even one Haitian in Springfield who actually ate a dog or cat but people inclined to vote for Donald thought, "That doesn't disprove what he said. We just know that kind of thing is going on somewhere or will."

But I also think they had a lot more than one reason. Democrats have until the mid-terms to figure out some of them and if they can't, maybe we need to find some new Democrats. Please don't write me about political stuff or any of this. I'm going to turn off that admittedly-small sector of my brain for a while and focus on matters that I understand a lot better and feel I can control a bit. Among other tasks, I have two books to finish. One is the one about Jack Kirby and the other is about someone else who was also really good at a drawing board. That much, I can handle.

Voice Guy Brian Hull has appeared in dozens of cartoons and — more important — on a couple of my Cartoon Voices panels at conventions. Here, he and many of the characters that live in his head and throat favor us with a rendition of "Defying Gravity" from Wicked. An amazing talent…

Here at newsfrome.com, we don't recommend a lot of things to put in your mouth…and when I do, you might think, "Why should I listen to Evanier about food?" And I have a great reply to that: "Why should you listen to me about anything?" Like most people on this planet, I have endless opinions about things I'm unqualified to judge so if you're going to listen to me about other matters, what's the big deal about listening to me about, in this case, the new Kirkland Signature Lightly Breaded Chicken Breast Fillets at Costco?

I guess it's no longer much of a secret that all the Kirkland products sold at Costco are completely prepared and/or manufactured by one little old lady — Mrs. Edna Kirkland — who lives somewhere in South Dakota. She cooks all the Kirkland foods in her home kitchen including the hot dogs that they sell in the food court and all those rotisserie chickens. She makes the Kirkland brand batteries that are identical to the more expensive Duracell batteries. She catches and cans Kirkland Signature's Albacore Solid White Tuna and makes it taste exactly like the tuna that Bumble Bee sells. She even goes out every morning and spends an hour or two pumping oil to make all that fine Kirkland-brand gasoline.

Well, she's outdone herself with these lightly-battered chicken breasts. They're very similar to what you get at Chic-Fil-A in their sandwiches except that you can enjoy the Kirkland brand ones without giving money to a company you may detest. They come out a little soggy if you microwave them but they're still pretty good. They're crisper out of an air fryer or oven and at my nearby Costco, you get a 48 ounce bag of them for $14.20. That's without hormones or antibiotics.

Mrs. Kirkland also makes the similar Kirkland Signature Lightly Breaded Chicken Breast Chunks but those little nuggets have too much breading and too little chicken for me. The fillets, I think, are just right and enormously convenient…so great work, Mrs. Kirkland! And I hope you have time soon to make that full-sized Kirkland Turbo V8 Sports Car you promised to make for me — the one that will drive just like a Maserati. And I hope they'll let me buy just one but knowing Costco, I'll probably have to purchase a package of twelve.

Here we have another of Robert Klein's specials for cable TV. This one is from 2005 and I still think he's one of the best stand-up comics of his or any other era…

Open Registration for Comic-Con 2025 — where anyone can venture online and try to buy badges — took place on October 26…only it didn't. There were tech problems and the website didn't work right and, oh, we hear it was a mess. But they think they've got the problems solved so they're trying again on Saturday, November 23.

One tip: You may or may not get what you seek that day but I can pretty much guarantee that you'll fail in your mission if you don't learn in advance how this thing works, which you can do on this page. If you succeed, you can start counting the days until the event commences. As of right now, there are 258 of them. Better leave now if you're going to need a parking space.

Chris Cavanaugh poses this question to me…

I enjoy your Instagram posts about comic books you owned, read, and loved. There is quite a variety. Did you buy almost everything you saw on the stands? Which genres and titles were your favorites? Were there any you passed on?

My memory is that I started with comics featuring characters I knew from television. We're talking 1957 or so here…so mostly Dell. At that point, there were comic book racks in a lot of markets and drugstores so my parents would say, "Go pick out a couple" and I'd pick out a couple and they'd buy them for me along with whatever else they were there to buy. But my parents also loved old book shops and in those, while they shopped for used books, I'd hit the piles of old comics that sold for a nickel each, six for a quarter.

Naturally, I bought them in multiples of six. An awful lot of the diversification in my purchasing came in the second-hand shops because I'd pick out, say, 35 comics I wanted and then I'd have to take one more to get to that multiple of six. So that was how I tried a lot of new things…because from my point-o'-view, that 36th comic was free. I'm pretty sure the first time I bought a Charlton comic, it was as a "free" comic in a used book shop. I do not remember seeing Charlton comics on racks of new comics until around 1966.

With me, it went roughly like this: I started with Dell comics that featured characters I knew from television. That led easily to some Dell comics that were similar in content even though they featured characters I didn't know from television.

I also started buying Harvey comics that had characters I knew from television and that led to Harvey comics featuring characters I didn't know from television. And somewhere in there, I bought two DC Comics — The Fox and the Crow and Sugar & Spike before I ever went near Superman. I still think The Fox and the Crow and Sugar & Spike are two of the Ten Best Comics to ever come out of that company.

Soon after, I started buying Superman comics because I knew Superman from TV. One local station sometimes ran the Paramount cartoons and another had the live-action series starring George Reeves. Julius Schwartz once asked me to write the Superman comic for a while and I realized that the way the character was being handled then was quite different from the way I would have wanted to do it so I declined.

I'm not knocking how they were doing it. Their approach might well have been more commercial but it wasn't the way I saw the character. (The way I saw the character, he would have been more like the Paramount cartoons when he was Superman and more like George Reeves when he was Clark Kent.)

Anyway, the first comic book I bought that had Superman in it was a coverless copy of Action Comics #250. I'm not sure why I had a coverless one but I did and it was many years later than I acquired a copy with a cover on it. That cover can be seen above and next to it is Jimmy Olsen #45, which was the second comic I bought that had Superman in it.

Not long after that, I bought an issue of World's Finest Comics because it had Superman in it…and it also had Batman, which led to me collecting all the comics with Batman in them, and then Justice League of America because it sometimes had Superman and Batman in it.  Each comic was a gateway drug to another.

Beyond that point, I just kinda started buying everything…all the other super-hero comics, then war comics and westerns and romance.  I just decided I liked every kind of comic book and I was more interested in the form — how they were written and drawn, how a story was told in them — than I ever was in the characters or stories themselves.  I can't chart a timeline of when different comics went on my "to buy" list because I was getting a lot of them second-hand, not when they arrived at newsstands.  I'd say "…and reading all those comic books made me the man I am today" but that's a horrible thing to say about comic books.