My old pal Pat O'Neill and I used to engage in big (but friendly) arguments in online forums. We agreed on so little about comics that when we did agree, some folks took it as a sign that we had to both be right. Here is a wise, I think, message Pat sent me about the Emmy Awards…

I think the problem with the Emmys is that the television audience has become so fractionated (if that's a word) that it is no longer a "mass medium." I'm not even sure you can call most of what it does "television" anymore, since so few people are actually watching these programs on TV sets. It certainly can't be called "broadcasting" anymore.

When there were only three or four or five networks, you could be certain that some substantial percentage of the audience (at least 20%) had at least heard of the shows and people that were nominated. Quite honestly, I didn't know a show called Fleabag even existed until I heard it announced as a nominee. Imagine my surprise when it wound up winning most of the comedy series awards.

This leads in to my opinion that they made a major mistake by not having a host. A host might have been able to weave all these disparate threads into a coherent tapestry. Instead it felt, to me, like a new award show about every 30 minutes as they shifted gears to a different genre.

One more gripe: The speech by the head of the TV Academy was purest hype for the industry. On other award shows — like the Oscars and Tonys — that speech is used to talk about the things the presenting organizations (the Motion Picture Academy, the Theater Wing and the League of Broadway Producers) do to foster the arts they celebrate — the museums they run, the educational programs they support, etc. Is the TV Academy doing nothing of that sort worth mentioning? Or is the industry as a whole afraid the TV audience doesn't really believe the hype about this being the "platinum age" of TV, as it was called in that speech?

I didn't see the speech you mention because I still haven't watched the whole show, nor is anyone recommending that I do. I do think awards shows often get a bum criticism the same way some televised baseball games are faulted for being boring. Not all games are exciting and that isn't the fault of the those who produce the telecasts. A lot of folks are upset that their favorite shows didn't win or weren't nominated. Yeah, and when I followed the Dodgers back in the Sandy Koufax era, I didn't much like any game where they lost or no one made a spectacular play.

Not the fault of the producers…nor is it their fault when the winners don't give memorable or funny acceptance speeches. I did watch John Oliver's two acceptances this time and they were disappointing. (It was classy, I thought, of Mr. Oliver when he and all the other writers on his program went up to accept theirs, to let one of the other writers make the speech. But even that classy move was undermined though because the backdrop of that acceptance was a giant photo of John Oliver's face.)

Anyway, I agree with Pat that a big problem with the Emmys is that the industry is becoming so…I believe the word is "fractionalized." I've never watched a lot of the nominated or winning shows…or watched them enough to have any particular rooting interest in them. Fleabag is a great show — or at least, that's my conclusion based on what little I've seen of it. Having not seen all the other nominees, I can't very well say it's the best in its category though.

For a long time, a working premise of an awards show like this has been that if, for example, you've never watched Fleabag, its win is likely to motivate you to tune in and check it out. I wonder how true that is. It seems to me that, given the way we're now so fractionalized — there's that word again — in so many ways, folks are more likely to think, "How dare they give the award to a show I've never heard of?" And they come away with a negative impression of the show because it seems undeserving. I could probably draw some parallel to the way we approach politics nowadays if I was in the mood for a bit of heavy lifting.

Anyway, I agree with Pat. It's hard to embrace a ceremony that seeks to celebrate excellence in television when we're not all on the same page as to just what "television" is these days. There isn't even a simple definition of "prime time" when we can watch some of these shows any time we choose. The whole art form and industry have changed and if they're going to give out awards, the rules need to change…a lot.

I was once on a committee at the Academy — the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences to use its full name — that was trying to refine the way they handed out Emmy Awards for animation on Saturday morning. Today, they might need one committee just to define "animation"..and another to figure out what and when "Saturday morning" is. Thanks, Pat.

• If you're at the New York Comic Con next weekend, first of all you have my sympathy. But it would be worth hacking your way through the crowds to meet and get an autograph from the lovely/gifted @larainenewman who will be there…live from New York. The best.

I just love people who do things — whatever it is they do — better than just about anyone else. Here's a great example named Simone Biles…

This whole matter with the Ukrainian call is the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say it's a waste of time to fret about whether Elizabeth Warren is ahead of Joe Biden with married women over the age of 39 in southern Wisconsin or any of those details. The election is about one thing: The misbehavior of Trump. And before we get to Election Day, there'll be fifty more scandals like the present one…fifty more outrages that no one can predict.

Every week-to-ten-days, we'll awake to some new bombshell, previously unforeseen, that Trump has done something that his opponents say is illegal, immoral or just plain stupid…and his backers say is fine, it's fake news, it's somebody else's fault, it's legal and if it isn't legal, so what? My suspicion is that the latter group will diminish over time but even if it doesn't, none of us will ever know what we'll be arguing about week after next. My prediction, for what it's worth, is totally unpredictability except for one thing: Trump's support will never go up by any significant amount.

Remember how in the last presidential election, there was a week or two when some people were genuinely concerned that Carly Fiorina was going to be the nominee? A few months…even weeks later, it felt ridiculous to ever have considered that as a possibility. I think from now 'til the day we vote, we'll feel that way about everything that happened eight weeks earlier. I'm still not convinced that either Biden or Trump will be on the final ballot.

• On the 977th day of the Trump presidency, Congress is launching an impeachment inquiry. This is 976 days more than a Republican Congress would have waited to investigate President Hillary over something like running a pedophile ring out of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC.

• Trump says he will release the "complete, fully declassified and unredacted" transcript of the phone call he had with the Ukrainian President; says to just ignore the portions written in with a Sharpie.

• CNN just wrote "Trump remained defiant that he's done nothing wrong and has no regrets about his behavior." They must have that on a macro. They'd need it if he did shoot someone on 5th Avenue.

I'm a big fan of the kind of actor who never quite becomes a star but also never quite is out of work…so I was a big fan of Sid Haig. I first became aware of him in an awful 1971 movie called The Big Doll House. It was one of those low-low-budget films shot in the Philippines about women who go to prison and take a lot of showers. Despite a script they probably got at a garage sale, Haig managed to steal the picture from all those shower-taking women.

Want to see a snippet of it? If you're old enough to watch an R-rated movie, click below and you'll be asking yourself why that year, Gene Hackman got the Academy Award for The French Connection instead of Sid Haig for The Big Doll House…

The lady, by the way, is Pam Grier, who went on to have a pretty impressive career of her own.

Once I was aware of Sid Haig, I spotted him in dozens of movies and TV shows after that, usually playing some kind of tough-guy thug (like in Diamonds are Forever) or a deranged killer, like in countless slasher/horror movies. I don't like slasher/horror movies but I occasionally was dragged to see one and if Sid Haig was in it — and he always seemed to be — he was the best thing in it.

The last decade or two, he was doing the comic convention circuit and I ran into him a half-dozen times in a food line or (once) at adjoining urinals. He seemed like a nice guy, always willing to talk to you for as long as you wanted to talk to him. He struck me as especially appreciative of anyone who knew he'd done anything more in his career than play psycho killers and demons.

A few weeks ago, he apparently took some sort of bad fall and he died from it last Saturday. He was 80 and is being mourned by all within the horror film community…with good reason.

Since I didn't watch the Emmy Awards last night, I have no idea if they really were, as many are saying online this morning, the worst Emmy Awards ever. The folks who are saying that this year seem to say that every year and I suspect most of 'em only watch so they can say that. To me, a lot of this is like someone who watches televised golf matches and gets angry that all that happens in them is that a bunch of mostly-white guys — some of them in funny pants — walk around a big park and try to hit a little ball into a hole. Just what are they expecting?

And of course, some are furious about who wasn't in the "In Memoriam" segment. This year, the main sacrilegious omissions seem to be Kaye Ballard, David Hedison and Peter Tork. I've decided I cannot begin to care about these complaints until such time as I see one person complain that they left out a producer, director, writer or any other behind-the-scenes individual who might have been crucial to the making of a television show.

Here's the math on this. 44 people were included in the televised montage last night. Another 38 were included in the "In Memoriam" reel at the Creative Arts Emmys last Tuesday. Some (not all) of those 82 people are on this page over on the TV Academy site. I like the Creative Arts one better because it isn't mainly about performers. It recognizes that other people matter.

Still, there are plenty of people who've worked and made important contributions in television but were not in either video or on the web page. My pals Larry DiTillio, John Boni and Tom Williams weren't in either place.

I am, however, not irate about that; not in the slightest. This is all too trivial to get irate about and I absolutely recognize that there's no way to include everyone. I'm just tired of people complaining about 10% of the performers who didn't make the cut and not being bothered in the slightest at the omission from the prime-time telecast of 90%+ of the writers, directors, producers, make-up people, stunt persons, art directors, stage managers, grips, hair dressers, composers, costume designers, editors, et al. When those crafts are as well-represented as the actors, I might start caring about someone like Peter Tork only being on the website, not on the telecast.

But even then, come on. Peter Tork will still be remembered just as long as anyone anywhere wants to watch reruns of The Monkees, which will probably be forever. Not getting his few seconds on "The worst Emmy Awards ever" (and maybe the lowest-rated) does not diminish his fame in any way. If anything, it's the folks who helped make The Monkees a hit and didn't get their faces on camera or their names in the main title who'll be forgotten. I guess because they weren't actors, who cares?

The La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts is a lovely theater that puts on very good shows. I like everything about it except its location which is too damn close to Disneyland for the traffic to not be a big drawback. Still, I may try to get down there before October 13 to see their latest offering, the musical of the movie Grumpy Old Men.

This a musical that has yet to make it to Broadway. Maybe it will and maybe it won't. It pops up in regional productions here and there and will probably continue to do so until someone with bottomless pockets decides it's ready for the big time. It has a book by Dan Remmes and music by Neil Berg…and no disrespect to those gents but what interests me is that the songs have lyrics by my pal, the late Nick Meglin.

Nick, after he retired as editor of MAD magazine, worked long and hard on this show and it's very, very sad that he left us, especially when he was but a few months from seeing it actually produced in an actual theater with actual actors. The actual actors in this production include Hal Linden, Cathy Rigby and Ken Page. See? Here they are in a piece of its advertising artwork…

I wasn't particularly a fan of the movie on which it's based but I'm a fan of those three performers. And of course, I'm a fan of Nick's. Traffic or no traffic, I would certainly drive down there to have another lunch with him.

Wanna know what's up with MAD? Issue #10 comes out October 8 and it will be available in comic book shops and certain specialty shops and by mail but it will not be on mainstream newsstands. This is not the last issue as many have understood and a person on the MAD staff with whom I recently spoke seemed pretty frustrated that people think that. To be accurate, this person said, this is the last issue with all-new content.

There is confusion aplenty here. I pointed out to this person that in recent years of declining sales, MAD has often snuck in "classic" reprints so it's been quite a while since MAD consistently had all-new content. It would also be wrong to believe as many do that MAD will henceforth be all-reprint since #11 and issues to follow will have new covers and some new content. Sergio Aragonés is still working on material for them and others are, as well.  The mag will just be mostly-reprint.

And even that, I suspect, will not last forever.  This is not a news item.  It's just me suspecting…but I'd bet a front tooth implant for Alfred E. Neuman that we will see the day soon when MAD shifts back to all or mostly-new material.  The magazine's star caricaturist Tom Richmond says on his blog that "There will be no more new movie or TV parodies." That's true right now but it'll change. MAD will not become more popular as it has less and less to do with the world today.

The Voctave folks offer their version of "Moon River." I'm thinking of trying to get into a group like this if I can only figure a way to improve my singing about eighty thousand percent…

• Every time a new Trump scandal pops up, you can almost hear Republican leaders thinking, "Oh, God! What we could do with this if a Democrat did it!"

Today for some reason is Batman Day. There have been periods in my life when every day seemed like Batman Day.

I got a few messages from folks asking me what my favorite version of Batman is. There have been a lot to choose from…too many, in my opinion. A character is defined by what's right for him (or her) and what's wrong for the character…and given all the different interpretations that have made it into print, I think there's really nothing now that's wrong for Batman. Has anyone made him into a paranoid mongoose with a lisp yet? If not, wait. It'll be a mini-series in our lifetimes. To me, each variant undefines Batman another notch.

That said, I find it helpful to divide Batman into two eras. There was the period before 1964 when everything was signed by Bob Kane and the artists drew in a broader, cartoonier style that was supposed to emulate how Bob Kane would have drawn it if Bob Kane had drawn it. From that era, I preferred the more serious detective-type stories and mainly the ones drawn by Dick Sprang or Jerry Robinson.

After '64, no one was trying to draw like Bob Kane — even the guy ghosting the comics that Bob Kane was allegedly drawing. Again, I liked the more serious detective-type stories…and the ones where Batman outsmarted the villain instead of out-crazying him. The more mentally disturbed the hero was, the less I liked him or thought of him as Batman. My favorite tales from this era were drawn by Neal Adams, Irv Novick, Jim Aparo, Don Newton, Gene Colan and a few others…but only a few.

A number of times in my life, I was asked to write Batman stories for DC. Each of those times, I declined because I honestly wasn't sure who Batman was at that moment at that company. In hindsight, me doing a version that did not match what others were doing with him might not have bothered the editors there much but it probably would have inhibited my writing a lot. I don't think I would have done a very good job at it.

Hello. I seem to be getting back into my old pattern of blogging. I'm finishing up a long piece on a bit of comic book history which I'll be posting in a day or so. I've been busy with an awful lot of different matters, some of them mundane to the extreme…if that isn't an oxymoron.

Just a reminder: Today, I'll be at the Dark Delicacies bookshop out in what the wonderful Gary Owens used to describe as "Beautiful Downtown Burbank." I'll be interviewing Jeff Abraham and Burt Kearns about their new book, The Show Won't Go On. Details here.

Hey, if you're in or around L.A., this might interest you: I've written before here about a local group called the Musical Theater Guild. They take great old musicals that aren't being produced much these days and they one-performance concert versions of them: No sets, not much in the way of costumes, small casts, actors often reading from scripts, appallingly little rehearsal. Tomorrow night, I'm going out to the Alex Theater in Glendale to see how the hell they're going to do one of my favorite musicals, Barnum, with almost no budget and a cast of nine people who had one day of rehearsal. I know they'll pull it off. I just don't know how.

If you're as curious as I am, tickets are still available here.