The unbelievably-busy folks who run Comic-Con International have posted the programming schedules for Preview Night and for Thursday.
Those of you who complain that Comic-Con is all about TV and movies and not at all about comics, go to those pages and count the number of programming items that are wholly or at least partially about comic books. Go ahead. Do it. You may be surprised.
That's a photo of Joe Raiola, a writer of very funny things who was a member of the editorial staff of MAD for 33 years. This morning, he posted the following to Facebook. I'll be back after it to add on my thoughts but I only disagree with two things Joe says…
During its long run, MAD Magazine inspired many second-rate imitators. There was Cracked and Sick and Crazy and so on. Oddly enough, the latest MAD imitator is MAD itself. The MAD published out of Burbank since the spring of 2018, which is being shut down, is an imitation of the real thing.
I say this not as a shot at the new MAD staff, which was thrust into an impossible situation. Not a single member of the editorial staff had any previous MAD experience, except as readers.
From 1952 to 2017, MAD had a remarkable continuity of talent. DC, which took over after Bill Gaines died in 1992, is a comic book company specializing in flying caped aliens. The former MAD staff offered sufficient resistance to remain editorially independent. And, to its credit, DC came to respect the MAD staff, even if the suits didn't fully understand the mechanics of creating a humor magazine.
When DC moved to California in 2014 and the MAD staff refused to go, DC wisely decided to leave MAD in New York. In November of 2017, Rolling Stone wrote: "Operating under the cover of barf jokes, MAD has become America's best political satire magazine."
Bottom line: For MAD to have had a chance to survive, it needed to remain in New York and the editorial reins been passed on to the "junior" staff, which had been in place for nearly two decades. That did not happen and this is the predictable result.
On a more positive note, I just found out that in 15 minutes I can save 15% on my car insurance.
Some might dismiss Joe's words as grapes of the sour kind but I don't think he's wrong except that I liked the new MAD, at least in its first issue or two, more than I think he did. Secondly, I think it's conceivable MAD could have benefited from the right "new blood" inserted into (but not displacing) the old structure and that didn't have to happen wholly in New York. I think what went awry here is much the same thing I see as a problem with just about everything that comes out of DC Comics these days…
If you talk to anyone who works there these days — anyone! — they will tell you this: That you come to work each day wondering who's going to get fired. Eventually, inevitably, it will be you…but until that time, you won't be sure who'll be above you next week. I would imagine the decision to suddenly and unexpectedly amputate most of the MAD division has only contributed to that environment. The answer to the question "Who's in charge?" is "I dunno. What time is it?"
Now, to be fair, MAD Magazine has long faced a problem that even the former staff could not make go completely away: It's a magazine. Magazines don't do that well these days and every danged one of them that's been around for a while is selling a fraction of what it once sold. On a percentage basis, Playboy hasn't fared much better than MAD and it's not because Americans are getting sick of looking at beautiful nude women. People just don't read magazines of any kind the way they used to.
The easy assumption is that this is the result of that new-fangled "internet" thing but it's actually a trend that began before any of us had handles or e-mail addresses. The eruption of online communication and entertainment merely turned a trickle into a waterfall.
I'm going to pause my add-on to Joe's essay here and insert one by my pal Paul Levitz, who ran DC Comics (and therefore presided in a business sense over MAD) for many years. Paul also posted what follows this morning on Facebook. Take special note of the one passage I have highlighted…
Culturally speaking, MAD Magazine is probably the most powerful print entity to emerge from the comics industry. At its peak (ironically, the Poseidon Adventure parody issue…only MAD could crest with a story about sinking)…MAD had a circulation over 2 million copies an issue, a pass-along readership that was a multiple of that, and was the magazine sold at the largest number of outlets in the U.S. and Canada. Its impact on the broader popular culture, spreading a snarky, borscht-belt, NY Jewish sense of humor and cynical attitude towards advertising, government, big business and human behavior, is immeasurable.
Founders Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Gaines, and editors Al Feldstein, Nick Meglin and John Ficarra who built on the foundation and made it a towering institution shaped the Baby Boom generation, inspiring movements from underground comix to Vietnam War protests. And the Usual Gang of Idiots — the incredible, long serving writers and cartoonists who filled the magazine — brought styles that even the most art-blind kid could recognize, they were each so distinctive and personal.
I've been proud to be a friend to some of the gang since my adolescence, and to have served as MAD's publisher for 17 years. I can't say I contributed much to its glory: I never found the business model to help it adapt to the changes in our culture, to kids' reading patterns, and technology that has accelerated the cycle of snark. But we tried, again and again.
MAD the magazine may be gone, but its legacy lives on in our conversations and our attitudes. I wrote about how the different editors' world views shaped the magazine (and our mindsets) in Studies in American Humor, Vol. 3, No. 30, a few years ago — using the vehicle of an interview with Al Jaffee, the then only "Idiot" to have worked with all of the MAD editors. There's an academic press book version of that issue coming out eventually, and much will be written about the fading of this American institution.
But today, I'm just sad.
Paul, one of the humblest guys I know, is shouldering way too much of the blame in the highlighted passage. Everyone at or around MAD for decades struggled to find that business model that would allow a magazine to thrive in a declining market for magazines.
A lot of what they did helped for a time. Purists shrieked when MAD began accepting advertising again — yes, again. Those who moaned that it was a betrayal for MAD to contain ads for "the first time" were unaware that it once had. But that move in 2001 kept the publication in the black as did upgrades in the area of interior color and print quality and various reprint projects.
What really kept MAD alive in perilous times though were (a) its tradition and (b) its content. As I've written here several times, I thought its content was really, really strong the last decade or two. There was some brilliant comedy writing in its pages.
If MAD had been the product of a small publisher working out of a low-rent office somewhere, that might have been enough. The hefty overhead of being a Time-Warner project — and their overall business model of seeking to monetize every property in every medium — caused MAD to fall short. I do not think it's gone forever. I'd bet my complete collection of that publication that the brand is too valuable to not be relaunched before long.
I just think they don't know what to do with it now…and that I blame a lot on that "Who's running the store?" problem I mentioned earlier. Since MAD was wrested from its New York crew, the answer to that question has been "Everybody" and when everyone's running the store, no one's running the store. My pal Bill Morrison was editor for a time and if you absolutely had to have someone with no MAD experience running MAD, you couldn't ask for a better pick. The problems there were that to the extent Bill was able to run it, it was in an unstable environment…and that it was still, when you got right down to it, a magazine.
I do not have a solution to that not-tiny problem. My gut tells me there is one but what the hell does my gut know about marketing? I just don't think giving up and abandoning MAD's long-established spot on newsstands and killing the "tradition" is a solution. Once those outlets stop making room for MAD on their racks, it'll be ten times as difficult to get them to clear a spot for it ever again.
Creatively, what MAD needs is a stability that I don't know is possible in the current corporate structure there. I know that the new MAD may have claimed to be the output of "The Usual Gang of Idiots" but it wasn't. The "idiots," such as they are, were not in any sense "usual."
When I fell in love with that publication in 1962, every issue was the work of more-or-less the same people: Mort Drucker, Don Martin, Antonio Prohias, Dave Berg, Frank Jacobs, Larry Siegel, Stan Hart, Al Jaffee, etc. They didn't even have Sergio Aragonés when I started buying the thing but he came along shortly after and quickly became a star there, a highlight among many in every issue. The last true star I think MAD added to its roster was Tom Richmond and that was around the turn of the century.
In the new MAD, you have a few holdovers from the previous regime like Sergio, Jaffee, Richmond, Dick DeBartolo and one or two others. But most of the magazine has been filled with transients…folks who look like they're auditioning even though no ongoing positions seemed to be available. The folks running MAD lately haven't found the new Don Martin, the new Jack Davis, another caricaturist besides Richmond worthy of occupying the space Drucker once did, etc. I don't believe it's because such people don't exist. I just think that's the way Time-Warner operates these days.
No one person among the mob of those who work on them can say what's right for Superman or Bugs Bunny or Batman or Tweety or any of the wonderful properties they've accumulated over the years. None of those folks created the properties. None of them has the overriding say as to what's right or wrong for them. And not one of them can reasonably expect to be associated with that property for long. All those legendary characters are being raised by baby-sitters, not by actual parents. Not even foster parents.
The demise of MAD is a failure of marketing and distribution and promotion; of no one finding that elusive business model that Paul mentioned. But even a sound business model needs a sound product to sell and I'm not sure it's possible to create that in a workplace where even the highest-ranked exec is really a well-paid (for now) office temp. Joe Raiola was right. The less MAD was controlled by corporate overlords, the better it was.
The folks at Playbill have posted some great photos from the original Broadway production of the musical 1776. This is a good day to do that.
And while you're over there, be amazed by how many productions Neil Simon had on Broadway. And I don't think their list is even complete.
Contributors to MAD Magazine received an e-mail today telling them that after two more issues of mostly-new content, MAD will become a reprint title. It will have new covers but inside, there will be naught but old, recycled material. It will also no longer appear on regular newsstands but will be available only via the direct market, which means comic book shops and a few other kinds of outlets. The letter said that all subscriptions will be honored but didn't mention anything about new subscriptions.
So what do I think about this? I think it sucks and I think it's a huge mistake, especially for a company like Time-Warner that is so into the concept of branding and expanding everything they own into all possible forms — TV shows, movies, video games, dolls, t-shirts, etc. It ain't good for them to tell the world that the name of MAD is of such low value that it can't even sell MAD.
The letter to contributors blames low sales and I assume they are indeed poor…but just because the marketplace isn't buying the MAD they're currently being offered doesn't mean it wouldn't sustain a different MAD, one that is true to the working premise of the publication in different, more timely ways. I have to think that someone there is pondering what MAD 2.0 might be like. At least, I hope someone is.
Around fifty years ago — actually, not "around" fifty years ago; fifty years ago — I used to poach in the hallways of NBC Burbank and visit the sets where shows like The Dean Martin Show, The Tonight Show, Hollywood Squares or various Bob Hope Specials were rehearsing and/or taping. A fun place to be was the Laugh-In stage so I got to see Arte Johnson performing as his various characters.
In rehearsals, he used to mouth gibberish instead of the actual punch lines, the idea being to wait until tape was rolling to speak the real lines. That way, maybe actual crew and onlooker laughter might get on the air. (There was no studio audience there but there were an awful lot of folks like me hanging around on the set.)
Mr. Johnson's refusal to speak the actual dialogue sometimes frustrated his co-performers or directors and camerafolks who needed to know on what line to move the camera. But they all thought he was worth the trouble…because when he did do the lines in the script, he delivered them better than anyone else could have.
He would also deliver a lot of lines that weren't in the script. After he and Ruth Buzzi had taped a dozen Gladys/Tyrone skits, the director would just roll tape and they'd improvise a half-dozen more, including some of the best ones that you saw on your TV. He really was a very clever actor. No, I didn't know him but I saw enough of him to see how good he was. There were a dozen reasons that show was so memorable and he was several of that dozen. Here's a good obit that will tell you more.
This is the latest in a series of what I call my Cranky, Rambling Rants. Cranky, Rambling Rant #1 was here, Cranky, Rambling Rant #2 was here and Cranky, Rambling Rant #3 was here.
#4 is about how weary I am of arguments which may be about almost anything but they're really about someone who is angry that the world is not like it was when he was 24 years old…or whatever age he now believes was a happier time for him than Right Now.
Generally, these are not someone longing for a time when his or her health was better or they were in a better relationship, though either of those can be an underlying factor in the underlying factor. I recently have had to "mute" a couple of people in my lives who cannot seem to talk about anything other than how everything was better Way Back When. If you mention to them you had a good hamburger somewhere, you have to listen to how hamburgers were better back in the seventies.
No, they weren't. Maybe there was a restaurant back in 1974 that made better burgers than the place you went to last Tuesday…but all hamburgers then weren't wonderful and all hamburgers today don't stink. When you say that to me, what I hear is "My life was better then than it is now" — and that may be so. You can certainly make it so if you're set on viewing everything new as another damned reminder that time passes.
And hey, I'm not saying some things weren't better way back. My knees certainly were. But complaints like that rarely reverse the calendar. I know one guy who seems to feel that if he bitches enough about how lousy The Tonight Show is under Jimmy Fallon, we'll get Johnny Carson back. I don't disagree that Johnny was better than Jimmy but, first of all, not that much better and secondly, that was then and this is now. A lot of entertainment is of its time. I think this fellow was just plain happier with his life back then. In fact, I know he was.
I was happy with a lot of things when I was younger but I've accepted that almost none of them are coming back, at least in the same form. You need to find them in their new form or, more often, appreciate totally new things around you. In my experience, this bitching and moaning about how everything has changed for the worse is always a self-destructive act. If you want to destroy yourself, that's your right but don't try to make me an accomplice.
This has been a Cranky, Rambling Rant against Cranky, Rambling Rants. You know, they were better when I was a kid.
It's the Voctave folks singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"…and singing it quite well. Have I ever written here about how I think the whole ending of The Wizard of Oz is wrong? I mean, I know most everyone loves the film but it always bothered me that in the second reel, Dorothy sings this beautiful "wish" song about finding a better place and a better world and then the rest of the movie basically proves that there isn't one and you should just stay in Kansas where they have tornadoes and old ladies seize your dog and take it off to be put to sleep and you'll never amount to anything better than what you've achieved by age 13 or so.
And yes, I know that it's a classic and none of this matters to the people who love the movie. But I think of its strange logic every time I hear the song, even when performed as elegantly as these folks…
Nate Silver is to me, the pollster of pollsters. He doesn't poll himself but he kind of polls the pollsters and parses their polling to arrive at a wider look. He's now saying Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris are about equally likely to win the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders is one tier below them and that no one else stands much of a chance. If that's so, then all the shrieking and moaning about a 24-candidate race was unnecessary because we got down to a four-way contest in record time. Now, we just have to get through debates where Michael Bennet and Andrew Yang get equal time with the actual candidates.
But I also question if the field is really that predictable. The rest of this election sure isn't. We have a volatile political atmosphere and a volatile incumbent and I doubt even Trump's staunchest supporters would be surprised if he said or did something outrageous or if any of the umpteen ongoing investigations turned up more scandals and possible crimes. We may still find out he committed some wild, still-prosecutable financial fraud or that he was born in Kenya or that he really did shoot someone on Fifth Avenue.
That's my position: That things will happen that we can't possibly imagine now. There will be numerous game-changers and some of them may make all conventional political wisdom and polling — the kind Nate Silver employs — irrelevant. Too many things that could never have happened have already happened.
I have often mentioned my beloved friend Shelly Goldstein, whom I count among the most talented people I know…and I know some damned talented people. Shelly is a fine writer of comedy and a fine vocalist of songs. She combines these things at which she's so fine into a cabaret show called "How Groovy Girls Saved the World." It was great when she performed it to sold-out crowds here in Los Angeles. I see no reason to think it won't be as great or greater when she performs it on Saturday, August 3 at Studio 5 in Evanston, Illinois.
You will love it if you love female vocalists of the sixties like Petula Clark, Mama Cass and Jackie DeShannon. You will love it if you love funny songs because Shelly intersperses the hits of the sixties with her own compositions. If you love both those things, you will go and never leave.
You can get ticket information here. I will probably not be there because Studio 5 is 2,034 miles from my house and after my recent trip to North Carolina, I'm giving up air travel for a while. Shelly's show might almost be worth crawling that far. I guarantee you no trauma counseling will be necessary.
I've been watching America's Got Talent lately — occasional peeks at the show on NBC and, more often, on YouTube. I like a lot of what goes on there. Sure, much of the show is configured to create inspirational, tearjerker moments. Fine. But they do it well, certainly better than any of their imitators. That show James Corden did a few months ago was so forced and unreal that it made me appreciate the simplicity of AGT all the more.
But you know what I don't like? I don't like "Watch me risk killing myself" acts.
I didn't always feel this way. In fact, I worked for a few years on a TV show that featured some of them and it didn't bother me there, possibly because my behind-the-scenes position enabled me to see that the stunts weren't as dangerous as their performers (and my show) made them out to be. There sometimes was an element of danger and a few people did get hurt on our program but you think, "Well, this is the profession they chose for themselves. They all weighed the possible risks versus the possible rewards and decided to go ahead."
I still feel some of that way but I less and less want to watch it. My thought process now goes more or less like this: Is it an out-and-out magic trick that looks dangerous but in reality, there's zero chance of actual harm? I can enjoy some of those but at times, there's an element of deception that bothers me. On the other hand, is there a real chance that the performer will be injured or killed? Increasingly, I don't want to watch it and don't think it should be encouraged.
I started writing this piece a few days ago, stopped with the paragraph directly above and decided to get back to it some other time. I'm back finishing it because I just read this news item…
A magician was taken to hospital over the weekend after reportedly being struck on the head with an arrow during an on-stage performance gone wrong. Entertainer Li Lau, who works under the name "One Crazy China," suffered an injury at the 2019 National Arts Festival in Makhanda, South Africa.
It was a trick wherein "One Crazy China" (apt name) was supposed to escape from some kind of restraints so that a crossbow fired by an assistant would not strike him in the head. Something went wrong and it struck him in the head. This line in the news report helped shape my view of the incident…
The art organization's chief executive, Tony Lankester, told the paper that trauma counseling would be made available to members of the audience who witnessed the accident.
There is something wrong with an act for which trauma counseling is ever necessary. And why didn't they offer it that time I went to see Jackie Mason perform?
In the seventies, a lot of folks were shocked and disbelieving when it came out that Dick Van Dyke — sweet, funny, wholesome Dick Van Dyke — was an alcoholic and had been one for some time. In 1974, he starred as an alcoholic businessman in the TV movie, The Morning After, and later revealed that it was based on his own addiction. On November 14 of that year, he talked candidly about it on The Dick Cavett Show. Here's an excerpt from that program…
And from the same show, here are Dick and Dick talking about Stan and Buster. My thanks to Robert Brauer for telling me about the first link.
There is a bit of good news about Donald Trump: He may be about to rid himself of the foreign policy of John Bolton, a man who demands war and regime change everywhere from Iran to Sesame Street. Fred Kaplan thinks it's likely.
Kaplan also thinks that Trump's obvious jealousy of dictators who can kill those who cross them is no longer a joking matter.
Okay, I seemed to have massaged my sleeping hours back to normal and I got all my pressing, must-go-to-press work in so maybe things will be more normal around here for a while. It'll get tougher as we inch towards Comic-Con which begins, let me remind you, sixteen days from now. The news of what panels will occur when is supposed to be embargoed until the convention itself announces the schedule but I seem to be about the only person honoring that. In any case, they'll begin posting the schedule on their website on Wednesday and going day-by-day until it's all up.
In light of our last Video Link, a couple of folks wrote to ask me what my favorite candy was back when I ate candy. I never consumed a lot of candy but when I did, there was nothing I liked better than the Russell Stover Cashew Patty. It looked like a coaster you'd set a drink on but it was just cashew pieces covered in quite-delicious chocolate. If a law was passed that criminalized all forms of candy except that one, I would have been fine with it. Simple. Tasty. And oh so satisfying.
They stopped making them decades ago. I heard or maybe I assumed that the Cashew Patty was swept away when the Russell Stover folks started a line of low-fat, low-sugar candies. They now offer the Russell Stover Cashew Cluster pictured above which I assume is the same chocolate and the same cashew pieces, though possibly not in quite the same chocolate-to-nut ratio. In any case, I liked chocolate-covered cashews as much as I ever liked any treat but I haven't had that kind of thing in twelve years. I haven't even had my favorite cookie, though friends still occasionally buy me a sack of 'em.
I gave up candy around 2007 when my love of sweets mysteriously disappeared. But even when I did eat candy, I never sampled any of The 10 Candies That You Forgot Still Exist in this video. I didn't forget about half of them because I never heard of them. The rest didn't sound like something I'd enjoy…or at least, wouldn't enjoy as much as my other immediate options…
It's like: Here's a candy bar you've never tried. Here's a candy bar you know you love. Which one are you going to pick? I always picked the one I knew I loved.
I'm a little fascinated by old candy bars and I'm also a bit fascinated by the editing on videos like this where someone goes through twenty clips a minute of visuals, some of which are only remotely pertinent. How long must it take someone to find all those videos and edit them together? It looks like it would take about a month per minute. Here, take a look…