Sgt. Sonny did such a good job yesterday we're having him back for an encore…

Just got an e-mail from someone asking if something was wrong since I haven't yet posted my usual "Had a great time at WonderCon" report. It's coming, it's coming. Actually, I got back last night setting some sort of record for getting home from Anaheim. If it was always that quick, I'd go to Disneyland more often than once every 1.5 decades.

Yes, I did have a great time…as I always do. There are just things that have to be done before I can tell you how great. They include unpacking, catching up on sleep, writing a sudden We-Need-It-Yesterday assignment for someone and it might be nice if I assembled all my tax records that I promised my Business Manager he'd have by St. Patrick's Day. But I will be back and I'll tell you how much I enjoyed WonderCon.

I really like these guys on the 'net who sing four-part harmony with themselves. This is Sonny Vande Putte ("Sgt. Sonny" to you) and he's doing the jobs of all four members of the Four Seasons…

Apparently, the Stormy Daniels interview is going to air tonight on 60 Minutes…and why the heck wouldn't it? They'll get big ratings. She'll get publicity and attention for whatever personal/business objectives she has.  I kinda doubt it'll lower a lot of opinions of Trump. I'm thinking most of the opinions of him that could be lowered already have been.

And I gotta say, I really don't care if he had an affair with this lady or anyone. Marital infidelity is high on my list of things that are nobody's business apart from those directly involved. The only thing I thought was our business about Bill Clinton's dalliance with Ms. Lewinsky was that it showed some pretty poor judgment on his part. I'd thought he was smarter than that.

Then again on a scale of 1 to 1000 for Bad Judgement with 1000 denoting utterly terrible, catastrophic Bad Judgement, I think Bill 'n' Monica barely cracks double digits, whereas the Iraq War is around 1008. And a lot of folks are not only denying the Iraq War was a mistake but seem quite eager to make it again maybe with some of the same people leading the way.

Even if all Stormy says is true, whose opinion of Trump is going to change? The rich got their big tax cut. Immigrants are on the defensive. Trump could [fill in name of your favorite sexual aberration] on the White House lawn and he wouldn't lose support from those who cheer those goals, not even from when they're self-described evangelicals.

If you're an exception to this — if you have a sense of morality that transcends politics, my hat's off to you even if I disagree with your morals. I haven't always been as consistent in that regard as I'd like and I'm working on it. That's whey I'm going to view Trump's alleged affairs the same way I viewed Clinton's. If it's just a matter of being unfaithful to one's spouse, that's their concern, not mine.  If there's a part of this that is our business, it's the ancillary, cover-up stuff.

The plan was to drive down to Anaheim on Wednesday evening, spend Thursday doing Disneylandic things at Disneyland, then attend the adjoining WonderCon on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Or at least, that was the plan before Mother Nature decided to dump the largest storm of the season on California from Tuesday night to early Friday morn. I know there are those who love the Magic Kingdom in the rain because you can get into all the indoor attractions without a wait. But watching dwarfs tread water and helping bail out Eeyore's thicket didn't sound like a fun time to me so Amber and I waited out the rain and only drove down here during a break in the precipitation Thursday evening. Late Friday when my feet began aching from walking around WonderCon, I thought "I'm sure glad we didn't spend yesterday hiking through Frontierland."

Foot pain aside, the first day of WonderCon here in Anaheim was very pleasant, in part because the hall wasn't jammed elbow-to-elbow with people. And even though Saturday was sold out, that was still the case. The convention center expansion here probably had something to do with that as did the new RFID badges which are nearly-impossible to counterfeit. So the number of attendees they want to let inside is now closer to the number they do.

Amber and I have spent our time here wandering the room and talking with people, and each day, I do two panels. Friday's were "The Sergio, Mark and Tom Show" and "Writing for Animation."  On the former, Sergio Aragonés, Tom Luth and I brought folks up to date on what's up with our bumbling barbarian buddy, Groo the Wanderer. What's up was reported upon here.

50 minutes wasn't nearly enough to say all that can be said about "Writing for Animation" but Shelly Goldstein, Marv Wolfman and I gave it a try.  The best advice I think we were able to dispense is that Writing for Animation is not a very good career choice but Writing for Many Fields, One of Which is Animation can be fun and sometimes even lucrative and/or creatively satisfying.

Mostly, Friday was a lot of running into old friends and talking, whereas Saturday was a lot of running into old friends and talking.  Friday night, we had a great dinner at the local Benihaha: Amber, me, Shelly Goldstein, Tom and Anna Richmond, Bill Morrison and Sergio Aragonés. Unlike a long-ago Benihana dinner I shared with Sergio at a comic convention, he did not get up, nudge the chef aside and take over the preparation of our dinners. I'll tell you more about the con in the next part of this report.

Allan Burns worked on a lot of prime-time situation comedies you've heard of like The Munsters, He & She, Get Smart, Room 222 and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In fact, he co-created a couple of those. But before he got into that line of work, he got his first job working in television by writing for Jay Ward.

This is an excerpt from his long, long interview for The Archive of American Television. It covers his time with Ward and he gets one or two things wrong…like, Dudley Do-Right was not on the original Rocky and His Friends show before it morphed into The Bullwinkle Show on Sunday evening on NBC. But it's still worth your attention…

This was one of my favorite shows when I was aged eight to ten…a daytime (and for a brief time, also nighttime) game show called Video Village. Kinescopes of the program are very rare but a decent one survived of this episode, perhaps because it was Show #500. There's a celebratory mood at the opening as host Monty Hall announces that milestone. At the end though, the mood changes as he announces that tomorrow's installment — #501 — will be the last one.

Video Village went on the air July 11, 1960 and off on June 15, 1962, so this episode is from 6/14/62. The show originated in New York and almost didn't survive. At the time, game shows were done live and they all shared studios. They'd do one show in a studio at 9 AM, then strike its set, bring in another and do a different program in there at 11 AM and maybe another later in the day. Video Village though required such a large, complex set that they couldn't have anything else in that studio all week — and on weekends, it cost a bundle to take down the Video Village set, do something else on that stage, then put the Video Village set back up for Monday morning. That made it more expensive than other shows and when there was a shortage of studio space, a lot of folks at CBS advocated canceling that one silly game show that was tying up one studio all the time.

The series squeaked by, largely by relocating to Los Angeles were there was more space and they had the technology to tape five episodes in one day. They'd do that several days in a row, then strike the set so other shows could be taped in that studio. A few weeks later, they'd put the Video Village set up again and tape another month's worth.

The hosts changed from time to time but Monty Hall, who's seen in this episode, was the last one. Mr. Hall did not suffer its loss. He and a partner had sold a game show called Your First Impression to NBC which went on the air earlier that year with Bill Leyden as its host. By the time that one was canceled in June of '64. Hall was hosting another show his company had developed for NBC. That one was called Let's Make a Deal.

Watching Video Village now, it seems very quaint…with contestants getting excited about winning five or twenty dollars. Today on game shows like The Wall, someone can win $513,000…and then say "We won half a million dollars" because that extra $13 grand is barely worth mentioning. Here — watch contestants being thrilled to win what today would not even pass as a consolation prize…

I probably worry less than most of my friends do about what Donald Trump can or will do to the United States of America and the world in which it resides. He's done a lot of bad things already but most of them seem to me reversible the next time Democrats — or even saner Republicans — are in control.

I'm more worried now than I used to be since Trump has replaced National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster with former U.N. ambassador John Bolton.

Bolton is not your typical Republican operative who believes there isn't a problem on this planet that can't be solved by cutting taxes for the rich. He believes that you need to cut taxes for the rich and go to war against…well, anyone. And everyone. Bolton's the kind of guy who would deal with long lines at the mall by sending in the Marines to carpet-bomb the place.

He doesn't even seem to care much who we go to war against as long as we go to war against someone. Jonathan Chait has more on the guy.

Sorry to hear that Meltdown Comics up on Sunset Boulevard is going away. It was a comic book shop but it was also a kind of media center and a gathering place for funny people of the "Let's put on a show!" mindset. The building was old and cluttered and the parking was just awful but they did all sorts of special events and comedy shows in a little auditorium-type space in the back, and I never went to that store without running into someone I was glad to run into.

The merchandise was not the only colorful, creative thing in the place. All over, you found interesting artwork and statuary and it was a terrific place to browse, run by people who obviously loved what they sold. It opened in 1993. It closes for good on March 30…and when I heard, I hoped it was a joke and the day after they closed, they planned to yell, "April Fools!" and reopen. But apparently not. Long sigh.

I don't have much of an opinion about privacy concerns on Facebook. To the extent I have concerns about my privacy these days, they're more about things like credit reporting, which seems to me like a swampland where private companies can collect any kind of data they want about you — including the erroneous kind — and share it with anyone who pays them. And there's very little you can do about it and very little the government wants to do about it.

Whatever concerns I have about Facebook flow from reports that Mark Zuckerberg believes that privacy is a bad thing and we should all have unfettered access to anything we want to know about anybody. I'm not sure if that's him believing what's good for his business model or if he has a deep-down belief similar to one held by a long-ago lady friend of mine named Sandra. I don't even know if those claims about Mr. Zuckerberg are true but he's the last person on the planet whose privacy we should worry about.

Sandra — not her actual name — is a lady I dated briefly several decades ago…and by "briefly," I think it was like four dates. I am about to tell you why we didn't make five.

One evening when she was here, we wanted a pizza from my then-fave place to get one and they weren't delivering at that moment due to a paucity of delivering people. So I left Sandra here and went to fetch our dinner and when I returned, I found her browsing through my filing cabinet, calmly reading any folder with a tab that caught her eye. She did not act at all like I'd caught her spying or nosing around where her nose did not belong. To her, this was the most natural thing to do.

I asked her what she was looking for. She replied, "Anything you wouldn't want me to see."

As politely as I could, I asked her to remove her nose from my personal papers…and in so asking, I had incriminated myself. She asked, "What don't you want me to see?" The pizza got ice-cold as we discussed her theory that if I had anything to hide, she had the right to see it for her own protection. "What if you were once a serial killer and your parole papers are in here?"

Keep in mind that as she asked that, she was rummaging through folders of scripts I'd written for the Daffy Duck comic book.

I said, "I don't think serial killers have parole papers…or at least, they shouldn't. Secondly, you shouldn't be with anyone you even suspect might be a serial killer. I haven't run a check on you. It's just that there's stuff in there I'd rather no one ever saw…half-finished manuscripts, documents relating to business matters I'd rather forget…letters people sent to me with the understanding that I'd be respectful of their privacy. Some of the worst writing I ever did is in there…"

She said, "You write for the public."

I said, "I write for myself. Only when I think it's finished and good enough do I let anyone else see it." I've always had a strong reticence to let anyone view a work-in-progress. It would inhibit me greatly as a writer if I couldn't write with the belief that I can go wherever I want with it and that it's For My Eyes Only until I decide otherwise.

This conversation went on a long time, during which our relationship and the pizza got colder and colder. I did get her to stop ransacking my files then and there for evidence of my past serial killing. I did not get her to concede that I had any right to control my own work or what parts of my past I wanted to share and when. She only called off the search because she decided she didn't want to hang around someone who had something — doubtlessly, nefarious — to hide. Thereafter, she did not.

Whenever I see discussions of privacy, I think of Sandra and the right she felt she had for me to not have any. But then the other day, I was on Mr. Zuckerberg's little online world and I chanced to spot the name of a lady I dated back in college. That is, I recognized her first and old last names, followed by the addition of her married name. She had some old photos posted, several of which confirmed for me it was indeed the same lady. On a whim, I decided to drop her a message and say howdy —

— but then I read a little of what she'd posted. There was a lot there about how we should thank the lord that the gay Kenyan Barry Sotero "Obama" is out of the White House along with his two rented children and the transgender black man who fools no one passing for his wife. Partway through a screed about all the bogus "false flag" school shootings, I found myself thinking, "Maybe I won't re-establish contact with this person."

So I guess I have Mark Zuckerberg to thank for that. There's a difference between privacy and reading what people choose to make public.

You ever see those "73 Questions" videos that Vogue does with various celebrities? Well, here's my pal Christine Pedi doing one as Liza…

In this world, we are often disappointed by the behavior of people we once respected. I'm not disappointed by most of the people I see out there treating Donald Trump like an honest, unjustly-maligned man because I never expected better of most of those folks…but I once did of Law Professor Alan Dershowitz. He once stood for religious freedom and battling hatred but at some point, he seemed to decide that taking the contrary-to-common-sense view on vital cases was noble…or maybe just a good way to get on television a lot.

Back when he was defending O.J. Simpson, he failed to convince me that Simpson had been framed by the L.A.P.D. He also failed to convince me that he — Alan Dershowitz — even believed what he was saying. I saw another attorney on TV one time explain it this way: "Alan heard that someone was assembling a 'dream team' of attorneys and then it was like, 'What do I have to do or say to be on it? And not that it matters but what is the case about?'"

He's been out lately taking up the cause of Donald Trump and here we have Jonathan Chait shredding Dershowitz's latest arguments.

Back in 2002 on this blog, I posted the following quote from Mr. Dershowitz. I thought it was worth quoting again…

Perry Mason was my dream and then my nightmare. He started as my dream. I wanted to be Perry Mason. I dreamed of the courtroom battles that Perry Mason had fought. But then he became my nightmare because I learned that the clients that Perry Mason represented don't exist in real life. Most of my clients were guilty.

WonderCon convenes this Friday in Anaheim. As I write this, Saturday-only badges are sold out but you can still buy one for Friday, one for Sunday or one for all three days. Those options may narrow shortly. The entire programming schedule is online here and here are the six I'm hosting…

The Sergio, Mark and Tom Show
Mark Evanier, Sergio Aragonés, and Tom Luth bring you the long-running, award-winning comic featuring the ship-sinking, everyone-slaying Groo the Wanderer. This is a panel where those three people talk about what they do, how they do it, why they do it and how one or two of them actually gets paid for doing it. It's just a very silly panel featuring silly people who do a silly comic book.
Friday, March 23, 2018 from 1:30pm to 2:30pm in Room 208

Writing for Animation
Interested in writing for cartoons or video games? Then you'll want to hear three people who've done it tell you how they've done it: Marv Wolfman (Epic Mickey 2, The Adventures of Superman), Shelly Goldstein (Shelldon, Flying with Byrd), and moderator Mark Evanier (The Garfield Show, Scooby Doo). They'll talk about script formats, breaking a story, getting the assignment, dealing with sinister forces, and everything else.
Friday, March 23, 2018 from 3:30pm to 4:30pm in Room 300D

Quick Draw!
It's another battle to the death—or at least until dinnertime!—with three lightning-fast cartoonists armed only with Sharpies and sharp senses of humor. The three cartoon combatants are Sergio Aragonés (Groo the Wanderer, MAD magazine), Lonnie Milsap (bacön, Silly Comics)), and Tom Richmond (MAD magazine's star caricaturist). They'll be drawing the suggestions of you, the audience, as well as the Quizmaster of Quick Draws, Mark Evanier. As always, no wagering.
Saturday, March 24, 2018 from 4:30pm to 5:30pm in North 200B

Cartoon Voices
Once again, your host Mark Evanier (The Garfield Show) gathers five masters of speaking for animated superstars to demonstrate their talents. The dais will consist of Neil Ross (Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, The Transformers), Eliza Jane Schneider (Final Fantasy, Skylanders), Wally Wingert (Batman: Arkham Asylum, The Garfield Show), Julie Nathanson (Marvel's Avengers, Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay, Far Cry 5), and Townsend Coleman (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Tick).
Saturday, March 24, 2018 from 5:30pm to 6:30pm in North 200B

Cover Story: Art of the Cover
What constitutes a good cover on a comic book? How are the best ones created? Be there for this "shop talk" discussion with artists who've been responsible for some of the best, WonderCon special guests Ryan Benjamin (WildC.A.T.S, Batman Beyond), Mitch Gerads (Mister Miracle, The Sheriff of Babylon), Dan Jurgens (Superman, Batman Beyond), and Ed Piskor (Hip Hop Family Tree, X-Men: Grand Design). Moderated by Mark Evanier.
Sunday, March 25, 2018 from 1:00pm to 2:00pm in Room 300B

The Annual Jack Kirby Tribute Panel
They call him the King of the Comics and maybe it should also be King of the Cinema, since so many of his co-creations (like Black Panther) have made it so big in the movies. As always, WonderCon takes time to talk about arguably the greatest superhero artist of them all. Joining in the discussion this year are Kirby museum curator Tom Kraft, attorney Paul S. Levine, former Kirby assistant Steve Sherman, and moderator (another former Kirby assistant) Mark Evanier.
Sunday, March 25, 2018 from 3:00pm to 4:00pm in Room 211

As always, things may change. In fact, the participants in a few of my panels have changed since the program guide went to press and was posted on the convention website. The above is correct as of now.

I will be there all three days. I do not sell things at conventions and I refuse to sit at a table for long periods but I will be wandering the hall and if you see me, please say howdy. I can often be found in the vicinity of Sergio Aragonés' table, which is located at A-01. He has a new fake mustache which is much more convincing than those cheap ones he got a case of at Costco years ago.

We're just now hearing that comic book writer-editor Don J. Arneson passed last February 1 at the age of 82. Don was born in Montevideo, Minnesota on August 15, 1935. His family later relocated to Boulder, Colorado where he attended the University of Colorado before enlisting in the U.S. Army. After his discharge, he lived in Mexico before relocating to New York City to try and break into the world of publishing.

Around 1962, he answered a newspaper ad for an editorial assistant for Dell Publishing and wound up working on their comic book line. Dell had recently severed a long relationship with Western Printing and Lithography, which has printed their comics and also handled all the editorial work. (A more detailed explanation can be found here.) Dell was now producing the contents of their books in-house and Arneson began working with their editor, L.B. Cole. After a month or so, Cole was let go and Arneson found himself as editor-in-chief.

He originally intended to do little or no writing himself but when scripts needed serious revision, there was no money in Dell's budget to pay anyone else to do it. Arneson found himself rewriting whole issues and eventually just began writing many of the Dell titles himself from scratch. Among the comics he wrote were Flying Saucers, The Beverly Hillbillies, F Troop, The Monkees and the superhero versions of Frankenstein, Dracula and Werewolf.

His most famous Dell effort was Lobo, a comic about a gunslinger in the Old West. The comic, created by Arneson with artist Tony Tallarico, lasted only two issues but is now cited as the first American comic book to star a black protagonist. Arneson, who was always politically active, was very proud of that, though at a loss to explain its swift termination.

Arneson was also the editor-writer of a series of comics with a political bent which he did, usually with Tallarico, for other publishers targeting an older audience. The two best-sellers were The Great Society Comic Book, which turned Lyndon Johnson into a super-hero, and Bobman and Teddy, which turned Robert and Ted Kennedy into Batman and Robin.

While working as the editor at Dell, Arneson also began moonlighting for other companies, writing scripts for Charlton (sometimes under the name, Norm DiPluhm), Tower (on Undersea Agent) and Western Publishing, for which he was the main writer for quite some time on their Dark Shadows comic book. He left Dell around 1969 and expanded his freelancing efforts, writing occasionally for DC's ghost comics and romance titles.

I knew Don only on the phone. We chatted occasionally the last few years and I was hoping, as he was, that various illnesses would abate and he could make the journey to San Diego for Comic-Con International. I'm sorry that didn't happen as he was a bright, engaging fellow who was very proud of his work…and probably writing something right up until he left us.