Well, today's big news seems to be that Trump is being investigated for Obstruction of Justice. Remember back when he wasn't yet and how important it was to him to get James Comey (or someone) to tell the world that? Well, he seems to be now.  Things can't be too jolly in the White House — or wherever he is — tonight.

What's more, journalists like Josh Marshall are theorizing that this investigation wasn't launched by Special Counsel Robert Mueller but by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and that a whole lot of Trump associates are under suspicion for various crimes, some of them financial. So it may not be a matter of "Will Trump fire the Special Counsel to shut down the investigation of him?" but "Will Trump fire a number of people in the Justice Department to shut down a whole series of investigations?" In other news…

• "By a 97-2 vote, the U.S. Senate approved stronger sanctions on Russia Wednesday and took the first step toward limiting President Trump's ability to ease those sanctions." He can't be happy about that, either. Here's the whole story.
• As Ed Kilgore notes, the American Health Care Act is about as popular as projectile vomiting…and this is over a wide political spectrum. This is not something that Trump voters and Republicans love and Democrats hate. Just about everybody dislikes it and they haven't even read the Senate version of it yet! Are our elected officials really going to pass this thing? Or is the idea here that at Trump's insistence, it's going to be vastly improved, and people will think it's better even though it's just a little less terrible…and Donald will claim he saved the day?
• David Margolick has a theory about that strange televised meeting where all the members of Trump's cabinet praised him for his greatness.

Meanwhile, Trump may get a break in the next few days whenever the verdict in the Bill Cosby trial knocks him off the front page for a day or so. I don't know which way it will go but reporting from the courtroom suggest that if Cosby is acquitted, it will be because his lawyers convinced the jury that it was not rape but just a really, really bizarre mutual romance.  Frightening.

An owl taking a bath…

Stuff to do today, stuff to do today. Whatever posting I do here will probably be this evening.

I awoke as you probably did to news of the shooting in Virginia at a baseball practice of congressional Republicans. Then I checked my e-mail and there was already a message from a right-wing reader of this site, calling me a hypocrite for not condemning the attack because (he said) I leap to condemn attacks when non-Republicans get shot at. I guess I'm supposed to post in my sleep.

Actually, I don't leap or even try to condemn most shootings because I figure anyone with a functioning heart and brain condemns murders and attempted murders and the condemnations accomplish nothing. Absolutely nothing. I know some very sane, responsible gun owners — some even with trophies for their marksmanship and skills — who can tell you any number of ways they think the availability of guns could be controlled better (not totally but better) without penalizing folks like them. Even when Democrats were in power in this country, no one who could implement their ideas was about to listen to them.

So I'm not even writing about the issue. Nothing's going to happen…not because of this shooting or the next one or the next one or the next one, no matter who gets shot or how many of them. People will just continue to try and make political capital off them, arguing that the latest shooting proves we need to abolish Obamacare or impose a high Carbon Tax or something. I think shootings prove we need to do a better job preventing shootings but since we're not going to do that, I really don't have anything valuable to offer on the topic.

Hey! How do they make cake sprinkles?

I'm not a big fan of attempts to psychoanalyze public figures from afar…but boy, the video of that meeting where Trump sat there grinning as all his cabinet members declared his greatness and the honor of serving him — that was creepy. And it practically begs us to discuss what's going on inside a "boss" who would demand that…

Now, this…

• Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has been busy backing off on promises.  Mnuchin once said that the Trump administration would not give rich people a tax cut.  Now, he's dying to do it.  He's apparently also rescinding on Trump's behalf the pledge to not cut Social Security.  The way he's going, I expect now to hear him say Trump has dropped plans to Make America Great Again. Jonathan Chait has more.
• Five weeks ago, Trump hailed the passage by the House of its American Health Care Act and called it a "well-crafted bill."  Now, he says it's "mean" and it needs to be "more generous."  Nothing changed in the bill so wha' happened?  Even Sarah Kliff doesn't seem to know.
• Nate Silver says that Trump's antics are making Europe liberal again.  Some of us are waiting for him to do that here. America First! America First!
• Ryan Lizza believes that if Trump isn't currently being investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, it's just a matter of time.  No wonder there's speculation that Trump is thinking of firing the Special Counsel.

Stephen Colbert had Oliver Stone on the other night.  Stone was plugging his new interview with Vladimir Putin and didn't — I thought — do a very good job of answering Colbert's questions about it. It sounds like the conversation just kind of sidesteps the allegations that Putin operates an oppressive regime that jails and maybe even terminates people who challenge him, reporters included. That would be like doing a twenty-hour interview with O.J. Simpson and just talking about football.

I think (maybe I'm wrong) that in the promos for Stone's appearance, he made some statement that a person would have to be stupid to believe Russia had influenced the last presidential election…but nothing like that was heard in the segment as aired. Anyone else hear what I think I heard?

Rumors abound that the magazine known as MAD — an institution that's been around exactly as long as I have — will soon cease publication. I'm pretty sure this is not so, though it is about to undergo some massive changes and no one is saying quite what they'll be. One biggie though is that its office of operations is shifting from New York, New York (across the street from where Stephen Colbert does his show) to Burbank, California (across the street from where Ellen DeGeneres does her show). With this migration will come a brand-new editorial staff consisting of…

Well, if the folks in charge of DC Comics have decided who the folks in charge of MAD will henceforth be, they've kept it a lot more secret than anything in the Trump White House. I don't know and no one currently involved in the production of MAD seems to know.

Some history. MAD started in 1952 and was originally owned by the infamous William M. Gaines. He sold it in 1961 to a conglomerate called Premier Industries that had grown out of a company that made venetian blinds.

Venetian blinds…irreverent humor magazine…you can see the obvious connection there. (By the way, Wikipedia — which of course is otherwise infallible — has this all wrong.)

Gaines stayed on as publisher with a contractual guarantee of absolute independence so everyone else stayed on. A few years later, Premier sold MAD to its distributor, Independent News, which was a division of National Periodical Publications, publishers of DC Comics. Gaines continued to have total control of his magazine.

Then in the late sixties, National Periodical Publications was acquired by Kinney National Services, another conglomerate — this one, built out of a company that dealt in parking lots, limousines and funeral services. Another obvious connection. Kinney eventually got so big, it acquired Warner Brothers and other businesses and was later reorganized into Time-Warner, which one day will acquire you and all of us unless Disney gets us first.

Gaines continued to have control but time has a way of chipping away at things and so does Time-Warner. His death in 1992 didn't help things and DC Comics began assuming more direct control.

Throughout this period, sales of MAD declined, just as sales of almost all magazines in this country have declined, many to tiny fractions of past heights. There is no major, long-running American periodical that is selling anywhere near as well as it used to sell and MAD is no exception. This has extinguished any viewpoint that MAD is first and foremost a print magazine and that other exploitations of its name and reputation are still just adjuncts to that. The view now is that MAD is a valuable property to be "monetized" by the various divisions. Some of those endeavors, like the MAD TV shows, have been rather lucrative.

Harvey Kurtzman was, as we all know, the first editor of MAD. He left in 1956 after a dispute with Gaines, and the editorship was filled from then until 1984 by Al Feldstein. After Feldstein retired, they split the editorial position between Nick Meglin and John Ficarra, and then Meglin retired in 2004.

Ficarra has been at the helm since then. Over the years, the quality of the magazine has varied a lot but in my opinion, it's been high for the last decade or so with some of its sharpest writing ever. John is a friend of mine but I have been telling him for more than a decade that MAD is important to me and if I ever think the magazine sucks, then screw the friendship — I will say so loudly and say it everywhere I can. I have not had to do this.  Unlike a lot of purists, I thought it was okay and even necessary when MAD went to a mostly-color format and began accepting advertising.  It is still, I believe, a fine humor magazine.

Still, you can only make so much money these days publishing a fine humor magazine. Most large comic book companies now make such a high percentage of their incomes via media and merchandising that actually putting out product on paper is relatively unimportant. Most do it out of tradition, because they don't want to admit that the properties aren't so popular in their native format, and as a place to develop new ideas that can become TV shows, movies and videogames. MAD could not have survived this long had it not joined that shift in focus.

A few years ago, DC Comics — accepting this shift — closed down its New York office and relocated to Burbank. MAD stayed behind — a last vestige of its independence — but that's over with. The current editorial staff in Manhattan will edit the magazine through #550, which will go to press at the end of this year and come out in February of 2018. After that, no one there knows what the heck will happen to it but clearly it will happen in Burbank without them. One production artist who has only been there a short time will make the move west. No one else.

One would like to assume Time-Warner has good, new folks lined up to assume command out here, even if things have not yet been finalized. Longtime MAD contributor Tom Richmond has heard that MAD will remain a magazine. It will not move back to the comic book format it had for its first 23 issues as some have speculated. Tom's blog would be a good thing to keep an eye on if you're looking for up-to-the-minute news on the future of Alfred E. Neuman and the magazine he adorns.

Tom notes the uncertainty that he and many other MAD contributors share. Many, perhaps most of them have not been there long and probably regard it as just an occasional assignment. But there are those who have served the magazine well for so long that it has become not only a major part of their incomes but their identities, as well. The work of Al Jaffee has appeared in 495 of its 546 issues, Sergio Aragonés has been in 469, Dick DeBartolo has had articles in 460 MADs and there are others among The Usual Gang of Idiots with lower but still impressive totals. The last few years, Tom Richmond with his terrific, MAD-worthy caricatures has filled more of its pages than anyone else.

They'd kinda like to know what's going to happen. Tom says he's hoping for some sort of announcement next month at Comic-Con International.

As a long-time MAD fan/historian (and contributor of two whole pages to it), I'm eager to know for my own reasons. I do not believe that an institution like MAD has to remain the same forever. The world changes and most things need to change with it. The fear is that in changing, MAD might wind up being MAD in name only, losing what its name stands for…and we have a dandy and true Worst Case Scenario to look at as an example.

Once upon a time, the name and logo of National Lampoon denoted an irreverent and wildly-popular humor magazine. It also represented a pool of brilliant contributors and a style and a standard. Separated from those contributors (or others of equal merit) and that style and that standard, it became just a label to be slapped on some pretty crummy products…and not even a particularly effective label. It no longer identifies something that has a kinship to the material — the magazine and the first few movies to have that name in their titles — that made that name notable. If you want to read a long article about how that happened, here's one.

I"m not saying this will happen to MAD, just that it would be a dreadful shame if it did. I am hardly the only kid of my generation who had his sense of humor shaped to a meaningful degree by MAD and who learned to look at the world with a certain amount of healthy, irreverent skepticism. I sure hope the franchise does that for future generations and isn't just used to sell them a shitload of stuff unworthy of the name.

An unusual approach to the cups and balls trick. This is Yann Frisch…

This time, I've got about twelve minutes…

• "Trumpism," as Kevin Drum notes, is becoming the new trend in politics. It's based on the premise that you can put out deliberate lies and also hide things that the public has a right to know…and you can still win. Winning, in fact, is the only thing that matters. You can even lose and as long as you lie and insist you're winning, a lot of your supporters will believe it.
• People around Trump are suggesting he fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller and put an end to the whole Russia investigation. He would cite James Comey's statement that he [Trump] was not under investigation and say, "That shows there's nothing to investigate" and shut the thing down. Of course, that ignores the fact that (a) Comey said there was no investigation of Trump at that moment, not forever…and (b) the Special Counsel is supposed to investigate many Trump associates. Matt Yglesias has more…but clearly, someone thinks Trump — unlike Nixon and his Saturday Night Massacre — could survive the outrage, especially with a Republican Congress.
• Sarah Kliff sees a real possibility that the Senate will sneak in a health care bill with no public debate and no scoring and get it through, thereby repealing most of Obamacare, gutting Medicaid, leaving lots of poor and middle-class folks with no affordable insurance or way higher premiums.  Then they will be able to give the rich that huge tax cut that seems to be the point of all this. They're counting on no one realizing for at least a few elections what they've done or that they'll blame Democrats for it.
• And Paul Krugman says that the Republicans are doing this thing to our health care because they want to do it and they can, with no pretense or theory that it will make anyone but the very rich better off.

John McCain says "American leadership" on the global stage was better when Obama was president than it is now. Back when there were actually people in this country who respected John McCain, that might have been significant.

As invariably happens the morning after a big award show, you have folks all over the Internet saying, "Worst Oscars/Emmys/Grammys/Tony/Whatever ever!" Awards shows are rarely as good as we want them to be but we keep forgetting that and imagining that last year's — which they hated the next day — was wonderful. That always bugs me a bit as does when folks complain that the wrong people were nominated and the wrong people won, like that's the fault of the producers of the telecast.

I thought Kevin Spacey was an okay host. I may be the only person who likes him better as Kevin Spacey than as Bill Clinton, Johnny Carson or Jack Lemmon. The opening number was probably a bit of a muddle to the more than 95% of viewers, myself included, who haven't seen all the referenced shows…but that's an intrinsic problem for the Tonys: They're about shows that few viewers have seen and about the people involved in them. There's not much anyone can do about that except to not start off the show by leaving so many of us out of the gags.

Once they got down to presenting awards and excerpts, the festivities went pretty well. I still don't get why Bette Midler couldn't do some number from Hello, Dolly! If they couldn't do the title song because of logistics, how about…oh, say, any of the seven other numbers she sings during it? I guess since tickets are scarcer than a straight choreographer, the producers weren't worried about not having an exciting, showy number on the Tony Awards. David Hyde-Pierce doing the cut song that's been added back into the show might have been the least commercial sampling they could have presented.

Hero of the night? Whoever thought of having Spacey (and it may have been Spacey) deliver that great line about Bette Midler as President Underwood. Wonder what he would have said there if she hadn't gone on and on thanking people.

(And did you notice? The camera cut to various folks in the audience laughing and one of them was Les Moonves, CEO of CBS. Moonves is the reason she was able to do that. Not all that long ago, the Tony telecast was on a rigid time schedule and not allowed to go even thirty seconds over its allotted slot. Moonves did away with that rigid timing.)

Some of the speeches were really good. Some of the numbers were really good. The whole thing felt long but 3+ hours of that kind of thing will always feel long. It was nicely produced. Our buddy Ken Levine was there for the rehearsals and he has a good post up about how utterly impossible it is to do a show like this…but they do it. Rachel Bloom's little spots, which included coping with some rude and unprofessional folks entering or exiting the stage, were even fun.

All in all, if I had to judge this Tony Awards Broadcast, I'd go out on a limb and say it was a Tony Awards Broadcast — no more, no less. I look forward to next year when we'll hear the folks calling it "the worst ever" call next year's "the worst ever" and lament that it wasn't as good as the marvelous one this year.

A baby sloth doing nothing. Sloths do nothing so well…

This is a series of articles I've written about writing, specifically about the problems faced by (a) the new writer who isn't selling enough work yet to make a living or (b) the older writer who isn't selling as much as they used to. To read other installments, click here.

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If you want to have a career as a writer, it is very important that you not look desperate. If you are, do what you can to conceal it…and yes, I know that might not be easy, especially if you're really, really desperate.

This applies to the wanna-be writer who hasn't sold much, if anything. It also applies to the once-established writer who's hit a career lull and hasn't sold anything in a while. It's probably more important for the latter. If you're new in the business, you have more of an excuse for appearing desperate. People who might hire you or buy your work can think, "No one's given this kid a chance." If you have some credits then what they're going to think is: "Gee, people have given this guy a chance and if he's now this desperate, maybe his work isn't that good lately."

Desperate people make others uncomfortable. We try to avoid them for the same reason we sometimes give money to homeless people on the street so they'll go away. But in The Arts, we don't usually give jobs to desperate people to lessen their desperation because they may not be able to do those jobs. In fact, we often suspect the reason they're desperate might be because they just don't have it in them to do those jobs. And if we give them those jobs and it turns out they can't do them, that creates bigger problems for us.

And unlike the homeless guy outside the CVS Pharmacy who went away after you gave him a buck, these people tend not to go away. They come back again and again begging for another chance.

So you don't want to look desperate and one good way to achieve that is to not be desperate, at least financially. We've discussed that in previous installments of this column.

The story I'm about to tell you is is not about a writer. It's about a guy who was doing (or trying to do) cartoon voices but it's the same situation. Because I was casting voices for a cartoon show I was writing and producing, he came after me seeking work. He came after me at conventions, via e-mail, and then when that didn't work, he started phoning me.

He was not without talent. He had enough that he'd landed an agent…but there are agents and there are AGENTS. He had an all lower-case agent, one of those who has limited clout or connections to sell anything. There are agents like that who represent writers, too. They'll take on almost anyone who looks competent enough to maybe someday get a job, then they do almost nothing to make that happen. If the client somehow manages to get a gig through his or her own contacts and campaigning, the agent will step in, close the deal and take their commission.

(What kind of agent do you want? The one who is in touch with the people who do the hiring, be they producers, directors, casting people or whatever. You want the agent who can and will get those people on the horn and say, "Trust me. You've got to meet with [YOUR NAME HERE] because this kid has really got something!" And then the hiring person thinks, "Gee, that agent represents some really good people. It probably won't waste my time to take a meeting with that client!" If it's an agent of the "anyone who looks competent" criteria…well, that agent probably can't get that buyer on the phone and if they do, their recommendation means very little.)

In the world of voiceover in Hollywood, there are about fifty-five agencies. About nine of them represent about 90% of all the actors who work a lot. They're the top agencies that represent the top people. I won't list these agencies but if you go to voicebank.net, you can browse the demos of most voice actors and find out who their agents are. There, you can easily look up the superstar cartoon voice actors and see which agencies represent a significant number of them. You can also hear the demos.

I'll leave it to you to figure out who the superstar cartoon voice actors are.

Tomorrow, if I was hired to cast voices for a new cartoon show and I wanted submissions of candidates to consider, I'd make a list of the actors I want to audition because I think they'd be right for the show. They would probably all be with one of those nine or so agencies. When I called to book them for auditions, I would also let the agents recommend other clients, especially those new to the marketplace, that they'd like me to consider.

In the highly-unlikely event that I couldn't cast the show with those nominations, I might call a few of the other agencies…though I don't think I ever have.

For the sake of this story, I'm going to refer to the actor who took to nagging/stalking me as Herbert. Herbert was not with one of those nine-or-so agencies and indeed, throughout his relentless campaign to get work out of me, the agent he did have never once called me to make a personal pitch for Herbert. It probably would not have mattered if he had.

Herbert introduced himself to me after one of my Cartoon Voices panels at Comic-Con. He talked a mile a minute about himself, telling me how talented he was and quoting others as saying how talented he was. Call those Mistakes #1 and #2.

If someone's trying to sell you a used car, a high-pressure sales pitch usually makes you suspicious of the product and it's the same if the product is someone's talent. Your high opinion of your work is meaningless. I mean, it's not like you're an unbiased critic of you. Some really lousy people think they're terrific and that kind of self-promotion can also suggest ego problems that might make the person difficult to work with.

Also, Herbert said, "I studied with [NAME OF VOICE TEACHER] and he said I was the best student he'd ever had." I had never heard of that teacher but even if I had, the same questions would have rapidly came to mind…

1. Did this teacher really say that?
2. Was this teacher trying to get you to pay them for an advanced course or more lessons when they said it?
3. Or just being nice? Or trying to get rid of you nicely by telling you what you wanted to hear? It's easy to say such things when you don't have to back them up by hiring someone.
4. And most of all, why should I care what that person thinks? What matters here is my opinion. I'm not going to hire you because they liked you.

Herbert, of course, had a CD of his work in hand which he wanted me to listen to. I gave him a business card with my P.O. box address and told him to mail it to me so I wouldn't have to carry it around. (These days, we don't even use CDs. Today, he'd give me a business card telling me where I could go online to listen to his demo.)

That wasn't enough for him. He began doing voices for me, then and there. I stopped him and said, "I don't do auditions in convention halls and besides, I have another panel to get to." He thanked me about eighteen times and let me go.

Fifteen minutes later, I had an e-mail on my iPhone from him. It thanked me for the nineteenth time and gave me a direct link to hear his demo online.

Okay, fine. The kid's enthusiastic and more than a little pushy. Simple logic would tell you that doesn't mean he isn't a good voice actor.  But I have to tell you — and maybe this is unfair — I assumed he probably wasn't that good or he wouldn't have had to resort to this kind of in-your-face salesmanship to get a job. I am not at the top of the voice-hiring business. I am darned close to the bottom and haven't cast a show in over a year. It's not my main line of work; more like an occasional adjunct to my writing career. If he was coming after me this way, it meant he'd probably struck out repeatedly with the folks who cast lots of shows and probably with all the top agents, as well.

That was Saturday at the convention. Sunday morning, when I awoke and checked my e-mail, there was another message from him. He wanted to know if I'd heard his demo yet and if so, what I thought of it. At the end, he added in one of those "jokes" that you just know the person is making to try and plant a serious idea. He wrote, "Do you have a series yet I can star in?"

Later that day at the con, I ran into two agents from one of the best of the ten agencies and I started to ask them, without mentioning his name, "What do you do when you have a guy who's nagging you to death to listen to his demo and maybe represent him and telling you how brilliant he is?"

One of them instantly said, "Herbert." Then the other one said, "I was thinking of Herbert but it could also have been…" and she mentioned four or five other names. Then the two of them engaged in a short debate over which of the wanna-be clients who pestered them was the biggest pest. If I wanted to be a cartoon voice actor, I don't think it would be good for me to get myself on a list like that.

I asked them both, "If someone is like that, what are the chances you'll listen to his demo and decide he's really good and you should sign him up?"

One of them said, "Zero." The other said, "It could happen but I can't think of when it ever has." Neither one could explain for me the connection between overselling and not being good enough in the talent department, though one added, "When I think back over all the really good people who came to us, not one of them came to us that way."

Herbert e-mailed me every day to ask what I thought of his demo. I finally gave it a listen and it wasn't bad…but "not bad" is not enough in that business; not when you're competing with people who are "real good." On the show I was then doing, I had a talent pool full of "real good" — four or five regulars plus about twenty people I occasionally used in guest roles. Based on his demo, there wasn't a thing Herbert could give me that one of them couldn't do — as well or better.

I told him that in a return e-mail in polite but firm terms. He responded by calling me, thereby upping the level of pushiness. He wanted to convince me he had new voices and skills that weren't on his demo. He called me a few times and hit on me at other conventions before I finally had to tell him to leave me alone. The last time, I said, "And if you keep annoying people the way you're annoying me, no one will ever give you a break." That, he understood and I haven't heard from him in a few years, nor have I heard a thing about him. He is not listed among the actors on Voicebank.

As I said, it's not completely logical that a guy who's too desperate will turn out to not be too talented but it seems to happen most of the time…and if that overly-brash guy turns out to be talented, the way he behaves can still make you wonder, "Do I really want to work with this person?" When we're talking about writers, I think those who hire tend to respect the writer who doesn't engage in the ol' hard sell and who lets the work speak for itself. Sometimes, it may just be because they're a refreshing change from all the Herberts out there.

• A lot of folks seem to think Batman died yesterday. Adam West wanted you to remember he was an actor, not a comic book character.

Since the Tony Awards are tonight, we're in a show tune kinda mood.  Here's the opening number from Fiddler on the Roof as performed by an Australian company. That's Anthony Warlow as Tevye…

I have twelve minutes before I have to leave for a dinner engagement. Let's see how many links I can get up here in that time…

• Did Trump really promise "100%" that he'd testify under oath against James Comey? That's what the headlines say but Andrew Prokop says it's not that clear. Also, take note of this nice bit of evasion: Asked if there were tapes, he said, "I'll tell you about that over a very short period of time" and "You're gonna be very disappointed when you hear the answer."
• You know that defense that some of Trump's allies are using; that he's new at the job and any rules he's breaking are just because he doesn't know better? That might fly if we'd hired a new janitor and he hasn't learned yet that whether styrofoam goes in the recycling bin or not…but this is the Presidency of the United States we're talking about. Fred Kaplan thinks that excuse is pretty terrifying, maybe worse than if they just admitted he's a criminal.
• Eric Levitz lists some pretty awful things Trump did lately, some of which are getting crowded out of the headlines by the other awful things he's done.
• Benjamin Wallace-Wells on the problems the White House is having in its mission to discredit James Comey.  For one thing, I think Trump has way overused the argument that any news item that isn't totally favorable to him is Fake News.  Even folks who want to believe in him are going to stop believing that about everything.

That's all I have time for. I thought Bill Maher did a good job of defusing the controversy about "that word" and apologizing with good sincerity. The folks who wanted him off the air anyway won't back down but I don't think this scandal has much more mileage in it. Then again, I didn't think it was that big a deal in the first place.

Adam West…sigh. Real nice man. I was tapped to interview him at a couple of comic book conventions and at one of them, we wound up having a dinner during which neither one of us mentioned Batman at all. From the way we didn't talk about it, I got the feeling he considered it a mixed blessing. It made him very famous. I don't think it made him very wealthy, at least at the time. Decades later, it was the autograph circuit that did that.

When he signed on for the role, he was a working actor who probably wasn't working enough. He had some good roles but he hadn't really distinguished himself; hadn't cut himself away from a herd of other handsome leading men types in his age bracket. Batman finally set him off from the others but for that, he paid a high, immediate price. It only lasted three seasons, getting very hot and then very cold in a very short span of time. Once it was off, it was Adam West's career that got very cold. He was a fine, versatile talent but he was too associated with that character and with a style of deliberately bad acting which no one wanted in their show or movie.

The first time I met Adam was at the Comic-Con in San Diego in 1986, I think. The Batman movie which would star Michael Keaton had been announced but Keaton had not been cast. No one had, nor had the film been green-lit for production. Adam was not a guest of the con. He had driven down to San Diego and maybe even paid admission, just to walk around the hall and try to drum up support for him to be cast in the role.

He had assumed — wrongly — that anyone who loved Batman considered him the definitive actor to play the part and that we'd all rally behind him. The presence of Adam West at the con drew very little interest and zero groundswell.

Back then, I don't think too many fans remembered that show fondly. It was, after all, a show that ridiculed the property — it was nominated for an Emmy for Best Comedy Series, remember — produced in large part by people who thought the comic books were stupid and those of us who bought them were stupider. We didn't know much about the then-pending Batman feature but we did know that it was supposed to be the antithesis of the TV show. The Casting Call, if there was one, probably said they were seeking anyone who wasn't Adam West.

He didn't get the part…or very many others around then but time changes how we view some things. Maybe it was just inertia. Maybe it was because as mainstream media began taking comic book characters more seriously, we who loved comics felt less threatened by one spoof. Maybe some people even felt that the move towards a darker, grittier Batman took the character too far to that side and the show Adam had done represented when Batman was more fun and less psychotic.

Pick one or come up with your own reason that the show became beloved and that folks lined up to pay for his signature, as well as that of his co-stars. At the first con where I interviewed him, West and Frank Gorshin were there on a guarantee of a very impressive number of dollars…and they way exceeded their guarantees. At about the same time, producers and directors who'd been tots when Batman was on began trying to hire Adam West for non-Batman roles, just because they loved him and wanted to work with him. (I should mention here that his career was also helped a lot by an agent named Fred Wostbrock, whose obit — sadly — was posted here last November.)

Adam West lived and survived long enough to become a genuine, in-demand superstar…and he deserved it. Like I said, he was a real nice man and a much more able actor than any line of that TV show required. Aside from the parts about him and his agent dying, this is a pretty happy ending.