Marc Summers has hosted a helluva lot of TV shows including Double Dare, Couch Potatoes, Unwrapped, The Home Show and What Would You Do?, plus he turns up on the Food Network more often than Kosher Salt. He's also been the producer of a good portion of the helluva lot of TV shows on which he appears — obviously, a skilled and industrious guy. Today, he appears on Stu's Show where its host, Stu Shostak, will pry out the story of how Mr. Summers, who got into TV as a page, made it from the second-lowest job in show business to being one of its busiest performers. (First-lowest is hosting an interview show on Fox News.)

Stu's Show can be heard live (almost) every Wednesday at that Stu's Show website and you can listen for free there and then. Webcasts start at 4 PM Pacific Time, 7 PM Eastern and other times in other climes. They run a minimum of two hours and sometimes go to three or beyond. Then shortly after a show concludes, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are 99 cents each or you can save a ton o' dough with Stu's "Buy three and get a fourth one free" offer. Well, maybe not quite a ton…

White House press secretary Sean Spicer was speaking today about how Syrian dictator Bashar Assad was a horrible person because he used poison gas on his own people. Not that long ago, we were hearing how Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was a horrible person because he used poison gas on his own people. So here's what I want to know…

What is it about gassing your own people that makes you so awful? Wouldn't you be pretty dreadful if you used poison gas on anyone? Would we think more highly of Assad or Gaddafi if they'd gassed people in neighboring countries? Someone help me out here.

The group Pearl Jam was just inducted into the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame…and here, making the speech that notes the honor, is David Letterman…

I thank you all for hundreds (I haven't counted — might be thousands) of condolence notes and let me make the following clear: I am fine. Honest. The loss of Carolyn was a long, wrenching, maddeningly-inevitable process and I did most of my mourning and crying in increments along the way.

I was sad when she could no longer walk. I was even sadder when she could barely talk. Well before Sunday night when she finally stopped breathing, I had lost my Carolyn. She was alive the last few days only on a technicality. I'm sure everyone who's "been there/done that" will understand how one of the many emotions that accompanied her official passing was a sense of relief — for myself as well as for her. The last week or two redoubled or maybe retripled my hope that by the time my death is looming, there'll be a legal, mature process via which I can elect to opt out of the final, painful months.

It may be different for you but I cope with tragedy by hurrying to normalize my life. My view is that when you lose a loved one, it is not necessary to grieve and mourn and be in pain for a long period of time. I have seen people do this because, it seemed to me, they thought that was expected of them; that it was somehow disrespectful of the deceased not to visibly suffer for their absence. I tell people who lose mates or parents or close friends, "You don't have to do that. You don't have to sick yourself up and damage your own life to prove you loved them."

You can if you want to but you don't have to. When I go, I hope all my friends and loved ones really, really miss me for about an hour and then go on with their lives. The last thing I'd want to do is harm those lives. If there's any sort of memorial service for me, I may leave a letter for someone to read aloud. It would essentially say, "Get over me." (Note: That is not the same as "Forget me.")

Carolyn was just so splendid in mind and spirit. Experiences we shared and feelings I felt will be with me forever, no matter who may henceforth blunder into my silly ongoing existence. I came to this way of looking at life — or the lack, thereof — when that previous lady friend died on me. I also learned not to think of her death — which in that case was jarringly unexpected — as something she'd done to me. I know someone who is still angry at their mate for getting killed in a car crash and that is truly a self-destructive way to view something like that.

Life goes on, except when it doesn't. I appreciate all the advice in those e-mails and Facebook messages but I am fine. Just as Carolyn would have wanted me to be.

People have written to ask if they can make a donation somewhere in her name. Sure. Of course. I support two charities and Carolyn liked both of them. One is The Stray Cat Alliance, which deals with the epidemic of feral felines. The other is Operation USA, which does a lot of the same things, only for human beings. These two efforts are always grateful for any legal tender you can send their way and they put it to very, very good use. Carolyn was very big on the concept of helping others, as are they.

I have much to do in the next week or two but I will be normalizing activity on this blog, a.s.a.p. Thank you all for putting up with my absence, and for the many nice notes.

A truly lovely person left us last night around 10 PM. Carolyn Kelly was, as many of you know, the daughter of the great cartoonist Walt Kelly, creator of the newspaper strip, Pogo. She was also a cartoonist in her own right and some years after his death when the strip was revived for a time, she briefly drew her father's greatest creation. I occasionally said that she was his greatest co-creation but she thought that was excessive and asked me to stop saying it.

Though she dabbled in other cartooning and in animation, most of her artistic endeavors were in the area of book design. In 2011, she united those skills with a passionate desire to see her father's work properly preserved and made available. That was when she began working on the award-winning series from Fantagraphics Books that is reprinting that glorious feature.

She not only co-edited and designed the books and painted the covers but with a devotion that transcended mere editorial conscientiousness, supervised and sometimes personally did the necessary restoration work. On many of the older strips, only imperfect source material was available so precision surgery had to be done if these books were going to be done right. Carolyn did her part of it right using one of my computers and my drawing table. She often put long, long hours into just one daily strip to get it the way her dad had originally drawn it.

That devotion was one of the reasons the books have not come out as scheduled. So was the difficulty finding good-enough source material. And yet another was medical: Her original co-editor, Kim Thompson, died of cancer in 2013. By a cruel coincidence, Carolyn was dealing with her own cancer problem at the time.

Carolyn would have wanted everyone to know that Gary Groth, Eric Reynolds and the other folks at Fantagraphics have been sympathetic, understanding and heroic in taking the blame for a tardiness that was not of their making. Volume Four will be out later this year and the rest will follow on schedule. She very much wanted the series to be completed, thereby restoring and preserving her father's magnum opus for all time and I promised her that will happen. The books won't be the same without her but her overall design will endure and fortunately, we have reached the period chronologically in the strip for which there is source material that needs much less restoration.

For a long time, Carolyn believed she was winning her battle against breast cancer. This was before it became other kinds of cancer in other body parts. The first diagnosis, after all, was more than twelve years ago and she was still with us…sort of. In the three years preceding last April, she was largely confined to her apartment for weeks at a time, rarely leaving for any non-essential reason.

Last April though, the pains and tumors reached a stage that necessitated her hospitalization. She was there for a month and then we moved her to a Skilled Nursing Facility, then on to Assisted Living. It was so very sad and though everything credible was tried — as well as a few incredible things — there didn't seem to be any way to stop the spread of the disease. The last few weeks in hospice have been particularly ghastly.

Many of you are aware of the reason I witnessed Carolyn's struggle, up close and personal. For around twenty years with occasional intervals off, Carolyn was the woman in my life. I met her at a Comic-Con International in San Diego. She first attended one year when asked to accept the Hall of Fame Award for her father. She returned the following year to see her dear friend Maggie Thompson, and to intensify a quest to find out whatever she didn't know about her father. Because Walt was married three times — Carolyn was born of the first marriage — she missed some sections of his life.

Not that father and daughter weren't close at times. My favorite of all the many internet arguments in which I've been engaged was years ago on a newsgroup about cartoonists. A gent there insisted that Walt Kelly often used flexible-tip pen points on the Pogo strip in the mid-fifties. After checking with Carolyn, I politely informed him on that public forum that he was in error; that Kelly had done all that with a brush. He posted back indignantly, "My source says he used a pen." I replied, "My source was sitting on his lap when he inked."

Now and then, she really was. Later, after Walt moved out and divorced her mother, there were periods when he gave Carolyn art lessons, let her stay in his New York apartment and — always — encouraged her in her career. Still later, as he was dying out here in California, Carolyn — who then lived in New York — traveled west and slept on the floor of his hospital room for weeks, working with Kelly's third wife Selby to care for this man they both loved dearly.

That was in 1973 but still, around a quarter-century later and after she moved to Los Angeles, Carolyn was trying to learn whatever more there was to learn about him. At one point, Maggie said to her, "You ought to get to know Mark Evanier. He may be able to help you."

That's how I met her in 1996 and it was not, as they say, love at first sight. Not long before, another "woman in my life" had died — this one most unexpectedly and at a much younger age. I really didn't want to get too involved with anyone else just then, if ever…but Carolyn was lovely and funny and charming and very bright and not the kind of lady with whom one could have a casual, short-term relationship.

So we were friends, just friends for a time. Then in 1997, I was hired as the story editor of an animated TV series called Channel Umptee-3 and Carolyn called and asked if I could get her a tryout to work on the show as an artist. I did and she was hired — by someone who didn't even know I'd arranged her audition. (Look fast and you can spot her screen credit in this video of the show's opening and closing.)

That somehow led to actual dating and…well, you know how these things go. If you believe in omens, you may like this one: The first night Carolyn spent at my house, I awoke in the middle of the night, slipped downstairs without waking her and went to the kitchen for some much-needed juice. As I sipped, I glanced out at the patio where I put out dishes of cat food for the feral felines in the neighborhood.  There, feasting on Friskies, was a live possum.

It wasn't wearing a striped shirt like Pogo does but it was a live possum, the first one I'd ever seen out there. I stood there and actually thought, "Boy, I'm lucky I'm not dating the woman whose father drew Alley Oop."

I wish I could say it was a perfect union but there were fights and separations, mostly about things that now seem frivolous and silly. I guess they always do after you lose someone you love.  The last few years, the quarrels were mostly about matters of medicine and sometimes about trying to get the Pogo books to press. In recent months, it's been all about the cancer and it's been painful in all the ways that pain can affect us.

She was one of the most compassionate people I've ever encountered; the kind who never met a person in need — even total strangers — without wanting to help them in some way. In fact, one of the things we argued over at times was my feeling that she was putting way too many other people, including me, ahead of her own needs.

Carolyn had many, many talents to accompany all that niceness. In addition to cartooning and book design, she would crochet magnificent scarves and hats.

Also, she was a superb cook and it was never a matter of slavishly following someone's recipe, not even her own. She would invent on the fly, adding in some of this and a lot of that along with a pinch of something or other, all selected and measured on sheer instinct. That meant the final product was always surprising and when I said, "Hey, this is great. Can you make it again?" her usual answer was that she wasn't sure what she'd done but would try. The next time, it would not be the same but it would usually be even better.

There was an innocence of spirit within her and a fascination with every single thing around her. I am the kind of person who goes somewhere to get there. She was the kind who stops to look at everything along the way, say hello to every passing cat or dog and smell every flower.

She also had the greatest smile I've ever seen on a human being. It was organic and real with nothing lurking behind it but sheer delight.

It was truly a smile you could trust and it was on a person who even if she'd lived to 110 would have been dying way too soon. Maybe there's someone reading this who could resist falling in love with a person like that but I sure couldn't.

I'm going to miss everything about her, even the things that occasionally drove us apart…and what I think I'll miss most of all is that smile. It was a great smile, a superb smile, the kind of smile that could make you want to spend the rest of your days close by, doing things that would make it appear.  Whenever it did, it cheered you greatly because it was — like the person it adorned — absolutely wonderful. I could really use one of those smiles right about now.

I am still healthy. This blog is still more-or-less closed but soon to reopen and when it does, I'll post some observations and stories about Don Rickles and other topics I've missed.

Before he passed, comic creator Jerry Robinson inaugurated the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing — an honor presented each year at the Comic-Con International in San Diego. The award recognizes a writer of comics who produced a splendid body of work but who did not receive proper recognition and/or financial reward. At the time Jerry proposed this award, that was all too true of Bill Finger.

These days, Finger is acknowledged for his contributions to his most important work…but since others are not, the award lives on. This is the annual announcement that as its Administrator, I am now open to receive nominations and suggestions for the 2017 presentation. We give out two of them. One is a posthumous award. The other is for someone who is happily alive and who can (we hope) be there to receive it in person. Here's what else you need to know…

1. This is an award for a body of work as a comic book writer. Every year, a couple of folks nominate their favorite artist. Sometimes, they don't get that "writer" part and sometimes, they argue that their nominee qualifies because their favorite artist has done so many comics, he must have written one or two of them so we can give him this trophy. Wrong. It's for a body of work as a comic book writer. Got that? Also, "a body of work" is not one or two comics you liked written by someone relatively new to the field.
2. This award is for a writer who has received insufficient reward for his or her splendid body of work. It can be insufficient in terms of recognition or insufficient in terms of legal tender or it can, of course, be both. But this is not just an award for writing good comic books.
3. And it's for writing comic books, not comic strips or pulps or anything else. We stretch that definition far enough to include MAD but that's about as far as we'll stretch it.
4. To date, this award has gone to Arnold Drake, Alvin Schwartz, George Gladir, Larry Lieber, Frank Jacobs, Gary Friedrich, Del Connell, Steve Skeates, Don Rosa, Jerry Siegel, Harvey Kurtzman, Gardner Fox, Archie Goodwin, John Broome, Otto Binder, Bob Haney, Frank Doyle, Steve Gerber, Robert Kanigher, Bill Mantlo, Jack Mendelsohn, John Stanley, Don McGregor, Richard E. Hughes and Elliott S! Maggin. Those folks, having already won, cannot win again.
5. If you have already nominated someone in years past, you need not nominate them again. They will be considered for this year's awards.
6. If you nominate someone for the posthumous award, it would help if you also suggested an appropriate person to accept on that person's behalf. Ideally, it would be a relative, preferably a spouse, child or grandchild. It could also be a person who worked with the nominee or — last resort — a friend or historian who can speak about them and their work. And if it's not a relative, we would also welcome suggestions as to an appropriate place for the plaque to reside — say, a museum or with someone who was close to the honoree.

Would you like to nominate someone? If so, here's the new address for nominations. Nominations will be accepted until April 24 when all reasonable suggestions will be placed before our Blue Ribbon Judging Committee. Their selections will be announced some time in May and the presentations will be made at the Eisner Awards ceremony, which is Friday evening at Comic-Con.

Just want to assure you all that I am fine (if a bit sleep-deprived) and that normal posting on this blog will resume shortly. I had a great, if fatiguing, time at WonderCon this past weekend and I'll be telling you about that when I resume telling you about everything.

And it's about time we had one. This is just in case you're the only person on the planet who hasn't seen this…

I continue to be fine but not quite ready to resume a normal pace o' posting. Thanks (again) to those of you who've written in concern but apart from a touch of sleep deprivation, I'm okay and I will be in Anaheim this weekend at least some of the time to host panels and walk aimlessly around WonderCon. Here is a link to the list of panels I'll be hosting there.

Can't write much about Trump because I haven't been keeping up on what he's doing…and by the way, that's a great way to get a restful night of sleep and/or digest your food without a Pepto Bismol milk shake — you know, the kind with multi-colored Omeprazole sprinkled on top. I'm probably on safe ground though if I say that his big plans are fizzling out, his outright lies are being exposed everywhere, and the downward descent of his favorable rating just passed typhoid and will soon be lower than passing a kidney stone the size and shape of a Rubik's Cube.

I did though enjoy this piece by Matt Taibbi. Favorite paragraph…

One of the brilliant innovations of the Trump phenomenon has been the turning of expertise into a class issue. Formerly, scientists were political liabilities only insofar as their work clashed with the teachings of TV Bible-thumpers. Now, any person who in any way disputes popular misconceptions — that balancing a budget is just like balancing a checkbook, that two snowfalls in a week prove global warming isn't real, that handguns would have saved Jews from the Holocaust or little kids from the Sandy Hook massacre — is part of an elitist conspiracy to deny the selfhood of the Google-educated American. The Republicans understand this axiom: No politician in the Trump era is going to dive in a foxhole to save scientific research. Scientists, like reporters, Muslims and the French, are out.

It used to be that everyone was entitled to their opinion. Now, it's like everyone is entitled to their own Laws of Physics.

I will be back full-strength when I can be. Soon, I promise.

I just read the smartest piece I've read on the whole Health Care mess. It's by Ezra Klein and it was written back when Trump was still demanding the Friday vote which wound up not happening. Here's a key excerpt…

Trump is not a guy who makes particularly good deals so much as a guy who makes a lot of deals — many of which lash his name and reputation to garbage products.

Trump, a lifelong teetotaler, didn't scour the globe to find the very best vodka. No — someone offered him an opportunity to make a quick buck by putting his name on a product [Trump Vodka] he wouldn't ever touch and he took it. Trump University was a far darker scam. Trump Steaks were, and are, a joke.

This is Trump's pattern: He licenses his brand and lets others worry about the details of the products. Trump's partners often end up going out of business and his customers often end up disappointed, but Trump makes some money, and he gets his name out there, and it's all good.

This was Trump's approach to the health care bill, too. He let someone else worry about the product and he simply licensed his name, marketing support, and political capital. Trump didn't know what was in the American Health Care Act, and he didn't much care. It broke his promises to ensure health care for everyone, to protect Medicaid from cuts, to lower deductibles, and to guarantee choices of doctors and plans — but he didn't pay attention to any of that. In private, Trump was apparently bored by the subject and eager to move onto tax reform.

And now Paul Ryan is in the position of all those partners in Trump hotels who lost their entire investment when the project failed. But of course.

WonderCon commences next Friday at the newly-refurbished and enlarged Anaheim Convention Center. I hear they've made it nicer and bigger and that it has way more parking spaces. If they'd moved it far enough away from Disneyland to not share the same off-ramps, it might be the best place ever to hold a convention. The entire programming schedule is online here and the list of panels I'm doing is below…

Friday, March 31 – 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM, Room 208
THE MARK, SERGIO, STAN AND MAYBE TOM SHOW
The folks who bring you Groo the Wanderer tell you how (and maybe why) they bring you Groo the Wanderer and maybe other things, as well. They are Mark Evanier, Sergio Aragonés, Stan Sakai, and maybe the hardest-working man in comics, Tom Luth. Learn what it is that compels these men to, month after month and year after year, tell their tales of the stupidest character ever in comics. [NOTE: Looks like Stan Sakai will not be present at the con. Dunno yet about Tom.]

Friday, March 31 – 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM, Room 213
WRITING FOR ANIMATION
Ever think you might want to write cartoons? Well, Mark Evanier has written more than 500 half-hours of animated programming, including such programs as The Garfield Show, Garfield and Friends, Dungeons & Dragons, Scooby-Doo, Richie Rich, ABC Weekend Special, Superman Adventures, Thundarr the Barbarian, CBS Storybreak, and many more. He doesn't claim to know everything but thinks he can fill the hour telling you what he does know.

Saturday, April 1 – 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM, Room 300DE
QUICK DRAW!
It's another cartooning battle royale, a duel with sketch pads and Sharpies as three super swift scribblers attempt to make the Flash look lethargic. Competing will be (of course) Sergio Aragonés of MAD and Groo the Wanderer; The Simpsons and The Flintstones artist Scott Shaw! and the new kid on the dais, popular Internet cartoonist Lonnie Millsap. Putting them through their paces will be Mark Evanier, aided by suggestions from the audience. As always, no wagering, and may the best cartoonist win!

Saturday, April 1 – 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM, Room 300DE
CARTOON VOICES
Once more, your host Mark Evanier assembles a dais of talented folks who speak for characters in animated cartoons and video games, and they demonstrate their artistry for you! This time, Mark has Dan Gilvezan (Spider-Man, Dennis the Menace), Elle Newlands (Skylanders, Star Trek into Darkness), Bill Farmer (Goofy, The 7D), Katie Leigh (Muppet Babies, Dungeons & Dragons), Daniel Ross (Donald Duck, Transformers) and maybe a few surprises!

Sunday, April 2 – 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM, Room 207
COVER STORY
Some say the most important part of any comic book is the cover. If that's so, we need to talk more about cover designs-and talk we will with these acclaimed cover creators: Michael Cho (Civil War II, DC reprint series), Sanford Greene (Power Man and Iron Fist, Runaways), Phil Jimenez (Wonder Woman, The Invisibles), Bob Layton (Iron Man, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter), and Lissa Treiman (Slam!, Lumberjanes). Your moderator as usual is Mark Evanier.

Sunday, April 2 – 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM, Room 211
JACK KIRBY TRIBUTE
2017 marks an entire century since the birth of the man many call the most important creative talent ever in comics. This year more than ever, comic fans celebrate the legacy of Jack Kirby. On hand will be former Kirby assistant Steve Sherman, Scott Dunbier from IDW Publishing, Rand Hoppe from the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center, and Paul S. Levine, attorney for the Rosalind Kirby Trust. Your moderator is another former Kirby assistant, Mark Evanier.

Anything and everything can change, including times, room numbers, panelists and the bushiness of Sergio's mustache. If you see me around, say howdy.

I am fine. I am back for a couple of postings just to let you know and to stop the e-mails asking me if I'm still alive. I'm dealing with something far more important than blogging and will be back in full force when I can. I still plan to be at WonderCon next weekend and will follow this message with my schedule there.

Sorry I wasn't around to write about the whole Health Care debacle in Congress. I offer you this piece by Jonathan Chait who, it seems to me, got it exactly right. I didn't follow the whole matter as closely as I would have if I'd had more time but it did strike me that few of the combatants were interested in anything more than proving who's running this country for the next four years.

As with the effort to destroy health care for poor and sick people, I shall return.