If you don't know what gerrymandering is, here's a real good explanation.

• Trump sending troops to stop people from saying Hillary got more votes; also will invade "Celebrity Apprentice" to shore up bad ratings.

Hey, why do cartoon characters wear gloves? There are a couple of reasons and one of them, believe it or not, is racial. What isn't, these days?

I suspect a lot of folks who voted for Trump are getting increasingly antsy about what they voted for. The ones I know are all decent people who are tolerant of all races and religions. They therefore have to be uncomfy with some of the people who are being added to Team Trump in Washington…for example, Michael Anton, who is now a senior national security official in that administration. As Jonathan Chait notes, Anton is a firm believer that the only "real" Americans are white Republicans and they must do everything possible to fight anyone who isn't one of them. Scary.

Allan Burns was one of the creators of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and here he remembers that experience, including the network's refusal to have Mary be a divorcee.

One of the many groundbreaking things about that series was that it seemed to loosen network control of a series. This was the case with All in the Family, as well. There were so many stories about executives at CBS being dead wrong about those two shows — predicting failure where success was the outcome — that a lot of folks at networks began backing off, letting the producers have more say about what they produced. The trend is recent years has gone in the opposite direction and I've never heard anyone — not even at the networks — who thinks that's a good thing.

Third one of these this year.  For those of you who are new to this blog: When I get so burdened with deadlines that I don't expect to be able to post much for a day or three, I put up one of these nifty graphics to indicate a few speed bumps for the time being.  I dunno why I chose Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup…some connect to "comfort food," I guess.  It signals to you to explore the remote possibility that there's something else on the Internet for you to read besides my blog.  Here are a few thoughts though before I focus on the writing that allegedly pays…

Hey, speaking of getting paid, artist Colleen Doran has a good discussion going about what kind of income one can reasonably expect from the profession of drawing pictures.  Of course, it depends a lot at how good you are at drawing those pictures and maybe on how good you are at marketing them.  But go read what she and her commenters have to say.  I really like that kind of discussion as opposed to the "you can achieve anything if you're determined enough" nonsense that I think does much harm to newcomers. If that worked, I would have married Mary Tyler Moore when I was twelve years old.

I said here that I was trying to write less about Donald Trump so I would think less about Donald Trump.  It may not look like I'm succeeding but oh yes, I am, people!  I could write 7-10 times a day about how awful I think this man is for the country.  Any day I can hold it down to two or three, I'm doing well.  I just saw a whole mess o' tweets from unabashed racists and Jew-haters who are doing happy dances and I'm resisting the urge to write about how being on the same side as certain people means you really need to question your perceptions.  I'm still shaken whenever I agree with Dick Cheney.

I will be back here at a normal posting pace when things clear up and scripts are sent.

Today on Stu's Show, Stu Shostak talks with my buddy Mark Rothman, a TV writer-producer with many, many credits to his name including Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, The Odd Couple, The New Odd Couple, She's the Sheriff, Makin' It and Busting Loose. This is his second visit to Stu's program and I think they'll be talking mostly about Laverne & Shirley this time…but who knows where the conversation may roam with these guys? Mark is outspoken and he and I have been known to have friendly arguments about everything, including where we have lunch. We each think each other's taste in restaurant is rotten…and I, of course, am right and he is wrong. But he's right about other stuff so tune in and hear what he has to say.

Stu's Show can be heard live (almost) every Wednesday at the 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 a paltry 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three. And if you act now, Stu may just give you eight for the price of six! He's all heart…

A lot of people seem shocked that Donald Trump is doing things he said he'd do. At least two of my Trump-backing friends — and a lot of people I see writing on the 'net — say they voted for him because they liked some of the things he said and assumed that the stuff they didn't like was just empty campaign rhetoric…things like building that wall or banning Muslims.

Well, it's nice to know that he's not keeping all his promises. He promised to go up against the pharmacy lobby and to negotiate drug prices way down but today he met with "Big Pharma," and now he's against that. Kevin Drum has more.

I seriously doubt Trump will ever do anything that would prevent a rich person from getting richer, no matter how many poor or middle-class people suffer for it. That seems to be his big problem with doing things that help the environment. It often gets in the way of maximizing profit.

If you were a fan of Dan Spiegle's work and would like to honor his memory, make a contribution in his name to the Carpinteria Valley Historical Society. It was a favorite place of Dan's and you can read all about it and get the address over on this page.

I will be a guest for some (not all) of this year's San Diego Comic Fest. What this is is a low-key convention that recaptures some of the magic of the early days of what we now know as Comic-Con International…back when it was mostly about comic books and nowhere near as crowded. It's run by some of the folks who worked on the early cons in San Diego, though it is in no way affiliated with that huge gathering.

The San Diego Comic Fest has an opening night ceremony on Friday, February 17 and then it's open Saturday through Monday, February 18-20. I should be there most of Saturday and Sunday, primarily hosting or appearing on panels about a man named Jack Kirby. 2017 is the 100th anniversary of Jack's birth and a lot of comic conventions this year will be featuring special events and tributes in his honor. You can find out all about this one at the San Diego Comic Fest website. They have some other terrific guests and themes. I'll tell you more about what I'm doing there once the schedule is firmed-up.

My next convention after that will be WonderCon, which takes place March 31-April 2 in the newly-expanded Anaheim Convention Center. Then I have nothing until Comic-Con International in San Diego, which is July 20-23. Later this year though, I expect to be making a couple of rare (for me) appearances at East Coast conventions. I'll be the guest roaming the floor because he has nothing to sell and refuses to sit behind a table all day.

Matt Yglesias explains why so far, what the Trump Administration has been demonstrating is "Malevolence tempered by incompetence." If you're horrified by its agenda — i.e., Donald actually trying to make good on some of those campaign promises even many of his supporters assumed wouldn't happen — that could be a good thing. Incompetence may subvert many of his goals in a way that Democrats cannot.

Ah, but what happens when there's a real disaster not of Trump's own making? A hurricane or a terrorist attack or an outbreak of disease or a new Adam Sandler movie? How comforting will it be to have incompetents in the White House then?

Hey, let's watch some popcorn pop…

Matthew Wecksell wrote to ASK me…

Today, in your obit for Dan Spiegle, you wrote that, "A strip like that would have been a full-time job for anyone else but Dan was very fast…"

As a fan of comic books, I've always wondered — why is drawing a comic strip considered a full time job, when most comic book artists can draw 22 pages a month? To this reader, strips see like far less work, particularly when some freakish artists ("Hi, Sergio!") can draw much faster than that…

Well, artists are all different…some much faster than others. For many years, Milton Caniff was writing and drawing the Steve Canyon newspaper strip and Frank Robbins was producing a similar strip called Johnny Hazard. The two features had approximately the same amounts of drawing in each installment in much the same style. Caniff put in a 60 hour week and sometimes employed an assistant to do much of the drawing. Robbins wrote and drew an entire week of strips in three days and spent the rest of his week painting or working in comic books.

It was just a matter of how fast each man was and Robbins was faster, the same way my friend Sergio is faster than many other cartoonists. It's also a function of how much time they actually spend drawing. Caniff had to spend a lot of time supervising the business interests of his strip, dealing with the syndicate, talking to editors, etc. Robbins, perhaps because his strip was less popular — and because unlike Caniff, he didn't own his strip — had less of his work week occupied by that stuff.

Once a strip becomes popular, there are many demands on the cartoonist's time. I once spent much of an afternoon with Charles Schulz during which, in addition to talking with me, he was on the phone a lot to licensees about merchandise and to others discussing an upcoming Charlie Brown TV special. A photographer came by to take some pictures to accompany an interview Mr. Schulz had done the previous week. He also had to sign a pile of books for someone.

He did not spend five seconds on thinking about the strips he had to do that week or drawing them while I was there…and that evening, he had to speak at a college so he wouldn't be at the drawing table then, either.

But maybe the main problem is that a newspaper strip is relentless. Unless you run reruns occasionally, which most artists don't like to do, you need to draw almost every day of every week. A comic book guy can usually skip an issue and they'll run a fill-in by someone else. If a strip artist loses a week due to the flu or a personal emergency, he or she have to make it up somewhere. If you want to take a two-week vacation, you have to get ahead, which means doing a lot more than a week of strips per week for a time.

I have occasionally ghost-written for a couple of strips. One time, one of the artists I've assisted called me in a panic. He was something like six months ahead on his strip. Then he got sick for a week, took some days off to attend to family matters, took his wife away for a weekend, etc. He thought it all amounted to about three weeks but when he went to look at his calendar, he discovered his six-month lead was down to two. A day here…three days there…it all added up.

He said, "I still don't understand it…only that I need to draw two or three weeks worth of strips a week for a while until I get that six-month lead back!" He had me bombard him with gags and a few months later, he had his six-month lead back — But he had to work night and day to get it back. It's just the nature of the job.

This is an obituary for a man I think was one of the greatest comic book artists who ever lived and inarguably one of the nicest people I've ever met. As you may glean from what follows, I really, really loved this person: Loved his artwork in comic books I read long before I ever imagined I'd know him and work with him. Loved the guy who did that artwork and not just because he was a joy to collaborate with and he made my scripts look good and my job, when I was an editor, as simple as it could possibly be.

Dan Spiegle left us on Saturday at the age of 96. He had been in poor health for some time…and it was tough for me to think of Dan that way because until about ten years ago, he was a very healthy individual, often out on the tennis court. Until some time in his seventies, he did most of his artwork standing-up as per the above photo. That was taken around 1973 in his studio, the first day we met.

Dan was born in Cosmopolis, Washington on December 12, 1920. He drew a lot in high school and then in the Navy, where among other duties, he painted insignias on airplanes. Following his discharge in 1946, he attended Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, thanks to the G.I. Bill. Funny story how he got his first real job doing comic art. He answered an ad in the L.A. Times from someone looking for an artist to draw a newspaper comic strip. The address was that of Capitol Records and it turned out the strip was Bozo the Clown.

Years later, Dan could have handled that with ease but at the time, he was more of a serious illustrator so he told the man he met with there that the project was not for him. The man looked at Dan's samples anyway, noted some fine drawings of horses and said to him — approximately — "My cousin works for William 'Hopalong Cassidy' Boyd and they're looking for someone to draw a newspaper strip. Why don't you go see him?" The office of the popular cowboy star was only a few blocks away.  Dan went directly there and Mr. Boyd, aka "Hopalong" happened to be there and he liked how Dan drew horses, too.  Before the day was out, Dan had the job of drawing a Hopalong Cassidy newspaper strip, which he did from 1949 to 1955.

A strip like that would have been a full-time job for anyone else but Dan was very fast so around 1951, he took samples of the strip to the Los Angeles office of Western Printing and Lithography, which produced the Dell Comics line. He walked in, showed his work and walked out with a comic book to draw. He drew for Western for about the next thirty years as the company segued from Dell to Gold Key Comics (explanation here) and only stopped when the firm did. His work there included dozens of different adaptations of TV westerns, including a long and acclaimed stint on Maverick. He drew many of their adaptations of Disney movies and the best-selling comic book, Space Family Robinson, which has recently been reprinted in fancy hardcover volumes. He was also the artist for years on Korak, Son of Tarzan.

His editor for much of this period was a man named Chase Craig, who was also my editor (and mentor) for many years. I once asked Chase, "Of all the hundreds of artists you've employed, who was the most reliable?" Without pausing to think, he replied, "Dan Spiegle." Then he added, "It's always on time and it's always wonderful." (A moment later, he added, "…and Mike Royer.")

Later, when I became Dan's editor, I had the same experience…and until you're an editor of comic books, you don't realize how rare and precious it is to have someone like that available to you. One time, another artist — a good one, not a newcomer — was six weeks late with a job and then handed in a few, unusable pages. I immediately went to Dan who did the entire job in eight days…and it was perfect.

My own association with Dan started one day in '72 when Chase asked me if I would take over writing the Scooby Doo comic book. I wasn't a huge fan of the TV show and started to decline when Chase mentioned that Dan Spiegle was now drawing it. That made all the difference. I had been a fan of Dan's art for years.

At the age of seven, my parents took me to a movie called Don't Give Up the Ship, which starred Jerry Lewis. The next day, they bought me the Dell comic book adaptation of Don't Give Up the Ship to keep me quiet on a visit to my pediatrician and I happened to be holding it when Jerry Lewis walked into that pediatrician's office to pick up one of his sons. That comic book was drawn by Dan Spiegle.

Scooby Doo was not really in Dan's wheelhouse at the time but that comic needed an artist and Chase, because Western was cutting back on adventure-type comics, needed an assignment to keep work on Dan's drawing board. So Dan was attempting to learn a broader, funnier art style and through no help from me, he "got it" about the time I began writing the comic. We became friends and frequent collaborators. We worked together for around a dozen different companies including Scooby Doo for two or three other publishers, Blackhawk for DC and Crossfire for Eclipse. Neither of us made a lot of dough off Crossfire but it was Dan's favorite project and mine, as well.

The way we worked together was very simple. I'd write a script. I'd send it to Dan. He would draw it, usually having his daughter Carrie do the lettering. He would send it to me. I would make the few corrections necessary and send it off to be printed. Couldn't have been more harmonious and easy. And the few corrections usually were that Dan would draw some scene so clearly that I would realize some of my dialogue was unnecessary and I'd remove or change it. At least once, I removed all the word balloons and captions I'd written for one page because Dan's artwork simply didn't need my silly words telling you what you were looking at.

Other companies grabbed him when I couldn't keep him busy. He worked for DC, Marvel, Dark Horse and many other publishers. Editors and writers would tell me how much they envied me being able to work as often as I did with Dan and his artistry was much admired by other artists. Gil Kane would say that Dan was the best comic artist ever when it came to "spatial relationships," meaning that in each panel, the figures and items were placed in perfect proportion to each other, perfectly setting the scene. When I visited Alex Toth, he insisted I always bring him the latest pages I'd receive from Dan so he could study them. Alex clearly envied the organic nature of Dan's work…how natural his staging was and how well he handled light and shadow.

And I want to underscore that Dan was one of the nicest men I've ever met. We never had an argument of any kind. Not one.

I'll tell you two quick stories about how devoted this man was to his artwork. We did a lot of Hanna-Barbera comics for overseas markets — work that has never been published in this country. Occasionally, the page format changed due to the needs of some foreign publisher.

For one six-page story, I told Dan to draw the pages 11" by 15" instead of the 10" by 15" page layout we usually used. Dan accidentally drew it 10" by 15". It was the only mistake he ever made on anything we did together and he was deeply apologetic when I sent the pages back to him and asked him to adjust them.

Anyone else would have just pasted on a half-inch on either side and extended what he'd already drawn. Either that or they'd cut panels out and repaste so they didn't have to draw the whole thing again.  Dan redrew the whole thing again on the proper size of paper. I thought that was extraordinary…but then I realized something else.

Anyone else would have traced or copied what he did the first time. Dan had changed every single panel to a new angle. I asked him why he did that and he explained, "Just to keep my interest up.  It would have been too boring to draw it the same way twice."

Soon after that, we had to do a batch of comic book stories for a publisher in South America. The publisher had been publishing terrible, badly-drawn comics and Hanna-Barbera had insisted they better their product by paying to have us do some of the material. The pay was low so I told Dan and the others working on these stories to knock them out fast, not to put in a lot of detail. Even rushed, simplified art by my crew would be better than what the South American publisher had been running and better than he was paying for.

When Dan's art came in, it looked just like what he did on the regular, decently-paying art. I thought he'd made a mistake and confused which scripts were supposed to be done with all possible shortcuts so I called him. It turned out he hadn't been confused. He said, "I drew it the way you wanted it but I didn't like it and couldn't hand in something that looked like that. So I redid it so it pleased me."

At my insistence, he sent me the simpler version. It was fine. The publisher would have been happy with it. But the point is it didn't please the guy who did it.

How can you not love an artist like that?

I just spoke with Marie, his wonderful wife of seventy (70!) years. She said a memorial will happen sometime in the future. They'd better get a large room because Dan had an awful lot of friends and admirers…those who knew the man himself and those who just knew the work. And then there were us lucky ones who got to be in both categories.  He is survived by Marie, four children who made him very proud (and a Grandpa) and around 55 years of top-notch comic book and strip artwork.

Here's an article where the headline says it all: It took 3 years for George W. Bush to hit 50% disapproval. Trump is there after 8 days. Well, at least he doesn't waste time!