A lot of Republicans are scurrying about, begging people to vote for Ted Cruz instead of Donald Trump. Why? The two men have pretty much the same stated positions on most of the major issues. Why are the Lindsey Grahams and Mitt Romneys so fervent for Cruz over Trump? Jonathan Chait can probably explain it.

There are a lot of articles around which say that Democrats should not assume that Trump, if he is the nominee, will be an easy defeat in November. Personally, I think he will be but that the Dems shouldn't presume that and should run as if he's a real threat. For what it's worth, Daniel Larison over at the American Conservative thinks Trump would not only lose, he'd lose big enough to damage the Republican brand in many ways.

I keep saying that I will be convinced that Trump might win when someone can show me numbers that suggest he will flip enough states Obama won to get an electoral advantage. As Josh Marshall notes, if he can do that with any large state, he oughta be able to do it with Pennsylvania…and the polls there currently show Hillary beating Donald by double-digits. Yeah, he's sewing up the disenfranchised white male vote all across America but so did Mitt Romney.

Of course, there's a long way to go and already a lot of things that no one thought could happen have happened. I just don't see much chance yet of Trump picking up the non-white or female vote, or for millions of angry white guys who haven't voted in the past to suddenly materialize at the polls. What I'm afraid of is not that Trump has the momentum to win but that suddenly something will come along — some new revelation or actual evidence of wrongdoing — and there will be a much better reason than there's ever been to not vote for Hillary. That's assuming it's Hillary.

I don't have a whole lot of interest in seeing the new Batman Vs. Superman movie, a film which has achieved something I didn't think was possible. It actually caused my dear friend Leonard Maltin to use the word "sucks" in his review. Even Rob Schneider never managed that and lord, how he tried.

Actually, for reasons I probably should elaborate on someday, I don't have a whole lot of interest in seeing any recent movie which takes a character I followed as a younger reader of comic books and turns him into a live-action merchandising vehicle.

In the same way it's possible to love James Bond when Sean Connery is playing him and not when someone else is in the role — or to enjoy a novel but not the movie based on it — it's possible to love a comic book character only when he's a comic book character…or only when he's a comic book character rendered by certain writers and artists or in a certain style. I'm also not a huge fan of action movies loaded with CGI and I really need to write a post on how that technology has made it harder for me to think of the people on a movie screen as mortal human beings. In some of the films I've seen, they clearly were not.

But I'm especially not interested in seeing this new Batman-Superman Meeting of the Merchandising. First off, all the trailers and ads make it look very dark and grim and violent. To me, a dark, grim and violent Superman make about as much sense as a dark, grim and violent Bugs Bunny. I don't think it's cool or adult or realistic. I think it's just the wrong approach to the character, especially when they strip him of all sense of humanity. It reminds me of those YouTube videos where someone executes a deliberate clash of styles like "What if Bambi had been directed by Sam Peckinpah or Quentin Tarantino?"

I can more easily view Batman in that light except that when they make him dark, they usually make him psychotic and kind of personally repulsive. Often, he's not different enough from the foes he's battling for me to particularly care who triumphs. That's someone else's Batman and it may be fine on its own terms. But mine has a guy I care about in the bat-suit and I ain't seen much of him for a long time.

Really though, it comes down to this for me: Superman and Batman don't belong in the same world. They really don't.

I absolutely understand the marketing reasons. If I were the guy in charge of them, I wouldn't be able to resist the sales advantage of crossing them over and teaming them up. But since that's not my job, I can look at it from another, purer angle. It's fun to see your favorite characters meet and maybe even fight. I didn't read it but some years ago, someone worked out the contractual problems and did a crossover comic of The X-Men and Star Trek. I'm sure that was delightful for fans of both properties and very lucrative…and since it was a one-time event, not particularly injurious to the mythology of either. Readers could just mentally declare it "out of continuity" and not worry about how it maybe damaged the internal logic of one fictional world to merge it with the internal logic of another fictional world.

It's harder to do that with two mismatched properties that appear together on a routine basis. Superman and Batman were created and configured as standalone, self-contained features. They were no more intended to appear together than Popeye and Prince Valiant…or Flash Gordon and Donald Duck.

Some history. In 1939, the firm we now know as DC Comics had a chance to publish a comic to tie-in with the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair. It was a 96-page anthology featuring stories of all the company's top characters and naturally, it cover-featured Superman. Batman certainly would have been in it but he was just then being created.

The comic sold so well that they squeezed in a 1940 edition. This time, there was a Batman story and they put Batman, Robin and Superman together on the cover. It also sold well so they kept the anthology going without a World's Fair tie-in. At first, it was World's Best Comics but apparently, another company which had a comic called Best Comics objected so it became World's Finest Comics. For years, it was a top-seller. It was a little more expensive than other comics of the day but it felt very special, featuring as it did one story of Superman and a separate tale of Batman and Robin. All three were on every cover in a little scene which didn't appear anywhere inside…since Superman and Batman didn't appear together inside.

Over the years, comic books got thinner and thinner. For production reasons, the page count of a comic book had to be a multiple of 16 and when they reached the stage where comics went to 32 pages, they decided that was as low as they could go. DC was selling 32 page comics for ten cents and they had a few, including World's Finest Comics, which had 64 pages for fifteen cents. Even with Superman and Batman (and other features) in each issue, World's Finest wasn't selling well. It had lost its "all-star" feel and was no longer an exception to a rule of marketing that comic book publishers had learned the hard way. If you put out comics in two different prices, kids would buy the cheapest ones, regardless of how much they got for their money. To most buyers, it was simple: If you had fifteen cents, you could buy a comic book…or you could buy a comic book and a candy bar. The latter just felt like more.

Also, retailers didn't like having two different prices of comics. Comic books were a small profit item and if your clerk accidentally sold a few fifteen-cent comics for a dime each, it could wipe out your profits for a day. Many distributors urged publishers to make all their comics the same price. A few years later when DC began publishing annuals for 25 cents, they calmed distributor concerns by promising that any comic that sold for more than the standard price would have a flat spine so it would feel different, alerting the cashier it was different.

A 32 page comic book had about 25 pages of comics in it. This presented a problem for World's Finest. Did they keep the 12 page Superman stories and the 12 page Batman stories and drop the other strips, which at the time were things like Tomahawk and Green Arrow. Or shorten everything? They didn't want to do either of those. They also didn't want to chuck either Superman or Batman…so someone came up with the bright idea of having the lead story in each issue be Superman and Batman — team-up stories and then follow it with shorter stories of the lesser features.

The alter-egos of Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne had met here and there in comics and also on radio but only for brief moments. Now, they became a regular team and that's kind of where things went awry. Yeah, the comic sold but the price that was paid was that Batman was severely damaged.

You see, hero stories require villains and menaces. Batman was a mortal. His origin may have been contrived and melodramatic but it was not scientifically impossible. No one in his world could fly without an airplane. No one came from another planet. No one could look smug as bullets bounced off his chest. That happened in Superman's world and that's where Batman wound up…and he had to go into the different "reality" of Superman's strip instead of vice-versa. If you'd put Superman into Batman's world, he could have captured The Joker in four seconds and the Penguin in under two.

So the stories had to be about menaces that could present a challenge to a guy who could fly and who had x-ray vision and super-speed and superhuman strength. That meant monsters and aliens and mad scientists and such. They were silly stories and they also weren't very good. I can think of lots of good Superman stories from this period and lots of good Batman stories but not a lot of great Superman-Batman stories. The plots were all so awkward as the writers struggled to come up with ways that the menace could not too easily be bested by Superman…but Batman — a guy who couldn't fly or smash through walls or see through them could still participate.

And since Batman was fighting those kinds of foes in World's Finest Comics, it bled into his own comics, which had the same editor, writers and artists. Batman and Robin in outer space? There's a real premise-killer. And then along came the Justice League of America so Batman really became a guy who associates not with the real-world scum of Gotham City but with aliens and beings with amazing powers, often on other worlds or in other dimensions.

A lot of folks will point to those Batman vs. Space Alien issues and say they represent the nadir of the character's existence…and they were usually poor stories that corrupted the series premise. But Batman never stopped being a guy who palled around with guys from the other worlds, Martian manhunters, Amazon princesses, members of the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps, etc. He's still a guy with no super-powers operating in a world where most heroes can fly under their own power and lift up school buses. No wonder he's so grim all the time.

Again, I understand the marketing reasons. I understand how much fun some of that is for Batman fans. I just think that characters like Superman and Batman suffer at some point because so many people handle them and try so many different interpretations that the properties eventually become undefined. There's almost no rule about who they are and how they operate that one of their handlers won't break. The concept gets turned upside-down so many different ways that after a while, there's no rightside-up. Is Batman a sane man in an insane world or is he just as cuckoo as The Joker? Depending on which comic or dramatization you check out, it could be either. How powerful is he? Depends who's writing him this week. What are his motives? His principles? Again, depends on who's deciding that.

It was wrong, wrong, wrong in those comics in our illustrations here that he was battling aliens from other planets…but now there's a multi-zillion dollar movie in which he fights a guy from Krypton. So what's the character all about any more? All I know is that if there's nothing wrong with what a character does and is, there's nothing right. So I think I won't go see Batman Vs. Superman.

Wednesday night, Trevor Noah did an amazing interview with Senator Lindsey Graham, who as I understand it has endorsed Ted Cruz on the premise that while Cruz would be bad, Trump would be worse. What a fine endorsement. Graham actually looked a little tipsy in the conversation. I don't think he was but I can understand how the position he's in would drive a lesser man to drink. Graham was kind of good-natured and charming — enough to almost make me forget that he really is a lesser man…

Antenna TV is switching tonight's scheduled Johnny Carson rerun. Instead of what they had planned, they're running the Tonight Show on which Garry Shandling made his first appearance. It was a night in which Garry's whole life changed, only for the better.

I'm not sure what I want to write about Garry Shandling here. I knew him but I didn't know him that well.

I certainly knew his work. He did a series called It's Garry Shandling's Show that was very funny and much-admired in the business. A few years after its completion, he announced he was coming back to TV with a new situation comedy and the "buzz" in the industry was that it was a likely flop. No one had seen it yet but it stood to reason: How could this new series, The Larry Sanders Show, possibly equal his first series? Well, it didn't. It was better. In fact, it was one of the best sitcoms ever…and they wisely ended it before it stopped being that.

His stand-up comedy was also outstanding. I wrote some material for him and so did several friends of mine…but I don't think any of us would claim much (if any) credit for his success in this area. From what I could tell, he came up with most of his best stuff himself and when others wrote for him, he rewrote to make it better. That's not true of all stand-ups who buy jokes but it seems to have been true of Garry.

The bios will tell you he was a successful situation comedy writer but that after seeing much of his material being rewritten, he decided to stop writing for others and do his own act. That's not quite true. He only sold a couple of sitcom scripts, the last one (I think) being his one script for Welcome Back, Kotter. That script was indeed completely rewritten — every word of it. And I oughta know because my then-partner Dennis Palumbo and I did the rewriting.

It wasn't Garry's fault. What happened was that he was hired by one set of producers and he wrote a script as per their directions and preferences. What he handed in was perfectly fine by their approach to the show…but before it could be produced, those producers were let go. The network and the star (Mr. Kaplan) were not happy with their approach so new producers were hired to change the direction. Dennis and I were handed Garry's script and told to rewrite it as per the new direction. We managed to save a semi-colon on page eight but that was about it.

Garry understood why the surgery was necessary and didn't hold it against us. In fact, every time I ran into him after it began rerunning, he'd grin and say, "Hey, I just got another $3.50 residual check from your script."

He turned to stand-up and it wasn't long before he became one of those comics whose career was made by a successful spot on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. Ordinarily, it would be quite some time after that before he'd even be considered as a guest host but not long after his third or fourth stand-up appearance, he got to sit in Johnny's chair as a last minute fill-in.

Another comedian — I want to say it was Albert Brooks — was set to guest host one night but he had some quarrel with Carson's producer Fred DeCordova over a guest booking or a sketch or something. I'm a little fuzzy on the specifics but I'm pretty sure Garry stepped into the host position with about eighteen hours notice. And he told me once that when he arrived at the studio that day, he was sure someone was going to tell him, "Oh, you're not hosting after all. We found a real guest host."

But he did it and did it well. Later, when Joan Rivers was abruptly terminated as Johnny's guest host, a lot of folks at The Tonight Show wanted Garry to replace her — and he did for a few nights. But at the time, there was an immediate problem: Garry was doing It's Garry Shandling's Show and hadn't the time or energy to do that plus fill-in on Johnny's frequent nights off. It was announced that he'd switch off with Jay Leno but soon after, Garry bowed out and Jay became the sole guest host.

Later on when David Letterman left NBC for CBS, Shandling was offered the slot after Leno and he declined it. A friend of mine who knew Garry a lot better than I did said, "Garry will never host a nightly talk show. He doesn't have the stamina for it. He spends two hours polishing every joke and then later, three hours wondering if it was all right." That's probably true but it's still a shame he never did that kind of series.

And of course, it's a bigger shame that now he'll never do any kind of new series…or movie or stand-up appearance or anything else. He really was a very talented guy. He seemed perpetually paranoid that whatever he was doing wasn't good enough…and all those jokes about him worrying about how his hair looked or if his ass seemed large were true. He really did worry a lot about things like that but so what? I really liked him, on-camera and off. We have plenty of comedians in this world but we don't have nearly enough as good as Garry Shandling.

WonderCon starts tomorrow at the L.A. Convention Center. Here is an updated list of the panels I'm doing there — and please note that The Sergio and Mark Show is now at 1:30 PM instead of 12:30. You can find the complete programming schedule online but these are the events you really want to see…

Friday, March 25 – 1:30 PM to 2:30 PM, Room 502A
THE SERGIO AND MARK SHOW
Spend an hour — or about as much time as it takes Sergio to draw an issue of Groo the Wanderer — with the folks who bring you that comic book, the award-winning team of Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier. They'll tell you all about Groo and other weird things they've done or are planning to do, plus you'll also get to meet the hardest-working man in comics, Tom Luth, who has to color it all, as well as the letterer, Stan Sakai, creator of Usagi Yojimbo.

Saturday, March 26 – 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM, Room 403AB
QUICK DRAW!
It's one of the most popular panels at Comic-Con each year but it was born years ago at WonderCon! Three cartoonists! Lots of paper and Sharpies and silly ideas! Watch the battle of wits and markers as amazing cartoons are created right before your eyes by Sergio Aragonés (MAD magazine, Groo the Wanderer), Scott Shaw! (The Simpsons, The Flintstones) and Kyle Baker (Why I Hate Saturn, The Bakers). Your moderator Mark Evanier throws the challenges at them, many suggested by the audience. So maybe you'd like to be part of that audience.

Saturday, March 26 – 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM, Room 403AB
CARTOON VOICES
Talk about super-powers! Here's a panel with heroes who can put voices into the mouths of your favorite animated characters. They'll tell you how they do it and there will be an unrehearsed reading to show how they do it! With Maurice LaMarche (Pinky and the Brain, Futurama), Candi Milo (Curious George, Jimmy Neutron), Townsend Coleman (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Tick), Amanda Troop (Batman Unlimited), Chuck McCann (Duck Tales, The Fantastic Four) and others! Your host is Mark Evanier (The Garfield Show).

Sunday, March 27 – 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM, Room 502A
COVER STORY
Some of the greatest artistry in comics today can be found not in the books but on the outside. What goes into designing a memorable, magnificent cover? This topic is discussed with examples by folks who've done it: Russsell Dauterman (The Mighty Thor, Nightwing), Paolo Rivera (Daredevil, The Valiant), Bill Sienkiewicz (Stray Toasters, Elektra: Assassin) and Annie Wu (Black Canary, Hawkeye). Presiding over the discussion is Mark Evanier.

Sunday, March 27 – 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM, Room 502A
JACK KIRBY TRIBUTE
They call him the King of the Comics and his influence is unescapable around the industry and around this convention. 22 years after he left us, there's still so much to say about him and some of it will be said by Steve Sherman (former Kirby assistant), Charles Hatfield (Author of Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby), Paul S. Levine (attorney for the Rosalind Kirby trust) and your moderator, Mark Evanier (former Kirby assistant, author of Kirby: King of Comics) and another special guest or two.

Everything is subject to change at a moment's notice, including times, room numbers, panelists and certain audience members' underwear. If you see me around, don't be afraid to say hi and I'll be glad to discuss just about anything except religion, politics and cole slaw.

Memories to come later. Such a clever, funny, totally screwed-up man.

Hank and John Green, aka the Vlogbrothers, are Internet Superstars. A few years ago, that accomplishment would have been like being the Most Valuable Player at a potato race but these days, it's very meaningful. Each week, Hank and John each make a video addressing the other on some topic and here we have John explaining how it works in this country with pledged and unpledged delegates selecting our presidential candidates. It really is as screwy as he makes it sound and everyone seems fine with it when their candidate benefits and outraged when theirs doesn't.

Anyway, I like these videos a lot. Does anyone here know Hank Green? He's a Guest of Honor (as am I) at this year's Comic-Con International and I want to get him to be part of one of the panel's I'm hosting. I can't go through the convention committee right now because they're all busy running WonderCon this weekend but if any of you are in touch with Hank, ask him to please drop me an e-mail or something. The only online contact info I have for him involves pathways via which I suspect he gets thousands of messages a day and I don't want to get lost in that throng.

Now, here's John explaining the unexplainable…

Donald Trump recently did an interview with the editorial board of The Washington Post. It really is a marvel of incoherent rambling and non-answers and a recurring theme is that Donald Trump can get something done because he's Donald Trump, no further explanation necessary. I keep expecting some interview with him any day now to include an exchange like this…

TRUMP: I will make it so World War II never happened because I will have a time machine so we can go back and kill Hitler.

INTERVIEWER: But no one has ever figured out how to go back in time. How will you be able to do it?

TRUMP: I will do it because I am Donald Trump.

Part of my distaste for the guy is his lack of seriousness about anything he says. He doesn't answer questions. He bullies his way through with questionable "facts" and superego. Things will be great because he'll do them. We will win because he's tougher. Long before I'd ever heard of Trump, I had a visceral dislike of people who talk tough…which as I've learned over the years is an entirely different thing from actually being tough. In fact, the folks I've encountered who talked the toughest were almost all bluffing because they didn't want to have to follow through and prove they could deliver. "Don't mess with me" is usually uttered by someone who's afraid you'll create a situation where he has to mess with you.

But I also really don't like people who blather on over serious matters without relating them to reality. I wrote this before here but every time the Writers Guild is on strike, we have members who are dissatisfied with the WGA leadership and who insist the impossible is possible if only we're tougher…

HIM: Our committee should get in there and negotiate!

ME: The producers refuse to negotiate.

HIM: Then we should insist they negotiate.

ME: The producers refuse to negotiate.

HIM: Then we should get in there and be real tough and demand they negotiate.

ME: The only weapon we have against them is to strike.

HIM: Don't strike! Negotiate! Demand they negotiate! If I were on that committee, I could force them to negotiate!

ME: How would you do that?

HIM: By being tougher than they are!

It is, of course, easy to say stuff like that when you're never going to have to actually do it. You know, I'd be a much better James Bond than Daniel Craig and if I got in the ring with Lucas Browne (I think he's the current Heavweight Champ), I could knock him on his ass in three minutes.

Hey, you can't prove that isn't true. Just as you can't prove that Trump's or even Ted Cruz's economic plan would grow the economy by 5% every year. Personally, I'd bet on me versus Browne before I'd bet on anyone promising 5% growth, especially if the way they're going to achieve it is by slashing taxes for the rich and social services for the poor. But read the interview with Trump. It'll make you feel Sarah Palin wasn't so bad…

Keith Olbermann has some things to say about Donald Trump but mainly about the news coverage of Donald Trump. I don't think the problem is what the media gives the public. I think the problem is the way in which we reward the media for giving us this stuff.

• Jeb Bush endorses Ted Cruz; says he's qualified, serious and, most importantly, not Donald Trump. Politifact all three as "half true."

I just looked at all I have to get done today and decided to declare today another of those days when I might not be blogging at the usual pace. Also, I have a ton of these soup can graphics I made up so why the hell not? This one has, for no particular reason, a background of jelly beans. You like it?

I woke up about 90 minutes ago and my iPhone was giving me a headline about the terrorist attack at Brussels Airport. In my dazed state, I thought, "I think I'll go back to sleep until a majority of the people running for president explain how this would never happen on their watch. I got up ten minutes later.

Could someone invent a plug-in for my browser that will filter out ads that feature photos of human deformities? I really don't need to see most of those. A few years ago, there was a commercial that ran incessantly on TV — a public service spot to get people to quit smoking. It showed diseased lungs and tracheotomy scars and people who could no longer speak without one of those freakish artificial speech aids…and I get it. Yes, yes…some folks might be repulsed enough and rattled to stop. But why should I, who has never smoked, have to view this stuff?

Also, one of these days when I click on a headline that says "Smith destroys Johnson in Debate," I would like it to take me to a video wherein Smith does more than land just one glancing blow that causes Johnson to look slightly annoyed.

I watched The Daily Show with Trevor Noah last night, wondering all the time why this show is no longer "must" viewing for me the way it was under Jon Stewart. That it isn't is proven by the fact that I have twelve unwatched episodes on my TiVo and when I watch one, it's kind of with the attitude that since it's The Daily Show and it's already recorded, I should watch it. Some of the writing is as sharp as anything that appeared on Mr. Stewart's version and Mr. Noah is quite professional and appealing. But the new correspondents haven't impressed me and the whole program just feels like a knock-off of the old show, not a continuation.

Some of it, I know is that there are so many others out there now: Colbert's still doing smart political humor on his show and so at times is Seth Meyers. You've got your John Oliver and your Samantha Bee (both great) and of course Bill Maher. When something happened in politics, I was eager to see what Jon Stewart would do with it. I'm not so eager to catch Trevor Noah's take even though it will probably concur with and reinforce mine. I think I'd be more likely to care about Noah's if it didn't.

I may or may not be back here later today. Depends how this script goes and how many times the phone rings. And it began ringing even as I typed that…

Again, Nate Silver's crew turns to the question of whether Donald Trump will arrive at the Republican Convention with the 1,237 delegates he needs to lock up the nomination. They don't know but they seem pretty sure that we won't know for sure until the results of the June 7 primaries are in.

I hate to break this to you all but that's 77 days from today. This phase of the election may not be over 'til then.

So here's what I'm wondering: If Trump arrives with 1,230 or even 1,236 and then somehow doesn't get the nomination, what happens then? He's certain to have more delegates than anyone else. Forget for a moment that it's Trump. Say it's some other candidate who gets almost enough delegates to win but is denied the nod in favor of someone he trounced in the primaries. Or even someone who didn't win any delegates in the primary. How does that not look like Grand Larceny? How does that line up with the will of the voters? Even folks who are praying for Trump not to be the nominee will say he wuz robbed. How do you bind a party together and rally behind its nominee then?

Because I do not want to see Republicans do well this year — and not just in the presidential race — I would love for that to happen. But I'd also like to see it just because…well, in a reality show, you want these kinds of twists and turns that make people really, really mad and which destroy past alliances. It may or may not be good for the country but it sure makes for fun television.

Here's a terrific documentary about a terrific comic actor, Marty Feldman…