I have never been bothered by "those words" and I think the world is coming around to that point of view. Those who are bothered need to hang out with folks who use those words casually and to good effect in conversation.
But I will admit I do have one prejudice in this area. Whenever a man uses the word "bitch" to refer to a woman, unless it's clearly a joke, I always think that man has a problem with all women, not just with the one he's so labelling. For a long time, any male I heard refer to a female that way obviously was angry that she was not being subservient and less-than-equal the way he believed a female ought to be. I am willing to admit that there may be exceptions but every time I hear a guy say it, that's what I think. And it may still be valid in a majority of cases.
Bill O'Reilly has joined Donald Trump's campaign to demonize immigrants and to make sure that no Hispanic person ever again votes Republican. I have Liberal friends who are not displeased by this because they believe analysts who say it's mathematically impossible for any G.O.P. nominee to win the White House without substantially improving on how Romney did with Hispanics. It's puzzling to hear loud voices in the party treating them as rapists and the source of all crime. Matt Taibbi has more.
Lost another friend, damn it. Alan Kupperberg died last night at the age of 62 due to thymus cancer, a condition he'd been battling for many months. He was an artist, letterer and occasional writer of comic books with credits that included The Invaders, Justice League of America, Star Wars, Marvel Two-In-One, Blue Devil, National Lampoon and Spider-Man. And he wouldn't like it if I didn't mention that he created, wrote and drew Obnoxio the Clown.
Alan got into comics in 1974 working for Neal Adams at Neal's studio, Continuity Associates. He was kind of a utility infielder and his hand is evident in many of the comics and commercial jobs that came out of that studio then. Not long after, he began working for Marvel where, again, they deployed him as a "he can do anything" kind of guy, assigning him often to fill-ins and emergency jobs on a host of comics. At times, he drew the Hulk and Howard the Duck newspaper strips and later, away from Marvel, he became the artist of the Annie strip, aka Little Orphan Annie.
I doubt anyone — including Alan — could itemize all the different comics and strips and art jobs he did during his career. He was really a prolific, versatile talent.
I last saw Alan…oh, maybe two years ago. He had moved his life to Palm Springs to kind of "start over" in a new environment and we had a mutual friend, Geoffrey Mark, who lived there. He and Geoffrey were making field trips into Los Angeles to visit folks so the three of us had dinner. We talked about comics and other topics — and if he knew then that he was sick, he certainly didn't let on. I learned about the cancer later via his Facebook posts and followed what appeared to be a brave but losing struggle.
Alan was a good man and a good talent…and while the news this morning was not unexpected, it still comes as a shock. Good thoughts to all his friends and family.
In case you want to mark it on your calendar, the 2016 Comic-Con International will run from Thursday, July 21 until Sunday, July 24 with a Preview Night on Wednesday, July 20.
What we have for you today is an excerpt from Frank Ferrante's show, An Evening with Groucho — although I was at this particular performance and it was in the afternoon so I think Frank should be sued for false advertising. And yes, I know: I write more on this blog about his career than about my own. That's because I'm more interested in his career than in my own.
Here he is performing the classic Groucho tune, "Dr. Hackenbush," which was written for A Day at the Races and then dropped before they even started filming A Day at the Races. Actually, I believe it was originally called "Dr. Quackenbush," which is what Groucho's character in that film was originally named. The studio legal department determined that there were way too many real Dr. Quackenbushes in America and that they all had lawyers.
I read somewhere that they decided to change Groucho's handle in the film to something else that suggested quackery but then realized that the name they'd chosen — what it was, I dunno — had the wrong number of syllables for the song. So to not damage the song, they changed his name to Hackenbush instead…then cut the song. It makes about as much sense as anything about a Marx Brothers movie. (At the end of A Day at the Races, they sing reprises of a couple of other songs that aren't really being reprised because their earlier appearances in the film were also cut.)
So now here's Frank out at the Pasadena Playhouse in, surprisingly, Pasadena. He'll be there again in January and he'll probably be singing this song there again, too…
I always hear people who've "made it" (in whatever field) tell folks who haven't: "Never give up. If you keep pursuing your dream, eventually you will succeed." This, I do not buy. I mean, it's a lovely thought — like marriages are forever and good always triumphs over evil — but it's just not so. Bet you can name twenty people who will do everything humanly possible to become President of the United States but will never spend one night in the White House.
I explained more about my viewpoint on this back here and in other posts. Right now, I want to tell you a story about someone I knew who never "made it." A few of you reading this will recognize who I'm talking about and if so, please keep it to yourself. I'm posting this to enlighten others, not to humiliate him…and I'm going to call him Harlow.
Harlow wanted very badly to be a famous cartoonist but I don't think his dream really included the part where you sit at a drawing table for twelve hours a day and draw, draw, draw. Whenever we talked about his goals, he seemed to only be interested in the part where he makes a lot of money and people say, "Hey, there goes a famous cartoonist." He idolized people like Jack Kirby and Milton Caniff but never grasped a key element of their success. Those two men worked their butts off for their entire lives.
So right there, I thought he had a basic misunderstanding of the career he sought. That alone can be fatal to most goals in life.
He didn't give up but he also didn't try very hard to improve his work. He half-heartedly signed up for a few classes and missed half of them. He didn't spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sketching like most artists need to do to get good. He'd just sit down, dash off a drawing every so often…then he'd wait for someone to throw money at him for it. This never happened.
I also thought there was another obstacle to him achieving his career objective: He was a terrible artist.
If he had tried harder, he would have been better but how much better, we'll never know for sure. My hunch is that he'd never have been great and might not even have ever gotten good enough to have a real career in the field. I further suspect that deep down, he may have known that and not seen the point of working harder at it.
His hope was that somehow — he had no likely idea how — he'd land a high-paying cartooning job and then he could hire talented assistants to do all the work. This was not entirely without precedent and here's one example of many: After Bud Fisher launched his newspaper strip, Mutt & Jeff, he hired ghosts to put in all those hours at the board. One of them — Al Smith — wrote and drew it for 48 years. As long as Fisher was alive, Smith did it all including the part where he signed "Bud Fisher" on every strip.
Harlow more or less hoped to emulate Fisher but there was a fundamental flaw in that plan: Bud Fisher did have the talent to draw the strip. He wrote and drew it for several years before handing it off to assistants. He made it successful enough that he could afford assistants. Harlow couldn't have done the first part which meant he never could have gotten to the second part.
Still, he tried and tried to break into cartooning work. He had a portfolio of samples which he forced upon anyone he thought might be able to hire him or recommend him to someone for work. When he thrust it before my eyes, I tried — honest, I tried — to think of somewhere in the cartooning world where there might be a place for him. I could not come up with one. This, alas, did not stop Harlow from trying to get work on a recommendation from me.
One day, he went to the Los Angeles offices of Western Publishing Company, which were then located on Hollywood Boulevard, directly across the street from the famed Chinese Theater. Western published many kinds of publications but he was mainly interested in the Gold Key Comics line, half of which was edited out of that office. The other half were edited in the firm's New York office. L.A. did comics like Tarzan, Woody Woodpecker, Scooby Doo, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Woodsy Owl, Pink Panther and all the Disney titles as well as many, many more. I was writing many of them at the time.
There would later be some disagreement as to how he represented himself there that day. Del Connell, an editor for Western who agreed to see him, said that he announced he was a friend of Mark Evanier and that I had sent him with my highest recommendation. Harlow later swore to me that he had merely mentioned he was a friend of Mark Evanier…which I guess was true. Del — a trusting soul — did not call me to check and see if what he heard Harlow say I'd said was what I'd said. I had not said that.
Del looked at his samples and decided Harlow was nowhere near qualified to draw or ink or even letter for their comics. This was true. Still, the guy seemed so eager…or maybe so needy. And there was one job Del had open at that moment…
Western was then publishing a few comics in digest format. Most of what was in them was reprints of material done for conventional-sized comics and that presented a problem. You couldn't just shrink an entire page drawn for a regular-size comic book down to the size of a digest comic page. They tried that for a time and realized the images were too small and the lettering was way too small. Also, the proportions of the pages did not match up.
So what they began doing was to have two sets of stats made of each of the old stories they wanted to reprint in digest format. They were reduced to two different sizes. Someone would then take these stats and repaste the panels in a new layout. They would take the artwork and rearrange it to fit the digest format, putting fewer panels on each page. A story that was 12 pages in the original format might be 16 or 18 pages in digest format.
They might take the images (as opposed to the lettering) in a given panel from either of the two sets of stats but they would take the word balloons wholly off one set so the lettering would be of a consistent size throughout. They'd rearrange that which needed rearrangement and paste all this up and it would then be necessary to do some minor art here and there, extending the background of a drawing or finishing a figure. Also, the rearranger would have to draw new panel borders around each panel.
If my explanation confuses you — and it would sure confuse me — take a look at the image below. It may explain things far better than I can here. On the left is a page as it ran in a comic book with the conventional page dimensions. At right is a portion of the material on that page reconfigured for a digest page. Note how someone drew in a few little things that weren't there before…
Click above to enlarge.
Okay, so it was mostly a cut-and-paste job but it did require some minor artistic skill to reposition images and to fill in a bit of minor drawing here and there and to rule new panel borders. Del decided to give Harlow a shot at this. They were at that moment preparing an issue of Walt Disney Comics Digest that would be all Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories by the great man himself, Carl Barks. Del explained to Harlow in great detail what had to be done. Then he gave him the stats to one Donald Duck story and sent him on his way with a one-week deadline.
Harlow was in heaven. He was a professional artist working in comic books…and on a Carl Barks story, no less.
Others who had done such work for Western could have done the job in a few days. Harlow took three weeks, most of which was spent coming up with other things he had to do before he could tackle the assignment…like, say, go to the movies. Finally though, he turned in the finished job. Del pronounced it utterly unusable.
The paste-ups were sloppy. The panel borders were shaky and blotchy. The places where he had to extend Barks' artwork were obvious because Harlow's linework didn't come close to matching what Barks had done. Del only had to look at the first page to realize that the whole job had to be redone by someone else.
As he paged through the rest of it, he got angry. He had explicitly told Harlow to extend Barks' drawings as necessary but not to change them in any other way. Harlow had done little additions and changes to the figures themselves, adding a new pattern on someone's shirt or adding gratuitous hair to some character's head. In one spot, he had added eyelids on Donald Duck, changing the facial expression Barks had drawn.
This was Carl Barks, widely hailed as the best artist who ever drew these characters…the creator of some of them. Harlow, an absolute beginner, had decided to "improve" Barks.
Harlow had also hidden his name on almost every page, writing it in on signs in the background or as graffiti on walls. Carl's name appeared nowhere on the story but Harlow's appeared in about fourteen places.
Del told Harlow that the job was unacceptable. They would not use it. He would not pay for it.
Harlow responded by screaming and crying.
Here, roughly, is how Del described it to me on the phone two minutes after he got Harlow out of his office: "I told him I wouldn't pay him for it and he began yelling and having some sort of breakdown. Everyone else in the office rushed in to see what was wrong. He started crying about how he wanted to be a cartoonist all his life and everybody was conspiring to deny it to him and how I was the latest one and he was not going to put up with us doing it to him any longer!
"I finally agreed to pay him half as a kill fee just to be rid of him. Zetta filled out the forms to pay him and then he left." Zetta DeVoe was the Associate Editor and Office Manager. She later confirmed Del's account to me as did others who worked there.
That phone conversation from Del to me had started with him saying, "Mark, that guy you sent me really screwed up the job I gave him." To which I replied, "What guy I sent you?" That's when Del told me Harlow had said he had my recommendation.
I told Del, "I wish you'd checked with me because I never sent him to you" and Del admitted that, yes, he should have done that. Before the call ended, I told him, "If you need someone to paste up digest pages, I can send you someone I do recommend."
I got off with Del and called a friend of mine named Rick Hoppe. Rick is now a top animator who's worked on Disney films and others but at the time, he was a beginning artist with more talent than most long-time professionals. He ran up to Del's office and picked up the stats to another Barks story that was slated to run in the same digest. He took the job home, repasted everything and I went in with him two days later when he delivered it. Del said what he did was perfect. No changes necessary.
Rick wound up doing that kind of work — and other, more complicated assignments — for Western Publishing until others started offering him far better art jobs. The third or fourth assignment he got from Del was to totally redo the Barks story that Harlow had ruined. Del ordered up two new sets of stats and Rick repasted them using none of what Harlow had done.
Harlow and I discussed the whole incident twice. The first time was the evening after Del called to tell me my "recommendation" had flopped. Harlow swore to me he had not said I'd recommended him. He also insisted he did a perfectly fine, professional job and that Del had said what he'd said in order to try and cheat him out of his fee. He was proud that he stood up to Del and got half of it.
Eight to ten months later, I was at a weekend comic convention that was held in a hotel up in Universal City. Harlow was present and he came up to me and asked if I knew if the issue of Walt Disney Comics Digest with his work in it was out yet. The digests had odd distribution and were very hard to find in some areas. I got my copies in the bundles I picked up at the office.
I told Harlow that the issue in question had gone on sale a few weeks earlier but his repasting job had been redone by someone else. He did not believe me and he went off to find a dealer in the room who had copies. Several did and Harlow bought every copy he could find on the premises.
He told me — like I was stupid enough to fall for that lie about his work being unacceptable — that it was definitely his paste-up. "They took out my name in all the places where I put it but I recognize all my little additions and changes."
The person I'm calling Harlow is no longer with us. To his dying day though, he refused to believe that his work had not been printed. Not only that but on his résumé, he listed it as a credit, phrasing it like he was Carl Barks's collaborator. He did not even indicate that he was referring to, at most, one reprint. If you read what he wrote, you might have thought that all those great Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic books were drawn in the first place by Carl Barks and Harlow.
That wasn't the only credit on that résumé. Through sheer persistence, he got a few others — some, even real. Sadly — and I really mean that — at no point did he ever get near a living wage in the cartooning profession. There was never a moment when someone pointed his way and said, "Hey, there goes a famous cartoonist," which was the main thing he wanted. I know I felt bad for the guy but I was never sure if it was because he didn't get what he wanted or because he wasted so much of his life trying to attain the unattainable.
I told this story here because at Comic-Con last week, an aspiring writer asked me for some advice and I quoted my oft-offered belief — I'm sure I've said it on this blog and more than once — that to become a writer or actor or almost anything of a "glamorous" nature, one must find the sweet spot between Idealism and Pragmatism and not have an excess of either.
The newbie seeking my counsel instantly understood what I meant by an excess of Pragmatism. You don't get far by limiting yourself to what you absolutely know is possible. He asked me for an example of Too Much Idealism and I started to tell him the Harlow story then said, "Wait. I'll post it on my blog after I get home from the con and sleep for at least three days." Today is Thursday so there you have it.
I really believe in this concept I came up with — at least, I think I came up with it — about the balance of Idealism and Pragmatism. Everyone I've ever known who has failed has had too much of one and not enough of the other. You can't achieve a dream if you don't have one…but you also can't succeed in the real world without having at least one foot in the real world. Harlow had about half his little toe in there, maybe less.
I ran this on December 12, 2009 and it sparked a few tiny controversies with friends who claim they were there when it occurred and that it didn't happen at the Denny's or that a few other aspects of it were different. No one quibbled with the essence of the story though and as I predicted, a number of folks were pleased to see the photo of Dave Gibson. Here's what I had to say about him and my version (i.e., the accurate one) of the incident with Dave Berg…
Most of you probably didn't know him but I have a few friends who'll smile to see this photo of Dave Gibson, who was a prominent comic book fan/dealer/entrepreneur in Los Angeles back in the seventies and eighties. Dave passed away within the last ten years — I'm sorry I can't be more precise — and he was a sweet, well-meaning guy who really, really loved comic books. When California introduced personalized license plates for cars, many people ran in and tried to nab the plate that would say COMICS. Dave got it…and he was very proud he got it, proud to drive around town with that on his auto. Years later when he moved out of the state, he continued to renew that plate for a while, just to hold onto it. (I'm not sure who has it now…)
Dave ran a comic book shop in L.A. for a time and he also tried publishing. In 1971, he invested darn near all the money he had in the world in a couple of ventures. One was a deal he made with Bill Gaines to manufacture facsimiles of the old fan club kit that EC Comics had issued in the fifties. Dave turned out a quality product and quickly sold every one he made…but claimed he'd tried so hard to do the thing right and to keep the costs down that he wound up losing bucks on the project.
Another, which turned out even less well for him, was an arrangement he made to reprint the run of Will Eisner's classic comic section, The Spirit, in little black-and-white replicas. Eisner wasn't happy with Dave's production values or with his marketing of the product. I think the problem was that Dave really just wanted to produce the items and be the guy to get The Spirit back into print, where it had not been in a very long time. He didn't care all that much about making a profit…which meant that Mr. Eisner, who was on a royalty deal, didn't make a profit. When Eisner angrily terminated their business arrangement after a year or so, Dave was crushed and I don't think he ever tried publishing anything again.
He had two other claims to fame. Jack Kirby knew him from the local convention circuit and liked him. When Jack took over Jimmy Olsen, he introduced a race of strange people called The Hairies and told Dave he was the inspiration for them. If you'd seen Dave at the time — I took the above photo a few years later when he'd tidied up a bit — you'd instantly perceive the connection, though I suspect Jack dreamed up The Hairies without thinking of Dave and then told him that just to please him. It did. Dave was very proud to have inspired something in any kind of comic book, especially one by Jack Kirby.
But among local fans, Dave will always be remembered for The Dave Berg Incident. This came about shortly after National Lampoon had done its famous parody of MAD magazine in its October, 1971 issue. Someone has posted it to the web at this website and it was seeing it again there that prompted me to tell this story here.
In the grand spirit of giving someone a taste of their own you-know-what, the NatLamp folks skewered MAD but good…and even the MAD staffers admired the effort. Some admitted the satire was dead-on and deserved. One of the most talked-about pages was the spoof/attack (take your pick) on Dave Berg, who did "The Lighter Side of…" section for MAD. It was drawn by Stu Schwartzberg, a very funny gent who did some work for Marvel in the early seventies, occasionally contributing to their comics but mainly operating the world's smelliest photostat machine in the office.
Dave Berg always drew himself into one or more of his cartoons. In the parody, a kid walks up to him and asks, "Say, you aren't the same Dave Berg who draws for MAD magazine, are you?" Dave Berg says, "That's me, young man."
The kid then asks, "No kidding, you're the guy who does that Lighter Side thing?" Dave Berg says, "That's right, youngster."
The kid says, "Hey, you're really putting me on! You really write all that stuff about baby-sitters and blind dates and drive-in movies?" Dave Berg proudly says, "Yes, I do, son."
The kid then says, "Boy, are you an asshole!" Dave Berg reacts accordingly.
Not nice but funny…especially if you recall how Berg manufactured his own, slightly-less-insulting punch lines. So a year or so after it comes out, we're all at one of the San Diego Comic-Cons. My memory is that this occurred at the '72 con, which was the first one at the El Cortez Hotel. I further recall that this took place in the waiting area of the Denny's restaurant just down the hill from that hotel. Gibson walks in with some friends and sees Dave Berg standing there. This gives Gibson an idea that he somehow thinks Mr. Berg will appreciate. He goes up to him and says, "Say, you aren't the same Dave Berg who draws for MAD magazine, are you?" Dave Berg says, "That's me, young man."
Gibson then asks, "No kidding, you're the guy who does that Lighter Side thing?" Dave Berg says, "That's right, youngster."
Gibson says, "Hey, you're really putting me on! You really write all that stuff about baby-sitters and blind dates and drive-in movies?" Dave Berg proudly says, "Yes, I do, son."
Gibson, pleased that Mr. Berg is playing along and following the script, then delivers the kicker. He says, clearly and loudly so all us onlookers can hear, "Boy, are you an asshole!"
There is silence. In fact, of all the silences I have heard in my life, this one most closely approximated the sound of floating adrift in deep outer space. It was finally broken only by the noise of Dave Berg sputtering and fuming and storming off.
Turns out Dave Berg had never seen the National Lampoon parody.
Umpteen zillion people have sent me this link to a video someone made — a mash-up of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Mad Max. Thank you all for thinking of me but I'm not going to embed it here. Maybe I'm dense…well, I know I'm dense but maybe I'm unusually dense on this one. I just don't "get it." I don't get why anyone thought this was funny or clever or worth making.
Land of the Lost was a popular Saturday morning show from 1974 to 1977 and one of the stars of it was an adorable young lady named Kathy Coleman. On the show, she was chased by dinosaurs. In real life, she faced other dangers which she reveals in her autobiography, Lost Girl: The Truth and Nothing But the Truth So Help Me, Kathleen. It was co-authored by a friend of this blog, Steve Thompson, and it's an engrossing, personal tale that will be of interest not just to folks who loved Land of the Lost but to anyone interested in the growing pains of a child star in and around Hollywood. You can order a copy at this link and you can hear Kathy and Steve talk about her life today on Stu's Show. Oughta be a great program!
Stu's Show can be heard live (almost) every Wednesday at the Stu's Show website and you can listen for free there. 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. Shortly after a show ends, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are a measly 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three. Watch out for Sleestaks!
And read Peter Beinart. He strikes a chord with me when he writes, "In life, what matters most isn't how a decision compares to your ideal outcome. It's how it compares to the alternative at hand."
I'm a big believer in that. Increasingly as I get older, I get annoyed by harsh criticisms that are unaccompanied by alternatives. It's fine to say, "I don't think this will work but I don't have anything better to offer at the moment." It's not fine, at least with me, to say, "This idea stinks and it will be an utter and total disaster and whoever thought of it is a moron…" and then to not have at least some of a better plan to offer in its stead. Or to offer an impossible, impractical alternative. Anyone can say, "That sucks."
What Beinart calls "ideal outcomes" are not always possible in this world of ours. "Best possible outcomes" usually are possible and the trick is to get to them. In deciding on a plan of action, there needs to come a point where the idealism and the fairy tales cease and you deal in realism.
I have no idea what we should be doing in Iran…and we're all in luck because I have no say in the decision. If the options are doing nothing, going to war and making a deal, making a deal sure sounds like the best of the three to me. Then it becomes a question of what's the best possible deal? I don't know if we got it but I do know that a lot of people love to say of any deal, "It's not good enough."
Tomorrow, if you sold your broken-down old car for twenty million dollars, someone would tell you you sold out too quickly. You could have gotten thirty million. People love to do that kind of thing…especially when they're running against you for public office.
Speaking of Floyd Norman, as I was: Here he is, writing about how Walt Disney was the best boss he ever had. Floyd has obviously forgotten the one time he worked for me.
