The National Portrait Gallery is running an online vote to determine which of three comedians will be featured on the museum's Recognize Wall this spring! I'm not entirely sure what a Recognize Wall is but I know which one I'd pick out of the three. The choices are Groucho Marx, Ellen DeGeneres and George Carlin.

Granted, there's something wrong with any poll where one is expected to compare Groucho and Ellen. Actually, none of these three people are or ever have been in any sort of competition. In this case, the goal is "to salute those who have had a significant effect on American politics, history, and culture." I would say that would be Mr. Marx by a wide margin with Mr. Carlin in a respectable runner-up position.

If you care enough about this to vote, here's a link to the page where you vote for Groucho. Apparently, you can vote every 24 hours until the voting closes on February 17. This wouldn't happen to be nothing more than a way to get clicks on their site, would it? Naw.

This appeared here during a supermarket strike in Los Angeles in December of 2003. It was on 12/11/03 to be specific. When the strike was settled, the local news was filled with stories that the markets regretted allowing it to happen; that they lost way more than it would have cost to settle, including a lot of steady customers who migrated from the struck stories to the unstruck. A few years later, perhaps as a means of luring back those shoppers, Ralphs got a lot better than it had ever been…and I wasn't the only one who noticed that.

Each year at the Comic-Con International in San Diego, I host this fun panel called "Quick Draw." We get Sergio Aragonés up there and Scott Shaw! and two other swift cartoonists and I throw challenges at them. It's kind of like Whose Line Is It Anyway? with drawings and without Drew Carey, Ryan Stiles, Colin Mochrie, Wayne Brady and a very large staff of comedy writers billed as "Creative Consultants." Anyway, the cartoonists in the "Quick Draw" panel have overhead projectors putting what they sketch up on large screens so everyone can see. This year, kidding around during set-up, I started sticking items from my wallet under the lens and I projected my Ralphs Club card. For those of you who don't have the privilege of membership in this esteemed organization, it's a card you flash when you go to a Ralphs market. You get a few items at a discount and they get to chart a profile of your buying patterns. Deep within the Ralph's corporate headquarters, there's a computer that knows exactly how many Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches I've purchased there and what flavors.

Sergio, being Sergio, grabbed my card and in about 1.8 seconds added the little editorial cartoon you see below. Since then, when I hand the checker my Ralphs Club card, I've gotten a wide array of snickers and giggles, plus some odd reactions. One checker actually asked, "Is that the guy from MAD Magazine?" Another insisted on calling the Manager over and showing it to him to make certain that we had not voided the card with Sergio's enhancement. (The Manager laughed out loud.)

It turns out Sergio was anticipating my recent experiences with Ralphs. There's a supermarket strike on in Los Angeles and it's not going well for anyone, except maybe the markets that aren't on strike. The union struck the Vons chain which is part of a coalition with the other two major retail outlets, Albertsons and Ralphs. The latter two locked out the union workers and the strike was on. After a month or so of no progress, the union withdrew its pickets from Ralphs, figuring that it would put pressure on the other two markets if their main competitor wasn't suffering as much. The move does not seem to have made much of a difference. A month later, the strike remains deadlocked and Ralphs has lost $145 million in third quarter sales because of the strike. This may be because even without pickets, customers don't want to go to a non-union market…or it may be because they've gone and discovered that Ralphs is now a terrible, terrible market.

I've always done most of my shopping at Gelsons anyway, but Ralphs is handier for a few items. Last week and today, I stopped into different outlets and found, first of all, that the shelves were only about half-filled. The Ralphs I went to last week was out of most kinds of bread. The one today didn't have any carrots. These are not exotic items. At the one last week, I bought a chicken and while the date stamped on it was still in the future, the chicken turned out to be seriously past-tense and went into the garbage as soon as I got it home.

Today, the checker mixed up my purchases. I bought one can of cranberry sauce and was charged for two. But then I also bought a can of soup for which I wasn't charged, so it almost balanced out. I bought twelve packages of luncheon meat, got down to the car and found they were not in my bags but about six items I hadn't purchased were. I took them back and the bagger realized he'd mixed my purchases in with the lady after me, who went home without her flour or her dishwashing liquid but with a dozen packets of honey-roasted turkey she may not have wanted. There were a few other screw-ups but basically, it was a pretty unpleasant place to market. No wonder they're down $145 mil.

While I'm at it, I might as well mention that I have a pre-strike bone to pick with Ralphs. Last July, I won a prize in their "Great Escape" promotion, which gives me two free nights in a hotel in one of 38 cities. I was given a voucher and told to either mail it in with my choice of city or phone the "Reservations Center." The voucher told me I had to do one of these two things by August 15 and I would receive my prize. It further said, "All travel must be completed by December 15, 2003." So I tried phoning the Reservations Center for two weeks and received naught but busy signals. Finally, around August 6, I got a recorded announcement that said they were no longer processing vouchers via phone and that I should mail it in. I mailed it that same day and that's the last I've heard of my free vacation. When I called the Reservations Center throughout September and October, I got a new recording that said that prizes would soon be mailed out. Mine has never come, the Reservations Center number is now a disconnect, and when I recently called the main Ralphs office, I got a lady who said she didn't know anything about any contest and that everyone there who might was too busy because of the strike to talk to me. I'm hoping they're out stocking the shelves with bread and carrots.

The New York Times write about Scott McCloud and his forthcoming graphic novel, The Sculptor. I would link to this even if it didn't quote me.

Not a lot of posting today. I have to finish a Groo letter column and then start on a new project unrelated to fictional characters who eat cheese dip or lasagna.

A friend of mine who used to work in the Washington press corps (and who wishes me to not use his name here) sent me the following…

I see you're puzzled why Huckabee's running for president. I don't think he knows what else to do. He may also have handlers who have convinced him he can win and they're not telling him that because they think he can win but because it could be extremely profitable for them if he runs even if (when) he crashes and burns. I think Huckabee's fighting to be relevant somewhere and it isn't Fox News because they won't treat him as a major on air personality. Also, we all know some of the clowns running for the GOP nom are going to self destruct and it's at least possible Huck could be the only man left standing. That's the only way I can see him getting the nom. He's about as popular with Repubs as Ben Carson and Carson is one of those guys who like you always say is going to get the same number of electoral votes as you.

Hey, I think I'm going to get more electoral votes than Ben Carson. I'm a shoo-in to get zero and he's likely to wind up owing some. When was the last time someone even came within a mile of the presidency who didn't have experience as a governor, a senator or a real prominent congressperson? Eisenhower, I guess…and we don't have war heroes like that anymore.

I'll be back later to post something. I don't know what yet.

I think I reran this once before but it's my blog and I'll run it as many times as I damn well please. Its first appearance was June 2, 2006…

For no visible reason, I'm going to tell a story from my past. Back around 1970, our local comic book club would sometimes adjourn its Saturday meeting and then a band of us would car pool to a local movie theater and take in a cheap double feature. One time, we caravaned to the Meralta in Culver City for the parlay of Kelly's Heroes — starring Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles and Donald Sutherland — followed by House of Dark Shadows.

I think it was a buck to get in and I hate to think what they could have charged us to get out. The Meralta (seen below) had probably been a lovely theater at some point but by the time we got to it, it was the kind of place where the cashier wore No-Pest Strips for earrings and the ushers were just cockroaches in uniforms. The seats were shabby and one out of every four was either broken, missing or filled with a dead body. The curtains no longer operated so (and this is critical to our story) the screen was open between films. And out in the lobby was a refreshment stand that sold popcorn that was stale when you could have purchased it to munch throughout D.W. Griffith's latest.

There were about ten of us there, crammed in a section of two rows with a gap or two where the seats were unsittable. We watched Kelly's Heroes and I don't think any of us particularly enjoyed it. Then came intermission. Some of us went out to the lobby but one of our group (a guy named Gary) stayed in his seat — he may have become permanently affixed by then — and handed some coins to another of our group (a guy named Barry). Said Gary to Barry, "Hey, while you're out there, get me a candy bar. Any kind." Barry was annoyed at being treated like an errand boy so he decided to go out and spend Gary's money on the lousiest candy bar he could find.

The Meralta refreshment stand had many to pick from but when Barry spotted a display of Idaho Spud bars, he knew that was it. The Idaho Spud is a popular candy in some parts of the country but apparently not in Southern California. None of us had ever heard of it before and I've never seen one since even though it has been manufactured since (their website says) 1911. The site also explains that it's "a wonderful combination of a light cocoa flavored marshmallow center drenched with a dark chocolate coating and then sprinkled with coconut."

And maybe it is. But you know what it looks like, in or out of its wrapper? It looks like a chocolate-covered potato.

Isn't that the first thing you'd assume? It's called an Idaho Spud and it has eyes all over its packaging. So what's the first thing you think of? Chocolate-covered potato, right?

And the Idaho Spud people have no one to blame but themselves. No one forced them to call it that. There isn't even a logical reason to call it that except that they're made in Idaho where, contrary to popular belief, not everything is a potato. In fact, I developed a theory that the guy who invented it turned to his wife and said, "Muriel, I've invented a new candy bar but I don't know what to name it" and she asked, "Well, what is it?" To which he replied, "It's a wonderful combination of a light cocoa flavored marshmallow center drenched with a dark chocolate coating and then sprinkled with coconut."

Muriel said, "That's easy. Call it an Idaho Spud." And the inventor, who was drinking to celebrate his new invention, was so plastered by this point that it sounded good to him. Especially because people would think it was a chocolate-covered potato. "That'll be great for sales," he said just before he passed out, face down in a bowl of vodka.

Anyway, Barry bought Gary an Idaho Spud, took it back to where we were sitting and handed it to Gary. "Here's your candy bar."

Gary looked at it and said, "What the hell is this?"

Barry said, "It's an Idaho Spud. I think it's a chocolate-covered potato or something."

Gary recoiled in horror. "I didn't ask for a chocolate-covered potato."

Barry replied, "You didn't say not to get you a chocolate-covered potato." Gary had to concede the point. Sadly, he pulled the wrapper from his candy bar, took one bite, hated it and hurled the remainder of the Idaho Spud at the screen…

…where it stuck.

This was still during intermission and the curtains were open, the screen was exposed. We all saw the Idaho Spud sail onto the screen of the Meralta and just stay there, about two-thirds of the way up, slightly to the left of center. Then House of Dark Shadows started. For us, House of Dark Shadows starred Jonathan Frid, Grayson Hall, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Nancy Barrett and an Idaho Spud candy bar. And the Idaho Spud should have had top billing because it was in every damn scene. Prominently featured, in fact.

My friends and I paid no attention to the movie. We just stared at the Idaho Spud. Every time the camera cut, it had a new role in the film. Sometimes, it was a beauty spot on one of the actresses' faces. Sometimes, it was a fly on a wall. There was a shot of a door where it looked like the doorbell. At one point — I don't recall the exact dialogue — one of the actors said, "What is this thing?" And we all answered, referring to the brown lump on his face, "It's a chocolate-covered potato." This was years before The Rocky Horror Picture Show and home video made yelling back at a movie screen a national and annoying fad.

Other members of the audience picked up our fascination with the alleged candy bar and by the end of the film, I don't think one single person at the Meralta was paying any attention to what the actors were saying or doing; only to how the lump figured into each shot. At one point, there was an odd lighting effect that made it look like the Spud had fallen off and a moan of disappointment echoed through the theater. But then, in the very next scene, you could see it was still there and a little cheer went up. It was still there when we left, having little idea what House of Dark Shadows was about. In fact, it was still there three weeks later when I took a date to the Meralta to see Airport. On the sheer strength of superior acting ability, the Idaho Spud stole the movie from Dean Martin.

That's about all there is to this story. I'm not sure I ever went back to the Meralta so as far as I'm concerned, the Idaho Spud remained in place until they tore the place down, maybe even after that. It probably didn't but I'd like to think it did. Even now, when I find myself trapped in a particularly boring movie and my mind wanders from the storyline, I find myself wishing I had something of the sort to focus my attention on. A good movie, of course, needs no external help. But a bad movie can always use a chocolate-covered potato somewhere.

Mike Huckabee is out there lately attacking Gay Marriage. I understand that the guy's running for president and he can't get near the nomination without the support of the extreme right, which is lukewarm at best to him. Actually, I doubt he can get near the nomination with their support but that's a separate discussion. Anyway, he's talking a lot lately about wedding cakes.

It's amazing how much of the argument against Gay Marriage is about wedding cakes. I just read a bunch of sites and speeches opposing same-sex wedlock and I was noticing how much the case against it has evolved. It used to be that letting Adam marry Steve would bring down The Wrath of God upon the Earth and destroy us all. Then after quite a few Adams married quite a few Steves and nothing of the sort happened, the dire result was the annihilation of Straight Marriage, which also somehow hasn't occurred. So now, the horrendous consequence of Gay Marriage is that somewhere, someone with a cake decorator is going to have to write two male or two female names on the same application of frosting.

Huckabee also says that expecting Christians to accept marriage equality is "like asking someone who's Jewish to start serving bacon-wrapped shrimp in their deli." No, Mike, it's like expecting someone who's already serving bacon-wrapped shrimp to not refuse to sell it to anyone who walks into their deli with money. You know…the way we don't let realtors say they won't sell to a black or Hispanic family that's financially qualified.

The former governor of Arkansas would probably make the argument that being gay is not the same as being a racial minority and in some ways, it isn't. In this way, it is. When asked if homosexuality is a "choice," Huckabee usually dodges or double-talks. Saying it is is just going to get him the inevitable "When did you decide to be straight?" question which makes that position look foolish. Saying it isn't just makes the analogy to racial discrimination fit better.

He usually opts to talk about how he has many "gay friends," which makes me wonder how a gay person could be friends with Mike Huckabee. I suspect the gay people he knows are more like acquaintances he doesn't know very well. That's if they exist at all. Could you be friends in any meaningful sense with someone who often said that you lead "an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle?" and was not deserving of equal rights?

Like I said, I don't think Huckabee has a chance at the nomination. I don't even know why he's running. It's not, like some of the others, to get a good job on Fox News. He had one and he gave it up to run. Maybe he thinks that if enough people see him as a hateful bigot, he can steal Donald Trump's job on Celebrity Apprentice.

One of my favorite impressionists is a gent named Bob Anderson, who's been delighting audiences in Vegas and Branson for many decades. He's a pretty good singer when he's not doing impressions but he also has this amazing repertoire of mimicry. Basically, he does every male vocalist who ever headlined in Vegas including some pretty obscure ones. Last time I saw him, he did Frank, Dino, Tony and Sammy but he also did Mel Tormé, Otis Redding and Jack Jones.

Here he is on the 1979 Jerry Lewis Telethon. He opens as himself, then becomes Tony Bennett, Dean Martin and Tom Jones in that order. Jerry's reactions to the middle impression are priceless.

Anderson can currently be found at the Palazzo hotel-casino in Vegas starring in a Frank Sinatra tribute with a 32 piece orchestra. Having a 32 piece orchestra in that town in the era of (mostly) pre-recorded music is almost as impressive as any performer, Frank included, who might be singing to their music. But I'll bet you Bob is real good…

It's hard to believe that in 2015, we're debating vaccinations. Well, maybe it isn't. There seems to be a strain of opinion out there that views science and expertise as weapons of tyranny. It's like, "How dare they try to tell me what's right just because they know better?" The folks who start out their speeches about Climate Change with "Now, I'm not a scientist…" all seem to be implying, "…and I resent having to listen to them."

The best thing I've seen written about the vaccination issue is this satirical piece over at The Onion. Here, I'll quote the first paragraph just to give you the premise…

As a mother, I put my parenting decisions above all else. Nobody knows my son better than me, and the choices I make about how to care for him are no one's business but my own. So, when other people tell me how they think I should be raising my child, I simply can't tolerate it. Regardless of what anyone else thinks, I fully stand behind my choices as a mom, including my choice not to vaccinate my son, because it is my fundamental right as a parent to decide which eradicated diseases come roaring back.

This morning, Chris Christie's people are scrambling to walk back and play down a comment he made about how parents "need to have some measure of choice" about whether or not to vaccinate their children. Didn't we just go through a scare in this country about Ebola? Do we need to start new ones about mumps, smallpox, diphtheria, polio and measles?

I ran this on November 5, 2002 here, following a period when episodes of Hawaii Five-O (the original one) were turning up all the time on my TiVo. I actually liked the show, which is why I didn't block the TiVo from recording them and why I didn't just delete them unwatched. A couple of fans on the series however reacted badly to this piece, missing the part where I expressed my fondness for the early seasons, acting like I'd trashed an acknowledged television classic. I've watched more episodes since then and I stand by my list…but I must admit to more affection for the show when I don't see it too often…

My TiVo recently decided I must like old reruns of Hawaii Five-O and has been recording them whenever it has space available. In truth, my TiVo is wise, though a bit out of date. I did like Hawaii Five-O, at least for the first half of its 284 episodes. Along about its eighth year, it began to get a bit too repetitive. I also had a little problem watching its star, Jack Lord.

Mr. Lord, rumor had it, ruled his show with an iron fist and the belief that he was its one and only S*T*A*R. Such was his mania to preserve this reality that word began to leak, even while the show was up and operating, that its cast and crew seriously disliked the man who played Supercop Steve McGarrett. Writers and producers complained — within earshot of reporters — that he was rejecting scripts because they even slightly showcased other members of McGarrett's squad or didn't properly portray his character as brilliant, flawless and loved by women everywhere. Other cast members, sometimes anonymously, suggested the S*T*A*R had come to believe he was all that and more in real life. (Here's a link to an article that ran in TV Guide in 1971. For its time, it was surprisingly harsh about a major TV star.)

Ordinarily, I would not take such bad press at face value. But I ran into Jack Lord twice in bookstores, and heard tales from friends who'd also had the dubious pleasure. The way he acted — brusque and demanding, treating salespeople as servants to be ordered about — certainly made the reports easy to believe.

And ordinarily, I would not let that affect my enjoyment of a TV show or movie. But in this case, it did…at least a little. It somehow made the whole character of Steve McGarrett seem pompous and hollow.

That, coupled with the repetition, kind of ruined Hawaii Five-O for me, at least as a weekly pleasure. Recently, thanks to TiVo, I've been watching a few again. I like them as an occasional treat, but am reminded of the fact that every episode seemed to be a new arrangement of about eight of the same twelve scenes. Here is a list of them…

1. The governor puts pressure on McGarrett. Someone is murdering people all over Hawaii and getting away with it, but the governor somehow thinks that alone doesn't motivate McGarrett to catch the killer. The state's chief exec has to make it clear that, despite the fact that McGarrett's office has solved every crime in the state for the last ten years, they'd damn well better wrap this one up soon or there could be some big changes. (This scene sometimes prompts a brief outburst from McGarrett — "Get off my back!" — but he quickly recovers his equilibrium, apologizes and promises to work harder. And the governor understands that McGarrett is under a lot of stress because he cares so.)
2. McGarrett seals off the island. With a known criminal out there somewhere, McGarrett decides to prevent anyone from arriving on or departing the island of Oahu. "This island is like a rock," he usually says. "No one gets on or off until we catch this guy." One can only wonder what impact this would have on Hawaiian commerce or tourism if the Hawaiian police did it once, let alone every other week.
3. McGarrett sends the Hawaiians to search the island. The Hawaiian aides who work for McGarrett are there largely to be sent out on ridiculous missions. So McGarrett has evidence that the suspect eats grilled cheese sandwiches and he says to Kono (played by Zulu), "Get the boys and search the island. Visit every delicatessen, every coffee shop, every place someone could possibly get a grilled cheese sandwich. Someone must have seen something."
4. The Hawaiians quickly find an incredibly good witness. This one usually connects with the previous one: "We're in luck, Steve. Chin Ho found a druggist who runs a lunch counter on Molokai. Seems he distinctly remembers selling a grilled cheese sandwich to a man just four days ago. He thought the man was acting odd so he watched him walk to his car and wrote down the license number."
5. McGarrett gets philosophical. Sitting alone in his office, usually late at night, McGarrett muses on the nature of the criminal they're pursuing. One of McGarrett's aides (usually Danny Williams) finds him there and hears a speech that includes the phrase, "What kind of man…?" as in, "What kind of man would murder six accordion players, three stationers and an overweight nun, and leave a large bowl of tapioca to identify himself?"
6. McGarrett gets mad. This usually consists of him staring out his office window and saying, "He's out there, Danno…and he's mocking us."
7. The beautiful witness in swimwear. McGarrett, in a suit and tie despite the 90-degree weather, visits and interrogates a beautiful woman who is lounging by a swimming pool. She is obviously attracted to him.
8. McGarrett goes casual. McGarrett's underlings visit him at home or on a weekend retreat with either a new nugget of information or just to hear him brainstorm the problem at hand. In this scene, they're all in suits and ties despite the 90-degree weather while McGarrett is lounging by a swimming pool wearing shorts, a loud Hawaiian shirt and a broad, floppy straw hat. Just to show he's a regular guy who doesn't always wear a suit and tie.
9. McGarrett is windswept. This one seems to have begun in the later seasons, when comedians and TV critics were making jokes about Jack Lord's hair being sculpted of plastic. At some point, McGarrett's investigation would carry him to a high cliff or pier where breezes would blow his hair around. (Also sometimes achieved by having him meet someone coming off a helicopter or riding in one, himself.)
10. The Amateur Actor. After about the third season, there was apparently a shortage of professional actors in Hawaii who hadn't appeared several times on the show, and the producers didn't want to fly someone in from the states for a bit part. So there's always one scene where someone (often, a uniformed cop) has two lines and is so awful, you just know it's one of the camera operators or the caterer's brother. This one is invariably a highlight.
11. Some innocent remark gives McGarrett the answer. This one was actually seen in about half the TV detective shows ever done. Someone makes a stray comment like, "Well, let's get your mind off the case for a while. How about a cup of coffee?" And then Mannix, Barnaby Jones, Cannon, McCloud, McMillan or McGarrett says, "Wait a minute…coffee. Coffee is made of beans. That's it! The killer is hiding in the old abandoned bean warehouse, just outside of town!" And, of course, he is.
12. "Book him, Danno. Murder one." He didn't always say this as the last line of an episode of Hawaii Five-O. It just seemed that way.

Apart from #10, I grew tired of seeing some sequencing of these scenes in every episode. If you think I'm oversimplifying, they run the show every morning on the WGN Superstation. Watch and see. Aloha!

Right again!

I'm not watching.

I predict that every year and so far, I've never been wrong.

My favorite musical group, Big Daddy, takes recent hits — in this case, not so recent — and rearranges them as they might have sounded in the Golden Age of Rock 'n' Roll. This is their most recent video and the premise here is: "What if 'Stayin' Alive' had been recorded in the style of the Coasters?" What they did was like the Coasters' "3 Cool Cats" record, which I think was the "B" side of one of their biggest hits, "Charlie Brown."

This tune and others like it can be heard on their latest CD, Smashing Songs of Stage & Screen. It's highly recommended and available from Amazon via this link and also somewhere on iTunes. What they did to "New York, New York" alone is worth the price.

HBO has a new special, Mel Brooks Live at the Geffen, which debuted earlier this evening. If you didn't record or watch it, it's on about eight hundred times in the coming week. And in those rare moments between now and next Friday morn when they're not running that, HBO is rerunning last Friday night's Real Time with Bill Maher, upon which Mr. Brooks guested.

This was posted here on June 16, 2002 and I have nothing to add, nothing to change…

Everyone who ever avidly read comic books has a couple of issues in their past that made a big impression on them; that linger forever in the memory like a favored childhood toy. They may not be the best comics ever done but they hit you at just the right moment with ideas and imagery that were at least new to you. Just like a guy never forgets his first girl (or vice-versa), you never quite forget your first favorite comic book.

For most folks who are around my age — I hit the half-century mark last March — that favored first comic is usually a DC or Dell from the late fifties/early sixties. My friend Al Vey — the comic book artist with the shortest name in the biz, one letter less than Jim Lee — always remembered a Dell/Disney special called Donald Duck in MathMagic Land, which came out in 1961. He told me this some years ago at a party at one of the San Diego Conventions and, by one of those loopy coincidences, we were standing next to Don R. Christensen when he said it. Don is a lovely, older gent who has been in animation and comics forever, and who was an extremely prolific funnybook author. When Al said what he said, I immediately turned him around to face Don and made him repeat it. The conversation went as follows:

Al: I was just telling Mark that my favorite comic book when I was growing up was a special called Donald Duck in MathMagic Land.

Don: (after a moment of reflection) Oh, yes, I wrote that.

I love moments like these: Al was thrilled to meet the man who'd created his favorite comic book. Don was thrilled that someone Al's age (and in the business) remembered the book all those years and loved it so.

Anyway, it wasn't the first comic I bought or even the hundredth but I always liked Around the World With Huckleberry and his Friends, a Dell Giant that came out the same year as Al's fave. The book was drawn by Pete Alvarado, Kay Wright, John Carey and Harvey Eisenberg. Years later, when I began writing comics, I got to work with the first three of these gents and — I have to admit — there was a giddy little thrill there. It was the same as the thrill I got working in TV with people like Stan Freberg and June Foray, whose work I vividly recalled loving as a kid. Never got to write a comic drawn by Harvey Eisenberg — he died before I got into the field — but I did work with and became good buddies with his son, Jerry.

The writers are unknown but, at the time, a lot of these comics were being written by Vic Lockman, Jerry Belson, Del Connell, Lloyd Turner and several others. Lockman and Don R. Christensen were the most prolific writers but Don tells me he didn't work on this particular book.

Its contents may seem unremarkable — short stories of various Hanna-Barbera characters of the day, each dispatched to a different foreign clime. Huckleberry Hound went to Africa, Pixie and Dixie to Switzerland, Yakky Doodle to Australia, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy to Ireland, Yogi Bear to Egypt, Snagglepuss to Spain, Snooper and Blabber to England, Hokey Wolf to Italy and Quick Draw McGraw to the Sahara Desert. I can't tell you what I found so delightful about it and I really don't want to oversell it, since the joy of most of the stories was in their simplicity. But the Hokey Wolf tale, to name one, was about a criminal who was running around Rome, chopping up all the spaghetti so it was impossible to get long strands. At age 9, that premise and its resolution (the culprit was a messy eater, traumatized by having stained his clothes, determined to make chopped-up spaghetti popular) struck me as outrageously funny.

I'm not suggesting you seek this comic out. Unless you're nine, it probably won't have the same impact on you…and it also helps to have a certain fondness for the early H-B characters, as I still manage to retain. I don't like everything that I liked then but somehow, the early Hanna-Barbera output — the characters primarily voiced by Daws Butler — still strike me as amusing. And of course, when I devoured the comic books of them, I had Daws's superb voice and comic delivery in my head, and was able to read the word balloons accordingly. It all made for a comic that has stayed with me for more than forty years. Best twenty-five cents I ever spent…

John Oliver was on David Letterman's show the other night and Chris Wade makes an interesting point in comparing the two men. Letterman's act has really devolved into doing jokes about how lame his show is. I don't think it's that lame and I doubt he does, either…but that has become his main topic.

Boy, I liked this guy, once upon a time. I really do hope he resurfaces in some new show but it would be nice if it was a show that challenged him and fired up his enthusiasm. What that show might be and where it might air, I have no idea.

Speaking of ineptness: Did you see the two episodes of The Late, Late Show hosted by Regis Philbin? It felt like some amateur was out there, not running a talk show but instead doing his bad impression of Dana Carvey's good impression of Regis Philbin. Mr. Philbin's rep as a broadcaster has long seemed to me to be based on endurance…and he gets some solid hurrahs for that. But like Larry King and sometimes Letterman, he long ago seemed to have reached the point where it was all about Showing Up and nothing else except sometimes a certain amount of self-parody.

Last week, one website reported — unsourced — that Jay Leno had been invited to appear with Dave before Mr. Letterman leaves the 11:35 berth. Other sites picked this up and treated it like it was a huge story, which it isn't. It's been reported before and it's kind of obvious both sides want it to happen. It's in Jay's interest to go on because it'll show the world Letterman doesn't loathe him and because Dave will be gracious and it will end that aspect of The Late Night Wars.

It's in Dave's interest to have Leno on because…well, I'd like to think it's because Letterman is a bit embarrassed by how much he trashed his one-time friend and contemporary and wants to undo some of that. Even if that isn't the case, it would be a big ratings bonanza and it would probably be a real good show. So I can't see why it wouldn't happen and I assume they're just trying to figure out when.