This weekend marks thirty-eight years since the debut of what may turn out to be the best job I ever had in my life…and it sure doesn't feel like thirty-eight years. That feels about as true as any given Donald Trump promise but in this case, it's true. The Garfield and Friends cartoon show debuted on CBS on September 17, 1988 with the first of 121 half-hours.

Of those 121 half-hours, I wrote or co-wrote 121 and after a slightly-bumpy production start-up, it was just a joy from my end. On earlier cartoon shows I'd worked on — especially for Hanna-Barbera and/for broadcast on ABC — I was fighting all the time with network execs and with Standards and Practices people. On Garfield and Friends, I had no problems with folks in either department.

The initial order from CBS was for 26 half-hours — thirteen to each run four times the first year and thirteen more for a second season. I was told a two-year order was unprecedented in Saturday morning television. Halfway through the second run of those first thirteen, I was summoned to a meeting at CBS along with Lee Mendelson, who was one of the program's three Executive Producers.

We went to a big conference room, a number of network biggies filed in and there was some small talk followed by some congrats on the show and the viewership it was attracting. Finally, we got down to business. Someone asked if we could do the show as an hour. Everyone looked at me, I said yes…and the meeting was effectively over. Lee and I left with an order for twenty-six more half-hours in addition to the original twenty-six. The show stayed on for seven years total with the price CBS paid for it escalating each year, until it got too expensive for them.

We had a wonderful voice cast — Lorenzo Music, Gregg Berger, Thom Huge, Frank Welker, Howard Morris and Julie Payne were the regulars. They were joined by guest voice actors often and since I was in charge of casting, I got to bring in a lot of my favorite performers. The recording sessions were so much fun.

I later worked on another Garfield series — this one called The Garfield Show — and that was fun too but not as much fun as the first one. There's yet another Garfield series in the works now but I have nothing to do with it. I just wish whoever's doing it as much happiness as I had on mine. Here's an article someone sent me about our anniversary.

For anyone young enough to be puzzled by a recent reference to a "typewriter" on this site, here's a demonstration of what that machine was like — and here's the only use they seem to have today…

Here's the latest Fred Kaplan column.  I don't know what to make of all this and apparently no one does…

Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink declared this week that the United States has weapons orbiting in outer space. It was the first time a U.S. official has publicly acknowledged this fact. The questions, which went unaddressed, are what sorts of weapons they are, why he's announcing this now, and — most important — what it all means for the broader issues of war and peace.

Chinese and Russian spokespeople denounced Meink's speech as a step toward "war in outer space." This was not only predictable but also a sick joke. Both of those countries have been launching, orbiting, and testing weapons in space — devices designed to disable or destroy U.S. satellites — for more than a decade, to a degree and with a tactical sophistication that far outpaces anything we have done. And they have been doing this without publicly declaring anything.

Just another reason we'd all be safer with someone a lot saner in the White House.

The men of Lemon Squeezy favor us with a selection from Hamilton…

Gary Cundall sent me a question from his iPhone. It goes, "Did you ever write something that Jack Kirby penciled?" Well, sort of. My partner of the time, Steve Sherman, and I plotted some sequences for Jimmy Olsen and other books Jack was doing then. I wrote up the "pitch" and a plot outline for Kamandi #1 but that was mostly me committing to paper what Jack, Steve and I discussed in a plotting session…and it was, of course, like 90% out of Jack's instant imagination.

And as most folks know, I wrote one page in Mr. Miracle #6. It's the one where Big Barda bathed.  Jack had finished the story (he thought) and he gave me the penciled/dialogued pages to read.  I counted and informed him he was one page short.  He said something like "Well, as far as I'm concerned, I'm done with that story." I think his mind was already deeply immersed in the next one.  He told me to find a place to add a page and to write it.  I did and he drew it.

There were a few other minor things but the closest we came to a conventional writer/artist collaboration was a story that was intended for the second issue of Spirit World.  That short-lived publication was part of a very brief attempt by DC to do black-and-white magazines competing with Warren's Creepy and Eerie.  DC put out one issue each of Spirit World and In the Days of the Mob but the folks in their distribution department couldn't get retailers to display them.

They called off the whole thing and the material we'd prepared for Spirit World #2 wound up in their regular color comics. A story called "Toxl the World Killer" was published in Weird Mystery Tales #2. Here is who did what on it…

Jack and I came up with the plot together — and it was more his than mine. The "host" character — Dr. E. Leopold Maas — was wholly his invention. I wrote out a panel-by-panel breakdown of the story and he followed it pretty closely. He drew the story in pencil and and he wanted me to then write the dialogue.

Today, that would be considered "Marvel Method" but back then — this was in 1971, I believe — the person paid and credited as Writer usually did not do a panel-by-panel breakdown of the story. Stan Lee told me he never did one. More common was that either the Writer or Artist — or both, collaborating — would come up with the idea and then the penciler would develop the storyline and decide what to put in Panel 1, what to put in Panel 2, etc.  In Stan's world, if you wrote the final draft of the dialogue, you were The Writer, no matter whose idea the story was or who figured out how to tell it on a series of pages and panels.

Click the pic to make it larger.

So I wrote the dialogue, trying to emulate Jack's writing style and he approved what I wrote with no changes. I recently found my script so if you want to see it, you can download a PDF image of the first page here. If the font looks odd to you, it's probably because it was created on a thing that existed back then called a "typewriter."

Mike Royer was the inker and ordinarily, he would have lettered the pages but DC asked that the story be sent in without lettering. Someone there had an idea that the black-and-white magazines should have typeset lettering like you saw in a MAD magazine movie or TV parody. I'm not sure what font they had in mind or if the word balloons would have been square ot what. They might not have decided that before they changed their minds and decided not to do that.

And then — a week or two later, after we'd finished the entirely of Spirit World #2 — they decided not to publish it at all.

When the story was repurposed for Weird Mystery Tales #2, they had the pages lettered with the usual comic book hand lettering.  At the time, the two main DC workhorse letterers were John Costanza and Ben Oda.  Before Royer took over as letterer/inker of Jack's work, Jack kept asking for his work to be lettered by Ben, with whom he had a long friendship.  Ben was for a time in the fifties, the main letterer for the studio Jack had with Joe Simon.

The DC Production Department would tell him, "We'll see if we can fit it into Ben's schedule" and then they'd give it to Costanza.  Or the few times Costanza was unavailable, they'd give it to someone else.  I believe Oda did letter a cover or two for Jack's books but the Production Department there didn't like Jack's work and especially his independence.  They ignored most of his requests about coloring, too.  (I told Jack that if he really wanted his comics lettered by Oda, he should be demanding Costanza.)

Nelson Bridwell, one of Jack's few allies in the DC offices, assembled Weird Mystery Tales and he made some slight, benevolent changes in the dialogue I'd written.  I don't think Nelson knew I'd done it because when the comic was printed, the credits — as you can see above — said "Story & Art: Jack Kirby."  (When we turned in Spirit World #2, all the credits were on a Table of Contents page in the front and I guess Nelson never saw it.)

Anyway, that's the closest I came to writing a comic book story that Jack drew.  Later on when Jack was at Marvel, Jim Shooter tried to convince Jack to have me dialogue his books but I refused and Jack refused and that's a long story that will be in a book I'm finishing.  So will the story of a later book that Jack and I began discussing for Marvel's Epic line.  Jack and I created the bare bones of a new comic together — no drawings, nothing but some notes on paper — and Archie Goodwin, who was then the line's editor, made us a great offer, sight unseen.  But then a few weeks later, Archie informed me he might not be able to make good on all the terms of that offer and that project evaporated…another story for the book.  I also, when Archie was editing at DC, talked to him about a mini-series of Toxl the World-Killer but nothing came of it, probably because Jack was no longer around to draw it.

This concludes a long answer to a short question.  My apologies to everyone reading this post  for not just giving Gary Cundall a shorter answer.

Concerned that our government is either doing too little to deal with the challenge of Artificial Intelligence or too much? Then go read what Robert Reich has to say about it. Then go read what Paul Krugman has to say about what Robert Reich had to say about it.

Last night, Stephen Colbert guested on Jimmy Kimmel's show and presented him with a gift. On the set of his show, Colbert had a Captain America shield which was presented to him by Joe Quesada back when Joe was the head honcho at Marvel.  Colbert said it had been hanging on a wall in the Marvel offices since 1960.  Quesada sent it to him and now he was passing it on to Kimmel.

There is an error here.  The shield was not hanging in that office since 1960 — a year, let's note, when Marvel wasn't publishing any comics with Captain America…or any super-heroes for that matter.  It wasn't there when I first visited the Marvel offices in 1970.  It was there when I was there in the eighties though I can't give you a precise year when I saw it on a later visit.  I can tell you where I saw it though.

It was in the office of an editor there named Mark Gruenwald who went to work for the company in 1978.  In fact, he's the one who had it made…I don't know when.  Mark died in 1996 — a terrible loss of a great, clever guy who was liked and loved by everyone.  I believe some company has since mass-produced them but when Mark had it made, it was probably a one-of-a-kind item.  It would have been nice if someone had mentioned Mark.

Netflix is now streaming all six seasons (135 episodes) of SCTV. I remember that show as being very. very good, especially in seasons two through five…but even those first and last ones always had a segment or two that was worth tuning in for…

COVID changed the world a lot and one thing it did was to create new uses for the Internet and programs like Zoom. I kinda liked the collaborations that emerged with a large band playing together with each of the musicians playing separately in their own homes. I posted a lot of them here but I'm still finding ones like this great rendition of "Birdland"…

From October 25, 1993 — MTV takes a chance on a new talk program, The Jon Stewart Show. The series was produced by Madeleine Smithberg (creator of The Daily Show) and Lorne Michaels was among its executive producers. Stewart now talks about it as if it was a fast failure but it was on for two years and 160 half-hours which were later rerun here and there, sometimes re-edited into an hour format. He was a good host then but a better one now…

Someone who signs this name "Roger" sent me the following…

My gal and I very much enjoyed Comic-Con this past July, in part because we for the most part avoided the trading floor and spent our time upstairs attending panels and presentations. A lot of the panels we attended were hosted and hosted quite well by you and they were all enjoyable if not informative but I noticed one thing that was different about the panels you hosted. In all the other panels, the host would ask a lot of questions but he would leave time at the end for questions from the audience. You don't do that.

This is not a complaint because I found all your panels interesting and wished all of them had gone on longer. I was just curious why you don't let the audience ask questions.

I do…sometimes. It's usually a matter of me reading the audience and sensing if they're enjoying the flow. If they are, it's one of those "If it ain't broke…" decisions. I have hosted panels and attended panels where at some predetermined time, a wonderful conversation was in progress and the attendees were enjoying the hell out of it…until the host opened it up to questions and someone asked either a very bad one or a highly self-indulgent one.

I had this problem for the early years of the Cartoon Voices panels. The audience was always filled with folks who wanted to do professional voice acting and who saw the "questions from the floor" portion as their chance to perform or audition or just to have a personal chat with some panelist they admired. Once when I had June Foray on the panel, most of those who lined up at the mike were guys who thought they did a great Bullwinkle impression and wanted to do a little impromptu scene with June as Rocky the Flying Squirrel.

Sometimes, that's fun but I could see much if not most of the audience rolling their eyes and in some cases, getting up to leave. We had one guy who showed up every year to try and make the remainder of the panel be about him and the career he wanted to have. I could also tell that the panelists didn't want to be part of that so it was up to me to play Bad Cop and cut it off.

I stopped asking for audience participation on the Cartoon Voices Panel. We started another panel — one called The Business of Cartoon Voices panel — which I do every year at Comic-Con on Sunday afternoon. That one always has a lot of Q-and-A with the audience and I just kinda ask that people ask questions, the answers to which could be of interest to all.

Basically, it's just a matter of me judging the mood of the room — the audience and the panelist(s) — and trying to steer things to make the panel pleasing to all. But I'll let you in on a little secret: For obvious reasons, you want the panel to end on a strong note…maybe a big laugh or someone on the panel saying something that registers big with those facing us. I may even have in mind a story or anecdote that someone on stage can tell for a strong finish.

Back when I used to interview Ray Bradbury at Comic-Cons, Ray was in his eighties and I got the best he had to offer by cuing him to tell some story I'd heard him tell somewhere else once. I occasionally had Harlan Ellison suggest one. So for each Ray Bradbury panel, I was up there asking him questions I knew he'd respond to with wonderful stories…and all the time, I was plotting to end with him delivering a wonderful punch line. I was real proud of myself when I could manage that.

Ray was more comfortable and the audience had a much better time when I kept him in familiar territory. One year when I let audience members ask questions, one guy was determined to have the rest of the hour be about him and his writing and his career — and no one in the room, Ray especially, liked that very much. In my position as moderator, I can see when the audience is getting restless or even leaving and it's my job to stop it.

Also, once in a while, I'm interviewing someone who has asked that we avoid some topic. An actress once asked me, just before we started, not to ask her — or let the audience ask her — about another actress on the same TV show. Once when I interviewed Harvey Kurtzman at Comic-Con, he welcomed audience questions but insisted they be posed by the audience filling out cards. The cards were passed up to me to cull through, selecting questions that did not ask certain things, the main one being "Why did you leave MAD?"

He did not want to address that matter on the panel…so I didn't ask it and we had a wonderful conversation without it. But halfway through it, I had about forty cards, thirty-six of which just said, "Why did you leave MAD?" I think I actually made up a question or two that wasn't on the cards but I pretended it was. And of course, one fanzine that reported on the panel scolded me for never asking Kurtzman the most obvious question.

In the previous post, autocorrect autocorrected the word “folks” to “fools.” I have corrected the autocorrection. Thanks to all the fools — I mean folks — who follow figured it out and wrote to tell me.

I'm not watching the Emmy Awards tonight and, as tomorrow's ratings will probably prove, I'm not alone in skipping this kind of show. The only thing that's usually of interest to me is that each year when these awards are being bestowed, the Academy posts on its website a list of every danged person they can think of who's died since the previous Emmy telecast and was even remotely connected to television. This is not me being macabre. I just find that on each year's list, I see a lot of folks I came into contact with but didn't hear that they'd died. This year's list is at this link and it's very long.

Here's the televised "In Memoriam" segment…

Here's an article you oughta read even though it's not written by Fred Kaplan.  It's Maggie Haberman and Jim Rutenberg writing about the Trump Administration's attempts — with some successes — to control and silence The Press. An excerpt…

Almost 20 months into Mr. Trump's second term, his long-running media clashes have grown into a sweeping campaign to control speech in America that stands out for applying so many levers, so fast, all at once.

Driven by personal pique, fury over leaks and a determination to shape the political narrative to his advantage, Mr. Trump is deploying the might of the federal government and filing personal lawsuits — targeting not just journalists and liberal critics, but also comedians and talk show hosts, and the corporate entities behind them.

It ain't working very well but it's fiercely unAmerican that it's working at all or even being attempted.

Among the many interesting things one can find on YouTube are the music tracks used for ambience at the Disney theme parks. I understand that there are folks who love Disneyland or Disney World so much that they have these music tracks playing in their own homes during waking hours. It's a way to feel like you're in Fantasyland (or wherever) when you're vacuuming your living room or taking out the trash.  It's also a lot cheaper and the food is probably better.

Some of these "loops" are several hours long.  They cone in seasonal moods and many are specific to certain places within in the park. Here's one that's played on Main Street and here's one that you hear when you're waiting in line for the Haunted Mansion. There are dozens of these on YouTube.

My favorite of the ones I've checked out is no longer heard at any theme park as far as I know. It's the one for the courtyard for the now-extinct 3-D Muppetvision attraction. It's almost an hour of some orchestra playing jazzy instrumental arrangements of songs from various Muppet movies and other projects. There are some repeats in there but it's really a nice assemblage…