In case you haven't guessed, it's another Mushroom Soup Monday here at newsfromme.com, meaning I'm busy writing cheese dip and/or lasagna jokes and haven't the time to update my blog with as much content as usual. Even this message is more than most people post on their blogs some weeks (hell, some months) so I feel not a dram of guilt. We will be back tomorrow in full force, probably with another long "family" remembrance. This one involved my Uncle Aaron and one of those warehouses full of old mannequins that you see in suspense movies. 'Til then…

My buddy Paul Harris discusses his encounters with Ted Nugent. I don't know Mr. Nugent and I'm not sure I've ever heard and/or enjoyed his music…but it strikes me that he has some bizarre views about guns and race and politics and — and the "and" is the big part — has discovered that voicing them is very, very good for business. I guess this puts him ahead of the people who only seem to be saying such things because it's good for business.

Sad to hear of the death of TV writer Rick Mittleman last Wednesday. Rick, who was 84, was walking his dog in the Hancock Park area of Los Angeles and was killed in a traffic accident involving an S.U.V. One of his colleagues, Jack Mendelsohn, just told me about it and he was really depressed…as am I.

Rick was one of the most prolific TV writers of his day, able to write comedies, dramas, adventure shows…he even wrote for The Flintstones. His was one of those names I knew from credits on all my favorite programs, including The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Odd Couple, Get Smart, M*A*S*H, The Red Skelton Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, That Girl and so many others. In the late sixties, when I was sneaking up on a career in TV writing, I went to a bookstore in Hollywood to buy some produced scripts to use as models. I was amazed at how many of those scripts were by Rick Mittleman.

I met Rick through our mutual work with the Writers Guild of America. In the late seventies, the WGA was trying to find a way to wrest jurisdiction of animation writers from Local 839, the Animation Union. For long, circuitous reasons we who wrote cartoons were in a union that represented artists with whom we did not have much in common. 839 wanted to maintain jurisdiction over us because we paid the highest rate of dues and the withholding of our services was a good weapon if and when that union had to threaten to strike.

Taking a body of employees out of one union and allowing them to join another is called Craft Severance…and the tricky thing about that is that you can't file for it when there's a contract in place. Once the union signs its new contract with Management, there's this thing called a "contract bar" that guarantees the employees represented will not leave the bargaining unit.

Rick had written both live-action (under the WGA) and animation (under 839) and he knew how badly the Animation Union represented the needs of its writer members. The Union still has control of writers at some studios and it does a better job of representing them now. But back then, the gent who was 839's Business Agent and negotiator was unabashedly hostile to writers. He even told some of us that if it had been up to him, he would have lowered our pay. Even after Rick stopped writing animation and had no self-interest, he campaigned to try and get us out of that union and therefore away from that Business Agent.

In 1979, it was necessary for the Animation Union to go on strike. It was Rick who realized that while we were on strike, no contract bar was in place. I don't recall if he was on the WGA Board of Directors then — he was, from time to time — but he got them to quickly file a lawsuit demanding Craft Severance. At the time, I was writing both animation and live-action so I was selected as the writer in whose name the suit would be filed, which was fine with me.

The suit did not succeed. Craft severance is very difficult to achieve and it's even harder when…the National Labor Relations Board is full of Republican appointees, as it was then so soon after Nixon. Also, management — in this case, the studios like Disney and Hanna-Barbera — was working closely with the union to keep us in the union. That should give you some idea of how poorly the union represented our concerns then. 839 wasn't just in bed with the producers, it was gleefully subservient in a committed S&M relationship. (And I will remind you again that this is no longer the case under its current Business Agent, who is a good guy.)

Before we reached that outcome, we spent a lot of time in hearing rooms at the N.L.R.B. and what struck me was that Rick was in there, devoting his time and fighting along with the rest of us. He was not writing animation at the time and was so successful in live-action that he could easily have avoided that kind of work the rest of his life. It was a matter of principle and justice to him…and that's when I realized that in addition to being a fine, fine writer, Rick Mittleman was also a fine, fine gentleman.

Stephen Colbert, not in character, gives advice to teenage girls. I'm not sure why Stephen Colbert's advice to teenage girls is any better than that of a random male of his age chosen off the street but he is quite famous. And he does say some things you might find interesting…

It looks like plans to expand the Convention Center in San Diego may have hit a little snag. I'll bet they find a way to work around this.

If you find yourself in one of those debates about whether the con will stay in San Diego, this may be of some interest. It's a list of every event that has inhabited that convention center for the last eighteen months and the estimated attendance. Comic-Con International is pegged at a turnout of 130,000 both times it's listed but what struck me was that nothing else was even close. I think the largest event after us is something called the Rock N Roll Marathon Health & Fitness Expo, which had 60,000 attendees — less than half of what Comic-Con draws — in each of its two stagings. Almost everything else is under 15,000.

So why are they talking about expanding that convention center? For us. They don't need the added room to attract the Western Car Wash Show and its 2,000 folks who are in, I suppose, the car-washing business. They need it, or feel they need it, to keep Comic-Con in San Diego.

(I wonder if, when you pay to attend the Western Car Wash Show, you can also purchase a car deodorizer, a giant-size Mountain Dew and a bag of Funyuns.)

Meanwhile: Several folks (starting with John Heaton) have written to inform me that the photo I posted of the Cookie Monster Imperial Stormtrooper was taken by a Flickr user called mooshuu. Here are a lot of his or her other photos of the convention.

Jamie Coville has posted a nice array of photos from the con and audio recordings of panels, including a couple of mine. The Bill Finger panels will be of particular interest to some.

Lastly: I am in charge of three of the most popular events at Comic-Con each year — Quick Draw!, the Saturday Cartoon Voices panel and the Sunday Cartoon Voices panel. For some odd reason, there's a debate going on over at one message board about who selects the people who appear on these panels. Simple answer: I do. I may consult with others but it's always been my decision.

The decisions are made at least six weeks before the convention and sometimes well before that. The convention program guide, after all, has to go to press long before the con commences. Still, this year, I had a lot of people who contacted me in the week before the con and either asked to be on one of these panels or, in one case, told me they were going to be on it. That was an interesting conversation but I managed to convince him that, no, he couldn't just insist on participating.

Then I had a couple of folks who showed up just before each of my two big events on Saturday — and I mean like two minutes before — and tried to talk their way into spots on the stage. I don't know what they were thinking. I do know what I was thinking and it wasn't flattering.

I actually do not need applicants for Quick Draw! I have more than a half-dozen people I've promised the third seat to, and one of them will do it next year and another will do it the year after and so on. Also, the Cartoon Voices panels for next year may be already close to full. I hate saying no to people so I'm posting this in the hope that fewer people will ask me, thereby forcing me to say no. Which, like I said, I hate doing.

Woody Allen's first-ever podcast interview! It's 35 minutes and it's mostly about his new movie…

Lenar Whitney, a Louisiana state representative running for Congress, has a video up in which she declares "Global warming is a hoax." You can see it at this page where you can also see the Politifact people explain, point by point, why she's wrong.

You know, I used to take a view of Global Warming that went roughly like this: "I hope the scientists who say it's so are all wrong but I don't think we can afford to take that chance and we need to act as if it's true." I thought that was a good way to look at it. I was acknowledging that I'm not a climate scientist or anything of the sort but that I believed the consensus among such folks was so overwhelming that we had to assume it was so. Sometimes in discussions, I'd parenthetically add that a lot of things that have been proposed to combat Global Warming — mostly involving limiting pollutants — seem like good ideas anyway.

Well, no one else thought this was a good way to look it. The debate has gotten so polarized that you kind of have to say, "Yes, Global Warming is real" or "No, Global Warming is a hoax" and there's no room for nuance…so I've given up nuance. Yeah, I think it's real. And I haven't heard anyone who feels otherwise for a reason deeper than that they hate the notion that Al Gore and "The Liberals" might be right.

On Saturday on my way to Quick Draw!, I passed this gent dressed in a Cookie Monster/Star Wars mash-up and thought he was very funny. Then on my way up the escalator to the top floor, I suddenly thought it would be funny to bring him into Quick Draw! and have the panel draw other variations on that mash-up. So I ran back downstairs, found him and invited him to come up for the event later. He never showed up so we did the premise anyway…and he missed out on all that attention, plus I'd sent my assistant out to get him a cookie.

Several folks sent me this photo of him which is apparently on several different sites at the moment. I don't know where it originated so I can't ask permission from the photographer but if it's you, please let me know if it's okay to leave it up here and let me give you credit.

Then on Sunday when I walked into one of my panel rooms, there was the real Cookie Monster. But I've already told that story.

Sunday was my favorite day of the con. As I mentioned, it started with the Jack Kirby Tribute Panel and then we had what was probably the best Cartoon Voices panel we ever did…including the last-ever performance of that "Snow White" script that panel attendees are sick of. Here's a decent video of the panel which featured, left to right, Gregg Berger, Vanessa Marshall, Fred Tatasciore, Debra Wilson, Robin Atkin Downes and surprise (to him) guest, Bill Farmer…

Then we did a panel called Cover Story: Art of the Cover. It's an annual thing I host in which artists discuss designing covers for comic books and this time, we had Amanda Conner, Fiona Staples, Mark Brooks, Jae Lee and Stan Sakai. A lot of folks seem to love the "shop talk" aspect of it. (Note to Self: Next year, either get the con to make this panel longer or have one less artist on it so we can go even more in-depth.)

My final panel of the convention was one called The Business of Cartoon Voices. Let me tell you two quick stories as to how this panel came about…

QUICK STORY #1: Many moons ago, I hosted the first-ever panel at Comic-Con with cartoon voice actors. Now, they're all over the place but back in whatever year that was, I got the con to give me a small room and I got a bunch of such people to come down and demonstrate their craft. Within a few years, we were turning away so many attendees that they moved us into the biggest room they had and because of how easily we filled that hall, we added a second Cartoon Voice panel — one on Saturday, one on Sunday.

For a while, we took questions from the audience but I finally decided not to do that. The questions were almost all about how to get into the profession and they warranted longer, more detailed answers than time allowed. The questioners also had a tendency to audition as they were asking their questions and it was obvious that most of the audience didn't want to hear that. People would start walking out the moment I said, "Let's take some questions from the audience." So I decided to stop saying that and to think maybe there should be a separate panel focusing on how to get into the business.

QUICK STORY #2 and this may not be so quick: There are an awful lot of people out there, mostly young, who want a career in voicing cartoons. By "an awful lot," I mean way more than the business can handle. Even if every one of them had the skills of a Daws Butler or June Foray, there could not possibly be enough work for them all. It's simple math. Not everyone who wants to pitch for the Dodgers will get that opportunity either.

Since there are so many people who want in, there's a thriving industry out there to coach and teach these folks. In Los Angeles alone, there are somewhere between 100 and 300 classes or private coaches and many of them are very, very good. But some are not. Some are, to put it bluntly, ripping off eager wanna-bes and promising them that which can never be. If a teacher has any integrity at all, it begins with not accepting money from folks with no flair for the profession.

The late Daws Butler was, I think, the best teacher of voiceover skills ever. (He was also, I am prepared to argue, the best practitioner ever of his art but if you wanted to say it was Mel Blanc or Paul Frees or Frank Welker or someone else in that phylum, I wouldn't quarrel.) The very first thing Daws did was to turn down students who he believed lacked promise. You could not get into his class with money…and if he did allow you in, he did not take an excessive amount of it from you.

I keep hearing of cases where someone has done the opposite and that's why my friend, the also-late Earl Kress and I started this panel called The Business of Cartoon Voices. Earl was a student of Daws and he shared my anger at such cases. Here's a recent one…

A troubled woman, about my age, approached me at WonderCon and said she was desperate for advice. Her daughter, who's about 25, is studying with a Voice Coach. Her daughter dreams of being a Cartoon Voice performer and has no other dream in life. The mother, who loves her daughter, is shelling out large sums of cash to a Voice Coach who promises the young lady will have a luscious and lucrative career.

This has been going on for around eighteen months without the slightest hint of a job. When the mother asks, "Shouldn't she be getting auditions or an agent by now?" the V.C. says more lessons (i.e., more payments) are still necessary. The woman told me the amounts of the checks she has written and I was shocked. They pretty much amount to her life's savings. She said, "I don't know if I should keep paying him or find another teacher or what." She is clearly motivated by nothing more or less than to help her daughter achieve her dream.

Much of the money she has paid out has been to make "demo" recordings of her daughter's work — the kind of recordings to which agents and casting directors listen. She gave me the most recent one and her phone number and I went home, listened and called her. While I hate to say that anyone could not possibly have a career in a dreamed-of field, I will say that Daws Butler would never have taken this woman's money in the first place.

This kind of predatory exploitation of burgeoning talent bothers the heck outta me. Earl and I talked about it years ago and we decided to start this panel to educate beginners and because we wouldn't feel good if we didn't do something like this. So I bring in agents (this year, Sandie Schnarr of AVO and Cathey Lizzio of CESD) and actors (this year, Gregg Berger, Vanessa Marshall and Bill Farmer) and we give the audience the basics. Some people have paid thousands of dollars just to learn what we dispense for free in ninety minutes. Sandie and Cathey are, by the way, two of the best voiceover agents in the business.

No, there's no audio or video of the panel available but in the coming weeks, I'm going to take some space on this blog to summarize what was said. For now, let me just say: If you want to get into voiceover work, be real careful about who you give your money to. There are great coaches and teachers out there. (Bill Farmer is one and Bob Bergen is another.)

So that was Sunday and that was Comic-Con 2014. I'll have more to say about the convention in the coming weeks. In fact, I'll probably be writing about it until it's time to prep for next year's…which, by the way, is earlier in the month than usual. Comic-Con International 2015 will convene on July 8 and run through July 12. It's barely worth my time to unpack.

Work is soon to start on a massive expansion of the convention center in San Diego. Assuming Comic-Con remains there after the current contract expires, which is what I assume, it will allow even more people to attend and for those who do attend to not be as crowded. However, according to this article, there could be some inconvenience before the expansion is completed.

By the way: I may be alone in this but this year, though there were theoretically as many admissions as ever, the hall did not feel as crowded to me as it usually does. Now, granted…

1. I am 6'3" and rather wide and I walk with great purpose and a GUEST badge on my chest. So even with my imperfect knees, I may still have an easier time getting around that hall than others.
2. I'm upstairs a lot doing panels. I didn't even set foot in the main hall on Sunday. And…
3. I have the good sense to stay away from some of the more congested areas, especially those relating to gaming and videogames. There's a reason it's impossible to get through those aisles and this is it: They want it that way. The gaming exhibitors want everyone in the business to see that their product is so hot and awesome that their booth is mobbed all day…and they design their exhibitions and plan giveaways with that in mind. It would not surprise me if booth managers have been fired because it was possible to get through the aisles around their display. Don't venture over there and then complain to me that it's impossible to move. That's like going to a Gallagher concert and whining that you got watermelon juice all over your pants.

I have more to say about Sunday at the con and about the con in general. I'll try to finish up the report later tonight.

Two days ago, comic "Professor" Irwin Corey hit the age of 100, thereby making him about as old as a lot of people thought he was, thirty years ago. I wish some of his funnier talk show appearances were still available for viewing. He was always hysterical even though he had a tendency to make a shambles of any show foolish enough to invite him on. I remember Mike Douglas just sitting there, unable to ad-lib or even comprehend what was becoming of his program…but the audience was laughing too hard to call a halt to any of it. That's probably why no one's had him on since Mike Douglas went off.

Corey still gets around, performing occasionally and giving interviews. When he isn't doing that, he's been known to walk the streets of New York, panhandling like a common beggar…but he takes all the money he collects and donates it to worthwhile charities. Nice to know that at his age, he can afford to do that. Here's a little preview of a birthday party for him that has since occurred. Funny man.

Mr. Sondheim's "Instructions to the Audience"…

As Mark Joseph Stern explains, the folks arguing against Gay Marriage have pretty much run out of any argument beyond, "We don't like the whole idea of it." Which is not something that can or should fly with the courts. In fact, it's the same argument I'd have to use if I ever launched a campaign to ban cole slaw. I may still try it.

Trust Dick Morris with their retirement income.

That this man still has an audience (and an occasional place on Fox News and other Conservative media outlets) is stunning. When I write here that right-wingers are being gouged by pundits who get rich telling them what they want to hear…this is the kind of thing I have in mind.

The photo above is from this year's Jack Kirby Tribute Panel at Comic-Con and the guy in it is Charlie Kochman, editorial director at Harry N. Abrams Books. Charlie is my friend and editor — two designations that do not always go together — and he's showing a mock-up of that new book I assembled for his firm, The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio. As I've said, I'll write more about it when we're closer to its release date.

I always enjoy the Sunday morn Kirby panel at the convention.  This year's featured along with Charlie, Len Wein, Scott Shaw! and a gent named Paul S. Levine, who is the attorney for Lisa Kirby, trustee of the Rosalind Kirby Trust. We sat and talked of Jack for 75 minutes, which is always fun.

Following those 75 minutes, I had to scurry over to Room 6A, which is one of the big ones, to do Cartoon Voices II, and I need to explain something here. As Moderator of many panels, I have many duties. You can kinda figure out what I do in terms of introducing panelists and posing questions to them…but as I tell people who ask, the two toughest parts of my job there are (a) getting the panel to start on time and (b) getting the panel to end on time. The latter is pretty simple: You just watch the clock, know when you're supposed to be outta there and start wrapping things up when you're within about five minutes of that moment.

Starting on time is tougher. Panelists may be late. There may be some set-up that takes time. (At Quick Draw!, we have to place and configure those projectors that put what the artists draw onto the big screens.) And then there's the most likely problem, especially in the big rooms: The panel before may just not care about finishing on time. Or they may think (wrongly) that just because they somehow started ten minutes late that they're entitled to go ten minutes into the next panel's time. I have occasionally had to get nasty about this…which is rare for me. I almost never get nasty about anything but I do it for having my panels start more or less on time. One year, I had to threaten to cancel Quick Draw! and blame them to get the preceding panel to vacate the stage.

So as I entered 6A, someone on the con staff says to me, "They're going to go over," referring the the preceding panel which was still going on. I didn't know what the panel was but I said, "No, they aren't." I didn't care what it was or why but I was steeling myself to get nasty and to demand they finish on time. And then I saw what the panel was…

It was Cookie Monster.

On the stage were three Muppeteers from Sesame Street — Eric Jacobson, who was operating Grover; Joey Mazzarino who does Murray Monster and David Rudman, the current operator of Cookie Monster. The moderator was Chris Hardwick, who hosts the @midnight show on Comedy Central — all folks I think are terrific. I met Eric on the set of a Muppets taping back in 2008 and told him how good I thought he was. I wrote about that here.

Well, I don't know about you but I don't have the heart to throw Cookie Monster off a stage, especially a stage on which he and Grover are entertaining a roomful of very young children and their parents. I'd throw DC Comics or Marvel or Lucasfilm or even one of my own employers off…but not Cookie Monster. I decided that just this once, maybe my panel didn't have to start on time.

They had a couple of kids waiting at the audience microphone to ask questions and I figured to let them finish. Before they could, a lady who worked for the con in that room, ran up and began doing her job. Perhaps because she knew how militant I was about panels finishing on time, she grabbed the mike and told them there wasn't time for the people who'd been waiting in line, probably for quite some time, to ask their questions. The audience groaned and booed…and I yelled out that they could go over.

Chris Hardwick announced from the stage that the next panel had generously agreed to allow them to finish and there was a big cheer. And then Chris did something wise and classy. In a non-condescending way, he reminded the kids present that the lady they'd booed didn't deserve that; that she was just doing her job and enforcing the rules. I thought that was very smart of him, turning the moment into a teachable one, perhaps helping the children present learn something about following the rules and about cooperation. Anyway, it just felt nice to me.

The last questions were answered. The last one was a young man who wanted to know when there'd be a transgender Muppet — which is what I always thought Ms. Piggy was — and then it was over. I wish I'd seen all of that panel because what I did see was wonderful.

In the curtained-off backstage area, someone from Sesame Street thanked me and I introduced myself to David Rudman. I really think he and Eric are amazing. It's tough enough to just do an impression of someone as gifted as Frank Oz — to sound enough like him that it won't jar when they intersperse newly-recorded segments with his old ones, as they do on Sesame Street. Just the match is impressive. But then the new guy has to also give a performance in someone else's skin, being funny and (in this case) ad-libbing in character without losing that match. That is very difficult and Messrs. Rudman and Jacobson are amazing at it.

As I was speaking to David, a photographer started snapping photos of us. Instinctively, I guess, he brought up the Cookie Monster puppet to get into the shot and Eric came over and added Grover to the mix. Here's the photo of me, two of my favorite characters and two superb puppet performers. I was a lot happier about this than I appear to be in this picture. (Like I told you earlier, I was exhausted for the entire convention.)

Within moments, they were gone and I had to set up for Cartoon Voices II. I host two Cartoon Voices panels at each Comic-Con and I've been doing this long enough to lose count. The following statement is selfless because I am not the reason but they have all been good and some have been outstanding. This one, I think, was the best. The panelists were Gregg Berger, Vanessa Marshall, Fred Tatasciore, Debra Wilson, Robin Atkin Downes and the surprise addition, late in the proceedings, of Bill Farmer. And by that, I mean it was not just a surprise to the audience that I brought up the voice of Goofy. It was a surprise to Bill, too. I saw him seated in the front row and decided our reading of the story of "Snow White" could use an extra performer.

For the last umpteen Cartoon Voice panels, including the one the day before, I have the panelists read (and enhance with their performances) this lame script of "Snow White" I found. I announced at the outset of Sunday's reading that this would be the last-ever time I'd use that script and as it turned out, I'm not sure I can use it again. When you see the video, you'll know why. Everyone on the panel was brilliant but I'm sure the others won't mind if I single out a stellar performance by Debra Wilson in the title role.

Debra drove down to the con that day on her motorcycle and hit some freakish California weather, en route. After three thunderstorms, she was drenched to the skin but like a good trouper, she still took the stage, wet and shivering. Other panelists and several audience members donated articles of clothing and she pressed on, delivering a stunning and hilarious display of talent. The other folks had been on my panels before so we knew how good they were. Debra, on her first panel, was a delightful discovery.

There are some partial videos of the panel on YouTube. They were shot with handheld Smartphones and have weak audio and I suggest you not watch them as they don't do the panel justice. I know of a good one that's coming and I'll embed it when it's there. Trust me on this.

And I have to go get some stuff done so I'll tell you more about Sunday in the next posting.

Today (Wednesday) is Stu Shostak's big season-ender…the last broadcast before Stu's Show goes on a well-deserved hiatus. His guest is our pal Jerry Beck, who is one of the world's greatest authorities on animation and he'll be discussing, among other topics, what cartoons we can expect to see released on DVD and Blu-ray in the coming months. Tune in. Listen. Enjoy.

Stu's Show can be heard live today at the Stu's Show website and you can listen for free there. The webcast starts at 4 PM Pacific Time, 7 PM Eastern and other times in other climes, and runs a minimum of two hours and sometimes three or beyond.  Shortly after a show ends, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are a paltry 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three.  So if you miss today's show, you can still hear it. It's just gonna cost.