• I think we should pass a law to defund 230 members of Congress.

Brian Madigan liked my piece on the first issues of X-Men and The Avengers and he has a follow-up question. It's about the extent to which X-Men resembled the new DC strip, The Doom Patrol, which came out the same year…

I've always thought X-Men looked a bit rushed (Jack could never remember if Beast had gloves or not). If DC had come out with the X-Men everyone would have seen it as a Fantastic Four copy. Let's see, Flame guy? Ice guy. Monster Hero? Beastly hero. Female hero with weak girly power? Let's do telekinesis. Thing and Johnny tease each other? Replicate that with the Beast and Bobby.

My big question is who came first? Professor X [leader of the X-Men] or Dr. Niles Caulder [leader of the Doom Patrol]? Or is this one of those coincidences?

The Doom Patrol debuted in DC's My Greatest Adventure #80 which went on sale in mid-April, 1963. The first issue of the X-Men came out the following July, probably the first week. Given the timing, it is theoretically possible that someone at Marvel saw the first Doom Patrol issue, decided to rip it off and hustled their imitation out post-haste. That's pretty unlikely, though. Neither Stan Lee nor Jack Kirby usually looked at competitors' comics. (Jack didn't even read the Marvels he didn't work on unless he had to for an assignment.)

Actually, if Stan and Jack had seen Doom Patrol before they did X-Men (or at least before they finished #1), it more likely would have had the opposite effect: They would have steered clear of any similarities so as not to look like they were copying…for legal reasons and also simple pride. Who wants to be accused of plagiarism?  After all, if you're going to steal, you steal from a proven hit, not from a new comic which, frankly, looked at first like a feeble attempt by DC to compete with Fantastic Four. Later on, Doom Patrol evolved into a pretty good feature but I don't think the first few would cause any competitor to gasp, "Damn, why didn't we think of a group of misfit super-heroes led by a guy in a wheelchair? Let's plagiarize it right away!"

But yeah, there were similarities. In Doom Patrol, the wheelchair-bound genius Dr. Caulder gathered together "freaks" to get them to use their powers for good. In X-Men, the wheel-chair bound genius Professor X gathered together mutants to get them to use their powers for good. And there were other similarities. In the March, 1964 Doom Patrol story, they battled a group known as The Brotherhood of Evil. In the March, 1964 X-Men story, those heroes battled a group known as The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. There were a few other points like that as well and personally, I think they're all a matter of coincidence.

The Doom Patrol was launched by writers Arnold Drake and Bob Haney, with Bruno Premiani handling the art. Drake actually came up with the basic premise and got the assignment, then tapped Haney to help him. Here is a link to Arnold's account of how it all happened. Later, they were all written by Arnold until he got himself fired at DC. There was a little uprising of writers demanding better rates, health insurance and payment for reprints of their work, and Drake was among the more vocal rousers of rabble so he was shown the door. He then went to work for Marvel where he wrote among other assignments, X-Men.

When asked about similarities between the two groups, Arnold for a long time said it was just a fluke and quipped, "Great minds think alike." Then in 1999, he was reunited with Haney at Comic-Con in San Diego — maybe even the same day the above photo was taken — and Haney convinced him to at least say otherwise. Bob, who was well aware of the success of X-Men, had somewhat more anger towards the comic book field than Arnold. I'm not sure if he really believed the X-Men was a swipe of Doom Patrol or if he just thought there might be recognition and/or money to be reaped from saying so…but he said so and he persuaded Arnold to at least say he was suspicious. Haney died in 2004 and Drake passed in 2007…and that's about all there is to say on this topic.

However, I do have a slight correction to make on the piece I posted about the simultaneous births of The X-Men and The Avengers. In it, I wrote the following…

[Publisher Martin] Goodman had long discussed the idea of doing a Marvel book that would ape DC's popular Justice League of America and gather together heroes from different titles. The Fantastic Four had, in fact, started with Goodman's request for a book like J.L.A. This seemed like the time for that so in a matter of very few days, Lee and Kirby whipped out the first issue of The Avengers and it went to press along with X-Men #1…

I recently discussed this whole matter with a friend and as I did, I recalled another detail that I was told by Sol Brodsky, who had been Marvel's production manager at the time these comics went to press. I would have been more accurate if I'd written that section as follows…

Goodman had long discussed the idea of doing a Marvel book that would ape DC's popular Justice League of America and gather together heroes from different titles. The Fantastic Four had, in fact, started with Goodman's request for a book like J.L.A. and a few months earlier, Lee and Kirby had briefly done some work on such a concept. It is not known how far they took it before putting it aside in favor of more pressing work. When a new comic was suddenly needed to replace Daredevil on the production schedule, they went back to that project. In a matter of very few days, Lee and Kirby whipped out the first issue of The Avengers and it went to press along with X-Men #1…

That better describes my understanding of what happened and I should have written it that way in the first place. Sorry I didn't.

Eric Idle recalls his participation in the movie, Burn, Hollywood, Burn. One of the funniest interviews I ever saw on TV was on a local station in Las Vegas. The (now, sadly late) comedian Richard Jeni, who was also in that film, was asked about it. He replied with roughly these words…

Did you ever see the movie, The Player? This is the exact same movie but without the quality. This is for the discriminating filmgoer who's been wondering, "What if The Player hadn't been a very good movie?"

Mr. Idle seems to have much the same opinion of it.

He goes on to plug the forthcoming Blu-ray release of The Rutles and he's right. It didn't do much business when it first aired but it's sure endured. I'll post an Amazon link to order it (and I'll order it) well before it comes out.

Back in 2001, I attended a "test" screening of the sequel to The Rutles and on the way out, I politely informed Idle that he had misspelled Garry Shandling's first name. I see by his blog post that he still hasn't learned.

Gee, I wish I could find a nice list of nouns that have only a plural form. Oh, wait. Here's one.

In eight minutes, this gent will tell you more about the problems of medical expense in this country than you'll hear in a hundred hours of CNN/Fox/MSNBC shows about Obamacare…

Want more Cookie Monster on your web pages? Of course you do. Me want Cookie Monster all over Internet!

David Weigel explains how the Republican plan to defund Obamacare is destined to fail. And of course since he knows it and you know it and I know it, most of the folks pushing for it have to know it, too.

So what's the idea here? I'm thinking that it's there to be sacrificed because they think Obama will fall for, "Okay, you can keep Obamacare if you agree to get rid of all taxes for Americans making over $10 million a year." Or maybe the leaders of this movement think they'll profit — financially and in terms of future support — from firing up their army for this battle, then enraging them further when they lose. Pat Buchanan never had a prayer of becoming president and he knew it…but he made a lot of money running and losing.

I saw the other day that right-wing lawyer Larry Klayman is calling for a "coup" against Obama. He's not plumping for impeachment or conviction. He wants all decent Americans to march to the White House and just stand there and demand Obama do the honorable thing and resign. Yeah, like that's gonna happen. The president will probably do it right after he signs the bill to destroy his signature achievement. But I'll bet you Klayman's figured out a way to make money off his plan not succeeding.

Yesterday was an interesting date in what we jokingly call my career writing animation for television. It was the thirtieth anniversary of the debut of Dungeons and Dragons, a cartoon series I developed for CBS. And it was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the debut of Garfield and Friends, a cartoon series I wrote for CBS.

Dungeons and Dragons was a pretty good show, owing mainly to the talents of those who followed me on it. I had enough other work at the time that I could only write the pilot and the "bible" plus one other episode, then get out. I guess I get credit for convincing the network to pick up the series but if you liked that program week to week, you have others to thank for that. They did a good job for the three seasons it aired.

I should mention the two big myths about the show's termination. One is that it was driven off the air by outraged parents' groups who felt it was preaching Satanism and/or violence. Nope. There were very few complaints. It went off because the ratings were falling and the folks at CBS felt it didn't warrant renewal for another year. And the other myth is that there was a "last episode" in which the kids got home from their adventure. Also a nope, even though I've met people who swear they saw it. No such episode was ever produced.

One of the shows' writers wrote a "grand finale" script that exists online in script format and also in a dramatization. If you want to consider that the ending, fine. If they'd asked me to wrap up the storyline (and I'm kinda glad they didn't), I would have done something quite different and other writers who worked on the show have their endings, as well. You can accept or reject any of them or write your own. As far as I'm concerned, the kids are still trapped in that world along with Venger, Tiamat and my royalties.

Five years later to the day, the first episode of Garfield and Friends joined the CBS schedule. It was originally to be a half-hour and the initial commitment was for 26 episodes to be aired over two years. After a few weeks, CBS called and said, "We want to make it an hour" — so we went into almost-perpetual production for what turned out to be 121 half-hours that were telecast over seven years. Contractually, it was eight seasons but when it went to an hour, they aired Seasons 2 and 3 the same year…so it looks like seven years to you but eight years to me. However long it was, it wasn't long enough. I had a wonderful time.

You hear a lot about kids' shows of that era being bastardized by network interference, pressure groups, censors, etc. We faced almost none of that. The network left us alone. The pressure groups didn't pressure. And the Standards and Practices Department made a few entirely reasonable requests — like no one could be electrocuted and each character had to wear a seat belt when riding in a car. So a lot of freedom and a lot of talented, fun people…and I think I got spoiled. The new Garfield Show which I work on — we're about to start production on Season Five — is also a joy. (And by the way, no, I have no idea when Season Four will begin airing in this country…)

I don't talk a lot here about the shows I work on but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy them. I hope some of you do, too. I only wrote this because I couldn't believe it: 30 years since Dungeons and Dragons went on, 25 since Garfield and Friends debuted…and I hadn't realized until today they both went on the air on September 17th. Maybe I'll write more of them before they're 35 and 30, respectively.

It's Cookie Monster. What else do you need to know?

Those of us who were fascinated with the collection of government scandals that went under the general heading of "Watergate" have a treat. The Harry Ransom Center is the repository of most of the notes and papers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and they've posted some choice ones online. Most folks will be interested, as am I, in Woodward's notes of his meetings, including a couple in the infamous parking garage, with Mark "Deep Throat" Felt. I'm also fascinated by his notes of a long interview with Barry Goldwater.

I know some like to view Watergate as a case where Democrats exploited some crimes by the Nixon Administration to drive Richard M. Nixon out of the presidency. I think it's more accurate that Democrats exploited the crimes to put him on and the Republican Party on the defensive…and it was the Republican Party that drove him out of office. Nixon planned to try and portray impeachment efforts as a partisan coup but he couldn't; not with guys like Goldwater planning to vote for impeachment.

I'm having some work done at my home tomorrow (Wednesday) which may interrupt my Internet access for a few hours. Do not be surprised if posting here does not happen…and never be surprised when I'm sloppy about answering e-mail. All will be normal again by nightfall…or so they tell me.

Remember Yakov Smirnoff? That's right: He was the first prominent stand-up comedian in this country to have immigrated from the Soviet Union. He was on darn near every TV show of the eighties that would book a stand-up and even a few that wouldn't, contrasting life back home with life in these United States. Audiences liked him and also the pro-American message of his act. I used to see him up at the Comedy Store back then, popping in for an occasional set and always delighting the audience.

So where has he been all these years? Mostly in Branson. He has his own theater there and spends much of the year playing to packed houses…and while he's in Missouri, he's been attending college in that state, studying and teaching psychology.

But he's not in Branson now. He's in Los Angeles with a limited engagement of his one-man show which I'm going to try to see before it goes. It's at the Acme Theater, a comfy place to see a show over on La Brea and I have three more chances: September 21, September 27 and September 28. If you're local, you have the same three chances to see this clever and gentle man. Get tickets here. (And while you're there, check out the one-woman show starring Kelly Carlin in which she talks about life with her father George…)

The George Furth-Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along is one of those shows — there are several — that contains so much good work by Mr. Sondheim that the theatrical community doesn't want to turn loose of it despite its other shortcomings. The original Broadway production opened in November of '81 after lotsa previews then closed after only sixteen performances. If you and I wrote a show that only lasted two weeks and received such non-rave reviews, it would never be heard of again…but then neither of us is Stephen Sondheim and we're likely to remain that way.

What's happened since is that Merrily is constantly revived (and sometimes revised) and it appears that a lot of the directors come at it from the viewpoint, "I'm going to be the one to make this show work." Many productions have probably improved on the original but it seems like no one's ever done the definitive "improved" version. A recent production in the West End of London has reportedly come darned close. I haven't seen it but I may be about to. It was captured on high-def video and it's being shown for one night at theaters across the continent on October 23. I may not go to one but there will probably be a DVD/Blu-ray release shortly after and I'm looking forward to that. Here's a little preview…

Mark Anderson writes…

Hi Mark, love your web work (especially the occasional references to Broadway — another passion of mine). Your article about Phil Seuling and comics distribution brought back a memory to me that I could never find more info on. When I was young, I started getting into comics around 1974 or 75, buying at the local Ohio pony keg store. When I would visit my grandmother in Toledo, I remember being able to buy "discount" comics with the covers taken off. These were sold in packs of 4 or 5 and would usually include a "Giant" issue for maybe 50 cents for the pack. My guess is that these would be a secondary market for magazines that never sold in their initial run, but I never ran into them anywhere else. Was this the work of one corner store, or a common practice throughout. Thanks again!

There's a long answer to this and a short one and I'm going to give you the short one…which as you'll see, is not all that short. This was back in the days when almost all comic books in this country were distributed on a returnable basis. The national distributor would ship bundles and crates (usually, bundles) to regional distributors. The regional distributors would ship comics to neighborhood newsstands which would offer them for sale.

The neighborhood newsstand had the option of sending their unsold comics back for credit and sometimes, if they got in 25 copies of the new Action Comics and didn't have room on their racks or didn't think they could sell that many, they'd return some or even all of them immediately. Or they'd send back unsold issues after a week or two. In theory, they were supposed to send back all the unsold copies of a given comic when the next issue came out but most got away with returns whenever they felt like it. At the main rack I patronized, the employees would return comics when they started to look a little shabby from kids pawing through them.

Simple math would then be done. Your newsstand got in 1000 comics last month. You returned 400. You pay for 600. The regional distributor would then take its cut of what you paid and pass the rest on to the national distributor. The national distributor would take its cut and pass what was left on to the publisher.

Ah, but what about those returned comic books? What happened to them?

In certain areas, deals were brokered to redistribute them, usually overseas. In some warehouse somewhere, kids being paid minimum wage or less would sort through them, pull out the ones in good condition and package them to be sent to other countries, often to be sold at U.S. military installations. It has been alleged that often, a publisher or distributor would get back 50,000 copies of an unsold-in-this-country comic, ship 20,000 of them overseas to be sold and then claim for tax purposes that all 50,000 were pulped.

Pulping — turning the comic back into raw materials for possible reuse — was what they were supposed to do to all the unsold comics. That often didn't happen.

Let us say you're a regional distributor in the mid-west. At the end of the month, you have around 100,000 unsold copies of comics published by my company. You want to get credit for them but it really isn't cost-efficient for anyone if you ship them back to my plant in New York and I pulp them there. It's easier if you send them to a pulping company in your area or even have your own machines. Okay: Then how do we handle the accounting on these? There were basically three methods…

1. The Affidavit Method. You just tally the unsold comics, pulp them and send me an affidavit saying you pulped 98,573 of my comics so you owe me no money for them. I trust you. The potential for abuse of this system is pretty obvious…and indeed, it was abused. Lying abounded. There are scholars who've studied this practice and concluded that some comics that were canceled for reported bad sales actually sold very well. They were just victims of affidavit fraud.
2. The Partial-Cover Method. You have kids in your warehouse tear off the top third-or-so of the cover of each comic. There were machines that could do this but more often, it was done by hand. Tearing off that strip rendered the comic void and unsellable so you could ship me just those strips of cover and I could count them if I didn't trust you…though more often, it was done by weight. And then you send me an affidavit that you pulped the rest of each comic.
3. The Full-Cover Method. This is like the Partial-Cover Method except that you tear off the entire cover of each comic and ship it to me.

The Partial-Cover Method was the main one used but it had its loopholes. In some areas, the comics weren't pulped after the title strips were removed. In some areas, they were sold for reduced prices, usually in bundles. In most cases, the publisher never received a cut on these.

There were many ways this deal worked. Some regional distributors were in on it, some weren't. In some cases, a guy would bring a truck around to the regional distributors' warehouse after hours or on the weekend and some employee there would fill the truck with stripped, to-be-pulped comics for quick cash. In some cases, an outside pulping plant fenced the goods. I once heard a long "confession" from a then-retired employee of a regional distributor in Southern California. The owners of the distributor were like Sgt. Schultz on Hogan's Heroes, officially knowing nothing. But they did get a cut when their warehouse crew sold tons of allegedly-pulped unpulped comics out the back door.

The stripped comics were sold in various venues, usually in bundles and always for much less than the comics would have cost intact. There was an old bookstore in downtown L.A. I visited often in the early sixties when I was amassing much of my comic book collection. A comic bought at a newsstand then was 12 cents. In this and most stores, used copies went for a nickel each. In this store — it was called Everybody's Books — you could also buy a bundle of twenty stripped comics, tied in twine, for fifty cents. I didn't buy many of them. I bought comics mainly for reading, not collecting, and the stripped comics were quite readable. Still, I felt uneasy about coverless and partial-cover comics. They were like injured pets.

But the big problem with the bundles was you could only see the top comic and you didn't know what else you were getting until you went home and cut the twine. If you bought two bundles, they might contain the exact same books but with a different one on top. All the bundles at Everybody's contained somewhere in them, a partial-cover copy of The Brave and the Bold #28 featuring the first appearance of the Justice League of America.

On a grander scale, there was a little shop in San Diego — my parents took me there once when we were on vacation — that sold nothing but coverless and partial-cover comics. They had thousands, unbundled, for a nickel each, six for a quarter. I went there shortly after I'd discovered and fallen for Batman. I left there with 96 damaged but readable issues of Batman and Detective Comics which I voraciously consumed for the remainder of that trip.

The sale of comics that were supposed to have been destroyed was not a secret. It was done openly in Southern California until around 1968 and I never heard of any publisher or distributor objecting. I'm sure the practice continued elsewhere after that but around '68 was when the shops I went to stopped carrying them. There is evidence into the seventies of what I mentioned earlier: Comics selling decently but being viewed as failures because someone exaggerated the number of returns.

I have a hunch why the sale of comics that lacked full covers disappeared. It was in the mid-sixties that a lot of magazine articles appeared heralding how much old comic books sold for…in good condition. I suspect those articles just made disfigured comics seem less desirable. But maybe that's a silly theory and the real reason had something to do with publishers and/or distributors quietly, as opposed to openly, cracking down on the racket.

Well, that's the short version and I apologize that it went on this long. The full version would include a lot more about dishonest dealings by distributors — it was not the cleanest of businesses — and questions of where the money went. There are a few folks I know researching this kind of thing and I'm eager to learn more about it. I'll try to follow-up when I do.

Number three hundred and twenty in a series…