Mark Evanier's Blog, page 11

Stan

One of the things that amazes me about my silly life is how I got to know and even work with a lot of people who were very inspirational to me when my age was in single digits. There was a myth (probably) that when a woman was pregnant, if she listened to a lot of Mozart, the kid then inside her would be born with great musical talents. My mother used to say that when she was expecting me, she watched the Time for Beany TV show which then starred two brilliant comic actors — Stan Freberg and Daws Butler. I dunno how anyone would describe my sense o' humor but it has obvious connections to both men and I got to know and work with both men.

I also got to know and work with most of the people responsible for Warner Brothers cartoons, the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons, the comic books from the fifties and sixties based on those cartoons, Jay Ward cartoons, The Dick Van Dyke Show, MAD magazine, DC and Marvel comic books from my childhood, a number of favorite comedians, Charles Schulz…well, it's a long list, longer than I have room for here right now.

I know when I write about these people here, some take it as namedropping but I just want to share what I know about them with anyone who'd be interested. One of the folks I was most thrilled to know was Stan Freberg, who was born this day in 1926. Stan was a brilliant actor and writer and it's hard to describe just what he did that set him apart from others working in animation, radio and television when he did. The video I've embedded below may give you a sense of the satiric skepticism with which he plied his trades.

Much of Stan's best work was made possible by patrons and sponsors who appreciated what he did so well and were willing to back him, no matter what the financial cost, to enable him to do it. For a while, one of the best things on television were commercials that he made for Chun King Chow Mein — a company that, oddly enough, was run by a man named Jeno Paulucci, who was also responsible for Jeno's Pizza Rolls. (Another of the best things on TV were the commercials for Jeno's Pizza Rolls, also produced by S.F.).

Stan's services as a producer of commercials were expensive but Mr. Paulucci thought he was worth it. At one point, they allegedly made a wager — and Stan admitted to me this was a publicity stunt that didn't really happen the way it was reported. The bet was that if a given ad campaign didn't boost Chun King sales by 25%, Stan would pull Jeno in a rickshaw down La Cienega Boulevard here in Los Angeles. If it did, Jeno would give Stan a ride. This photo — which you can enlarge by clicking on it –shows you the outcome…

Those of you familiar with La Cienega Boulevard will spot Norms Restaurant in the background. That's the one a lot of people fought to save recently and I'm happy to report that it is still there.

Getting back to Stan and Jeno: Another thing that Jeno gave Stan to play with was an hour on a Sunday night in 1962. Paulucci bought the hour on ABC that normally housed one of its top-rated shows, Maverick, and let Stan made a sixty-minute infomerical long before that term was coined. Its goal was to sell chow mein but it was enormously brilliant and entertaining and if you start watching it, you'll probably get hooked and watch the whole thing.

Stan went, as he always did on everything he did, way over budget but Jeno sold enough canned Chinese Food that he didn't mind. It features the whole Freberg stock company including Sterling Holloway, June Foray, Shep Menkin, Billy Bletcher, Jesse White, Peter Leeds, Howard MacNear, Arte Johnson, Naomi Lewis, Byron Kane, Mike Mazurki and many others, including a cameo by Frank Sinatra. We used a clip of the big production number that starts about eleven-and-a-half minutes in as the opening to a tribute evening I helped assemble in November of 2014. It was one of Stan's last public appearances…

WKRP People

I have a few e-mails asking if I'm going to write anything about Loni Anderson, who left us recently at the age of 79. I'm afraid I don't have much in the way of Loni Anderson stories and what I have, I told here back in 2014 writing about the show that made her famous, WKRP in Cincinnati…

I was a fan of this program even before it went on the air. Back when I was writing some show or other for Sid and Marty Krofft, we were working on the KTLA lot in Hollywood. Another writer, Lorne Frohman, and I would sometimes sit on a porch there and talk out ideas. One day, we began to notice…

No, let me rephrase that: One day, we couldn't help but notice a stunning blonde lady walking around in what they then called "hot pants." She was obviously an actress and obviously one who wanted to be noticed. Somewhere in some shoebox somewhere, Lorne probably has the negatives of photos we took of each of us with her.

She was Loni Anderson and she told us about this show she was doing on the lot…and invited us to come watch a taping or even just rehearsals so one day, we played hooky from our show and took in a dress rehearsal of theirs. It was the one in which Howard Hesseman's character did a live remote from a stereo store and there was a robbery during the broadcast. Whether the public would think the series was funny or not, I had no idea…but I sure did. (If we'd gone over two weeks later, we could have seen the infamous "Turkeys Away" episode. It's amazing that a show would do its most popular episode as Show 7, I think before they were even on the air.)

Loni was very nice and very sweet and she had that "she's gonna be a big star" aura around her which doesn't, alas, always translate to becoming a big star. In her case though, it did and I felt proud I sensed that was coming before WKRP debuted on CBS and America began to feel the same thing. And that, I'm afraid, is all I have in the way of a Loni Anderson story. I never ran into her again…although I can add that I never heard a bad story about her — and if there had been any, I probably would have heard.

By the way: Among the great things you can find on the Internet are "air checks," which are merely audio recordings of old radio shows, including disc jockeys of the past spinning records of past eras. I enjoy occasionally listening to air checks of the deejays who I listened to back in the sixties and I was delighted to recently find this website where you can hear air checks of Dr. Johnny Fever and Venus Flytrap on WKRP.

Today's Video Links

In 2011, Sutton Foster starred on Broadway in the umpteenth revival of Anything Goes, the 1934 Cole Porter musical that had more memorable songs than you'll find in an entire season of new Broadway offerings these days.  The most memorable part of Ms. Foster's revival was a dance number set to the title song and it was performed that year on the Tony Awards.  Here is that performance introduced by Joel Grey…

It inspired the then-not-as-famous-as-he-is-now Broadway star Jonathan Groff and at a benefit soon after, he performed his own version of the number. It's pretty good though it might have been even better if someone had thought to put microphones on the dancers working alongside him…

(Space) Ghost Artist

I mentioned here that DC Comics will soon issue a hardcover collection of artwork that the late/great Alex Toth did for the firm.  I also prayed that they would not use a cover Alex's drawing of Superman had been replaced by one by another artist…and I'm hearing now that that was not the final cover; that it was just a dummy they made up for advertising purposes.  Hopefully, when we get the Toth collection, its cover will be 100% Toth.

Alex was one of the most talented artists to ever work in the comic book business and he also spent a lot of time in animation for television. In the latter arena, he was surrounded by many talented writers and artists whose names are largely unknown to the fan community. I know people who love the 1966 Space Ghost cartoons but can't name a single other person besides Toth, Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera and the voice cast who made that show.

They act like Alex created it all by himself (he didn't), wrote them all (he wrote none of them) and did all the artwork. He was the lead artist and designer absolutely…but a weekly network cartoon show is not like a comic book. It can't be all produced by one or two guys. Take a look at the end credits from that series. You will notice a lot of names in there besides Alex's…

Alex almost certainly deserved more credit than those credits gave him but when fans write about the show, they generally give absolutely none to the other folks there since they aren't familiar with the names. (And hey, did you notice that they misspelled the name of Gary Owens, who only voiced the title character? The credits on Hanna-Barbera shows often made mistakes like that. And every single one left out a lot of names.)

At WonderCon Anaheim a few months ago, an avid Hanna-Barbera collector showed me a newly-prized acquisition. He'd just paid a lot of money for what was offered as "original Hanna-Barbera production art by Alex Toth from Super Friends." I kinda broke his heart a little when I told him — well, somebody had to tell him — that the piece he'd bought was probably never used in the H-B studio and was likely created after there was no more H-B studio.

Above is an image I found online of a piece identical to what the Super Friends fan showed me in Anaheim. The most likely way it was made — and this is like a 95% certainty — is that someone who probably never worked for Hanna-Barbera got hold of a black-and-white image of the line art from this model sheet. It's something like a JPEG scan of Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a drawing that was used in the studio for reference. They may have just downloaded that JPEG from the Internet.

Then they Xeroxed the image onto a cel, painted the back of that cel with colored paints in the appropriate places, let it dry, then put it into some sort of frame or mat and sold it. And they probably did all this fairly recently…

…and, oh, the original drawing was not done by Alex Toth.

I don't know who did that model sheet. I once heard — from Mo Gollub, who was one of the gents whose name was in those credits you just watched — that Alex did a Superman model sheet for the Super Friends show but it was redone by someone else.  The intent was to kind of "split the difference" between Alex's way of drawing The Man of Steel and the way the character looked on the then-somewhat-recent Superman cartoon series produced by a rival cartoon studio, Filmation. Mo did not recall who had done the redraw and didn't even rule out himself as a suspect. (Mo, by the way, was a terrific artist. He painted many of the best covers that ever appeared on a comic book, mainly for Dell Comics in the fifties.)

So the piece the kid bought was not exactly what it was represented to be. He felt a little cheated but he was still happy to have it. It reminded him of the Super Friends show he loved. That was another show Alex labored on but not that much and for not that long. Alex was very good at drawing but he was almost as good at quitting. When we both worked at Hanna-Barbera and made a date for lunch, it was always tentative and based on the understanding that Alex might quit the studio before our agreed-upon lunch date. At least once, he did.

He probably didn't do a lick of work on maybe six of the nine seasons of Super Friends. His influence was certainly visible when he wasn't on the payroll.  The artists working on it were certainly consulting and aping his designs…but he wasn't working there. Still, when fans talk about that series, his is often the only name they mention as the guy who drew it and sometimes even as the guy who created it, which he wasn't. And people (sadly) still make money by forging cels and saying they were drawn by Alex Toth and/or actually used in the production of the series many years ago.

Scenes From Comic-Con #6

I like that of the nineteen panels I appeared on at Comic-Con, only four could in any way be considered "promotional" for anything in which I have even a teensy financial interest.  Two of my panels were about a new book I have coming out this October.  It's this one — The Essential Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz: The Greatest Comic Strip of All Time — celebrating the 75th anniversary of the most widely-read (and loved) comic strip ever.  So we did a panel about it…

Photo by Bruce Guthrie

The folks on the panel and in the above photo are as follows: First is Charlie Kochman (editor-in-chief, Abrams ComicArts, publisher of the book and one of the best editors I've ever had), then we have Chip Kidd (graphic designer), Paige Braddock (creative director emeritus at Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates), and Alexis E. Fajardo (editorial director, publishing & experiences at Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates). Chip did a superb job with the design and art direction of the project. Paige and Alexis, along with others who protect the heritage of Mr. Schulz these days, could not have been more supportive.

The reason I'm seated in this photo is that this was my fifth (of six) panels that day.

Photo by Bruce Guthrie

You kind of have to be an author of books to appreciate the above pic. The book won't be out until the first week of October but it's been printed and the printer has bound the books and inserted all the special bonus features and shoved it all into the wonderful slipcases Chip Kidd designed. The first chunk of the press run is currently on a very slow boat from China, inching its way to this country and, eventually, to warehouses from which it will be distributed. But they shipped one (1) finished copy over for the convention and I got to open the package on the panel. I think I looked into the open box and exclaimed, "My God! The Epstein Files!"

It's always a very special moment for an author to hold in his or her mitts, the finished product of what, in this case, was about a solid year of effort and waiting. You know every page of the book from studying and correcting proofs for months…but you're still not prepared to have a completed, you-can't-make-any-changes copy before you. Because suddenly, miraculously, there's a book where there wasn't one before.

Years ago, I wrote a line which has since been attributed to others. It's "When you get the first finished copy off the press, no matter how much you and others proofread it and no matter what page you open it to, you'll find a typo." So far, I'm happy to say, that hasn't happened. I've found all sorts of things I now wish I'd rewritten but I haven't found a typo.

As with everything I've ever written, I will always find things I wish I'd rewritten. On my deathbed, I will be thinking of a better joke I could have put into an issue of Groo I did in 1981. That's just how it is with us writers…most of us, anyway.

Now, this last photo on this page was not taken at Comic-Con. It was taken here in my home office yesterday…

Photo by me

My friend, photographer/designer/model Gabriella Muttone, came over and on her way in, she found a box on my front steps and brought it up here to my office…my first very own copy. I'm still delighted with it and I still haven't found a typo. You'll have to wait a couple of months to obtain yours but if you want to see what Gabriella looks like without a book covering much of her face, you can check out this Instagram page. [CAUTION: Not safe for some workplaces.]

You'll see more photos from Comic-Con here tomorrow. That is, if you can tear yourself away from Gabriella's page.

Fact-Checking the Fact Check

Yesterday in a Fact Check post, I wrote, "Trump claims that the bad jobs report that just came out is phony and he fired the man who reported it. FactCheck.org says there's no evidence that the reported numbers are inaccurate." As many of you wrote to tell me — and as I have corrected — the person fired was a woman. Thank you all for helping keep things right and proper here.

Today's Video Link

Hey, how do they do the Muppets when the Muppets go outside?

More Comic-Con News

Okay, so Comic-Con 2025 in San Diego is over. 2026 will take place July 22-26 that year and the con is committed to the San Diego Convention Center for 2027 for (probably) the same week of the year.

But what about 2028? That's where it gets interesting because the 2028 Olympic Games will be taking place in Los Angeles — spreading out over much of Southern California — from July 14-30. They will include a surfing competition in San Diego.

So what does this mean for the 2028 Comic-Con? I have no idea and as far as I can tell, neither does anyone else. The prevailing guess seems to be that Comic-Con will shift to some time in August but I don't think any of those making that guess have any sense how possible that might be or what complications it could bring.

That's literally all I know about this and it may be all there is to know at the moment. But we should be hearing something about it over the next year. Hey, do you think they'll let me host panels at the Olympics? Maybe we could make Quick Draw! an Olympic competition. I'm thinking Sergio Aragonés versus Simone Biles, both sketching on the Uneven Parallel Bars…

FACT CHECK: No Wonder Kessler's Giving Up

Daniel Dale over at CNN takes a long, deep dive into the history of Donald Trump rewriting history. He includes a number of examples where Trump spokespersons were asked the source of the man's claim and they either couldn't do it, wouldn't do it or just made up something that didn't prove anything.

Benjamin Netanyahu insists there is no starvation in Gaza and in so insisting, earns one of those coveted "Pants on Fire" awards from Politifact.

Is it true that since Reagan was president, the national deficit grew under every Republican president but decreased under every Democratic president? Snopes says, "Mostly True!"

The Associated Press explains why Trump's claim to be cutting drug prices by "1,500%" is ridiculous. But if you took fifth grade Math, you already know this.

Trump claims that the bad jobs report that just came out is phony and he fired the man who reported it. FactCheck.org says there's no evidence that the reported numbers are inaccurate.

Trump keeps claiming that Bill Clinton visited Jeffrey Epstein's island "twenty-eight times." FactCheck.org also says that there's no evidence of that.

The Internet abounds in claims about Seed Oils, some folks (including U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary) claiming they're very bad for your health while others say there's no proof of that and even that the opposite may be true. The folks at FactCheck.org — my, they've been busy — side with the latter view.

Lastly for now, as we noted here, the longtime Fact Checker for The Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, is tossing in the towel and stepping down. Here's a link to a video interview that he just did about his decision and the state of fact-checking in the world today. Thanks, Bruce Reznick.

Scenes From Comic-Con #5

More photos from what was maybe by favorite Comic-Con of all I've attended in years.  There was something magical about the early ones because everything was so new and exciting…and there was also this: My first few dozen years of attending comic book conventions, not just in San Diego but anywhere, I was constantly meeting — and in some cases, getting to know well — the men (and occasional women) who wrote and/or drew the comic books I read when I was a kid.  That's not possible anymore.  The few who haven't passed away are simply not attending cons at their current ages.

But along the way, I discovered another thing to enjoy about conventions…hosting or being on panels.  I help create events that I'd enjoy attending and it's even more fun when I get the best seat.  These first two photos are from this year's Groo Panel…

Photo by Bruce Guthrie

The lady is Carrie Strachan, who took over as colorist of Groo after our friend Tom Luth passed away.  Coloring Groo is not an easy job — see any page in any issue and you'll understand why — and Carrie is succeeding beyond the wildest expectations of mine, as well as those of that guy with the mustache who draws those pages.  The gent in the above photo is Stan Sakai who has lettered Groo since Day One….and he still letters it "the old-fashioned way," meaning that he letters by hand (not computer) on the same pieces of paper that Sergio draws on.  Close to zero other comics these days are done that way.

Stan is also, of course, the creator-author-illustration and even letterer of his own creation, Usagi Yojimbo, one of the best and most dependable comics you can but after you buy every issue of Groo.  But you already knew that.

Photo by Bruce Guthrie

And we had another participant, albeit from afar, on The Groo Panel.  This is me holding my cell phone up to the microphone so the audience (we filled the room) could hear the voice of that guy with the mustache who draws Groo.  Sergio Aragonés — my best friend in the Male Division and my collaborator since the early nineteen-eighties — isn't attending conventions these days so he phoned it in and everyone was happy to hear him. And before you ask: The WiFi in the San Diego Convention Center is insufficient to do this via video but I phoned him on this panel and the next day on Quick Draw! and that audience was thrilled to hear him also.

Photo by Bruce Guthrie

Right after The Groo Panel, I spent another hour in the same room with another great letterer. Todd Klein and Stan have occasionally taken turns winning the Eisner Award for Best Letterer of the Year. And Todd is not only great at calligraphy but he has researched and written extensively about his craft…a craft which is often underappreciated. I've read plenty of comics where the best thing on the page was what someone like Todd put there and I always enjoy talking with this man about what he does so well. More photos from more panels tomorrow.