Mark Evanier's Blog, page 121

Today's Video Link

Very busy today but I'll post more than this later.  This is Ben Meiselas of The Meidas Touch Podcast — a real good podcast to follow if you want to know the legal status and woes of our 45th President. The predictions of Mr. Meiselas and his partners Michael Popok and Karen Friedman Agnifilo — attorneys, all — have been amazingly accurate.

Here, Ben presents a medley of some of the anti-Trump commercials that you might not be seeing if you don't reside in a swing state. They're pretty potent — but then the folks making them have an awful lot to work with…

Today's Video Link

Here we have the the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and what are they playing? Beethoven? Bach? Mozart? Nope, none of them, They're playing Hoyt Curtin…

A Quick Reality Check

I keep coming across the above list on Facebook and elsewhere so I thought I'd take one entire minute to take inventory…

Yes, I've used a rotary phone, a floppy disk, a typewriter, an encyclopedia, a phone book and a paper map. I've taken pics with a film camera, listened to music on a CD and a Boombox, made a mixed tape, owned a Walkman, watched a movie on VHS and even rented some from Blockbuster. I've learned Cursive, played an Atari, both sent and received Faxes, ordered from Columbia House, had an AOL address, accessed the Internet via dial-up, sent a postcard, uncurled a telephone cord and I still own a couple of dictionaries and I sometimes write checks.

The only thing I've never done from that list is have a MySpace account.  So I guess at the age of 72, I'm old, at least by the standards of whoever compiled this list.  If so, I'm glad I've lived long enough to see most things on this list be replaced by something newer and better.  So I don't really feel it's about me getting older.  I think it's about things around me improving.

Today's Video Link

Here's a nice mini-doc on Joe Besser's days with The Three Stooges. It takes the viewpoint I have — that he has been unfairly unappreciated. Yeah, the sixteen films he made with Moe and Larry were not great…but I don't think they were not great because of him. They were not great because Columbia was making these films for a buck and a half with a deliberate intention to shoot them in a day or three through the use of old scripts and old footage. Also, Larry and Moe were getting older and the Stooges' act was also getting older. Joe just had the misfortune to join the act when it was on its way out, at least insofar as the short subjects market was concerned. He brought a new energy to old material as this video shows…

Mushroom Soup Saturday

Much must be done today so I won't be around a whole lot. As always, I will make it up to you later…especially you nice folks who contributed to our annual "Help Mark Pay For Keeping the Blog Online" campaign. We covered my annual outlay with enough left over for dinner for two from my fave L.A. Chinese restaurant…so I thank you all and hope you always think you're getting your donation's worth.

This December, newsfromme starts its twenty-fifth year and I'm trying to think of some way to make it special. Maybe if Trump wins, I'll try blogging from a bunker somewhere near that watering hole in Namibia. I wonder if my fave L.A. Chinese restaurant delivers that far. It might be nice to share their Double Mushroom Chicken with a couple of warthogs.

Today's Video Link

Seth Rudetsky introduces and accompanies my talented friend, Christine Pedi.  This is what the show Evita would be like if various divas had the title role…

Happy Sergio Day!

I don't post a lot of Happy Birthday wishes here because just about every day is the birthday of someone I know but I usually make an exception for my collaborator and best friend Sergio, who is  AGE REDACTED  today. He sure doesn't look or act like he's  AGE REDACTED  or even  AGE MINUS 5-10 YEARS REDACTED . I guess drawing silly pictures keeps you young.

I have known Sergio since  YEAR REDACTED  so we've been friends for  IMPRESSIVE NUMBER OF YEARS REDACTED  and in all that time working together, we've had about five fights, one of which was about how many fights we'd had. Whatever the precise number, they all total up to about three minutes and then we were friends again.

I once wrote a particular issue of a comic book and had literally — and yes, I know what "literally" means and I'm using it correctly — more arguing its artist,  NAME OF ARTIST I WILL NEVER WORK WITH AGAIN REDACTED, than I have with Sergio for  NUMBER OF ISSUES WE'VE DONE REDACTED  on Groo the Wanderer. In fact, you can toss in all of our non-Groo collaborations and we still had fewer difficulties than I did with the artist of that one issue of that one comic, the name of which was  NAME OF NOT VERY GOOD COMIC BOOK REDACTED .

What else can I write about this guy? You know how talented he is. You know how beloved he is. You probably know approximately how much work he's done…although I'd bet there's way more that you don't know about. Did you know what a fine cook he is? There, you see? You didn't know that. So I'll just wrap this up and say, "Happy Birthday, Sergio! You don't look a day over  AGE MINUS 20 YEARS REDACTED ."

ASK me: The CAPS Logo

Here's a fast one from Matt Tauber…

As a founder of C.A.P.S., do you have any info on the "Steve Canyon"-inspired logo and who drew it?

Yep. William Stout drew it and I think it was his idea to somewhat ape the style on Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon strip. Mr. Caniff was briefly a member from afar. I don't recall him ever attending a meeting but I think he paid dues for a little while to support the group.

There are an awful lot of stories to be told about the group, at least from the days when I was active with it. I'll try to get around to posting some in the coming weeks. One of the things I discovered early-on was that when you start a group and decide you're going to restrict membership to "professionals only," there are some people who get really, really mad that someone has decided they don't qualify as professionals. There are also a few people who are inarguably professionals who get really, really mad when the group admits someone they don't consider a professional.

I'll try to tell some of the nicer stories. Some really wonderful things happened because of that group including folks making some of connection that really helped their careers.

Go Read It!

As I've mentioned here, I was very impressed with the Democratic National Convention as a piece of television. I'm not talking about whether it helped Kamala Harris get a lot of votes. I have no idea how many of the people who tuned in were inclined to support her anyway and how many people who weren't were watching and transformed. But just as a very difficult-to-do TV show, I thought it was especially well done — and especially that Tuesday roll call vote.

I also had no idea who had been behind the production but Vince Waldron sent me this link to an article by Andrew Rice who went behind-the-scenes on that end of things. Turns out it was a number of folks who usually produce or direct the Tony Awards each year. You might want to read a little about how they did what they did.

C.A.P.S., R.I.P.

In 1975, there was a significant community in Los Angeles of folks who created comic books, comic strips and related forms of print media…but who did not know one another all that well. They didn't meet at "the office" because they all worked through different offices, often in other states. They didn't meet a lot at comic conventions because there weren't many of them and most professionals did not attend the ones that existed. It just felt like there was a void there.

I occasionally had dinner with two friends at a Numero Uno pizzeria on La Cienega Boulevard…within walking distance of where I then lived. One was Don Rico, a comic book writer, artist and editor whose credits stretched from 1939 until the present day. The other was Sergio Aragonés, then best known for his work for MAD magazine. It was over one of those dinners that we got the idea to start a kind of social club for local professionals in the field.

I think — I can't swear to this but I think — the impetus for this idea was me complaining about so many people in the field calling and asking, "Do you know a good letterer?" or "Where's a cheap place to buy art supplies?" Calls like that. Regardless of the flash point, I recall — and may still have somewhere — a Numero Uno paper placemat with Sergio doodles on it and me writing out possible names for the organization. We settled on "The Comic Arts Professional Society" or CAPS for short. In July of that year, we held an organizational meeting at a "street church" on Hollywood Boulevard that Don Rico and his family sometimes attended.

They had a community room that was available to just about any group and that would donate any amount to the church. I went up there and gave them $40 and the minister was delighted. He penciled us in on his calendar between two other groups that met there. One was "Alcoholics Without Partners" and the other was "The Lesbian Softball Team." I may have those adjectives reversed but I saw him write "Comic book artists" on the calendar and I wondered if someone was going to think, "Well, now you're letting some weird fringe group meet here!"

The first meeting was a success. The moment I most recall was when a fellow who'd been writing comic books for Western Publishing met an artist who'd been drawing his scripts…for something like twenty years. It was the first time they ever met.

CAPS had monthly meetings thereafter. It kept changing where it met. It kept changing who ran it. I was President for a while, Sergio was President for a while, Don was President for a while. Members came and went including Jack Kirby, Alex Toth, Milton Caniff, Dan Spiegle, Roger Armstrong, Don R. Christensen, Alfredo Alcala, Stan Sakai, Steve Gerber, Roy Thomas, Rick Hoberg, Dave Stevens, William Stout, Christy Marx, Willie Ito, Scott Shaw!, Jerry Eisenberg, Tom Luth and I shouldn't have started this list because I'm leaving out several hundred people. Quite a few were folks who made very good livings in their field but whose names you might not know.

The focus of the group changed a lot over the years. At one point, I was very unhappy with some of the things some current leadership was doing and I resigned. Sergio resigned almost every month for a time there but I don't think anyone knew it because he kept attending meetings. There were banquets and awards and projects and I remember some meetings being a lot of fun and others having some angry disputes.

I will probably tell more stories about CAPS in the future but, as you may have figured out from the subject line, this is an obit. I've received an e-mail from someone in the current leadership (someone I don't think I know) saying, in part…

CAPS is ending. There's a lot of reasons for this decision but the most prominent ones are the clear ones — Leadership has not been good and participation has been waning for some time. With the most recent update of the current president stepping down, the board had a discussion and found that no one would like to take the position, so we found it best to thank everyone for being a member but to dissolve the organization by the end of this year (2024.)

There will apparently be one more in-person meeting at a time and place to be named later. Frankly, I think the organization lost all reason to exist once we had an Internet and frequent comic book conventions. Everyone who did comics seemed to know one another without attending monthly meetings. I'm sorry to see it go but I've kinda felt that way for the last 20+ years.