Mark Evanier's Blog, page 148

More on Tom Luth

Sergio Aragonés issued the following statement this afternoon…

Today, I received the news of Tom Luth's passing. Tom was not only a good friend but also a valued colleague of more than 40 years. While Tom's exceptional skills as a colorist were widely recognized, it may come as a surprise to some to learn of his quiet and unassuming nature. He had a deep love for his work, music, friends, and his beloved little chihuahuas. I will miss Tom.

I second all of that.

Richard Sherman, R.I.P.

Richard Sherman on the right, me on the left.

I guess I don't need to write a lot about Richard Sherman and about how though we've lost the man, the music he and his brother Robert wrote will last forever. Everyone will be saying that and everyone will be right. And there are already plenty of obits up like this one which tell of his amazing career, filled with dozens of achievements, any one of which would qualify him as an important part of American music.

So I'll just say it was just a delight and privilege to know this man, to talk with this man, to be in a room where he was performing a song you knew so well and that was so much an underscore (at least) to your life. He was so nice to everyone who wanted to meet him and so encouraging to anyone who tried to venture anywhere near the field in which he made his mark.

And he was so approachable and friendly. I remember being at a party one time and a lady — I have no idea who she was — had brought along her ukulele because she heard he'd be there and she wanted to accompany herself and perform the song "Pineapple Princess," which the Sherman Brothers had written for Annette Funicello. I can neither play nor sing but even if I was a master at both, I don't think I'd have had the nerve to perform a song for its composer.

But she did and I remember the absolute delight on Richard's face. He felt so happy and so honored. The lady was pretty good but you could tell that even if she'd been…well, as lousy as me, he would still have loved every moment of it. Because the lady had cared about it enough to learn it.

You all know his more famous songs, especially the ones in Mary Poppins and the ones scattered around Disneyland. But here's a performance of "Pineapple Princess" that I'm sure Richard would have loved. And if it were my song and ASCAP money was not a factor, I think I'd rather see it done like this than sung by Streisand…

And here's one of my favorite Sherman concoctions played and sung by Richard, joined by his brother Robert and some other guy. I'll let my friend Leonard introduce it…

Tom Luth, R.I.P.

Photo by Bruce Guthrie

Tom Luth, hailed by many as "The Hardest-Working Man in Comics," was found dead in his apartment last Thursday. He earned that title for the Herculean task of coloring the work of Sergio Aragonés — for Groo the Wanderer and other publications — for around forty years. It kept him busy but not so busy that he couldn't squeeze in work for others who admired his handiwork and wanted Tom Luth coloring on their comics.

I first met Tom through Alfredo Alcala, from whom he was receiving some mentoring and occasional assistant work, and through cartoonist Phil Yeh, who was a close friend of Tom's. It was Phil and his wife Linda who found Tom last Thursday, struck down by an apparent heart attack. Tom had suffered an attack last year and was scheduled for surgery in the not-too-distant future. He had not been answering his phone for several days and had missed an online music lesson last Monday. The Yehs, being good not-too-distant neighbors, went over to check on their friend and found what they found.  He was 70 years old.

Tom largely retired from the coloring business a few years ago, opting to spend most of his time composing music. He was very good at it. Still, when Sergio and I agreed to contribute a Groo story for the recent Comics for Ukraine benefit book, Tom practically demanded to color it as his contribution to the cause. The last thing he colored for Sergio — and I suspect for anyone — was the cover to a forthcoming collection of our 2000 mini-series, Space Circus. Tom colored the original series back then and he colored a wonderful wrap-around cover that you'll see on the book when it's released later this year.

I think there's still time for me to write something more about him for the book before it goes to press. I won't have to write about how good his work always was. You'll be able to see that for yourself in that volume and in any of the hundreds of comic books to which he lent his great talents. What I will write about is how nice, professional and dedicated he was. There would not have been 120 issues of Groo the Wanderer in 120 months from Marvel's Epic line if Tom hadn't done the impossible over and over and over, month after month, often meeting impossible deadlines. His work was always good and he was a helluva nice man. We're all real shaken-up over this news.

Today's Video Link

In a recent post here, I mentioned Norman Maurer, a fascinating gent I had the honor of working with. Norman was a very fine comic book artist who among other work, wrote and drew the Three Stooges comic books for St. John's, a small but important publisher. He later went on to become a TV and movie producer…and most but not all of what he produced featured The Three Stooges. He also managed the trio and that connection makes a little more sense when you know that in 1947, he married Moe's daughter Joan.

Norman was responsible for the Stooges' later works. In 1960, he produced a TV pilot called Three Stooges Scrapbook which was a half-hour of them stooging around in both live-action material and an animated sequence. The pilot never sold but in '65, he exec-produced a syndicated show, The New Three Stooges which featured the Old Three Stooges. Well, "Curly" Joe DeRita was kinda new, having joined the troupe in late 1958 but Moe and Larry sure weren't new.

The 1965 series consisted of animated Stooge cartoons, wrapped-around by live-action intros and outros. The animation was done by Cambria Studios whereas the animated cartoon in Three Stooges Scrapbook was produced by a company called TV Spots. We'll get to them.

Three Stooges Scrapbook is one of those films that Stooges fans long to see. I have no idea if it's possible to view the entire show anywhere but the cartoon segment and its live-action intro and outro have surfaced…and no, I'm not going to embed it so you can watch it here. I'm instead posting this link to where you can watch it on YouTube.

It was put there by a YouTuber named Curly's Grandson who is apparently Curly's Grandson. Since he apparently spent good money to preserve and transfer the film, I want to give him every possible chance to monetize its presence on YouTube…ergo, a link but no embed here.

TV Spots was an animation studio that mainly did commercials. It was founded by Bob Wickersham, who among his many credits directed the first Fox & Crow cartoons for Columbia and also wrote and drew comic books — of the Fox and Crow for DC and some other creations for other companies. At some point, he was squeezed out of the company he started but before TV Spots closed down in (I think) the late sixties, it was involved in a number of TV shows you may have heard of including Crusader Rabbit, King Leonardo, Calvin and the Colonel and some occasional sub-contracting work for Jay Ward.

If you go watch the Stooges cartoon, you'll see Moe Howard, Larry Fine and "Curly" Joe DeRita intro it and provide their voices for the animation. I'm pretty sure the announcer in the cartoon was Don Lamond and all the other voices were done by Mel Blanc. The credits at the end are for the entire half-hour show.

Today's Video Link

I don't know what year this is from but it was a long time ago. Billy Joel and Marlee Matlin visit Sesame Street…

P.S. ADDED LATER: Bill Mullins, a follower of this site, identifies the clip as from Christmas of 1988. Thanks, Bill.

Rudy Kablooey

There is zero chance of me buying a bag of Rudy Giuliani's new coffee. I don't like Rudy Giuliani and I don't like coffee…and even if I did like one or both, I would see no reason to presume that Rudy knows anything — I mean anything! — about coffee. Maybe if he were endorsing a line of guaranteed-to-fail legal maneuvers and I needed some guaranteed-to-fail legal maneuvers…

I know, I know: You don't care about this man and in some ways, neither do I. I just have this strange fascination with people who seem determined to destroy their lives and careers by doing wrong thing after wrong thing.

It's like when you read that some entertainer who once had $30 million bucks is now broke and declaring bankruptcy. If you ran through $30 million smackers, it means that one day, you were suddenly worth $29 million and a little later, you were worth $28 million and still later, you were worth $27 million and so on. Around about the time you hit the $15 million mark, I would think you'd pause and think, "Hmmm…maybe I'm doing something wrong here" and change Business Managers or strategies or something. But in most of those stories, the former thirty-millionaire waited until he got down to chicken feed before he tried to stanch the bleeding.

I'm going to guess that the man it says on the coffee bag is "America's Mayor" never had any thoughts about being in the coffee business before someone who was in that biz approached him. It was probably someone who shared Rudy's politics who thought, "There are a lot of people out there like me and they'll buy this coffee to show their support for him." After all, Trump hasn't done badly selling sneakers and over-priced, badly-printed Bibles…and it's not like there's any reason to think Trump knows anything about sneakers or God.

And Rudy, of course, is in no position to turn down anything that'll put money in his pocket. He'd probably dress up in drag like he always has enjoyed doing, and make a kinky film with Stormy Daniels if someone offered cash in advance. And it would probably sell way better than coffee with his face on it.

Today's Video Link

And now, here's the PaleyFest interview with Seth Meyers, who happens to be my current fave late night host if you don't count people named Jon or John…

ASK me: Kamandi Kovers

Michael Ryan wrote to ask…

I recently picked the new soft cover collections of Kamandi and, as I was when I bought the original issues off the newsstand, I'm struck by the Joe Kubert covers on the last seven issues (#34 to #40) of Jack's run on the book.

While Joe's art can be quite loose, these covers seem to me to be overly sloppy or at least rushed. Joe's covers start with Gerry Conway taking over the editorial and eventual writing duties on the book. Joe certainly knew how to draw powerful covers and did hundreds, if not thousands, for DC and they trusted him to produce images that would sell books, but his Kamandi covers are not his finest work, IMO.

Perhaps I'm just being overly critical, but is there a story behind this that I’ve missed you telling before?

Here's my answer but first, I should answer another question. A lot of folks have written to ask why Joe Kubert was suddenly doing the covers on Jack Kirby comics. The answer is that back then at DC, all covers started with either a rough sketch by Head Honcho Carmine Infantino or with a rough sketch by someone else and that sketch was approved, perhaps after modification, by Infantino. Sometimes, as I've explained here, the cover was designed before the insides of the book were drawn or even written. Sometimes, it was done after. I believe these were all done after.

Jack was working for DC on a contract that called for him to finish one issue of something and then immediately start on something else. So as he neared the end of one story, he'd call up Carmine's office and ask "What do you want me to do next?" Carmine would check the schedules or have someone else check the schedules and Jack would be told to next do an issue of this or that.

Near the end of his contract, they had him backlogging issues of Kamandi. And when that contract expired and he stopped working for DC, there were many issues for which Carmine had never gotten around to designing covers for or having Jack design something. So they had Kubert do them.

I have nothing but admiration for Joe Kubert as an artist but I would agree with you that those covers were not his best work. And I think if you look over all the covers on all the DC books from that period, you would find a lot of very talented artists doing not their best work. The firm no longer had the services of Neal Adams or Nick Cardy as cover artists and Infantino seemed to have forgotten all he'd learned over the years about designing attractive covers. They'd also adopted a new cover format with an ugly banner across the top and…

Well, I just think DC was putting out a lot of weak comics then with a lot of weaker covers. Kubert was pretty unhappy that his Tarzan series was failing and a lot of other comics in the line weren't doing so well. Infantino knew that his bosses weren't too happy with him. He was fired not long after. It was not a good time for the company and I think it showed in their comics.

Today's First Video Link

Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone discusses the legalities (or lack thereof) of protests on college campuses. This ties in with something we were discussing earlier on this blog — how some people somehow forget that the First Amendment is only about government restrictions on free speech. One of these days, I may write a blog post here about my experiences on both sides of the protests over the Vietnam War when I was attending U.C.L.A.. I was one of those rare animals — a person who actually had their mind changed…

Rudywatch

If anyone doubts my claim that Rudy Giuliani is in a ridiculous amount of trouble, read this.