Mark Evanier's Blog, page 20

FACT CHECK: Falsehoods Galore

Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post has been one of the most reliable reporters out there. So when he says there's no evidence of Trump wrongdoing in the Epstein matter, that's not like some partisan stooge saying it. Of course, it also doesn't explain why Trump and so many of those around him are acting like there's a bombshell waiting to emerge.

And, speaking about acting guilty, Politifact bestows its coveted "Pants On Fire" award to Mr. Trump for his irrational insistence that the Epstein Files were written by Comey, Obama, Biden and other folks who weren't in office at the time and never did anything with those files they supposedly authored to destroy Trump.

FactCheck.org notes that Border Czar Tom Homan keeps insisting there are over 600,000 illegal aliens with criminal records walking the streets of this nation. But that number includes a lot of people who entered the U.S. legally and a lot who have never been convicted of anything.

Meanwhile, an analysis from the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University is estimating that the "Big, Beautiful Bill" will lead to at least 42,500 preventable deaths each year and to a whole lot of suffering. Trump and his minions say otherwise…

…But then Trump is also throwing around some numbers about a surplus here and there which do not seem to the whole truth. And he also says his approval/disapprove numbers have never been more favorable to him while lots of other sources — Ed Kilgore cites some of them — are saying just the opposite. Who do you believe?

Today's Video Link

I've been telling you for some time here why I, once a frequent Vegas visitor, have no interest in going back to that city now. Would you like to hear someone corroborate everything I said and give even more reasons? Steven Campbell is a longtime resident of the town who posts videos about where to go and what to spend your money on and — more important — where not to go and what not to spend your money on.

Here's fifteen minutes of him ranting about what Sin City has become. When the man's right, he's right…

Today's Video Link

Here's an animated commercial that Hanna-Barbera made — one I never saw. And why did I, loyal viewer of the kind of shows that aired this kind of commercial, not see it? Because it only ran in the United Kingdom as part of the way Kellogg's cereal were marketing their products over there. The great thing about this is that it features Huckleberry Hound, Mr. Jinks and Yogi Bear — three characters voiced by Daws Butler.  Knowing Daws, he probably did this in one or two takes, switching voices off instead of recording each character separately…

The Colbert Question…

A lot of folks online are expressing their displeasure with the announcement that Stephen Colbert's show will end next May. Many of them say they've canceled their subscriptions to Paramount-Plus and I'm curious if they have some other way of watching The Late Show for the next ten months. It would certainly make CBS's decision to drop that show look less outrageous if Colbert's ratings went down a lot.

And a lot of them are telling me it's insane to think that the decision was not because for political reasons or for the appeasement of that guy in the White House. I'm not saying for sure it wasn't but, first of all, I'd like to hear what Jon Stewart thinks. And secondly, it has been my experience that when TV networks make some big decision — and giving up an entire daypart and axing one of their most popular and critically-acclaimed programs sure counts as a big decision, there are usually several reasons.

My mind can certainly be changed about this but I don't think the "it's not political" assertion is impossible.

NFM Weathercast

Because now, the National Weather Service ain't as good as it used to be…

Perils of Publishing

I keep getting "ASK me" questions to explain what's going on with the recent bankruptcy of Diamond Comic Distributors, at one time the major distributor of comic books and related materials.  If you asked, you came to the wrong place because I don't understand — and have never understood — much about that end of the industry. I only know that it has thrown the industry and most publishers into something between Total Chaos and Partial Chaos, and that's there's a legal battle raging over what will become of all the publishers' unsold goods that Diamond still has in its possession.

Beyond that, I leave the matter to those who understand more about sales and distribution than I do…which is, like, everyone involved in sales and distribution. One of those folks is my pal John Morrow, who publishes The Jack Kirby Collector and numerous other magazines and books about the kind of material that is considered "on topic" at any comic book convention. This article will tell you a little about John, the TwoMorrows Publishing Company and how they're coping with having the rug pulled out from under their feet.

ASK me: Prepping for Panels

Chris Gumprich asks…

For as long as I've been following you, you've hosted a tremendous number of panels. How do you prepare for these? Is it like a journalist preparing for an interview, or do you rely on your own deep knowledge of virtually everything in comics and animation to just wing it?

Has there ever been a time where you hosted a panel and felt completely out of your depth?

Some panels, you just wing. I've usually found that if you have a solid opening question, the responses you get usually lead organically to a solid second question and a third and so on. So I don't do much prep with those except to think of a solid opening question…and to research the interviewee(s) a bit just to see if there are areas worth exploring that I don't know about.  You don't want to miss some fascinating part of the panelists' lives.

But Quick Draw! takes a lot of prep as do the Cartoon Voices panels, as does Cover Story. This Comic-Con, I'm interviewing Don Glut, who I've known for about fifty years. If I just bring up all the interesting things I can remember about Don and his work and get him to telling stories about them, it should be an entertaining breeze.

I don't recall any awkward panels when I was the one deciding on the panel's theme and who'd be on it. I do recall a few where the convention operator asked me to moderate a panel they'd configured…and they had configured it with no rhyme-and-reason. I told one of those stories here and there were others long ago.

The con would have a lot of guest stars who really had nothing in common with each other. That was fine when they were sitting behind tables in the Dealers Room autographing stuff. But someone running the con would say, "We have to have our guests on a panel" and there were two things wrong with that. One was, and probably still is, that some convention guests would rather spend that time at their tables making money. They were appearing on a panel under at least slight duress, eager to get the thing over. Never a great situation.

So I had to moderate a panel where the panelists had nothing in common and there were few (if any) questions I could put to all of them. And when I asked Panelist #1 a question about his or her work, Panelist #2 wasn't interested…and it can make for an awkward panel when anyone on the panel doesn't care about much of what's being said. They're fine with the parts of the panel where they can talk about their own work but during the ones when they can't, they're sitting there squirming, thinking of all the sales they're not making back at their tables. So we try to avoid that.

Mostly, it's just a matter of me thinking either "What do I know about this person that this audience would like to hear them talk about?" or sometimes, "What do I not know about this person that I'd like to hear about and which I think the audience might be interested to hear?" If you keep those two questions in mind and the panelists have something in common and want to be there, you can't go much wrong. And when it's me interviewing just one person, you usually don't have those problems because most people like to talk about themselves.

Today's Video Link

Robert Kanigher was a writer-editor at DC Comics from 1945 until around 1985. He was amazingly prolific and several folks who worked around him told me, with only slight variations, the following: That one of the other editors could go to him and say, "Bob, I'm in a jam. I need an eight-page romance script" and Kanigher would drop whatever he was doing, roll a fresh piece of paper into his typewriter and without pausing to mull, start writing Page One with no idea whatsoever what might happen on Page Two or subsequent pages. The story, of course, would be done in an hour or so…

…and it would always be publishable. It might be wonderful, it might not but it would always be something they could use with one possible exception. The only reason it might not be used is that it might be the same story Kanigher had written a few months or years before. He had a tendency to repeat himself without realizing it…as any longtime reader of Wonder Woman, Metal Men, Enemy Ace, Sgt. Rock or any other comic he wrote could tell you.

Needless to say, he made a lot of money writing comics…a fact which I think prevented him, as it prevented others in comics, from branching out to other areas. We had a few interesting encounters, including one time when he explained to me that every single comic book ever published by Marvel and most of the non-Kanigher comics published at DC were pure shit.

He always struck me as perpetually angry that he felt trapped in a profession that probably didn't allow him to explore the full range of his abilities. He also struck me as just plain perpetually angry and a lot of folks who worked with him found him difficult to work for. There was a point in the sixties when a lot of DC artists were migrating to Marvel, usually hiding under pseudonyms at first. They were almost all artists who'd worked for Kanigher.

Here he is in a 1972 episode of the game show, To Tell the Truth…

Some More Thoughts About Colbert…

A lot of folks online seem sure that the axing of The Late Show is a case of CBS giving in to some demand by Donald Trump…and given some of the things CBS has done lately, that's an understandable suspicion. It could be that but the "financial decision" seems utterly credible to me. Colbert's show is expensive and even with it leading in the ratings of all late night shows, it's quite possible that CBS could put something else there that would be more profitable. Or at least thinks they can.

Networks have canceled profitable shows thinking that there's more cash to be made with something else. It's also not impossible that forces high up in Skydance Media, which is likely to merge with CBS/Paramount, don't like Colbert's politics (and recent criticisms of the "bribe") and decided to dump him without any pressure from the White House.

And of course, it's possible that there are more sinister doings here. One way I think we might know is if we see some of those Trump tweets where he basically confesses to his dirty dealings. A more likely way would be to see what Jon Stewart has to say. I don't believe we've heard from him yet but he has a very real interest in this. Colbert has ten more months of shows on CBS and may want to not get into too great a pissing contest with the network…for his staff's benefit if not his own. But Stewart doesn't have to get along with CBS until next May.

The Colbert Retort

In case you haven't heard — I just did from Stu Shostak — CBS is getting out of the late night business and terminating Stephen Colbert's late night show as of next May. They're saying this is a purely financial decision and I have no reason to doubt that even though Colbert currently has the most-watched of all the late night shows. But that species of show has become less and less profitable over the last decade or two. That's why they tried replacing James Corden not with another late night host but with something much cheaper…and then they decided to dump even that. All the regular broadcast networks are cutting and slashing expensive programming. It's just the way the business has been going for some time.

Colbert will do fine. His managers are probably cackling now at the kind of offers he's likely to get. If I ran HBO or one of those networks, I'd offer him a check with a lot of digits on it to do a completely uncensored — live, even — version of the kind of show he's been doing. He may not want that. He's such a versatile guy and a talk show only taps into some of what he can do so he may want to do something else.

And that's about as far as I've thought this thing through as of right now. It's kind of shocking, I know, but we're going to see CBS, NBC and ABC all remake themselves over the next few years so there will be more such shocks.