Mark Evanier's Blog, page 204

Today's Video Link

Here's the second episode of Turn-On. That is to say this is what would have aired the second week if the show hadn't been cancelled during its first week — by some accounts, cancelled on the East Coast while it still airing on the West Coast…

Ask ME: About Covers

Chris Powe writes…

I briefly accumulated comics, including recent back issues I ran across at a cool general store in Wichita Falls, back in the early 60s. I read my DC favorites from cover to cover. DC used to send original art to their letter writers that were published. Do you remember that? Another thing I seem to recall reading is that sometimes a cover would be drawn and then a story written for it. That seemed reasonable at the time to fourteen year old me, but now…

Yep, some editors at DC used to mail original art to readers who had letters printed in their comics…and wasn't just those editors who announced on the pages that they were doing this. I had a couple of letters published in The Inferior Five, which was edited by Jack Miller and he sent me a couple of original pages from that comic without announcing it.

One was from the second Showcase issue of that property in which the art was credited to Joe Orlando and Mike Esposito. I had that page on the wall of my bedroom for about a year until one day I looked at it and realized it wasn't drawn by Joe Orlando. All or most of it was ghost-penciled by Jerry Grandenetti. Grandenetti ghosted a lot of work at DC, Western and Warren that was credited to Orlando.

Click above to view these larger.

And I didn't have any letters published in Strange Adventures when it was featuring Deadman drawn by Neal Adams but Mr. Miller, shortly before he left DC, sent me a couple of those pages as a thank-you for a short correspondence we had and to apologize that he wouldn't be able to give me a script assignment he said he was going to give me.

And yes, covers were sometimes drawn before there was a script. Before the advent of the Direct Sales Market, there was a stronger belief — very strong with some editors and publishers — that the cover of a comic was the single-most important selling tool. They believed almost all readers were casual readers, not collectors. They felt most folks who bought comics bought them as an impulse buy. They'd look at the rack and purchase whatever looked interesting, often because of the situation depicted.

Then click above to view these larger.

Many an editor, after struggling to find a great cover scene in a story that was already written and maybe already drawn, decided it might be easier to do it the other way around: Design what seemed to be a "grabber" of a cover and then have a writer write a story to go with it. Often, the person in charge had some idea that certain elements on a cover — like gorillas or fire or the Earth blowing up — boosted sales. It was easier to get one or more of those elements on a cover if you started there.

Sometimes also, the needs of the engravers and printers necessitated the cover going to press way before the insides. (Some folks seem to believe that was always the case. Not so. Just sometimes.) And there was a period at Marvel when getting Jack Kirby to draw a cover before the insides of the comic were written or drawn was a way to get him to design a new character or come up with a plot idea. There were lots of reasons. I've illustrated this answer with the covers of some comics that were known to have been drawn before the story was written…but it didn't happen all the time.

Today's Video Link

In 1969, a new comedy series debuted on ABC called Turn-On. Produced by George Schlatter, who was also the producer of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, Turn-On promised to take comedy, as Laugh-In had, to new places…and for one episode, it did. Here is Mr. Schlatter himself telling you his version of what happened. There are other versions but here's his and here's the first episode. Tomorrow in this space, I'll post Show #2…

Farewell, Old Friend!

The digital video recorder known as TiVo was introduced in 1999 and as far as I was concerned, it was the greatest scientific breakthrough since Ben Franklin flew his kite in the rain. I immediately bought a Series 1 (or whatever they called it) and for about six months, I was the only person I knew who'd ever heard of such a thing. I demonstrated it for every friend who came by and every friend who came by asked, "Where do I get one?"

I loved my TiVo and all the many models of TiVo I have owned since. I still love TiVo but sometimes, you have to say goodbye to people or things that you love.

These days, most people have DVRs of some sort but few of them have TiVos. TiVo is still around and selling TiVos, this despite decades of predictions that the company would soon disappear. Such rumors began when most outifts that brought cable or satellite TV to your home introduced their own proprietary DVRs and supplied them to you free with your subscription.  There's no doubt that TiVo's existence was threatened by these offerings.

But TiVo is still here, despite all forecasts of its demise. This, I would attribute to the fact that TiVos are smartly designed by smart people whereas the DVRs designed by others are designed by utter morons with the collective I.Q. of an earthworm. Or maybe it just felt that way the times I tried them.

I have had several different companies provide me with my TV signal over the last few decades. Beginning well before the turn of the century, whenever I had a problem with one — no picture, bad picture, missing channels, etc. — the first thing the TV provider would say I had to do was to junk my TiVos and install their DVRs. One technician who came out to fix things here took it upon himself to uninstall my TiVo and, install his company's DVR when I wasn't looking. "I've upgraded you," he proudly announced. I made him put things back the way he found them and then actually fix the problem.

I forget which company he was from. I do recall that when I had DirecTV — the satellite version — one of their guys told me I had to install their DVR because TiVo was going out of business. He knew this because he'd read an article in an industry journal or something…anyway, it was a lie. That was many decades ago, TiVo is still here and that man is currently an anchor on Newsmax. Most likely.

For the last decade or so, I've been a subscriber to a cable/Internet/phone system which shall remain unidentified in this post. Let's just say its name reminds you of autism. Through those years, I've spent way too much of my life on the phone to their Tech people and sometimes their Billing people…and sometimes, I can't reach either because of an Artificial Intelligence Phone Operator Voice that drops my calls, routes me to the wrong divisions, nags me to buy services I don't want or already have and/or leaves me on "hold" for what feels like hours at a time.

In one of my favorite movies, Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, there's a scene with a man who is trapped in a hillside cavern for many long days and nights. Workers are attempting to reach him with a powerful drill that pounds away at the rocks above him…and after days and days of hearing that pounding sound, over and over and over and over, he decides he can take it no longer. He would rather die than listen to that pounding for a minute longer.

That's kind of how I feel about listening to this company's "hold" music.

I took my Internet service to another provider and got a faster, better, more reliable connection for a better price. I took my phone service away from them and am happier now, as well. I was down to just getting my TV service from them but last week, I could not get the HBO I've been paying for and this is like the eighth time it's happened. Their tech folks are usually very nice and very competent when you can talk to one and they usually tell me they can't solve the problem unless I scrap my TiVo and use their DVR.

The way it's gone in the past is like this: I tell them I want to keep my TiVo and if we can't fix it, I'll cancel my service with their company. They then find a way to fix it. Then half the time two days later, UPS delivers me a box containing one of this cable company's DVRs that I did not request. Once or twice, I've given it a try. I've installed their device, played with it, decided my TiVo was much better, uninstalled their DVR and put it back in its box and had my assistant take it back to their store while I reconnected my beloved TiVo.

I shouldn't have to do this every time I want to watch or record John Oliver.

This last time, I spent around twenty minutes on the phone with a smart, affable tech guy discussing the problem. This time, he couldn't solve it and was just offering to send out a technician when suddenly, a different male voice said, "To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?" The crackerjack phone service at the company from which I used to get my phone service had cut off the discussion-in-progress and connected me to a different guy in their tech division.

He had no idea how to get me back to the first guy and no notes from the call. He wanted me to start over with him but instead I asked him, "Please connect me to whoever I have to talk to in order to cancel my service. He said, "Really? According to my computer here, you've been with us for 41 years." Actually, I signed up with another company for Internet 41 years ago and when they went out of business, they passed me to another company.

And when that company went out of business, they passed me to another company. And when that company went out of business, they passed me to another company.  And when that company went out of business, they passed me to another company.  And I'm not sure how many more there were before I arrived at this company, nor can I imagine where they'd connect me if I'd stayed when as, when seems inevitable, they get out of the cable/TV/phone service and become a business that sprays your yard for mosquitoes…or something else they're more qualified to do.  I made four instant decisions…

Even if they could get my HBO working again — even if they'd refund me for all the weeks I was paying for it and couldn't watch it, which is something they told me they simply couldn't do — I couldn't deal with them any longer and…Even if I could still use my Tivo with them, there will soon come a day when I can't…And I don't know where to turn for a provider who can provide me a TV signal for my TiVo and so…Maybe it's time to abandon my TiVo and investigate streaming systems.

So that's what I'm doing now. I've severed all dealings with the cable company and am doing seven-day free trials of companies that will give me television programming and other goodies over my high-speed Internet.  I shall use their DVR-in-the-cloud feature and learn to adapt.  Please do not send me suggestions for streaming services or roof antennas or how to reconnect my TiVo somewhere it will do me good.  I have to do this for myself.  Mankind has survived for its entire existence by learning to adapt and I can do this.  I think.

Monday Morning

I've received a lot more mail about the time period of this video of old New York. You may remember that reader Peter Cunningham said that the footage had to be from different years because in one shot, the Empire State Building didn't have its giant broadcasting antenna and in another, it did. A number of folks — including Peter Cunningham — wrote to say that in one of those shots, he had mistaken the Chrysler Building for the Empire State.

Bill Lentz noted that — before it was colorized and had faux audio added — was identified as being from 1948. And my longtime buddy Joe Brancatelli, who knows New York like nobody I know, noticed this…

I can add some more specificity. At the 13:18 mark, you have a shot of Times Square at night. You see the Astor Theater in the left foreground and right next to it a marquee advertising Berlin Express. That's the Victoria Theater. Berlin Express opened there on May 20, 1948, according to The New York Times review.

So I'm declaring the matter settled: The film was shot in mid-1948. End of discussion.

Turning to a topic that actually matters: Like all of you, I'm quietly — or maybe not so quietly — horrified by the latest in the never-ending series of Israeli-Palestinian wars. I have nothing to say about it that's worth even the low value of a blog post. If you forced me to say something, I'd probably say what Kevin Drum had to say about it…

Israel's enemies have launched war after war over the past 50 years and they've been crushed Every. Single. Time. The result has been uniformly disastrous: settlements, walls, blockades, checkpoints, and massive oppression of Israeli Arabs. You don't have to approve of any of this to recognize that it's the easily foreseeable response of a nation under siege. The same thing will happen this time. Thousands of Palestinians will die and Israeli retaliation will make the rest worse off than before.

And now I'll shut up about it because I have nothing to add.

Comics For Ukraine – It's Out!

Yesterday, I received my contributor's copies of Comics For Ukraine, a magnificent benefit book that is raising funds to aid refugees displaced and/or harmed by the current military actions going on in that part of the world. It was the brainchild of my pal Scott Dunbier and he assembled a list of participants so impressive that most people can even overlook that I am one of them. Here's that list…

Alex Ross, Arthur Adams, Dave Johnson, Brent Anderson, Sergio Aragonés, June Brigman, Kurt Busiek, Howard Chaykin, Michael Cherkas, Colleen Doran, Emil Ferris, Pia Guerra, Rob Guillory, Larry Hancock, Greg Hildebrant, Dave Johnson, Joe Jusko, Peter Kuper, John Layman, Joseph Michael Linsner, Gabriel Rodriguez, Alex Ross, Stan Sakai, Liam Sharp, Bill Sienkiewicz, Louise Simonson, Walter Simonson, Jill Thompson, Billy Tucci, Matt Wagner, Mark Waid, Yours Truly and more.

Sergio and I — with the graciously also-donated lettering of Stan Sakai and coloring of Tom Luth — produced a new, 8-page Groo story which is appearing nowhere else.  (Well, let me amend that a bit: Nowhere else for the foreseeable future.  I can't promise it won't be reprinted somewhere decades from now.)

A few copies of this handsome volume were available at Comic-Con last July and were snatched up immediately.  The bulk of the advance orders are now being delivered and if you arranged for one, you're going to be very happy with your purchase.  If you didn't order one and you want to, that's not possible right this minute but I should have a link for you in a couple of weeks.

To repeat something I said before here: One of the many reasons I'm excited about the project is that every cent of profit is being placed in the capable hands of my favorite charity, Operation USA, to direct to the points where it'll do the most good. You may have seen me write about Operation USA on this site and a little ad for it has always been in my right-hand margin here. It's the main place I send my money when I want to see it help people in need and I would remind you that you don't have to just buy the book to get funds to them. You can send them whatever you can spare right this minute. Here — I'll even give you a nice, clickable banner…

Today's Video Link

This will interest many of you but especially my pal Anthony Tollin. It's a 1974 episode of the game show To Tell the Truth and the first segment features the prolific author Walter Gibson. Gibson was a frighteningly-prolific author who among his many credits authored several hundred novel-length stories for the pulp magazine market of The Shadow, a character he largely created. He also wrote comic books for most of the major comic book publishers of the forties and fifties and of The Shadow and he wrote over a hundred books on magic and the supernatural and…

Well, there wasn't much that a writer could write during his lifetime that Walter Gibson didn't write. See if you can figure out which of three men was the real Walter Gibson and I'm sorry about the oddly-inserted commercial interruptions in this video…

Still More About Frank Robbins

I'm still receiving e-mails about my three-part piece (which started here) about comic book/strip creator Frank Robbins. Before I get to some more of those missives, I have to make a correction or maybe a clarification…

I said that Robbins wrote, drew and sometimes lettered his Johnny Hazard newspaper strip — six daily strips and one Sunday page — in three days each week without assistants. At times, I believe he did but there were periods when he employed Howard Liss as a writer — or probably more of a co-writer. Also, a French artist named Patrice Serres assisted with the art at times and said there was one other art assistant while he was doing it.

I was told by Gil Kane, Irwin Hasen, Ben Oda (Robbins' letterer at times) and a few others that Robbins produced the strip without assistants but maybe they meant that was so at the time they told me. In any case, no one doubts that Robbins was very fast and I thank Andreas Eriksson for the information he sent me. Now to the mail, starting with this message from David Long…

Thanks for writing about Frank Robbins on your blog. I feel Frank has been under rated as to his contributions to Batman. While everyone credits Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams for moving Batman back to a dark and serious character, I think Frank Robbins did a lot of heavy lifting of moving Batman in that direction that is often overlooked. (Along with artists like Irv Novick and Bob Brown.)

I will admit I did not care for Robbins' art when I saw it on Batman and Marvel's Invaders. It wasn't until after his death that I discovered his work on Johnny Hazard and saw how good he can be in the right venue.

Yeah, that was kind of my main point — one that I think some readers of this blog missed; that comic book artists sometimes don't do their best work on a certain comic or with certain collaborators. As a kid, I often loved some artist's work on one book but not another and I was curious why. I came to the conclusion that the reason was obvious. Most comic book artists were and are pretty consistent in their skills. What varies from book to book is, first of all, which book they're working on and who they're working with.

This next one is from Bob Thomas…

I'm a longtime daily reader of your blog and just finished reading your series on Frank Robbins. I must confess, I was a hater of his Invaders artwork (but loved his writing on the Batman/Detective stories) appreciate you mentioning the non-Neal Adams art bias (of which I suffer). I took what you wrote to heart and am going to reread some of those Invaders stories with an eye towards non-traditional art. I recently did the same with Alex Toth, whom I previously hadn't liked, and found I liked his artwork when I wasn't comparing him to my favorites (Adams, Kaluta, Wrightson, and other "stars").

When Neal Adams kind of exploded in comics in the late sixties, we had kids in our local comic book club who said, in effect, "Yeah, that's how all comic books should look" and became hostile to any that didn't. As good as Neal was, I always thought there were many comics for which his "look" was wrong…and the same applies to Kirby or anyone else.

This is from Rob Weldon…

I wanted to thank you for the excellent sequence on Frank Robbins. Plenty of new information and context for me, it was great. Outside of Rob Liefeld, he's the most maligned artist online, at least as of today.

I think you're right that poor inking hurt his work, but this was pretty common at the time. But his artwork was really special so it stood out anyways. Everyone complains about his anatomy, but he didn't make random errors in random ways, he did the same things consistently, and conveyed complex movements and emotions. His paintings show that he understood anatomy very well.

And his facial expressions are perfect; you can feel the accomplishment of having worked on all those Johnny Hazard strips where you need to make every bit of space carry meaning. You always know what a character is looking at in a scene, and sense their emotions.

A better critic than I could put together a case that what he learned producing strips, comics and paintings was used across the media and improved his work in each.

In any case, I loved his comics stuff when it first came out, I even put up with the Human Fly and the Man from Atlantis while he drew those books. I later looked into Scorchy Smith and Johnny Hazard. But never hear comics readers say anything good about him, only professionals. I can't think of another artist or writer that is true about.

Well, I know an awful lot of comic readers who have good things to say about Frank Robbins. I now have a folder on my computer with over a hundred e-mails from them…and I also know folks who think Rob Liefeld is terrific. There's a wide variety of opinions and sensibilities out there as well as people who expect different things from comic book art.

I expect/hope for smart panel-to-panel continuity but I've encountered folks — and I'm not saying they're wrong even though they are — who just want neat-looking pictures and don't really care if they tell a story or not. I recall debating with one Alex Toth detractor who thought he'd won a debate by saying, "Show me one panel he ever drew that you'd frame and hang on your wall!" I can think of many with Alex but if that's what you're looking for, you're missing the point of what he was trying to do.

With Toth — with most of my favorite artists — judging the work by individual images was like judging a movie by looking at freeze-frames of different moments in the film. As I mentioned, the aspect of drawing comics that Kirby thought was most important was deciding what to draw in each panel. He meant, "…to tell the story well."

Here's one last e-mail for now, this time from Phil Rushton…

I'm in complete agreement with everything you wrote about the wonderful Frank Robbins, but it occurs to me that I'd have really loved to see his version of Blackhawk. I wonder if you ever tried to get him to draw the title when you were editing it — or had he left comics forever by then?

He'd left comics forever by then and Alex Toth — who was my only possible conduit to Mr. Robbins — told me Frank was happy to be out of them…so I didn't ask. I actually didn't seek out most of the artists who did those short backup stories in Blackhawk. It was more a matter of who asked me or who I ran into at conventions or in my everyday life. Robbins would have been sensational on that feature.

Thanks to all who wrote. I may do at least one more of these. I certainly have enough e-mails to fill ten or more.

Today's Video Link

The Flintstones debuted on September 30, 1960 when I was eight years, six months and twenty-eight days old. For a while, I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen or ever would see. That changed. It lasted in ABC prime time for six seasons but by about halfway through Season Four, I was bored with it. I liked a lot of cartoon shows better, including some Hanna-Barbera shows. When The Jetsons joined the ABC schedule on September 23, 1962, I thought that was a much better program even though it only lasted one year.

As you may know, The Flintstones occasionally had celebrity guest stars like Ann-Margrock (Ann-Margret) or Stony Curtis (Tony Curtis) and they'd have had more of them if they could have figured out stone/rock puns for more celebs' names. I was always kinda baffled by the first one of these they did. The first episode of Season 2 featured the composer Hoagy Carmichael…and they didn't even turn him into Hoagy Carmarble or anything. He was Hoagy Carmichael, doing his own voice and living in the Stone Age.

At the age by then of 9.5 or so, I vaguely knew who Hoagy Carmichael was and I suspect that 75% of the viewership didn't. He was a great writer of songs but he wasn't that famous. I don't recall seeing him on any other TV show for the rest of his life, which ended in 1981. I regret that, years later when I worked for Hanna-Barbera, I didn't think to ask Bill Hanna or Joe Barbera just how or why someone thought it was a good idea to snag Hoagy Carmichael as a guest star. I pestered both men with questions aplenty but somehow never got around to that one.

I'm going to guess that since they obviously did it for whatever publicity value it had — which was probably not much — somewhere out there, there are a few magazine-type articles about this. They probably explain about Hoagy being a huge fan of the show and Bill and Joe being huge fans of him and somehow they connected and it was too good an idea not to do…which it wasn't. And I'll further guess that while some of all of that was true, there was also some connection like Hoagy and H-B having the same agent or some idea about H-B doing a cartoon series with famous songwriters.

Whatever the catalyst, here's a clip from that episode. Despite the animated Hoagy giving credit for the song to Barney Rubble, it was all a Carmichael composition which, maybe they hoped, would become some kind of hit record…

Friday Evening

I just voted to ratify the new Writers Guild contract. So when the final vote is announced, if it's (let's say) 9,261 votes, you'll know that "1" is me.

Earlier today, I linked to a video of New York in the forties. In trying to pin down what year, I took notice of a movie marquee for the 1942 movie, Valley of Hunted Men…and one of another theater marquee showing the 1948 film, The Loves of Carmen. Might it be footage from '48 and the 1942 film was in re-release then? Or might it be that the video shows footage from different years?

Well, one of the many smart, industrious readers of this blog, Eric Costello, dug into some online newspaper archives and found that Valley of the Hunted Men was indeed in re-release in 1948 though he didn't find it playing at any theater in or near New York. He also spotted another marquee in the video. It's the Loew's Criterion and it marquee shows the film Tap Roots which the newspaper archive says was running there in late August and September of 1948, plus he found a review from September 3, 1948 showing The Loves of Carmen at the Loews State in New York. From all this, he concludes the video is from September of '48.

That sounds like pretty solid proof — but then I got this e-mail from another of the many smart, industrious readers of this blog, Peter Cunningham…

As to the question of the year of that New York film, the answer has to be multiple. At 6:45, The Empire State Building doesn’t have its giant broadcasting antenna. At 7:20, it does.

So you make the call for yourself. I'm going with footage from different years.