Mark Evanier's Blog, page 259

Update

And I'm paying so little attention to the news that by the time I wrote about it, a fighter jet from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia had already shot down the alleged Chinese Spy Balloon. Personally, I think we should have let it float around until Thanksgiving and left a space for it in the Macy's Parade.

Mushroom Soup Saturday

Still trying to trim that "To Do" list down to a manageable length. I'm not looking at the news much but what I see is a lot of people panicking over that "Chinese spy balloon" that seems to be drifting over parts of the U.S. — and there are reports that there's more than one and also that these have been there before but the government just kind of hushed that news up because the balloons were harmless and there was a fear people would react like…

…well, like a lot of them seem to be reacting right now. I don't have the energy to read all the articles so maybe someone has a solid take on what these balloons might be spying for and what it is we really don't want them to see that isn't visible on Google Maps.

Meanwhile: The second issue of Gods Against Groo is on sale now. Two more to go and then the next Groo mini-series will follow a few months after this one is completed. One of the things on that "To Do" list of mine is doing whatever it is I do on that series, which I shall do as soon as I figure out what it is I do on these comics.

Today's Video Link

My pal Arnie Kogen — oft-mentioned on this blog — explains what it was like to write on The Dean Martin Show…

Mushroom Soup Friday

My "To Do" list is approaching the length of the lists of George Santos Lies that some news sites are keeping. I am spending today trying to whittle my list down to size so don't expect a lot of posts here today…or over this weekend, probably. And I'm not slighting you or this blog. Some of what I'm doing involves furthering the migration of this site to its new software.

Oh! I wanted to mention this. Back on Wednesday, I posted links to three video segments from the 9/26/1974 Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The folks who oversea Mr. Carson's archives have now posted the video of that complete episode which also includes a little more with the guests plus Johnny's monologue, a bit at the desk with Ed and a sketch featuring The Ace Trucking Company (including Fred Willard). If you want to see the whole thing, here it is.

I'll be back with more stuff when I'm back with more stuff. Ciao.

Today's Video Link

Here's a backstage web video done for Stephen Colbert's show: Eight minutes of Nathan Lane reminiscing about a few of the 25 starring roles he's played on Broadway. I saw him in Guys and Dolls, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (twice!), The Producers and November. Those are the ones I actually saw on or around Broadway and I saw a few others on video. I've liked every show I've seen him in except November and I even liked him in that show. I just didn't like the show. Wish I'd seen the others…

ASK me: The Killer Agent

Mike W. asks…

I'm looking for someone to agent my writing. Tell me a true story that ends with the phrase, "And that's when I knew I shouldn't sign with that agent!"

With your kind permission, I'm going to change it to "And that's when we knew we shouldn't sign with that agent." The "we" is myself and my partner at the time, Dennis Palumbo. We had accomplished something that few beginning writers were able to do. We had gotten a script assignment for a prime-time series from Norman Lear's company and we did it without having an agent. True, it was The Nancy Walker Show, which was canceled sometime during the middle commercial of the debut episode. And also true was that none of what we wrote got in front of a camera.

But at the time we got the job, it was a big thing. And suddenly, every agent in town wanted to meet with us and pitch us on hiring him or her to represent us. So in one amazing week, Dennis and I went to see nine or ten agents. The first five or six all did their best selling job, telling us how they'd get us jobs galore and fulfill our every dream about Show Business. That's, after all, what agents do: They sell. You wouldn't want an agent who wasn't a skilled salesperson.

So we go see the sixth or seventh one, already a bit weary of telling our life stories and explaining where we saw our careers going. This one agent greets us warmly, sits us down, offers us refreshments and then begins his "pitch" with, I swear to you, the following words…

"Now, I'm not good at getting you work…"

Honest. He said that. He said that to two beginning writers he was hoping would become his clients. Dennis and I looked at each other like we were Abbott and Costello in one of those monster-meeting movies of theirs meeting the monsters. It was like a guy who wants to be your dentist telling you, "Now, I have no idea how to fill a cavity…" or a pilot welcoming you on his plane by saying, "Now, I don't have the slightest clue how to fly this thing…" We were both waiting for the "but" and what would follow.

Which is when the agent guy added, "But when you do get a job, no one will get you more money."

He went on, getting increasingly animated as he said, "I will kill for you. I negotiate like John Wayne storming the beach in war movie, only I take no prisoners. I will leave them bleeding…bleeding and begging for mercy! I will hurt them for you and hurt them bad and get you every fuckin' cent there is to be gotten. I have never left even a nickel on the table…"

That was when one of us — I think Dennis — said, "Boy, you're some tipper." But the agent didn't hear it and went on for five minutes more saying things like, "Did you ever see one of those movies where the hero slaughters two dozen opponents and steps triumphantly over their bodies, all lying there in a pool of blood? That's me after I negotiate with those Business Affairs guys!"

I guess there are some writers who want that. We sure didn't, especially when we were starting out. Not that this ever happened to me at least, but you don't want to walk into your first creative meeting once the deal is set and have the producer say, "After what we went through to get you, you'd better be fucking brilliant!" If it ever happens to me, I'll probably say, "If I give back some of the money, could the goal just be for me to write a good script?"

Dennis and I made polite conversation for a few minutes with the bloodthirsty agent and we said we'd think it over and get back to him. We thought it over for three seconds in the hallway outside his office and then never got back to him.

But that moment when he said, "I'm not good at getting you work"…that's when we knew we shouldn't sign with that agent. Is that kind of what you wanted, Mike?

Today's Video Links

Things got a little outta hand on The Tonight Show for 9/26/1974 and I'm not sure how much of this was planned. On a talk show today if these kinds of things happened, they would all be planned and the host would never not know what was going to happen.

Here are three segments — one each with Dom DeLuise, Burt Reynolds and Art Carney. You may see why I think Mr. Carney was one of the five best comedians of his generation. But watch the clips in sequence…

ASK me: How Kirby Worked

Mitchell Senft sent me an e-mail with that subject: "How Kirby Worked" and then further asked…

Did he use any notes for the story at hand?

Did he breakdown a page either with thumbnails or on the board? If I recollect, I read somewhere that he he would just start at the top left of a page and start drawing.

I can't quite turn this into a question but I recently reread both his New Gods (the book, not the concept) and Eternals runs. The former struck me as having the rhythm of a monthly while the latter flowed much more smoothly.  Am I imagining something?  Was something going on that I've picked up??

Jack Kirby had an amazing story sense and it was sometimes hard to tell, when he suddenly started telling you a plot or a concept, if that was something he'd come up with at that moment or something he'd been carrying around in his head for some time.  I am absolutely certain that he could do both.  There was almost nothing put down on paper before he began composing a page he was drawing for publication.

Over the years, I've had dozens of people come to me and say, "Let's assemble a book of Jack's rough sketches and outlines and plot notes" and I have to tell them that there are almost none.  And the few things in the category that do exist were almost always produced because his publisher or editor insisted on seeing a "rough" or an outline.  If they hadn't demanded that, Jack would never have done one.

My then-partner Steve Sherman and I were sometimes used as a kind of "sounding board" for stories Jack wrote and drew when he went back to DC in 1970.  We'd sit in his studio next to his drawing table.  Jack would be sitting at the drawing table but not drawing as he told us the entire plot of the issue he was about to do next…and we'd make invaluable suggestions like, "That sounds great, Jack."

I would have loved to have given Jack an idea to make his story better but there was very little room for that.  What he told us was complete and it did sound great…so the few suggestions of ours that got in were pretty trivial. And one of our other big contributions was that at the proper moment — when we'd done whatever Jack asked us to do that day and he needed to focus on putting a story on paper, we'd leave. Steve and I should get a lot of credit for leaving. We were very good at it.

Jack would start committing his story to paper…and what he put down might have been pretty much what he told us. Or on our next visit when he let us read the story in pencil off the original art, we might have wondered how the heck he got from what he'd told us to what he then wrote and drew. If it was significantly different and we told him that, he was genuinely surprised.  He didn't know how he'd gotten there either.

He never wrote any sort of outline on paper for himself.  A couple of times, I wrote one down for him but only based on his ideas. When Jack did the first issue of Kamandi, Carmine Infantino (he was the head of DC at the time) wanted to see an outline first…I suspect so he could make some comments and then pretend he'd co-created the new feature. At least once or twice later on, he claimed he was the sole creator of Kamandi and when people ask me about that, I give this reply: "I did a lot more on that first issue than Infantino did and I don't think I deserve any kind of creator credit."

Basically, what I did was this: When Jack told us the plot of Kamandi #1, he had me take notes on it, then I went home and wrote up an outline which Jack then sent east for Carmine's approval. Once that was secured, Jack followed it pretty closely. As far as I could tell, the one bit of input that Infantino had was to insist on imagery of a wrecked Statue of Liberty — a fresh, clever idea if you'd never seen the movie, Planet of the Apes.

But outline or not, Jack worked from what was in his head. He would start roughing out sequences on the illustration board, designing with light figure placements, working out how the story would flow from panel to panel. He did a fair amount of erasing during this stage to get things the way he wanted. Then once he'd designed each panel lightly on the page, he would do the finished penciling right over his light roughs.

He did very little erasing in the "tightening" phase…and when he did, it was not because he thought the drawing could be better but because he decided that other things should be happening. If we were present, he might hand a page to Steve or to me and say, "Erase those three panels" because he'd decided he wanted something different in them.

He did not always start on page one. He'd start drawing sequences and then jump around and rearrange pages and fill in between those sequences.  Occasionally, he'd omit an almost-finished page here and there to arrive at the story he wanted to send in.  These were all pages where he knew roughly what each caption and word balloon would say but he hadn't written the copy in.  He would do that as the final step.

The line you read about how he'd start at the upper left hand corner and just draw from there is a line I said on a few occasions.  I was talking about him drawing one of those amazing double-page spreads he'd do.  It was like the drawing was all there already but in invisible ink which only he could see…and then as he went over those lines with his pencil, they became visible to everyone.

I hope this is the kind of answer you were seeking.  I'm not sure I completely understand the question about the New Gods having "the rhythm of a monthly" but a key difference between the work Jack did for DC then and what he did for Marvel when he went back there in '75 was that at Marvel, he was his own editor, deciding what should be in each issue.

At DC, he had the title of Editor and much latitude came with it…but Carmine Infantino had definite ideas of which of the many ideas Jack had told him should appear in each issue.  Left to his own devices, Jack would have introduced new characters and new concepts in a different order, perhaps dwelling more on one before introducing the next.  The character of The Black Racer, in Jack's mind, was a standalone comic unrelated to Darkseid and the Fourth World…but Infantino wanted it in there and he wanted it in New Gods #3 so Jack complied.

At Marvel, he got some direction — like, he was told they wanted a Hulk guest appearance in The Eternals — but he got less of that kind of order and he didn't have to comply as totally. In that case, he was able to make it a Hulk robot instead of the man/creature himself. Perhaps that kind of difference is the answer to your question.

Just In Time For Valentine's Day…

Costco is offering this round Brilliant 0.85 ctw VS2 Clarity, I Color Diamond 14kt White Gold Ring in Size 7. It's made of 14kt White Gold (Rhodium Plated) with a total diamond carat weight of 0.85 ctw and the total number of diamonds is 55. While supplies last, this elegant piece of jewelry can be yours to place on the finger of that very special lady for only $1,112.99.

That's Costco…for when you care enough to buy wholesale and while you're at it, get her a 30-roll pack of 2-ply Kirkland Signature Toilet Paper and a rotisserie chicken.

Today's Video Link

Jordan Klepper is back visiting Trump rallies…only they're not really rallies. They're more like intimate conferences or some other name you give a rally when not many people show up.

No, I don't think all the folks who turn out for one of these Trump whatever-you-call-them are like the ones he selects to put on camera and into his videos. But I think it's kind of scary that there are people like that at all…