Mark Evanier's Blog, page 262
January 21, 2023
Mushroom Soup Saturday
I have to deal with a little knee problem. It's nothing major but it may prevent me from posting much today. I'll bet if you look hard, you can find something interesting on the Internet from someone else.
January 20, 2023
ASK me: Pride in Work
Mike Masters sent me this…
I enjoyed your recent piece on John Buscema, an artist whose work I admired greatly. I was aware he preferred doing historical work or Conan, and near the end, Marvel had him do a long form standalone Arthurian adaptation and noted it was a passion project for the artist.
From what you said, telling him "I really enjoyed your 2nd Avengers run, especially 'Siege' wouldn't necessarily get the response one expected. This got me to wondering. Can you think of other people in comics or film who are less than thrilled to be associated with what they are most known for? I read years ago that Vivian Vance was horrified she'd go through life with people thinking she was actually married to William Frawley and Alec Guinness seemed to be embarrassed by Star Wars.
Was Curt Swan proud of his work on Superman? What about Ditko and Spider-Man? Jack Kirby and anything? (Please don't tell me you're embarrassed by Blackhawk; that’d be heartbreaking.) In a nutshell, is Buscema the exception or was he just more vocal?
If you'd told John Buscema you loved some work he did on The Avengers, he would have thanked you and possibly muttered something about how he hoped you also saw certain of his other projects. Don't mistake being prouder of one piece of work than another for not being proud of the latter.
Everyone with any body of work is happier with certain jobs than others. They can't expect you to rank what they've done in the same order and — speaking for myself here — sometimes, it's nice to hear that someone liked something I didn't think turned out so well. Makes me think, "Well, maybe that wasn't as big a disaster as I thought."
Actually, John told people that the work he least enjoyed at Marvel was in 1969 and 1970 when they had him drawing stories for My Love and Our Love Story. I thought the work was outstanding and I know a lot of artists collect those issues as examples of how to draw beautiful women…but Buscema thought the stories were stupid. And again, he was drawing people in modern day dress and settings which didn't interest him half as much as fantasy material, especially the kind that oozed testosterone.
Generally speaking, creators and performers love compliments but sometimes, you may hit on a sore spot. I don't know anything about how Alec Guinness felt about Star Wars but it wouldn't surprise me if someone who'd done so much fine, respected work had some problem with people who only knew him as Obi-Wan-Kenobi and seemed to not know he'd done anything else of note.
Late in life, Henry Fonda picked up some serious money doing ads like this…
He was amused — or maybe "bemused" is this right word — that so many younger people he met thought of him as a commercial spokesguy. They didn't care, if they even knew, that he'd been in The Grapes of Wrath, The Ox Bow Incident, My Darling Clementine, Mister Roberts, 12 Angry Men and dozens of other great films. (By the way, the little girl in that commercial is Jodie Foster.)
I've seen some actors bothered if someone praises long ago work and says nothing about more recent accomplishments. What they hear is "Gee, you were good a long time ago!" When I met Robert Morse, for example, he was pleased that I didn't act like How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying was the only thing of note he'd ever done. Imagine if you were Jodie Foster and people kept telling you today, "Oh, I loved you in that View Master commercial with Henry Fonda!"
Vivian Vance, I have read, was bothered by people calling her "Ethel" and thinking she was the right age to be married to William Frawley, who was actually 22 years older than she was. They also didn't get along very well. Some actors do resent that people think they are the characters they play…or that one particular role is all they can do.
Swan, Ditko and Kirby were all proud of most of the things they did…and I would venture that they were all proudest of how long they'd been productive and employed. Individual stories or books might not have mattered as much to them as the lifetime batting average.
I remember how Nick Cardy was actually moved to tears on occasion by younger professionals telling him, "Your work was one of the main reasons I became an artist." He was proud of many things he'd done and frustrated that some of them had not lived up to the standard he'd tried to set for himself. But what he was proudest of was that he'd had a long, productive career and that it had meant something to someone.
January 19, 2023
Today's Video Link
I love photos and films of old Las Vegas — especially the marquees out front of the hotels. There, you can see some of the amazing entertainment that was being offered there. Take a look at this montage of old marquees. Betcha see a couple of shows there you would have liked to have seen…
Top Secret
If you're going to get involved in discussions about the handling of classified documents, you ought to read what Fred Kaplan has to say about classified documents.
Comic-Con Memories
This is my schedule for Comic-Con International 2008, the year I somehow found myself hosting seventeen panels in four days. And, like that's not enough to keep a guy busy, doing three signings and presenting the Bill Finger Award at the Friday night award ceremony.
That was not as difficult as it sounds, especially back when I was fifteen years younger than I am today. By contrast, I hosted or was on ten panels in three days at the 2022 con (plus one signing) and I was about as tired as I've ever been in my life. Part of that was the age difference but part of it was that due to The Pandemic, I was not in as good walking shape and not as accustomed to dealing with crowds. I probably need to train for these things.
Rush to Judgement
Earlier today, I did something I should have known better than to do. I posted a message saying that I didn't think Alec Baldwin should be charged in the matter of the shooting on the set of his movie, Rust. And I still think there's a massive hole in the case if even after a year-long investigation, no one can explain how live ammo got into the gun or even onto the set.
But I got a number of calm, well-reasoned messages that, while they didn't convince me he should be charged, did convince me I should know more about the case before I decide he should. And that reminded me of all the times in the past that I've felt that "armchair juries" — people watching from afar who haven't heard all the facts and both sides — have made their minds up too quickly about legal cases. So I decided to withdraw my opinion and have removed the message.
My position is now that I need to know more about the case if I'm going to form an opinion. And that's a big "IF" because, as I often do with trials that people watch as distant spectators, I may decide I don't need to form an opinion at all.
Credit Where Due
The latest issue of that fine publication, Back Issue magazine (#141 with Nick Fury on the cover) has an article I wrote for them. It's about my experiences writing the Crossfire comic that Eclipse published some time in the late twentieth century and in it, I said the following…
Crossfire was, as you may know, a spinoff from The DNAgents, a comic I co-created with my friend Will Meugniot. Several places on the Internet, I get listed as sole creator, and that's just plain wrong. The DNAgents comic was created by Evanier and Meugniot. Crossfire was created by Evanier, Meugniot and Spiegle. If you come across someone saying otherwise, please help me out here and let them (or me) know.
I put that in because I am super-sensitive about misattribution of credits, especially creator credits. Even if future money is not at stake — and often it is — I think it is a very bad thing to do to someone. It's bad when it's done accidentally. It's worse when it's done intentionally. And it's also bad when it's done accidentally and no one corrects it. I may be too militant about this but I have seen how it has wronged people I care about and not just Jack Kirby.
I have, as most people know, very mixed feelings about Stan Lee and among the negatives are the many times he took sole credit for what were inarguably collaborative works. But — and Stan and I once had a slightly-heated argument about this — I also fault him for the many times that reporters or other folks gave him sole credit and he enjoyed the mistakes instead of correcting them. I wouldn't have expected him to catch every instance but I thought he should have done it way more often than he did. Never correcting it leads to the miscredit being repeated again and again and again.
So I said what I said in the piece for Back Issue and then I got to the end of it and found that the editor (or someone) had written a line explaining who I was…
Former Jack Kirby associate and biographer MARK EVANIER is a writer of comic books, television, and television animation. He is the co-creator of Groo the Wanderer, with Sergio Aragonés.
No, I am not the co-creator of Groo the Wanderer, with Sergio Aragonés. I am the guy who works with the creator of Groo the Wanderer, Sergio Aragonés. The difference may not matter to you but it matters to me.
January 18, 2023
Comic-Con Memories
And now we bring you my schedule of panels from Comic-Con International 2007…
Tales of My Father #19
My father passed away in March of 1991 at the age of 80. If you don't count the heart attacks, he was in reasonably good health the last decade of his life but starting around the age of 65, his hearing began to go. He was okay talking to people, especially when they spoke slowly and he could see their faces…but he had a lot of problems with TV and radio.
One of the great joys in his life was watching the L.A. Dodgers on TV or listening to non-televised games on the radio…but he was having trouble making out what Vin Scully (who did the play-by-play for the Dodgers) was saying. The same was true of the L.A. Lakers and their sportscaster, Chick Hearn. Experiencing the Dodgers without Scully or the Lakers without Hearn was like eating french fries without ketchup or a hot dog without mustard or…well, make up your own food analogy.
So I found a shop in Santa Monica that sold devices to help older folks with such problems and there, I bought a set of lightweight headphones that could connect to a TV set and amplify its sound. It was made by the Sennheiser company and the headphones were connected to the set by a long, thin wire. My father loved it from the moment I did the installation though for some reason, he kept referring to it as his "wireless." Four or five times a week, we had the following exchange…
HIM: I'm really loving my wireless, son.
ME: I'm glad but you know, there is a wire on that device.
HIM: I know but I call it my wireless.
So he used his non-wireless wireless for a few years…until his hearing worsened to the point where he was simply missing too many words to enjoy watching TV. He was still okay with live conversations but TV and radio were problematic. The next step was closed-captioning.
Early in 1991 — but too late to help my father — Congress passed the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990. It required most TV sets to contain the proper circuitry to display closed-captioning if desired by the viewer. All manufacturers distributing sets in the U.S. of A. had to be in compliance by July 1, 1993.
Before that, closed-captioning was achieved by installing a set-top box that looked like — well, here. I'll show you what it looked like…
That was not the precise model I got for my father but his was similar. I had to uninstall his "wireless" in order to install the closed-captioning box on his set but I got the captions working. At first, he thought I hadn't hooked it up properly because some of the on-screen words were misspelled but I managed to convince him that was just a built-in flaw of closed-captioning. Some of the words were also just plain wrong.
Once in a while, I accidentally hit the button that turns on closed-captioning on my TV. A lot of the words are still misspelled and a lot of the words are still just plain wrong. I'm surprised some writers don't complain about how their words and changed or mangled in the process. It's forgivable for live TV but movies and filmed shows have less excuse.
My father liked the closed-captioning at first but he asked me to come back and reinstall the "wireless" so he could have both. I had to order a special adapter to have them both operational at the same time but this was done. He was very happy once he had both but he largely stopped watching TV news. He said he saw too many instances where the captions didn't precisely match what he heard and he wasn't sure which to believe.
Half-jokingly — but only half — he claimed that whoever was doing the captions on President Ronald Reagan — and later, his successor, President George H.W. Bush — had to be a Republican. According to my father, "What those men say is vile and untrue but whoever does the captions is cleaning up their language and making them sound nicer and smarter in the captions."
Maybe he was joking by more than half but he thought there might be something to his observation. He did stop watching the news and that sadly was not enough to stop the heart attacks.
A few weeks after we lost him, my mother asked me to take the devices off their TV set and I did. I installed his "wireless" on the TV in my home office so I could listen to TV and my lady friend, when she was working or trying to read a book in my office, didn't have to hear it. I now have an actual wireless "wireless" that does this.
I left the close-captioning device in the trunk of my car. I didn't know what to do with it but it seemed too useful to throw away. I thought something might come up and something did.
In July of '91, I was in the DC Comics booth at the San Diego Comic Con, talking with Dick Giordano, who then held the dual titles of vice president and executive editor at the company. It was noisy in the hall and Dick had a hearing problem so he had to keep asking me to repeat things I'd said. A sudden thought hit me and I asked him if he had a closed-caption device on his TV set at home.
Dick Giordano
He said he didn't. He said, "I've always wanted to try one of this things but I have no idea where to get one."
I said, "I do. I'll be back in a little while." I ran back to my hotel and got the valet parking guy to loan me my car keys and tell me where to find my car. About twenty minutes after I'd left him, I handed Dick a supermarket shopping bag which contained my father's old closed-caption device. A month or three later, he called me and said the device was working great. I was very pleased that I'd found a good use for it and when my mother asked one day what had become of it, I told her the story…and that pleased her.
My mother lived until October of 2012. Her last few weeks were spent in a nursing facility and when I visited her, she often uttered statements that started with some form of "After I'm gone…" She knew the end was near and was generally at peace with that idea. She was almost blind and largely unable to walk and those conditions were only going to get worse, never better.
After my father died, she had had me get her an Estate Planning Lawyer and she put everything she owned into a trust with me as the sole beneficiary. I had a sealed manila envelope and she told me that when she died, I was to open that envelope and I would then be able to do everything that needed to be done in less than a half-hour. It turned out to be more than that but not a hellluva lot more.
But in her final weeks, she kept thinking of tiny matters that were not covered in the envelope…like she'd forgotten to specify what she wanted done with a couple crates of old Christmas decorations in the garage. Minor things like that. I'd gotten her a cell phone that was made for sight-impaired senior citizens. It had big buttons with big numbers and it was so simple to operate, a goldfish could have made a call on it.
She picked it up from the bedside tray and said, "I want you to find someone to give this to. Maybe you can find some editor like you gave Dad's closed-caption thing to, only this one would have to be almost blind instead of almost deaf."
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