Mark Evanier's Blog, page 266

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I have worked on eight TV shows that had less episodes than CNN's "The Vote for Speaker."

Set the TiVo!

The PBS series American Experience is currently featuring an episode called "The Lie Detector," all about the invention of that machine and the uses to which it has been put, not always for good. I always knew the device was inadmissible in court because of its dubious accuracy but I hadn't known of some of the damage it has done to justice and human lives.

I had also heard that William Marston — famous in my circle as the creator of Wonder Woman — was one of the "inventors" of the lie detector. According to this documentary, that's probably giving him way too much credit but there's much info on Marston in the show…and yes, they mention Wonder Woman. They also say he did it for DC Comics, which is not exactly true. He did it for a company called All-American Comics which was funded by and later absorbed by DC Comics.

You can probably catch this program on your local PBS channel for the next few days and it also seems to be streaming online from a number of sources.

From the E-Mailbag…

The fine writer of comic books and other things, Kurt Busiek, has this to add to my piece on why the X-Men comic was almost certainly not an imitation of DC's Doom Patrol…

In addition to the stuff you've pointed out, I can't see where someone thinking the Doom Patrol was a cool idea would decide that the bits to copy were the wheelchair and the name of a group of villains.

The Brotherhood of Evil and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants also debuted the same month, which would make it even harder to swipe, even if either party thought it'd be a good idea. I mean, I can see someone thinking, "Brotherhood of Evil is a great name, I want something like that," and inventing the Monastery of Menace or the Lodge of Licentiousness. But just adding a word to a name the other guy's using is…pretty obvious. Not to mention that everyone involved was more creative than that.

And if Goodman wanted another book like F.F., as he did, Lee and Kirby didn't need to hurry-up and swipe a book that had just come out. Kirby (if not Lee, as well) had been reading pulp S.F. with stories of mutants feared and hated by ordinary people, fighting against worser mutants to save the world (and themselves) in the form of Kuttner's Baldy stories (which featured bald telepaths, even), Van Vogt's Slan, Sturgeon's More Than Human, Shiras's Children of the Atom…they had lots of other material to draw from, and they'd even both done stories about mutants before.

Some people have pointed out that the X-Men's blue-and-yellow costumes and the Doom Patrol's red-and-white costumes have a similar design — but the X-Men had theirs first; the D.P. started out in F.F.-like coveralls.

It doesn't make any sense from the POV of a creator.

It sure doesn't. And something else I might have emphasized is that folks who did comic books back then rarely read what their competitors were doing. Devout comic book fans read everything but don't realize that most comic book creators didn't and probably still don't.

I have no trouble believing that Stan Lee hadn't seen The Fly from the Archie company before the creation of Spider-Man. Heck, an editor at DC Comics almost never read the books supervised by the other editors there, even the ones with whom he shared an office. Publishers looked at their competitors' sales figures and would sometimes order up similar books because of that.

There seems to be an ongoing debate among some historians as to how Martin Goodman at Marvel found out that Justice League of America and before that, Challengers of the Unknown were selling well for DC. There was this fabled golf game between Goodman and Jack Liebowitz at DC in which the latter supposedly bragged about the numbers, prompting Goodman to race back to his office and tell Stan Lee he wanted a super-hero team book.

That golf game almost certainly never occurred. Goodman never said it did and Liebowitz said it didn't. What I think happened was that someone asked Stan how they came to start Fantastic Four and he said something like, "Oh, Martin found out DC had this book that was selling well. He probably had lunch with Jack Liebowitz or played golf with him or something," and the part about playing golf became enshrined in Marvel history. The simpler explanation is that the sales figures were no secret. Anyone who cared could find them out…and DC and Marvel then had the same distributor which made it even easier.

Here's what Goodman's company would put out when he saw the numbers on Pine Comics' Dennis the Menace comic and Harvey's Casper the Friendly Ghost…

He did not find out they were hits by playing golf with anyone. And that kind of thing came from someone looking at sales reports, not someone looking at a competitor's comic book and saying, "Hey, that's a great idea for a comic! Let's steal that!" There might be an exception somewhere in history but that would be rare.

And to some extent, what was happening here was not theft of an idea but an attempt to confuse buyers into purchasing your knock-off instead of the other company's real thing. It was like all those records in the sixties that hoped the customers would think they were buying The Beatles when it was actually The Beetles or The Fab Four. Anyway, thanks, Kurt.

Today's Video Link

A company called FilmRise Television has put every episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show up on YouTube. I'm assuming they have the legal right to do this so look at this page and select the one (or more) you want to watch. Here's one of my favorites — especially the ending…

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Kevin McCarthy is losing ground. Now, he doesn't have enough votes to send out for pizza.

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They're just starting Vote #10 for Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. You still have time to get a bet down.

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I wanted to watch as the House votes to elect its new Speaker but every time I tune over to C-Span, they're just showing reruns.

ASK me: Doom Patrol and the X-Men

Here's a question I received from Jeff Wagner but also occasionally from other people. Oh, wait. First, let me put one of these here…

Okay. Now, here's what Jeff (and others) wanted to ask…

In 1963, DC Comics brought out a new super-hero team called The Doom Patrol in a comic called My Greatest Adventure. Shortly after, Marvel brought out the X-Men. The two comics had a lot of similarities. I've seen many people discuss whether one was a rip-off of the other. What do you think?

I think it's pretty close to impossible. Yes, there are similarities. The Doom Patrol was about a wheelchair-bound genius gathering together a number of "freaks" with great powers to try and stop other "freaks" with great powers from wreaking havoc on the world, particularly a band called The Brotherhood of Evil. The X-Men was about a wheelchair-bound genius gathering together a number of "mutants" with great powers to try and stop other "mutants" with great powers from wreaking havoc on the world, particularly a band called The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.

There were a few other parallels. Both comics had as a theme that the freaks/mutants felt like outcasts from society and there was a sense that they were bound together by the problems they had from being different. The Doom Patrol was billed as "The World's Strangest Heroes" and the X-Men were billed as "The Strangest Super-Heroes of All!"

In both groups, the heroes bickered a lot…but that was becoming pretty standard in super-hero groups at the time thanks to the success of Fantastic Four.  In fact, writer Bob Haney, who was one of the creators of The Doom Patrol, told me and others that one of the ideas behind that comic was to give DC a super-hero group with the dynamic of the Fantastic Four, which was selling quite well for Marvel.  And X-Men was reportedly started because Marvel publisher Martin Goodman had, for the same reason, asked for another super-team like the Fantastic Four. So there's one clear explanation for some similarities — both creative teams had the same goal: Imitating to some extent the F.F.

"Brotherhood of Evil" was also a phrase then turning up in the news, sometimes to describe organized crime; at other times to describe any alliance of Communist nations. In 1959, not long before, author Frederic Sondem Jr. published Brotherhood of Evil, a book about the Mafia.

I have seen several possible scenarios of theft floated over the years. One is that the team which came out second (The X-Men) was assembled after its creators — Stan Lee and Jack Kirby — saw the first story of the Doom Patrol on the newsstands and decided to copy it. The problem with that scenario is that My Greatest Adventure #80 which introduced The Doom Patrol went on sale April 18, 1963 and X-Men #1 went on sale July 2, 1963.

That's a gap of 75 days. This process got simpler in later years due to technological advances but in '63, it generally took at least 75 days — often more — to take a comic book from inception to on-sale. That was why letter pages didn't feature letters about the previous issue. More often, it was the issue from three or four months before.

Could Stan Lee and Jack Kirby have seen that first Doom Patrol story on the stands and whipped up the first issue of X-Men quickly enough to have had it hit newsstands on 7/2/63?  I'm skeptical.

This was a first issue and those always take longer than books where all the characters are designed and named and everyone has agreed on what they'll be like and how they'll function and what color their outfits should be.  Kirby was fast but even he had to cogitate a little before putting pencil to paper and on a new book, there would have to be a few meetings with Stan and maybe preliminary sketches.

Stan was pretty fast too but there were a lot of steps necessary to put out any issue of any comic book then — not just writing and penciling but also inking, lettering, coloring, editorial work, sending it over to the Comics Code for approval, etc. Then it had to go the engravers to be photographed and then color guides were sent off to the engravers where the color separations were done by hand…and that might take a week or two.

Then film was made of the separations…then printing plates were made…then the comic was printed…then it was bound…then it was shipped all across the nation. This was in a time before FedEx or Dropbox or computers. Some of this trafficking was done via U.S. Mail. Also, the printers and engravers often charged extra for a "rush" job.

Why go through all that if you're going to be second on the newsstand no matter what you do?

Some people trying to make the case for theft have said, "Well, maybe someone visited the printer and saw what the other company was working on before it came out." The problem with that speculation is that, first of all, it's just speculation. Secondly, comic book writers, artists and editors almost never visited their printers…and besides, DC and Marvel had different printers then.

"Well then, maybe someone from one company's editorial offices visited the other company's office and saw or heard something." Slightly more possible but no one can name a single person who might have done that. Stan and Jack certainly never dropped by the DC offices during that period. I can't think of anyone who was then working for both companies.

Copying a competitor's book as soon as it came out strikes me as a "crime" that no one would have wanted to commit. People in this industry have imitated others' hits but they usually wait until those books are proven hits before they do. It was probably a good six months before any reliable sales figures on My Greatest Adventure #80 were known. No one even started tallying them until the issue went off-sale…in this case, two months later.

And when the numbers did come in on My Greatest Adventure #80, they weren't very impressive. DC waited six issues before they had gathered sufficient sales data to warrant changing the name of the comic to Doom Patrol. It lasted a few years but it was never a top seller.

Bob Haney and Arnold Drake. In that order.

One other thing. This is not evidence but I worked with both Stan and Jack, and I knew Arnold Drake and, to a lesser degree, Bob Haney. They all struck me as the kind of folks who, if they were working on a new idea and found out a competitor was coming out with something similar, would change their plans. I can imagine them inventing something like someone else's success at the insistence of their publisher. Stan certainly had in the past complied with his publisher's directives to ape what was selling for others…but, again, that's something that happens when a comic is a proven moneymaker over some period of time.

Again: Why go through all that if you're going to be second on the newsstand no matter what you do? You might as well wait and see how their book fares before you start whipping up something similar.  Theirs could, after all, flop and you might then decide you didn't want to go that route.

When I first discussed the matter with Arnold Drake, he was immediately dismissive of the idea that X-Men had in any way copied his Doom Patrol. Many years later when X-Men was one of the hottest comics ever, he began suggesting that maybe there was a bit of plagiarism there…but even he couldn't explain how it could have been on the stands so soon after his.

Arnold was a lovely man and a fine writer. He was booted out of DC about time the original Doom Patrol comic was canceled and immediately went over to Marvel where he began writing — wait for it — X-Men. I was sorry when we lost him and even sorrier that he didn't live to see the Doom Patrol turned into a rather popular — and surprisingly faithful to his concept — TV series. He would have been very proud and a little wealthier.

As for Stan and Jack, both men said they never saw the Doom Patrol — before or after they started the X-Men. And when you think about it, did they really need to imitate a comic book that was kind of an imitation of what they were already doing?

Today's Video Link

Let's watch two champions. On May 9 of 1973, Johnny Carson welcomed one of the world's great athletes, Pelé, to The Tonight Show. Pelé, as I'm sure you've read, recently passed away, causing mass mourning in Brazil. His coffin was carried through the streets on top of a fire engine, with huge crowds turning out to pay their respects.

His appearance on Johnny's show was an interesting spot because Pelé spoke almost no English and Johnny decided — and I'd love to know why — to attempt the spot without an interpreter. He also did something that few (if any) current talk show hosts would attempt — a physical demonstration of some soccer moves.

Most hosts today would avoid it. It couldn't be written in advance. Too much improvisation would be involved. The host might look stupid and inept. But it was never dull when Johnny tried something like that…

WonderFul WonderCon

WonderCon will be held March 24-26 at the Anaheim Convention Center. They're just starting to announce their guests and, lo and behold, I am one of them. For reasons we all understand, I have not been to a WonderCon since 2019 and I'm hoping no disease prevents this one from taking place or me being there for it.

It's always been a great convention if you can deal with the Disneyland traffic, which is rarely as bad as I expect. A lot of folks plan a trip that includes both WonderCon and Disneyland. The proximity to Disneyland is also nice in that there are plenty of places to stay and plenty of great places to dine.

Badges are still available for WonderCon. If you can't get in to Comic-Con in San Diego, this is a good alternative. It's run by the same folks and features many of the same panels and exhibitors. It also usually has one of the most impressive turnouts of cosplayers if that's a selling point for you.

In fact, badges are not only available, the 3-Day ones are on sale until January 8. So if you want to go for all three days, you want to order in the next four days. Consider doing this.