Mark Evanier's Blog, page 97

Today's Video Link

Time for the latest installment of Everything You Need To Know About Saturday Night Live. We're up to Season 16, nearing the end of what I thought was the best period for the show after the initial five years…

About Bob

Andrew Farago did a deep dive into the life of our friend, the late Bob Foster. Well worth your time to read.

Border Crossings – Part 9

This is the long-delayed Part 9 of a series about Western Publishing and Gold Key Comics. If you followed this series months ago when the previous installment appeared, you still may need to refresh your memory, which you can do by re-reading Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.

Now then: As I mentioned eons ago in some part of this, back before a lot of their artists drew on computers, comic book companies would often supply drawing paper with the panel borders printed in light blue (and therefore, non-reproducing) ink. Here is a piece of a page that Western Publishing was supplying to its artists back in the early seventies when I worked for them. I have tweaked the image to make the blue ink darker — so you can see it better than it is on the actual page. If you click on the image below, you can see it larger on your computer screen. It's the bottom part of one page…

This paper was printed up by the New York office of Western Publishing for use by their artists and the ones working for the Los Angeles office. As you can see, it specifies how the word balloons should not touch the panel borders. The editors in the L.A. office told their artists and letterers to ignore "that stupid rule" (their term for it) and let balloons touch panel borders.  The New York office generally wanted this rule followed though once in a while, they didn't.  The Little Lulu comic, which came out of the N.Y. office for some reason changed back and forth.

A few others changed and I know not why but most N.Y. books stuck to this rule. Even when sales were plunging to the level where the entire comic book line was about to go under, no one there looked at what was selling for DC and Marvel and said, "Maybe we ought to not constrict our artists as much as we have."

The page is ruled off into six panels — three tiers of two. It was never intended that any artist just fill in the six panels the way they are. Generally speaking, they could rule each tier off to one, two or three panels (or even four) of varying width. But they were generally expected to layout a page in three separate tiers.

It is my opinion that Western was too rigid in its page formats and that at times, DC and Marvel were too loose with them. I think there was some terrible story-telling in comics with triangular panels and too many "montage" page layouts. An imaginative arrangement of panels can be wonderful and can serve the story well. But you oughta be able to easily figure out which order the panels are to be read in.

This also may be of some interest…

For many years in the industry, the vast majority of comic book art was done to an image area of 12" by 18" or sometimes 12.5" by 18.5". In 1967, both DC and Marvel switched over to an image area of 10" by 15". These were the image areas, not the size of the piece of art board on which the page was drawn. The exact size of that didn't matter. What mattered was the image area. A 10" by 15" page image area was usually drawn on a piece of art board that was 11" by 17".

And what I wanted to point out here was that Western stayed with the larger size after DC and Marvel went to the smaller size. The page I scanned to get the above image had an image area of 12" by 18". That difference meant a lot, pro or con, to some artists.

The "balloons don't touch panel borders" principle was tried on a number of comics at a number of companies.  During the years that Carmine Infantino was in charge at DC, they tried it now and then and, because they did it without resorting to square balloons, I don't think a lot of readers noticed.  It often crowded the art though.  I think of it as a well-intentioned bad idea that happily never caught on.  Western Publishing was the only place I know of where it was tried for an extended period but it was just one of the many points of friction between the two offices.

One of the days, I may think of some others to write about here…and also some of the other things that Western did that other companies didn't. But this is the final installment of Border Crossings for now. Sorry it took so long to get it all here on the blog.

Today's Video Link

Have you ever seen Andy Huggins do stand-up? Well, I guess with him, it's sit-down but he's a funny guy either way…

You Don't Know Jack

Comedy writer and cartoonist Jack Mendelsohn was a good buddy of mine. We presented him with the Bill Finger Award in 2014 and then sadly, just three years later, I had to write this obit of him. In there, there's a video of him accepting the Finger.

I just came across this interview online that will tell you more about this amazing man.

Today's Political Comment

You probably won't see much of that header here in the coming weeks. Trump and his gang are passing into the category of "Things I don't like but I can't do anything about at the moment." Before last Tuesday, there was about a three-hundred-and-thirty-millionth of a percent chance that I could contribute, if not to a G.O.P. defeat then at least to the group dialogue on why there should be one. Now there's not even that in the near future and keeping up on politics at all means reading all sorts of articles that I don't want to read and don't think are helping.

One kind is the "Why Trump Won" pieces which are now crystal clear on all the reasons that were in place before Election Day but the person who wrote the article is just now noticing them. Too little, too late, I'm afraid. The other kind would be the "Here's the one reason" articles and while I'm not sure of much about this election, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of different reasons. It's like when they give out the Oscars and someone says, "Oh, they gave Best Actress to Meryl Streep because they all thought she got robbed when she didn't get it for that movie she made last year." The people voting did not vote in lockstep with the same one viewpoint.

One thing I'd like to think is that there won't really be a Mass Deportation. My guess is that there'll be an ongoing deportation not that much greater than what Obama and Biden oversaw, though Trump and his backers will be a lot louder and prouder of it and will make it seem like a Mass Deportation. I can't imagine Big Business in this country urging Trump to get rid of their lowest-paid, I'll-take-any-job-for-any-salary laborers. Trump doesn't think employers should even pay overtime to employees who work overtime.

This article by Kevin Drum is probably worth reading and saving. President Trump will doubtlessly brag that he solved the problem of Runaway Inflation but as Drum notes, that problem has already been solved. He'll say he solved the problems of Illegal Immigration and Economic Strength and Imports From China and Oil and Gas Production and the Murder Rate but all those are already trending in the right direction.

If you forced me to pick one reason why Trump won, I'd say it's because the Democrats failed to get the mass public to realize things were trending like that and the Republicans did a good job convincing that public that if they did hear such facts, they shouldn't believe them. You know…the same way even the Right Wing Press couldn't find even one Haitian in Springfield who actually ate a dog or cat but people inclined to vote for Donald thought, "That doesn't disprove what he said. We just know that kind of thing is going on somewhere or will."

But I also think they had a lot more than one reason. Democrats have until the mid-terms to figure out some of them and if they can't, maybe we need to find some new Democrats. Please don't write me about political stuff or any of this. I'm going to turn off that admittedly-small sector of my brain for a while and focus on matters that I understand a lot better and feel I can control a bit. Among other tasks, I have two books to finish. One is the one about Jack Kirby and the other is about someone else who was also really good at a drawing board. That much, I can handle.

Today's Video Link

Voice Guy Brian Hull has appeared in dozens of cartoons and — more important — on a couple of my Cartoon Voices panels at conventions. Here, he and many of the characters that live in his head and throat favor us with a rendition of "Defying Gravity" from Wicked. An amazing talent…

The Amazing Mrs. Kirkland

Here at newsfrome.com, we don't recommend a lot of things to put in your mouth…and when I do, you might think, "Why should I listen to Evanier about food?" And I have a great reply to that: "Why should you listen to me about anything?" Like most people on this planet, I have endless opinions about things I'm unqualified to judge so if you're going to listen to me about other matters, what's the big deal about listening to me about, in this case, the new Kirkland Signature Lightly Breaded Chicken Breast Fillets at Costco?

I guess it's no longer much of a secret that all the Kirkland products sold at Costco are completely prepared and/or manufactured by one little old lady — Mrs. Edna Kirkland — who lives somewhere in South Dakota. She cooks all the Kirkland foods in her home kitchen including the hot dogs that they sell in the food court and all those rotisserie chickens. She makes the Kirkland brand batteries that are identical to the more expensive Duracell batteries. She catches and cans Kirkland Signature's Albacore Solid White Tuna and makes it taste exactly like the tuna that Bumble Bee sells. She even goes out every morning and spends an hour or two pumping oil to make all that fine Kirkland-brand gasoline.

Well, she's outdone herself with these lightly-battered chicken breasts. They're very similar to what you get at Chic-Fil-A in their sandwiches except that you can enjoy the Kirkland brand ones without giving money to a company you may detest. They come out a little soggy if you microwave them but they're still pretty good. They're crisper out of an air fryer or oven and at my nearby Costco, you get a 48 ounce bag of them for $14.20. That's without hormones or antibiotics.

Mrs. Kirkland also makes the similar Kirkland Signature Lightly Breaded Chicken Breast Chunks but those little nuggets have too much breading and too little chicken for me. The fillets, I think, are just right and enormously convenient…so great work, Mrs. Kirkland! And I hope you have time soon to make that full-sized Kirkland Turbo V8 Sports Car you promised to make for me — the one that will drive just like a Maserati. And I hope they'll let me buy just one but knowing Costco, I'll probably have to purchase a package of twelve.

Today's Video Link

Here we have another of Robert Klein's specials for cable TV. This one is from 2005 and I still think he's one of the best stand-up comics of his or any other era…

Comic-Con News

Open Registration for Comic-Con 2025 — where anyone can venture online and try to buy badges — took place on October 26…only it didn't. There were tech problems and the website didn't work right and, oh, we hear it was a mess. But they think they've got the problems solved so they're trying again on Saturday, November 23.

One tip: You may or may not get what you seek that day but I can pretty much guarantee that you'll fail in your mission if you don't learn in advance how this thing works, which you can do on this page. If you succeed, you can start counting the days until the event commences. As of right now, there are 258 of them. Better leave now if you're going to need a parking space.