Mark Evanier's Blog, page 99

Mushroom Soup Sunday

Afraid we have another one of these days. I need to get my mind off the election and onto a manuscript that's due so I'll post some video links but that'll be about it for this Sunday. Unless you're spending today actively working for your candidate(s) or proposition(s) of choice, I suggest you get your mind off the election. In the undying words of Doris Day, "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)."

Today's Video Link

In March of 1994, I was in Las Vegas with a lady friend who'd previously said she would go anywhere with me. It turned out she had her limits. She wouldn't go with me to the Sahara Hotel to see — and this was the actual title of the show there — "Milton Berle's Comedy Roast of Sid Caesar." It consisted of Mr. Berle and four other comedians — Jackie Gayle, Slappy White, Foster Brooks and Henny Youngman — doing their stand-up acts and inserting occasional gratuitous mentions of Mr. Caesar to make it a "roast" about him.

One of those four, by the way, had taken over for Norm Crosby who was in the show for part of the week or two it played the Congo Room at the Sahara. I wrote about going to that show in this article that was mainly about Henny Youngman.

As I said there, Berle opened the show with a stand-up routine that actually pleased the audience a lot. Berle doesn't have the greatest reputation these days, in part because of stories about his behavior the one-and-only time he hosted Saturday Night Live. His wide separation from the kind of comedy that show did is reportedly depicted in the new movie all about the debut night of SNL. Whatever the sequence is (I haven't seen it), it's largely fiction as the man they called Uncle Miltie was nowhere near Rockefeller Center that night.

Apart from mentions like that and stories of him exhibiting his legendary phallus, Berle is largely forgotten these days…a pity since he could be so wonderful at times. It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is, for me, one such time. Recently though, I came across this video of a stand-up comedy performance he did in 1991 and I believe this is pretty much what he did that night I saw him and his friends at the Sahara.

Take a look and judge for yourself. No, it's not fresh, hip comedy but I wouldn't expect that from a guy who was 83 years old at the time. The audience seemed to love him and it starts with him being presented with an award by Mary Tyler Moore…

ASK me: The Paper Jack Kirby Drew On

Bret Bernal did the seeming-impossible. He wrote to ask me a question about Jack Kirby that I don't think anyone else has ever asked me. And then he asked me another one which others have and I'll get to it. But first, here's the one no one has ever asked me before…

When you worked in Jack Kirby's studio, do you recall him ever disliking a batch of the 2-ply bristol board publishers sent him? Obviously, the King could draw on a paper bag and it would look astounding, but I'm curious if mediocre paper would slow him down or distract him in any way?

When Jack went to work for DC Comics in 1970, they shipped him a ream of their drawing paper — all cut to the proper size — and he hated it. Absolutely hated it. And it slowed him down because as he applied his favorite pencils to it, it kept smudging and he had to draw more carefully and occasionally erase and redraw something he'd smudged, plus he had to get up and wash his hands more often than he liked. He wound up drawing some of his work during this period on leftover Marvel paper but he had only a limited supply of it.

So he asked if Steve Sherman and I could find him better paper. He gave us one of the last remaining sheets of the Marvel paper — which he thought was great — and we went down to a hallowed art supply store in downtown Los Angeles called McManus & Morgan. It was opened in 1923 and it's still in business.

There, we were waited on by a gentleman who treated the selection of drawing paper like the Royal Sommelier choosing a fine wine to serve to His Majesty. He rubbed his fingers expertly over the Marvel paper and pronounced it "mediocre, at best," then brought out samples of three different styles of two-ply drawing paper. We took them back to Jack who did a little drawing on each one then selected his favorite. We then went back to McManus & Morgan and bought a lot of it for Jack. They cut larger sheets of it into the size Jack needed and then Steve and I each took half the stack and ruled margins in pencil on each page for Jack.

For a while after, our duties for Jack included trips down to McManus & Morgan when he was low on paper. Actually, Steve — since he had a car and I didn't then — did the later paper runs and he ruled the margins off until one day, Jack said, "You don't have to do that for me. For some reason, I enjoy it."

One Saturday, Joe Kubert was in town with his family and they dropped by the Kirby home. Joe, in addition to being a writer, artist and editor for DC had been one of the people who'd chosen the paper stock DC supplied to its artists and he and Jack got into a friendly argument over it. Joe loved it but Joe worked in a different manner than Jack. Joe would do his initial penciling with light blue pencil and he suggested Jack try doing that. Jack was a little peeved (just a little) at the suggestion and he said something like, "I've been doing it the way I do it for over thirty years and I'm not going to change now."

So this might be the answer to Bret's other question which was as follows…

And if he were alive today, do you think he’d ever tinker with digital drawing?

I don't think so. Jack was working, as he did for the rest of his life, on a very old, worn drawing table with a pretty ratty taboret next to it. People kept suggesting he get something newer or offered to get him something newer — and he said, "Thanks but I like what I have." He had many, many visions of the future, some of them amazingly accurate. But I think he always thought of that as the future of generations later than his. I have trouble even imagining Jack with a GMail account.

Getting back to the paper: At some point, DC had some printed on a different stock and Kubert urged Jack to give it a try. He did and he was happier with it so we no longer had to go buy him drawing paper. After he stopped working regularly for DC or Marvel, he drew a lot of the things he drew on whatever kind of paper he could find and it wasn't always great paper — for him or for the inkers. Occasionally, some of his later work was on one-ply drawing paper which wasn't bad for inkers who worked mainly with a brush but it caused problems for inkers and letterers who worked with pens.

Thanks, Bret. Always nice to have a new question to answer.

Today's Video Link

I don't watch (or like) a lot of Bill Maher these days but every so often, I see something from him that I think is mostly on-target. This from last night's show, for instance…

Today's Video Link

My pal Gary Sassaman used to be the guy in charge of Programming at Comic-Con International and he also was the guy in charge of Publications there. He did a fine job in both departments. He has a deep and longtime love for many comic books of his youth and I happen to have the same thing for the same comics. So I enjoy the YouTube videos he's been making since he retired from the convention. He calls them "Tales From My Spinner Rack" and I recommend 'em all. You can find them at this link and you might as well start with his newest one which takes a deep dive into Marvel's Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos…

Good Blogkeeping

I embed a lot of video links on this blog. If at any point, some video seems to be in the wrong window, that almost certainly is a problem on your end, not mine. It means the cache on your web browser has too much stuff in it and it's getting confused. What you need to do is to flush (i.e., clean out) your browser cache. If you don't know how to do this, this page should tell you.

Mushroom Soup Friday

Today is going to be a busy day of deadlines and Zoom conferences and other things that may keep me from blogging at my usual pace. I am also way behind in answering e-mails so please forgive me for all of this.

In the meantime, I'm awaiting a delivery from Costco of many items, two of which are these…

…so we now, at long last, may find out the answer to the age-old riddle: Which will come first? The chicken or the eggs?

Today's Video Link

If a legal free copy of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein could be found on the Internet, I'd link you to it here as it's, to me, the perfect Halloween flick. Instead, you'll have to settle for this well-made short documentary on the Abbott and Costello Meet [Name of Monster] films. Most comedians made movies that called for them to be really, really scared but nobody was better at being really, really scared than Lou Costello — except for some Democrats I know at the moment…

Thursday Morning

I'm not paying much attention to the election. You can easily find articles online where learned men and women will predict every possible scenario next Tuesday so there's not much point in reading any of them. I've decided to save up my outrage for then because you know that no matter how the ballots are counted or what the count will be, Donald Trump will do something to piss off half the country.

I watched a smidgen and a half of the World Series…which is more than I usually watch by about half a smidgen. I, of course, missed Vin Scully and I, of course, didn't think the Dodgers won that last game so much as that the Yankees lost it. That fifth inning was included in the smidgen I did watch and I'll bet it was pretty exciting for folks who care about these competitions more than I do. I seem to be incapable of rooting for a team — or deriving joy from their victories — just because they have the same home base city as I do. I did not inherit that trait from my father who would have loved every second of a Dodgers victory.

I may be more interested in how television covers this kind of event than I am in the event. They seemed to have eighty million cameras out there to show us every move from every possible angle…to the point when I was sometimes momentarily confused as to whether what I was watching was a new bit of action or the ninth replay of the previous bit of action. And when some cameraguy with (I guess) a steadicam was running along with a player, the player looked to me like a videogame animation. I'll think about this more in a few years when I watch another smidgen or two of some future Fall Classic.

Congrats to the Dodgers but I really can't muster any feeling like I won anything. I keep hearing the Yankees referred to as the losers…and I keep thinking that the real losers are all those folks who would have profited mightily if the series had gone to Game Seven.

Why I Don't Like Halloween

This is my almost-annual post about why I don't like Halloween. I run it each year and usually I change the name of the anti-gay person in the last paragraph — but if you've read it before, there's no need to read it again…

At the risk of coming off like the Ebenezer Scrooge of a different holiday, I have to say: I've never liked Halloween. For one thing, I'm not a big fan of horror movies or of people making themselves up to look disfigured or like rotting corpses. One time when I was in the company of Ray Bradbury at a convention, someone shambled past us looking like they just rose up from a grave and Ray said something about how people parade about like that to celebrate life by mocking death. Maybe to some folks it's a celebration of life but to me, it's just ugly.

I've also never been comfy with the idea of kids going door-to-door to take candy from strangers. Hey, what could possibly go wrong with that? I did it a few years when I was but a child, not so much because I wanted to but because it seemed to be expected of me. I felt silly in the costume and when we went to neighbors' homes and they remarked how cute we were…well, I never liked to be cute in that way. People talk to you like you're a puppy dog. The man two houses down…before he gave me my treat, I thought he was going to tell me to roll over and beg for it.

When I got home, I had a bag of "goodies" I didn't want to eat. In my neighborhood, you got a lot of licorice and Mounds bars and Jordan Almonds, none of which I liked even before I found out I was allergic to them. I would say that a good two-thirds of the candy I hauled home on a Halloween Eve went right into the trash can and I felt bad about that. Some nice neighbor had paid good money for it, after all.

And some of it, of course, was candy corn — the cole slaw of sugary treats. Absolutely no one likes candy corn. Don't write to me and tell me you do because I'll just have to write back and call you a liar. No one likes candy corn. No one, do you hear me?

I wonder if anyone's ever done any polling to find out what percentage of Halloween candy that is purchased and handed-out is ever eaten. And I wonder how many kids would rather not dress up or disfigure themselves for an evening if anyone told them they had a choice. Where I live, they seem to have decided against trick-or-treating. In earlier versions of this essay, I used to say, "Each year, I stock up and no one comes. For a while there, I wound up eating a couple big sacks of leftover candy myself every year." But I haven't had anyone at my door for three or four years now so I don't bother.

So I didn't like the dress-up part and I didn't like the trick-or-treating part. There were guys in my class at school who invited me to go along on Halloween when they threw eggs at people and overturned folks' trash cans and redecorated homes with toilet paper…and I never much liked pranks. One year the day after Thanksgiving, two friends of mine were laughing and bragging how they'd trashed some old lady's yard and I thought, "That's not funny. It's just being an a-hole."

Over the years, as I've told friends how I feel, I've been amazed how many agree with me. In a world where people now feel more free to say that which does not seem "politically correct," I feel less afraid to own up to my dislike of Halloween. About the only thing I ever liked about it was the second-best Charlie Brown special.

So that's why I'll be home for Halloween and not up in West Hollywood wearing my Mike Johnson costume. I'm fine with every other holiday. Just not this one. I do not believe there is a War on Christmas in this country. That's just something the Fox News folks dreamed up because they believe their audience needs to be kept in a perpetual state of outrage about something. But if there's ever a War on Halloween, I'm enlisting. And bringing the eggs.