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May 3, 2002 · 1:00 PM PDT · link

WE HAVE REPORTS that long-time comic book artist Tom Sutton was found dead the other day in his home — "probably," one person theorized, "slumped over his drawing board."  That was the man's usual habitat and, considering his output during certain times, it's doubtful he ever left it for long.  Sutton was one of the few artists to get into comics in the late sixties, starting with westerns for Marvel and eventually moving into every other kind of book they had.  His work was always competent and showed vast amounts of effort but it always struck me that he was perfectly suited for some kind of comic that no one was paying him to draw.  Lurking around the edges of his super-heroes and science-fiction tales was a wicked sense of humor, kind of what you see in old stories by Jack Davis (one of Sutton's heroes) before the world realized he was a humor artist.  For a long time, Sutton drew ghost comics for Charlton where he obviously expended a lot more effort than their page rates warranted.

I never met the man in person but we corresponded briefly.  What I recall from his letters was that he never stopped being a fan, never stopped wanting to learn how to be a better artist.  In one note, he listed about twenty questions he hoped I could answer about Jack Kirby (another hero), all of which boiled down to, "How does he do that?"  With one, he sent me a lovely print of a cover he did around '68 for Bill Spicer's Graphic Story Magazine.  It was a huge, cluttered western barroom brawl that, I suspect, showed the kind of thing he could do when he was more interested in pleasing himself than in pleasing editors.  It made you wish he could have made a living pleasing himself.

May 2, 2002 · 10:00 PM PDT · link

NICE ARTICLE in The New York Times by Stan Lee about the enduring appeal of Spider-Man.  You know how to get there.

May 2, 2002 · 4:00 PM PDT · link

DARK HORSE COMICS has released the second volume of Little Annie Fanny, collecting the wonderful feature that Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder did (with the occasional help of others) for Playboy.  It's kind of hard to believe that this was once a naughty comic strip but it was.  Back in our old Comic Book Club, circa '68, we used to have contests, in game show format, of funnybook knowledge.  The prize was always some old comic of modest value and, one week, one of our members won a copy of the first Annie Fanny paperback collection.  Problem: The member was 14 years old and, though he loved the thing, he knew his folks would regard it as hard-core pornography since, after all, it had the occasional naked woman in it.

His folks also routinely searched his room so he dared not bring it home.  The solution?  He immediately offered it up for sale to any other club member.  New problem: Since our members knew he had to sell it, they all made lowball offers.  I think the book retailed for around $9.95 and our members — who wanted the book but more wanted to see this guy squirm — offered him fifty cents for it, escalating to about a dollar.  "But it's worth ten dollars," he kept pleading, as if we were somehow obligated to pay him that or something in the vicinity.  He actually got mad because none of us would make him what he considered a real offer.

This went on all afternoon.  He had to sell it but he got increasingly upset that he couldn't sell this book — which had cost him nothing in the first place — for what he believed to be its true value.  Finally, if only to put him out of his misery, I made him an offer: Three dollars...but my offer was only good for two minutes.  He threw a tantrum, accused me of shamelessly exploiting him, begged anyone else to offer more...and then, one minute and fifty seconds after my timed offer, he took my three bucks.

I still have that copy and it's quite nice...vastly superior in its reproduction to the current volumes.  The first of the new ones was disappointing and this one is actually poor in some places.  But unlike previous reprintings, these collections are complete and feature articles and examples of preliminaries and other bonus materials by Elder and Kurtzman.  The supplementals are worth the price, just by themselves.  So I bought the books and you might want to, as well.  You can give us a cut by ordering from Amazon.Com, clicking on the links below...

Volume 1		Volume 2

MORE THOUGHTS on the identity of Deep Throat, which John W. Dean says he will expose in an upcoming book.  This will be Dean's third "unmasking" of the famed shadowy source.  I said he'd previously fingered Alexander Haig but I forgot that, before that, he was peddling the notion that the man who gave Woodward and Bernstein their inside info on the Nixon Administration was U.S. attorney Earl Silbert.

The problem with Dean's revelation, of course, is that it will be just another guess in a long line of supposedly well-investigated guesses by folks who ought to know but probably don't.  Former Nixon insider Leonard Garment wrote a book that spent many pages arguing that D.T. was Republican strategist John Sears.  Others have identified F.B.I. agent Mark Felt and a CBS News inquiry claimed — rather foolishly, I thought — that it was L. Patrick Gray, who was then the acting director of the bureau.  That was foolish because their main bit of "evidence" was that the parking garage wherein Woodward met Deep Throat had been described in terms that seemed to match the parking garage of the building wherein Gray was living at the time.  Leaving aside the fact that half the parking garages in America could have fit the description, there's this: Does anyone think that Deep Throat held clandestine meetings in the garage of his own building?  That he left the privacy of his own apartment, took the elevator down to the cold, less-private garage and stood there for hours talking to Bob Woodward, hoping not to be seen?

Still others have offered up names as bizarre as Henry Kissinger and John Ehrlichman.  You could actually build a strong case for Kissinger, who certainly had a great many mixed feelings about Nixon and who was obviously wary of how their mutual history would be written.  But apart from that being such an incredible possibility just because it's Kissinger, there's one clue that doesn't fit.  In All the President's Men, Woodward and Bernstein say that Deep Throat was a smoker...and Kissinger never was.  Matter of fact, when Oliver Stone's film of Nixon came out, Kissinger complained mightily that the actor portraying him was always seen with a big cigar and that he'd never touched tobacco in his life.

I am inclined to disagree with those who speculate that there was no Deep Throat or that he was a composite.  First of all, it was a dangerous lie for Woodward and Bernstein to tell their editor.  If Ben Bradlee had demanded to know who it was, what would they have said?  A promise of confidentiality to a source doesn't mean you can't tell your editor and, in fact, they eventually did. I also find it hard to believe Bradlee would have gone along with a phony source.  The Washington Post had too much riding on two relative novices.  The paper would have been humiliated if the Woodward/Bernstein reporting had proven bogus and doubly humiliated if it got out that it had been based on a phony source.  Moreover, a number of people have died who could have been Deep Throat.  If it had been a fraud, I think Bernstein and Woodward would have seized on one of those opportunities to say, "That's the guy.  He was Deep Throat.  Now, get off our backs about this."

So Dean will make his guess.  Bernstein and Woodward will either "no comment" or, if the subject gets upset and convince them to do so, they'll announce no, it was not him...and the mystery will continue until the right guy dies and they say it was him.  What I hope is that, along with a name, we eventually get a couple of Whys — why he did it, why he insisted on not being identified for 30+ years — and also a What: What did he think of what occurred as a result of his leaking?  Unless they manage to restore the famed 18-and-a-half minute gap on one of Nixon's tapes, as one lab is reportedly attempting, those will be the final secrets of Watergate.  It's about time we put the last of them to bed.

May 1, 2002 · 11:00 PM PDT · link

WE HIGHLY recommend the new issue...hell, any issue of Amid Amidi's Animation Blast, a splendid periodical that is too periodical.  That is, it doesn't come out nearly enough...but when it does, it's always full of interesting insight and history concerning the animation field.  The latest issue (seen at left) has a terrific piece on Ed Benedict, one of the great unsung designers of cartoons, including most of the early Hanna-Barbera shows.  I think the piece gives a wee bit too much credit to Benedict and not enough to Dick Bickenbach who, I've heard, did more than is indicated here.  On the other hand, there's no question Benedict was the main creative force behind the visuals and that he hasn't received nearly enough recognition for it.

You can find out how to get this issue over on Amid's website, which you can reach by clicking here.  And while you're there, browse about.  The place is full of interesting animation articles and links.

May 1, 2002 · 6:00 PM PDT · link

THE ONE VIVID MEMORY I have from this year's Academy Awards ceremony is of Woody Allen standing on stage, delivering the rough equivalent of one of his old stand-up routines...the only non-winner of the evening, by the way, not reading off a TelePrompter.  There has been something distant and perhaps a bit numbing to me about his last dozen or so films, at least the ones I've seen.  That I haven't run to catch every one, as I once did, is because I started to find them remote — brilliantly made (always) but dealing with people I didn't care about, hashing out issues that did not command my attention.  Maybe it's me...no, it's probably me.  Nevertheless, it was wonderful to see Woody up there on Oscar night, reminding us who he is and why we first loved him, back when he spoke to us directly.  The material was no great shakes but I enjoyed the flashback.  Between the dark nature of most of his films and his personal problems, it's been easy to forget that he was and is a very funny man.  There are times you get the feeling he's forgotten it, too.

This coming weekend, Turner Classic Movies kicks off a Woody Film Fest — 18 of his movies throughout the month of May.  You've seen them all and, like me, probably have a good percentage of them on DVD or tape.  I am, however, going to tune in for the premiere of Richard Schickel's new documentary, Woody Allen: A Life in Film.  It debuts this Saturday evening, May 4, and reruns May 18.

DC COMICS has just reprinted the first issue of Sugar and Spike, which is only one of the best comics they or any company ever published.  In an industry where writers and artists have usually been forced into unnatural collaborations on whatever book needs a staff at the moment, Sugar and Spike was a rare, welcome exception.  A very talented cartoonist named Sheldon Mayer created the book he wanted to do and then proceeded to write and draw it, all by himself, for around a hundred issues.  We're hoping this facsimile edition will arouse enough interest to warrant a lovely reprint collection of the full run, or even of just a few more issues.  It was a fun comic and I happen to think the industry would be ten times its size, and not at all in trouble, if more great talents over the years had had the opportunity to create and control the comic they really wanted to do.  (You can read the first three pages of Sugar and Spike #1 on-line by clicking here.)

April 30, 2002 · 4:00 PM PDT · link

RICHARD NIXON (seen above with his choice for the post of Drug Czar) was brought down by many factors, most of them Richard Nixon.  One minor contributor received more attention than he was due, largely because we didn't know who he was.  We're speaking of Deep Throat, the shadowy "insider" who tipped Bob Woodward of the Washington Post to various Nixon skullduggeries.  Because his identity has been so zealously concealed, lo these past three decades, there has been much speculation as to who he was, why he did what he did, why he has held Woodward and his partner, Carl Bernstein, to secrecy as to his identity, etc.

As a source, Deep Throat has probably been overrated.  At least as he is quoted in the Bernstein-Woodward memoir, All the President's Men, he wasn't that huge a help and much of the info he divulges in that book is either just plain inaccurate or falls under the general heading of Good Guessing.  At one point, he passes along to Woodward the hush-hush info that the F.B.I. was very concerned about leaks to the press.  Well, gee, I was writing Daffy Duck comics for a living at the time and I could have told them that.  But he also seems to have given the reporters enough valuable info to win the trust of their editors and to keep the Post in pursuit of the story.

Many guesses and theories have been offered as to the true name of the 20th century's most celebrated snitch, along with at least a dozen instances where someone has said they know for certain; that they have solid info that Deep Throat was actually...and then, at this point, they all give different names.  For a time, Alexander Haig seemed to be the leading candidate but, at his request, Woodward and Bernstein announced that it was categorically not him — the only person they've ever so designated.

Recently, another celebrated Nixon snitch — his former counsel, John W. Dean — announced that thirty years is long enough; that he knows who Deep Throat was and will reveal it in June of this year.  I'm a bit skeptical that he knows.  In Dean's second book, he devoted several chapters to the detective work he did at the time, named Al Haig as The Man, then admitted that it was just a theory and that a lot of the clues didn't fit.  Does Dean have the goods this time?  I dunno.  He's a pretty smart guy, and it would seem somehow poetic if that Deep Throat story came to a close the same year that Linda Lovelace passed away.  We'll see...

In the meantime, the only hint Dean has offered as to who he'll name is that Judge Antonin Scalia will be very surprised to find out that a friend of his was the Post's notorious informant.  Call me reckless but I'm guessing it's not Clarence Thomas.

April 30, 2002 · 3:00 AM PDT · link

ONCE UPON A TIME, National Lampoon was a very funny, sometimes brilliant magazine.  Today, it's just a brand name that's slapped on products of indeterminate quality.  I suppose it's supposed to suggest that the movie or merchandise has something in common with the hipness of the Lampoon of yore, or its more successful film tie-ins, even though no one involved in them is contributing in any way to the current stuff.  Anyway, I thought it might interest someone to know that the spirit of the old NatLamp is hailed and indexed on a very thorough website.  It's Mark's Very Large National Lampoon Site.  I'm not the Mark that maintains it, though it inspires me to haul out my old issues and browse.  Which I'll do as soon as I get past current deadlines.

April 30, 2002 · 12:30 AM PDT · link

1776 is one of my favorite musical comedies.  I've loved it the several times I've seen it on stage but I only liked the movie the first time I saw it.  That's because the movie, as initially released, was hacked down from its original director's cut.  Under pressure from Richard Nixon (honest), studio mogul Jack L. Warner cut 40 minutes of mostly political content and the film suffered for it.  We summarized this in this article here on this website and it was also covered last year in The Los Angeles Times in this piece.  The mostly-restored version was released a few years ago on Laserdisc and it finally comes out on DVD on July 2nd.  It's still a bit "stagebound" in this format but it's a much better movie.

The DVD is already available for advance ordering from Movies Unlimited for $26.99 plus postage and if you click on that link and give 'em your credit card info, my site gets a tiny percentage.  However, the DVD oughta be up for advance ordering any day now from Amazon and, if I understand the two companies' pricing systems correctly, it'll be two bucks cheaper there...plus, depending on the size of your total order, Amazon could cost you less in shipping.  (For standard, domestic shipping of videos, Movies Unlimited charges $5.00 per order plus 50 cents an item; Amazon charges $1.99 per order plus 99 cents per item.  This means that, looking just at postage charges, Movies Unlimited is cheaper when you order 9 or more items; Amazon is cheaper if you order fewer.)  So wait and order it via the link on this site when we tell you and we'll both profit.  Better still, wait until you have a whole lot of things you want to order.  After all, you have two months.

April 29, 2002 · 11:00 AM PDT · link

ARTICLE IN The Los Angeles Times about Steve Ditko.  Here's the link.  Don't believe that part about how they stuck Spider-Man in the last issue of Amazing Fantasy because they knew it was going to be cancelled anyway...but otherwise, it's a pretty good piece.

April 29, 2002 · 1:00 AM PDT · link

IT'S NOT QUITE his tenth anniversary but NBC is celebrating ten years of Jay Leno hosting The Tonight Show this week.  I happen to be a major fan of both him and Mr. Letterman and have never quite understood why folks who prefer one show over the other can't just watch and enjoy it without praying for the demise of the competition.  The whole "Late Night Wars" thing, after all, really came down to a battle over which of two already-successful men would get paid millions of dollars for hosting a talk show at 11:35 on NBC and which one would have to settle for getting paid millions for hosting a talk show at 11:35 on CBS.  (Yes, there's a secondary, ongoing "war" over which one dominates the ratings but, unless you're involved in one program's advertising revenues, I can't imagine why you should care who's #1.  Neither show is going off until its host quits or dies.)  Was being able to say your show was a tenuous extension of Johnny's really worth all that fuss and sending agents out to try and destroy others?  Apparently so...but, with a decade's hindsight, it all looks pretty silly, especially the one-time assertion that the choice of Jay over Dave was the greatest mistake in TV history.

Sure doesn't look that way now, does it?  The two of them probably have the two most secure jobs in the entire television business.  Matter of fact, a friend of mine at one of the networks — formerly, a major Leno detractor — recently called to say he wants to pay off on our bet.  It involved lunch at the restaurant of the winner's choice that Jay would or wouldn't make ten years.  I remember no such bet but, hey, if he's buying...

None of this is to suggest that I like everything about both shows.  Many nights, I find myself fast-forwarding through the "Act Two" comedy bits, especially when it's predicated — as too many are — on the theory that it's hilarious to put non-professionals on camera in situations that will allow us to laugh at how stupid and/or awkward they are.  A little comedy writing in that slot would be nice.  There are also times when Jay's a bit too merry and Dave's a bit too cranky for me to believe I'm not just watching an act.  Of course, I have my chronic complaint that both shows are too scripted where they should be spontaneous...and I guess my complaint about the "Act Two" spots is that they should be scripted when they try to be spontaneous.  So if they could just reverse the two, I'd be an even happier late night TV consumer.

I'M BACK in Deadline Hell this week so we may not be updating this page as often as we'd like.  This will change.

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