Mark Evanier's Blog

Good obit for Gerry Conway in The New York Times.

I've mentioned this before but it bears repeating: Back in the sixties, seventies and eighties — and even before and for some time after — it was very rare for the death of anyone in comic books to be noted in any newspaper, let alone The New York Times.  Nothing appeared when Bill Everett died.  I don't recall much if anything when Wally Wood or Syd Shores or Reed Crandall left us.  Comic books are now much more mainstream and, of course, a lot of kids who grew up on comics are now working for newspapers.

Haven't done one of these for a while and not because there was a paucity of public figures saying things that were demonstrably false.  Quite to the contrary, I think people are just getting used to the fact that when Donald Trump says the war is over, as he seems to insist every day lately, that doesn't mean for a minute that the war is over.  We're all getting way too tolerant of this kind of thing…

Here's FactCheck.org telling us that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is again denying studies that prove him dead wrong on medical matters, that lotsa folks are fibbing about what "86" means, how White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is trying real hard to show that her opponents engage in "violent rhetoric," and what actual statistics show about how the economy is much worse than Trump will admit.

Here's Politifact noting how all-fired stupid Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (him again) is with his explanation of how “If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to $10, that's a 600% reduction."

And finally for now, the folks at CNN list some of the misleading things Trump has said about inflation and birthright citizenship, about the Iran war and his foreign policy record, about Pope Leo and about NATO, NASA, taxes and immigration.

I'm not sure what the WDR Funkhausorchester is but here it is playing the theme from The Love Boat…

I've only been there once but once was enough to fall in love with The Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia. It's gone through name changes and a fire and relocations but the lineage of the place dates back to 1808 and that is not a typo. George M. Cohan played there. Ethel Barrymore played there. Edwin Booth played there. And here's one so special it deserves its own paragraph…

In 1923, the Marx Brothers debuted their first show headed for Broadway, I'll Say She Is, at The Walnut Street Theater.

And speaking of men named Marx: In 2017, my lovely friend Amber and my not-quite-as-lovely friend Marv Wolfman and I went there to see my pal Frank Ferrante not playing Groucho Marx. He was starring in a very fine production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum which, as you know if you read the previous post on this blog, is my favorite musical.

That's me, then Frank, then Amber in the lobby before the show. And just before that photo was taken — by Marv, I think — we all got a wonderful backstage tour of the place. I love old theaters. I love old theaters a lot.

If I were more mobile, I'd go there before the end of May and see their current stage offering…another of my favorite musicals, 1776. Yes, I know a lot of theaters stage that show but how many of them are located within walking distance of where the action in that play takes place? Independence Hall is three-tenths of a mile away so that is just too, too appropriate. Here's a video of the ribbon-cutting when the show opened recently…

Well, I guess I asked for this by having a heading here that says "Ask Me Anything." I might change that to something like "Ask Me Anything But Don't Expect an Answer to Some Questions." A person who understandably asked me to withhold their name sent me this…

When you write an obit about a friend of yours who's the same age as you like Gerry Conway, do you ever stop and think if that person's dying, how long do I have left?

Nope. Everyone's body is different. And when someone I know turns a hundred like Dick Van Dyke or Al Jaffee or (almost) Carl Barks or June Foray or my maternal grandmother, I don't subtract my age from theirs and think, "That's how long I have left," either. I think it's one of the dumber ways to look at life. I've also known people who thought — with a different number inserted — "My father died when he was 90 so I'll probably die when I'm 90."

I understand why some people wish they could know how much time they have left on this planet. It would make estate planning and a lot of other things easier…but unless a wise doctor tells you you have X months or years to live, that kind of thing is unknowable, And even wise doctors are sometimes wrong. (I won't even get into consideration of accidents and other causes of death that are even less predictable than natural causes that aren't predictable at all.)

Some folks I've known are just way too obsessed with that and I don't think that's good for your health. I'm thinking of one actor I know who, when he hit some arbitrary age, became incapable of conversation that didn't include phrases like, "Well, I won't be around to see that" or "Guess I'm not long for this world" or the ever-popular, "I'm just circling the drain." I wanted to slap the guy and yell, "Cut that out!" He did die about the time he was predicting but I think he almost talked himself into it.

His widow told me he stopped taking care of himself, stopped seeing his doctor and adopted a less-healthy lifestyle because "Why bother? You can't cheat death." Maybe not but you may be able to delay it for longer than you think. Or make better use of however much time you have left. Here's a thought I find very comforting…

My favorite Broadway musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, opened in New York on May 5, 1962. It was directed by the legendary director George Abbott and many of the reviews said things like, "Isn't it amazing that Mr. Abbott is still able to direct a musical at his age?" In 1962, his age was just shy of 75 years old.

But Forum wasn't the last play Mr. Abbott directed. A few months later, Never Too Late opened on Broadway, directed by George Abbott. It was followed by Fade Out, Fade In, which was followed by Flora the Red Menace, which was followed by Anya, which was followed by Help Stamp Out Marriage!, which was followed by Agatha Sue, I Love You, which was followed by How Now, Dow Jones, which was followed by The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, which was followed by The Fig Leaves Are Falling, which was followed by a revival of Three Men on a Horse, which was followed by Norman, Is That You?, which was followed by Not Now, Darling, which was followed by a revival of The Pajama Game, which was followed by a revival of Where's Charley?, which was followed by Music Is, which was followed by a revival of On Your Toes, which was followed by Broadway, which was followed by another revival of Three Men on a Horse…

There was a point there where it appeared like every play George Abbott had ever directed, he was going to direct again.

On and on he went, well past the ones I just listed. Not all of those plays were hits. In fact, a lot of them lasted just a few nights..,but obviously, he was still functioning. Producers with a lot of money on the line kept entrusting their plays and investments to him. When I met him, George Abbott was a hundred and fucking six years old and he was in the process of directing a play, albeit from a wheelchair.

You have to wonder: All those people who acted likeA Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1962 would probably be his last play…what did they think of this man's longevity? Well, we couldn't ask them. We couldn't ask them because they were all dead.

We're nearing the end of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and if you didn't read this interview with him in The New York Times, you might like to read it. I admire the way he's retaining dignity and not acting like the absence of him at 11:35 PM is the end of the world as we know it.

I'm curious about what kind of offers he's had and whether he might turn up on The Daily Show on an interim basis. Probably not. I don't get the sense that he's looking for some position from which he can still annoy Trump and those who smooch Trumpian buttocks. It feels like he's looking for a new career but maybe, as the article suggests, he simply hasn't decided yet where and what he wants to be. We shall see.

This happened at an outdoor dining spot in St Christopher's Place in London. Daniil took his friend Maria there for lunch and people started playing musical instruments and singing and…well, just watch…

I first met Gerry Conway in a hallway at the DC Comics offices in New York. This would have been a few days before the July 4th weekend of 1970. I also on that trip and in those hallways, first met Len Wein and Marv Wolfman, who would become two of my best friends. Len, Marv and I got to talking that first day about how Gerry had just done the impossible. He'd sold his first professional comic book script and he'd sold it to Murray Boltinoff. It just might have been the last time a young writer sold his or her first script to Murray Boltinoff.

We didn't know it at the time but 1970 was a major turning point in the history of comics. Some would tell you that's when the "Silver Age of Comics" ended. I've never been much for assigning specific years to when the "Golden Age" started, when it ended, when the "Silver Age" started and ended, when the "Bronze Age" started and ended, etc. Those are questions with no answers on which most people could ever agree. But things were changing in comics in and around 1970.

DC was undergoing a radical transformation under the leadership of Carmine Infantino. Jack Kirby had left Marvel and come over to DC. Marvel began publishing Conan. Comic book prices were about to experience a major increase. A lot of longtime talent had left the industry, some of it not by choice. There were all sorts of markers and a big one was an influx of New Talent…kids who'd grown up reading comics were starting to get jobs writing and drawing them. (I oughta know. I was one of them.)

Murray Boltinoff was a longtime editor at DC. Unlike the other editors there then — Joe Orlando, Julius Schwartz, Dick Giordano, Joe Kubert and others — Murray was largely resistent to give work to folks in my (our) age bracket. He would hire some of us (not me but others) once we were well-established with other DC editors or even at other companies. But he was not about to give anyone their first sale.

I can make a case for his attitude. The industry then did not pay royalties or reprint fees or offer health insurance or vacation pay or anything of that sort to its freelancers. If they bought a six-page script from you, they paid you six times your page rate and that was it. The one perk they could give you…the closest thing to any kind of financial security…was that once you were "in," they'd usually (not always) buy work from you on a sorta steady basis.

It was not a contractual guarantee but the editors at the comic book companies then were all men who'd grown up in ways impacted by The Great Depression. They understood that if you were going to pay rent, buy groceries and raise a family, you needed a more-or-less regular income. To the extent their bosses would allow it, they'd try to give you one. Murray didn't want to buy scripts or art from new people when he had long-serving writers and artists who counted on that income.

As far as I know, he never said this policy out loud. If you submitted something to him, he gave it proper professional consideration because that was his job. But ultimately, he spent what he was allowed to spend on veteran writers and artists, including some guys whose incomes had been hurt when, a couple blocks away down Third Street, Western Publishing (aka Gold Key Comics) cut back. He just felt that obligation to men of his generation.

Marv and Len and other new writers politely pestered all the DC editors for work and most of them succeeded eventually. Gerry was one of those and, unaware of Murray's reticence in this area, submitted stories to him. And what happened was this: Murray saw Gerry so often in the DC hallways visiting other editors that he thought Gerry was selling scripts to them…so he bought a script from Gerry.

One. Gerry's first sale. And once Murray found out that it was Gerry's first sale, he never bought anything else from him, at least for a long, long time. Gerry said that long, long time was "forever" and it may have been.

But it didn't hurt Gerry's career because other editors were discovering how good he was and how dependable. He really was amazingly prolific, sometimes writing five or six complete comics a month. If he hadn't ventured into other things — novels and a pretty impressive career writing for television — he might have been the most prolific comic book writer of all time. And there were some very good, memorable stories on that list.

One time, we were having lunch at Art's Deli on Ventura Boulevard and on the way out, I ran into a friend of mine who was a longtime comic book reader. I introduced him to Gerry and he immediately began good-natured but earnestly-meant complaining about the Spider-Man story Gerry wrote which killed Peter Parker's love interest, Gwen Stacy. But he ended it with, "On the other hand, I always loved The Punisher.  Oh — and that first Superman/Spider-Man crossover!"  (I think that's just been reprinted.  Gerry was real proud of it…and still bothered that Neal Adams and John Romita had retouched Ross Andru's drawings of the lead characters.  He assured me what Ross had drawn was much better.)

This coming July at Comic-Con in San Diego, Gerry's wife Laura will be accepting his Hall of Fame honor. I'm pleased Gerry knew it was coming and sad he didn't live long enough to accept it himself. He certainly deserved it for a truly amazing body of work…and he was nice guy, too. That counts for a lot in my book…and selling a first script to Murray Boltinoff? That's something I don't think anyone else achieved. Hell, give him the trophy just for that.

Here's a little video tribute to the late, much loved Sid Krofft…

I used to make mention here of friends I had who supported Donald Trump and how we were able to discuss our differences in a friendly, non-hostile manner. It has occurred to me the last few months that I no longer have such friends, either because they've converted or because they simply don't talk to me any longer.

I don't miss those discussions. What I do miss is being able to talk with certain people who agree with me about Trump but we talk about topics other than Trump. Whatever he is — and you may think he's not who or what I think he is — he sure is hard to ignore.

Put simply: I need more time in my life when I'm not thinking about this man, reading about him, talking about him…and I need more control over when I'm doing those things. I can't pretend like he doesn't exist because I do believe he's harming my country and the people in it but I need to compartmentalize better. Compartmentalization is something I used to be better when I was younger. I could deal with some important matter from 10 AM to 10:30, then put it completely aside and never give it another thought until I'd finished a script or accomplish something else I needed to accomplish.

It's an ability I think a writer needs to have in order to have a career. Whether what you write is wonderful or terrible, it's of no value to anyone unless you get it done. I think I've made mention here in the past of writers I know who were always late with their work and always had a good, seemingly valid explanation of how that lateness was someone else's fault. If you wanna make a decent living as a writer, you have to learn to not let all — let's say "most" — of those external forces interfere.

I was going to offer some tips here about how to do this but I realized, much to my horror, that I don't have any. You just kinda have to overcome such intrusions by sheer determination. You'd think that after 56 years of doing this for a living, I'd have better advice than that but no. Sorry. I don't. I tried not answering the phone but then I sat here and instead of writing, I just worried about the consequences of not taking that call, the one I just let go to Voicemail, only sometimes it didn't. I tried getting out of town but then I worried about some possible crisis back home and about getting back there if/when I had to. I tried telling friends of mine not to call me…

…and then one time, a close friend had a genuine, time-sensitive emergency that I could have solved quickly and completely if they'd called. But I'd asked them not to call me and they didn't and…well, I felt terrible about that.

I finally realized — and I'm offering this to you at the same time I'm reminding myself — that you just have to say or think, "I'm not letting this distract me from accomplishing what I need to accomplish!" I am not going to allow each day's daily Trump outrages stop me from doing what I need to do. And come to think of it, I do have one tip: If you let him prevent you from finishing that script, filling out those forms, taking your car in for servicing, going to the market, taking out the trash, writing that letter, paying those bills, doing your exercises, reading that thing you have to read, whatever it is…

…it's not him preventing you from getting things done. It's you. You're the one who has to fix that.