My uncle's biography is titled The Benefit of Steel and it has begun to roll out in various ebook formats; you can see them all here. Part of each copy sold goes to support my uncle's mission in Angola!
The print version of the book will be coming later; when it arrives, I'll talk about it on the blog. If you're interested in missionaries, Angola or just reading my prose, why not buy a copy?
Benny fans usually state that the Jack Benny Program was at its best when what's considered the classic cast is assembled: Jack with Mary, Don, Phil, Dennis and Eddie Anderson (Rochester). But I feel there are other important factors which are often neglected in determining what was the best of Benny: the supporting cast; the sponsors; the writers; the audience.
I have divided up the 1932-1955 run of the Jack Benny Program into six rough groupings and I'll explain how I rate each of these groups of shows.
1932-1936: The early years of the Jack Benny Program creak quite a bit; in the earliest episode we have he kept running through sponsors (Canada Dry, Chevrolet, General Tire, then finally Jell-O) and he didn't have a studio audience. His wife, Mary Livingstone, was with him almost from the start and stayed to the end; before too long he added Don Wilson as his announcer and he remained 'til the end. During this time he also picked up Kenny Baker as the show's singer and 'crazy kid' type to annoy Jack. It isn't terrible radio comedy, but it isn't Jack at his funniest either.
My Judgement: Completists Only!
Best episode: June 9, 1933: I kinda enjoy the opening sketch which satirizes Schmeling vs. Baer.
1936-1939: And this is where the show becomes great for the first time. Again, most fans think Dennis Day is indispensable - I don't. Kenny Baker was not as good as Dennis Day, but filled the same role and did it better than other person in the show's history. What's really important is that this is era where Phil Harris joins the show as the bandleader and Eddie Anderson begins playing 'Rochester'. Phil isn't fully-formed when he first appears on the show, but he gathers steam quickly and by '39 was basically the same person he'd play on radio and television for the rest of his career. Along with the arrival of Rochester, who was such a hit with audiences that many felt he overshadowed Jack, this is also the era of the many 'Buck Benny' skits with Andy Devine, the great Fred Allen feud of 1937, and it's where Ed Beloin and Bill Morrow became Jack's writers. Beloin/Morrow are, so far as I'm concerned, the best of Benny's writers; throw in Jell-O and all the fun the show had with that product... and the show had a great supporting cast which included Beloin himself (frequently as 'Mr. Billingsley'), John Brown, Frank Nelson, Verna Felton and Mel Blanc; most of the radio cast at this point stuck with Jack to the end.
My Judgement: Great!
Best episode: May 5, 1939: The second half of a two-part 'Gunga Din' parody, this half including Phil's performance as the jazzed-up leader of the villains (ie, his band).
1939-1944: 1939 brought Dennis Day to the show, taking the place of Kenny Baker. This era of the show is, to my thinking, the absolute best: Beloin & Morrow are the writers, Jell-O (later Grape Nuts) is the sponsor, there are live audiences (including army bases during the war), and the most important members of the cast are there: Jack, Mary, Dennis, Don, Phil and Rochester. This is the era of the memorable 'Trip to Yosemite' four-parter and the four weeks with Orson Welles as host! The supporting cast also saw Butterfly McQueen for about a year - she's one of my favourite underrated Benny performers. But by the end of this era, Milt Josefsberg had joined the writing staff as Beloin and Morrow stepped down...
My Judgement: THE BEST!
Best episode: January 12, 1941: Jack's writers fail to come up with a script in time for the broadcast; when they try to perform a murder mystery story the cast keeps running out of pages!
1944-1946: This era is kind of a letdown on a few fronts; Beloin and Morrow are gone and while Josefsberg was a great writer (who ran the writer's room for the rest of Jack's career), the humour has a different feel as the show becomes more and more of a sitcom. Lucky Strike becomes the show's sponsor and is almost certainly the worst sponsor in all of old-time radio; Benny and his crew occasionally made light of the Lucky Strike commercial campaigns but not to the extent they did with Jell-O or Grape Nuts; the Lucky Strike people were, by all accounts, humourless and fiendishly devoted to the idea of repeating commercial catchphrases over and over. The sheer number and volume of Lucky Strike commercials from this point on--and typically only one ever done by Don Wilson--really hurts the show going ahead. Topping that off, this is from the period where Dennis Day was in the Navy and Larry Stevens took his place. Stevens was a fine singer, but didn't achieve much as a comedian.
My Judgement: Great!
Best episode: April 1, 1945: Jack relates the story of how he first met Phil Harris; in this telling, Jack actually enjoys all of the things about Phil's personality which normally make him upset!
1946-1952: And this is the last great era, the last time in which the cast was Jack, Mary, Dennis, Don, Phil and Rochester. The supporting cast continued to balloon as performers like Bea Benaderet, Artie Auerbach and Sheldon Leonard became recurring presences. I always have time for one of Leonard's 'racetrack tout' routines, but some of these recurring characters--like Sam Hearn's 'Friend from Calabassas'--aren't especially funny. It also points to a weakness of the Josefsberg era - despite the larger comedy writing staff, the jokes were becoming repetitive; instead of Jack and his gang put on their show, many episodes were in sitcom format and would follow Jack as he encountered the various supporting characters, who would each come out, do their bit, then go away. The show was starting to get predictable; I think it also hurt the program that while Phil Harris was still present, he had less time for the program due to his own Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show and would typically disappear about 10-15 minutes into Benny's show. And to top off all those Lucky Strike commercials, we have the Sportsmen Quartet; the only funny thing about the quartet is how much Jack despised them; the musical interludes by the quartet were only great when it made Jack upset (thankfully, that was most of their routine). This was also pretty much the end of Benny before a live audience, which is definitely an element in its favour--a number of memorable bloopers occurred during this era (such as Don's "Drear Pooson") and the show certainly felt more dynamic when it was live.
My Judgement: Great!
Best episode: October 20, 1946: Jack and his cast parody the program The Whistler with their sketch "The Fiddler" in which Dennis is the would-be hapless victim while Jack is irritated by Phil, the would-be murderer.
1952-1955: And here the show ends; Bob Crosby replaced Phil Harris but never developed an identity of his own, mostly just repeating old routines of Phil's about the show's band; the show start to be pre-taped; Mary began reducing her appearances or outright disappearing; scripts were recycled with greater frequency; entire episodes were rebroadcast. By this point, Jack was well on his way with television; I'm glad he stuck with radio as long as he did, but I can't call this era as good as what came before... I wouldn't even call it as good as the 1936-1939 era--it's a very slick production and better than anything else in radio comedy of the time, but compared to where Benny had been before, I find these years a letdown.
My Judgement: Pretty Good!
Best episode: January 11, 1953: Bob Hope guest stars in a parody of Hope's film Road to Bali, irritating Jack, who wanted to play Hope's part in the sketch!
Check out the very excellent fan webpage Jack Benny in the 1940's for a horde of great information and opinions on Jack Benny!
All of which brings me to Insiders Vol.1: Chechan Guerrilla by Jean-Claude Bartoll & Renaud Garetta.
Originally published in 2002 in French by Dargaud, Insiders wasn't translated into English until 2009. The series concerns Najah Cruz, an undercover agent who infiltrates an international corporation which, left unregulated, has begun fomenting regime changes which are beneficial to their executives. It's a very 21st century kind of threat - this idea that corporations seem to be above the law and hold influence beyond that of any governments. This first volume is engaged with what were current events back in 2002 - namely, the end of the Angolcan Civil War.
Basically, in the wake of the civil war's end, this corporation decides it's a great opportunity to drive Angola out of Cabinda and give Cabinda independence so their corporation can assume control of their oil & gas industry (it is seldom brought up in the media, but Cabinda does supply a significant amount of oil & gas to North America). Now, I would have thought a better time to drive Angola out of Cabinda would have been during the civil war when their attention was divided, but that's why I'm not a corrupt international businessman.
Although everything is drawn from current events, Insiders is pretty timid when it comes to real world political references. As you can see above. they don't refer to any of the actual Angolan (or Cabindan) political parties or political figures. But Insiders does track with what I've read about the death of Savimbi back in 2002 - at the time, people weren't sure if his death meant the end of the civil war or not (in the end, his death did conclude the war). Watching from the outside, the world was ready for the fighting to start up at any time. However, for all that Insiders is very savvy about international politics, the takeover of Cabinda seems laughably easy - I mean, in this comic, Angola dispatches only two MIGs to fight the private army who are driving out their ground forces. Considering how valuable Cabinda was/is to Angola, I imagine such a conflict would take considerably longer than one day and involve more than just two jets. In the real world, Cabinda actually helped the peace process post-war because the continued conflict in Cabinda gave the government somewhere to deploy their soldiers while the war cooled down.
But that minor criticism stated, Insiders is immensely well-researched and well-informed about Angola; I've never been to Cabinda, but there are scenes in Luanda which are clearly photo-referenced and seem quite accurate, showing the contrast from the skyscrapers to the shanties. Visually, it's the best representation of Angola I've seen in any comic book thus far.
Mind you, this may not be a full retirement for Moore - there's every chance that he may come back for a story here or there; heck, Steve Ditko 'retired' in 2000 but was still self-publishing at the time of his death in 2018.
Moore occupies a very odd position in the comics industry - he's absolutely one of the most-read creators who has ever written, Watchmen alone ensures that. He's one of the most influential creators on super hero comics, yet he's always been an outsider. He's considered both over-hyped and under-appreciated.
I came late to Moore -- being a Marvel Comics reader and his Captain Britain so hard to find -- and when I finally did read his work, I found it held up. I'm afraid I haven't read much of his 21st-century output (I didn't care for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), but I've read his Watchmen, Miracleman, From Hell, Captain Britain, Swamp Thing, 1963, Supreme, Youngblood, Superman, Batman: The Killing Joke, Judgement Day, Top Ten and V for Vendetta.
It was just a couple of years ago that I audited a course on graphic novels where, in addition to Watchmen as one of the textbooks, we looked at two Alan Moore stories which I hadn't read before - his 9/11 piece "This Is Information" and one of his Greyshirt stories from Tomorrow Stories. I enjoyed the storytelling on Greyshirt so much that it led me to read all of his Tomorrow Stories, which was quite a bit of fun - he's best known for his grim super hero deconstructions, but his humourous super hero deconstructions are also well worth experiencing.
Part of what impresses me about Moore is the amount of effort he places into his storytelling. After all the years I spent reading scripts from Marvel writers who gave so little thought to what they wanted their artists to communicate and how they wanted it communicated (they were primarily concerned with their dialogue), I admire that Moore cares about storytelling, and it's evident from the books he wrote that he was always seeking to produce a certain effect on every comics page - sometimes through panels packed with dense information, sometimes by delivering information through simple imagery. The man cares about his art and wasn't content just to rush out pages to meet his deadlines. Enjoy your retirement, Mr. Moore.
To that end, I want to look at a recent Marvel Comics trade paperback cover. I should note that I used to be a freelance employee of the collections office during the eight years I worked on the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and other projects (2004-2012). Consequently, I know a few of the people who put this collection together, particularly the researcher/layout designer Jeph York, who was also a member of the OHOTMU team. But I really have to say something about the cover to Wolverine Epic Collection V.13: Blood Debt.
Blood Debt is a real hodgepodge of material. It reprints Wolverine's 1999 Annual, Wolverine#150-158 and the entire mini-series Origin#1-6. The book is titled after the story 'Blood Debt' which ran through issues #150-153 and was written & drawn by Steve Skroce. Skroce, strangely, never became a big name in the comics industry, even though he was the guy who storyboarded the film The Matrix, which you'd think would have parlayed him to the top tier; it was enough to get him his own Wolverine story, but he's mostly worked in movies. When he drew the mini-series We Stand on Guard for Image a couple of years ago, it was his first monthly comics work in a decade. Skroce was always considered a talented guy and there was precious little of his work in print. So as the collection is titled 'Blood Debt' you'd think the cover would be a beautiful Steve Skroce image, right?
That's right; you're wrong.
See, after Skroce, Wolverine was very briefly taken over by Rob Liefeld, who only managed to squeeze out two issues of art (and two more on plot) before leaving. There's no shortage of Liefeld in the world - even though he has burned many bridges in his career, the industry keeps asking him to come back. Why then, with so much Liefeld already out there, would you turn to him instead of Skroce? Or, for that matter, Joe Quesada & Andy Kubert, who drew the Origin series also included in this volume?
Deadpool, obviously. Yeah, that's Deadpool on the cover, and that's the only reason I can think of that the collections department chose this reprinted cover for the front honours. But it's not even a good image of Deadpool - it isn't full-body, he's pushed off-centre, and even though Liefeld is Deadpool's creator, it doesn't look especially on-model. It was already a bad cover, but I suppose the hope was that Deadpool's presence would shift a few more copies than Skroce, Quesada or Kubert would. And perhaps the collections department is right. From a marketing standpoint, maybe this was the right call... but from a philosophical and logical standpoint, it makes no sense. It's a bad image of Deadpool and it does not reflect anything about the title of this trade. It's disappointing.
