![]() And I came so close to greater public recognition for what I do, and lost the opportunity. ![]() Moreover, I've effectively lost an afternoon when I could have been working on other projects (like this column), and now I have to make up for lost time. So, I knew going in that this might happen, and Mark Evanier assures me that this sort of thing happens all the time, but, of course, it's still disappointing. I thought back to an episode of HBO's Unscripted, in which an actor throws a party for his friends to watch his appearance on Smallville and then discovers as they watch the show that he had been cut out of it. And then the segment about Bugs's "makeover" proved to be very brief, and everything I had said was left on the cutting room floor. ![]() I dispatched the last e-mail as the Rather show begins. (And yes, off camera I also explained to my interviewer about how 60 Minutes Wednesday had ignored Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's other collaborators in creating characters I wonder if this will do any good.) So I headed back to my apartment, where I dashed off e-mails to many, many people I know, telling them that I might be on television that very night. The interview itself went quite well, and I was told afterwards that the segment on Bugs's "Extreme Makeover" would run that very night on The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. (See "Comics in Context" #71: "Comics' Other Golden Age".) I drop everything and head in, emerging from the subway into a torrential rainstorm well, at least I got a nice look at Christo's The Gates, his temporary art installation in Central Park, as I rushed under my umbrella along the southern edge of the park on my way to CBS, arriving around 3:30 PM. Wow! What an opportunity to appear before an audience far greater than anything I've ever done before has had! (And yes, ironically, it would be for CBS News, which had so grievously erred in deeming Stan Lee the sole "creator" of the classic Marvel characters two weeks before on the Wednesday edition of 60 Minutes. So, at about 2 PM a CBS News staffer phones me and asks if I can come to the CBS Broadcast Center in Manhattan to be interviewed on camera. CBS News had contacted MoCCA to find someone to interview about the "makeover," and Jim nominated me. The promotional pictures of the futuristic, manga-style Bugs made him look grim, gritty and ghastly. That day The Wall Street Journal had broken the story of how Warner Brothers was readying a new animated science fiction series for the WB Network, Loonatix, featuring "reimagined" versions of Bugs Bunny and other classic Looney Tunes characters. Jim Salicrup (the editor behind Papercutz' new, praiseworthy comics revivals of Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys, which demonstrate how updating classic characters can be done right), asked me on behalf of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art to get in contact with a reporter from CBS News. None!?! Not even sweeping up!?Īh, but now came an unexpected miracle. This electronic form letter claimed that it found my resume "interesting" (three Ivy League degrees, published books, and teaching at NYU? I should think so!) but that there was no job in the vast Bertlesmann empire that I was suited for. ![]() Was it the fault of Verizon? AOL? Or was it the computer I'm now using after my old one went into what may be terminal malfunction mode last month? Then there was the e-mail response to my recent job application to Random House, which is owned by the German media giant Bertelsmann. After dunning New York University to pay me for teaching my course in "Comics as Literature" there last fall, I discovered I was the victim of a bureaucratic screwup, whereby I was not officially appointed to teach there until January – a month after the semester ended! Having finally settled that problem, I now faced a new battle with technology: suddenly I couldn't seem to stay online for more than ten minutes at a time.
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