My favorite newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, ran this photo on Thanksgiving Day. Is it just me, or does it look as though along with turkey, the mission serves human head on a platter?

Slate’s Bryan Curtis on Christopher Guest’s new movie. He doesn’t like it — or Guest’s methodology.

You may recall that back here I was saying that if there were a prize god, “The Road” would win. Although four — four! — people have since taken my recommendation and read “The Road,” evidently there remains a lack of a prize god, because last I checked the book hadn’t won any prizes. Except with me and others I’ve spoken with who read it.

In today’s LA Times (okay, yesterday’s at this point) Book Review, a judge from this year’s National Book Award discusses the judging process. Click here to read the piece. Having been on both sides of this sort of evaluation — picking writing-contest winners and losers, and being a writing-contest winner or loser — I can agree that it’s hard to make these judgments and that yes, there are backstage maneuverings. I’m glad she made a pitch for “The Road” (which her fellow judges were unmoved by). I’m also glad that all five judges agreed to shortlist Phillip Roth’s “Everyman,” a miraculous little novel I read last spring.

One thing about this contest took me back to my own days reading plays at Moving Arts, where we had an ongoing discussion about our evaluation process. A question that constantly arose was this one: If we didn’t read the entire play, were we being fair? Was it fair to render judgment by, say, page 10? In the case of the National Book Awards, over the course of three-and-a-half months these five judges had to read 258 novels. Each. The same 258. Do the math and it becomes clear that they had to skim many of these books — as she admits.

My other observation is this: If Phillip Roth didn’t finally place (they nobly saved him the embarrassment of being an also-ran, after having won twice), and Cormac McCarthy didn’t even show, then I have to marvel at just how high the bar has been set for the winner, “The Echo Maker” by Richard Powers. I’m going to have to find out personally by reading the book.

Dave Cockrum, co-creator of the new X-Men, died this morning from the effects of diabetes. (Here is the posting from his friend Clifford Meth.) Cockrum, with writer Len Wein, created the characters of Storm, Colossus and Nightcrawler, relaunching the moribund X-Men and building a new dynasty for Marvel Comics.

I knew Dave Cockrum. As a boy I would see him at comic conventions and interview him for fanzines. I remember during his stint on X-Men, which was initially bi-monthly, that he once told me that Marvel would like to make the book monthly but that he didn’t think he could make the deadlines. I remember thinking, “Uh oh” — and soon thereafter Marvel replaced Cockrum with John Byrne.

Cockrum also told me that Storm was his fantasy woman and that Nightcrawler was he himself. At the time, being raised in the household I was being raised in, it seemed incredible to me that this white man was fantasizing about this black woman. Fantasizing about being a teleporting obsidian elf with a tail and cloven feet didn’t faze me.

Several years later when I was in my late teens, I put on my own comic-book convention. Here was my thinking: my business partner and I were selling comic books every weekend at comics shows and making money doing that — how much harder could it be to run the convention, too, and make money not just at our table but from admission and renting tables to other dealers? Not hard at all, it turned out.

To guarantee attendance at the con, we needed a comics celebrity. I called Marvel Comics and asked for Dave Cockrum. He was no longer drawing X-Men — in fact, I can’t remember what he was drawing — but he agreed to do the show, and here’s what I agreed to pay him: the cost of a round-trip train from Manhattan to New Jersey (around ten bucks), and lunch. I promptly slapped Dave Cockrum’s names all over our flyers and ads, sold all the dealers’ tables in advance and for the first time in my life, I made money before walking out the door (with the admission fees still to come in). It was a great feeling.

About 150 fans showed up for the show, which we named Escape (bouncing off the name of the Creation Con, a name that made no sense whatsoever to me — weren’t comic books about escapism?). All day long, Dave sat at his table and patiently answered fans’ questions and sold original artwork and pencilled sketches. He was incredibly gracious. I sent out a hireling even younger than myself to buy Dave his preferred lunch: Burger King. Total investment in his attendance: $13.

At the end of the day, Dave had made about $3000. I was astonished. Even now I’m astonished. That’s $3000 in circa 1980 dollars. At the time it seemed like enough money to retire on. He asked me if we were going to do another Escape Con and told me he’d be glad to come back. I wanted to, but my partner told me in a very snippy tone, “You can do that if you want to, but I’m not.” Maybe I should have kept it going, but other things began to intrude, like college, and theatre, and an even greater focus on writing, so that by the mid-80’s when I was no longer selling comics and had stopped writing about them for The Comics Journal, comic books were becoming less important to me.

It’s difficult to explain just how much of a star Dave Cockrum and artists and writers like him were to me, or how important the relaunch of X-Men was. It’s sad to read of his death, and sadder still to read that he was stuck in a VA hospital for so long and with such financial problems until Marvel finally agreed to help out the artist who, perhaps more than any other, is responsible for the remarkable resurgence of their comics, both on the page and on the screen. Although for a long time they figured they didn’t owe him anything, they finally realized they owed him a lot. Just as I do.

This blog isn’t about politics, but a good friend sent me this message, which elicited a response from me that I thought I’d post here.

Lee: You and I have agreed, I believe, that as wrongheaded as it was for the U.S. to invade Iraq, we can’t simply leave now. Have you read Michael Moore’s letter suggesting we do just that? (Click here.) I’m swayed by his argument. What do you think?

No, his argument doesn’t sway me a bit.

First of all, Michael Moore always plays fast and loose with the facts. Does it indeed cost $35,000 to get a cab ride from the airport to the Green Zone, as he claims? I don’t know — probably not — and since he doesn’t offer any citation, I’m going to say almost assuredly not. I wouldn’t base any conclusion upon any facts presented by him.

Even accepting his facts, though (the 71% or whatever who supposedly support insurgency and want us to leave), unilateral disengagement would be even more disastrous than this hunkered-down guerrilla war.

The history of the 20th century (and no doubt farther back) shows that once an occupying force pulls out, another force moves in. Look at Vietnam, to offer just one example. Whom do we think those occupying forces will be? Iran? Syria? If we’re “lucky” it would be Turkey. The odds that a local power base could hold this already fractious “nation” together are slim. It will splinter, and people we don’t like will wind up with more of it.

Add onto that its enormous bounty: Iraq is the world’s fourth-largest repository of oil. Set aside for one moment how much we want that — and think about how much others want that. It’s hard to believe that anyone is going to just let it sit there.

Finally, we made all sorts of promises (again!) to the Kurds and others. We left them to be slaughtered in 1991. Now we would do it again. Perhaps we should not be the policeman of the world, but when you promise to patrol a beat, you owe it to the people who entrusted their safety to you to do it.

We’re not going anywhere soon. We’ve built, I think, 20 FOB’s (forward operating bases) in Iraq. These are huge, huge permanent facilities. Our government, several of our major corporations, and tens of thousands of influential individuals all have enormous investments in these bases and in Iraq. To think we’re pulling out immediately is not only wrongheaded, it’s naive. Even key Democratic leaders like Pelosi and Biden understand this and aren’t promising immediate withdrawal.

Do I think we have tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) more troops to invest, up to the number needed to “win” this war? No. Do I think we should have invaded in the first place? No. But we cannot pull out and allow neighboring terrorist states to control Iraq and its oil deposits and its insurgency and then act upon us elsewhere.

Evidently, they’re comparative morons.

Considering some of the relative achievements of adults (World War II, the Spanish Inquisition, and “Who’s the Boss?” to name three), I reject this research and its conclusions.

According to Skeptic magazine’s Michael Shermer in today’s LA Times, you’re a racist too. And so am I. And so is he.

So does this finally answer a question posed by many (including me, in my play “Animals”): Given our animal nature, are we doomed to behave like animals?

I guess the answer would be yes.

Timothy Noah would like to read OJ’s book and makes a good contrarian argument for it.

I just don’t want OJ making any money from it.

Ditto with Rupert Murdoch and Judith Regan.

Hey — maybe I can sue these people! I feel violated.

Above are three self-portraits of Robert Crumb, as a four-year-old, an adolescent, and today.

Accompanying these illustrations in today’s Los Angeles Times Opinion section is an odd little piece written by his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Click here to see it; if you want to see the full versions of these cropped images, registration is required. Here is the entirety of the text:

As a child, my husband, Robert, already felt like an alienated old man (top left). He longed for the past, never having actually known what he was nostalgic for. It was as if he were born in the wrong time. He never felt part of the contemporary culture. You can see the roots of his alienation already beginning.

You can see from this drawing (middle) how out of sync Robert was — awkward, sensitive, nerdy. He was destined to suffer the cruelties of the outsider — especially in Southern California in the 1950s, where surfers and beach bunnies were the mode.

This image (right) is reflective of Robert as a mature artist — someone who has an eye for capturing himself with total honesty and has finally honed his scathing critique of modern society. We see the artist here in his pajamas at home. He has nothing to hide; it is all there.

Like most things about the LA Times, this baffles me.

(First, a few other things that baffle me about the Times:

1. Why doesn’t the newspaper that is situated in the entertainment capitol of the world have far better entertainment coverage than we get in Calendar — and for God’s sake, why is the writing in that section so deadly dull?
2. Why doesn’t the paper of record for the nation’s second-largest city have a metro section (rather than a “California” section)?
3. Why can’t the paper settle on a font? It doesn’t seem to be a problem for other newspapers — or even for me.
4. Why is it so riddled with errors? I have on file my favorite example: the day that the bottom half of Calendar Page 2 was advertising, and the top half was corrections. Other days have only come close to that achievement. Let us never forget the day they announced on page one the death of Allen Ginsberg, probably the most important American poet of the past 50 years — and misspelled his name.

I could go on in this vein, but I’ve already surpassed “a few.”)

What baffles me about this piece is that a) I don’t know what it’s doing in the Opinion section because it doesn’t offer an opinion about anything, and b) I just can’t figure out what prompted it. Is Crumb in the news and I missed it?

This is not as bad as some stage directions I’ve seen.

Thanks to Mark Chaet for sending this.