As several folks have pointed out, MJ was a real comics fan. During the height of his fame in the ’80s and ’90s he would occasionally shop at his favorite comics shop — it would have to be shut down so he could shop in peace. A more recent trip with his children resulted in tabloid images, like much of his later years. He was certainly no stranger to the comics section.

Laura Hudson and Tom Spurgeon have more round-ups of Jacko and the Comics inks. John Jackson Miller looks at the comics connections of MJ, Farrah and Ed McMahon. And here’s a tribute by James Kochalka.

Rick Marshall remembers Jackson’s attempt to buy Marvel Comics, one of those weird moment of ’90s Marvel history that Jim Salicrup should write a book about some day.

The above issue of Disney Adventures was, at the time, only the second magazine cover that Jackson had done a shoot for since he become the King of Pop. (The other was Vanity Fair.) It was his idea to pose with Pinocchio, an idea that’s pretty creepy in retrospect. But let’s try to look on the best side. In the end, the man lived a sad, sick life, but it’s the music that will live on forever and ever. Cliched but so true.

While running around the Internet, we happened upon the news of the death of animator/cartoonist Jaime Diaz. The Argentininan born Diaz had a lengthy career in animation, working with Warner Bros., Hanna-Barbera, Cartoon Network, and Nickelodeon on everything from Dexter’s Lab to Fairly Odd Parents and everything in between.

During a decade-plus stint back in Argentina, Diaz opened an animation/comics studio, and I worked with many of his fine artists in my Disney days. Their work was always completely professional and occasionally inspired, and I always got a kick out of the faxes with Diaz’s big signature at the bottom. The Jaime Diaz Studio hired many local artists who were were good enough to work for Disney, but couldn’t find enough work in original Argentinian comics…yet another case where the American product has drowned out the local, as far as I could tell. Anyway, if you ever picked up a copy of Disney Adventures or a Disney comics in the early ’90s, you certainly saw the work of the Jaime Diaz Studio, and they also did a lot of animation work.

I recall Cosme Quartieri as being one of the finest artists there, and Walter Carzon, who later drew a bunch of Warner Bros comics, including ANIMANIACS. From reading the comments on his death I learned that Bill Diaz, Jaime’s son, passed away two years ago. I also worked with Bill on various projects over the years, and that’s sad to hear; it seems the older Diaz had never recovered from this loss.

After Disney Comics shut down and other kids’ comics died away in the mid ’90s, Diaz came back to the US to resume work in the animation field. Larry Huber has much more on his life and career, including Diaz’s own original creations. Cartoon Brew has more, as does Fred Seibert.

I never met Diaz, and I doubt that anyone reading this who didn’t work in animation this even knew his name, but they should have. Diaz is certainly exemplary of a level of talent and craft that touches and inspires those he worked with, and produced a body of work which entertains and charms generations. My condolences go out to his family.

The Ric Flair of Japan is dead after an in-ring accident.

Artist and animator Dave Simons has passed away after a long battle with cancer. He was 54.
Daniel Best has a tribute:

In his career Dave worked with some of the giants of animation and comic books. He was one of the best inkers to work with Gene Colan since Tom Palmer, a fact that Dave was damned happy to hear, especially when that praise came from Gene. He worked with Bob Budiansky on one of the best runs seen on Ghost Rider in the books life, and beyond. He worked with almost anyone you care to mention. His attention to detail and apparent inability to turn in a bad job held him in excellent stead and made him one of the go-to inkers of his generation. His generosity to others was known amongst his peers and there’s several inkers and artists who’ll happily tell you that Dave helped them along their way and gave them a start in their comic book careers.

Simons’ website can be found here.

The 72-year old star was found dead in a hotel room in Bangkok where he was filming his latest film.

The son of great character actor John Carradine, and brother of Robert and Keith, David Carradine was best known for his roles in the TV show Kung Fu and film Kill Bill. The prolific actor starred in over 100 other movies. After studying kung fu for his signature role as Kwai Chang Caine in Kung Fu, Carradine retained a lifelong interest in martial arts and Eastern philosophy.

Update: Sad details emerging.

Artist Ric Estrada passed away last week — there’s an obit retelling his remarkable life at the Salt Lake Tribune. His life included going to school with Fidel Castro, help from Ernest Hemingway, as well as many fine comic strips and comics, mostly for DC, where he drew such things as KARATE KID and OUR ARMY AT WAR. You can read more about his career at The Comics Reporter and Mark Evanier’s blog.

I actually worked with Estrada many moons ago on a project for Disney Adventures. He was a total pro and real “natural” — everything that came out of his pen was flowing, confident and beautifully drawn. He was also a fine storyteller…in short, one of those cartoonists who brings a craft to even tired genre stories that elevates them and gives them life.

There’s a website run by his son, where, we learn, a movie about his life is being made.

We have failed to properly mark the passing of Bea Arthur, but must now remedy that. As our pal Zena pointed out, there are now as many surviving Golden Girls as Beatles. As we probably noted when Estelle Getty passed away, our step-dad produced Golden Girls for a few years, so we know all about that and still have our Golden Girls cast jacket, even if it is too hot to ever wear it again.

Arthur, always a fierce, witty presence, made her great contribution to nerd culture playing the manager of the Cantina in the Star Wars Holiday Special. You can see her crooning, serving up drinks, dealing with Rodians AND Harvey Corman in the above clip. It’s pretty amazing.

As you watch it, you realize there was never a character in the whole Star Wars canon any tougher than Bea Arthur. RIP.

We’re a little under the weather today, so it’s late and light, but we had to make mention of this Not Comics obit: The legendary cinematographer Jack Cardiff has died at age 94:

An Oscar winner for Black Narcissus, in 1948, Cardiff’s career as cinematographer spanned an astonishing eight decades, with his career in films going all the way back to an 1918 acting job.

Cardiff will be best remembered for his long collaboration with directors Powell & Pressburger on films like A Matter of Life & Death and The Red Shoes, but he also worked on classics like The African Queen for John Huston, The Barefoot Contessa for Joseph L. Mankiewicz and King Vidor’s War and Peace.

And CONAN THE DESTROYER and RAMBO, of all things. Cardiff was still working even a few years ago, and directed several films himself, including SONS AND LOVERS.

The Powell/Pressburger films remain one of the great treasures of film, and Cardiff’s unbelievable photography on BLACK NARCISSUS — a delirious story of repressed nuns in the febrile Himalayas — remains a singular cinematic achievement of beauty and psychological expression. Under Cardiff, even a potboiler like THE VIKINGS looked great. Truly, one of the masters.

Newsday reports the death last week of veteran artist Frank Springer at age 79.

Springer was a gregarious and practical man who labored for hours a day in his backyard studio, said his son, Jon Springer of Brooklyn. “He’d be out there basically all day long, morning until dinnertime.”

The artist would listen to jazz and opera while he worked, and he never got too high-minded about his outstanding talent, his son said. “He was a normal, conservative kind of guy,” Jon Springer said.

Frank Springer drew for a wide variety of companies, including DC Comics and Marvel. He also illustrated an adult-themed satire, “The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist,” a comic that Springer considered one of his best works.

Springer worked on Nick Fury, the Dazzler, Batman, and may other characters of the Silver and Bronze Ages. He worked on comics strips and creator-owned comics and did it all with style and craftsmanship. For more on his work and life, there’s this fairly recent interview, the Mark Evanier obit, and Springer’s Wikipedia entry..

Anne Cleveland, a cartoonist from the ’30s to the ’50s, whose main subject was college humor and her alma mater, Vassar, has died at age 92, according to a comment on this blog by her granddaughter, Ursula. We’ve taken the liberty of reprinting the comment here with some minor technical editing:

My grandmother died in February 2009 (she was born in May 1916, not 1917, so the previous age was wrong). The Oregonian refused to publish a paid obituary with a cartoon instead of a photograph– yeah, I know, my mother is up in arms about it.

Anne had a twin brother, Van (short for Van Buren; I think that was his middle name), and two younger brothers, Stanley and Harlan. Her father had volunteered as a clergyman in WWI; he died of a blood infection contracted during that time period when Anne was a girl (somewhere between ten and thirteen). Her mother supported the family; she worked at Andover as a house mother for a while, and eventually became Dean of Women at Rollins College.

Anne started out at Vassar as a classics major, and soon switched to art history. (There are several family legends about her ability to identify art forgeries.) At some point she taught a few classes at Rollins; during WWII she worked for the WAC, drawing maps. (My mother has some sketches of Anne’s fellow WACs.)

My grandfather’s name is Augustus R. White; to this day, he says that he married Anne because she was the most brilliant woman he’d ever met. Anne and Gus had two children, A. Tobias White and my mother, Susan (now Susan Whitcher). Gus’s family had lived in Shanghai before the War, and maintained business interests in Japan afterwards; that’s why Anne spent time in Japan (where my mother was born).

I understand that in addition to the books, which one can buy on Amazon, Anne published some cartoons in the New Yorker, but I have not yet tracked them down . . .

Anne & Gus divorced c. 1965. After that, Anne spent a couple of years in New York, battling depression, then moved to Ashland, Oregon. She lived in Ashland until the early 1980s, until she moved to Baltimore to be closer to my mother; she moved back to Portland, Oregon with my family in 1992.

Cleveland’s cartooning career was fairly minimal, but she became something of a cause celebré here at this blog, for various reasons. Instead of rehashing that, we’ll just post links to appreciations by Shaenon K. Garrity, here, here, and here. (We’ve stolen a photo of young Cleveland and a cartoon from Garrity.) Our last post on Cleveland can be found here. Our condolences to her family, and thanks to Ursula for passing on the news.

Horror artist Jose Gonzalez has passed away, according to Harris Comics:

It is with great sadness that Harris Comics has learned of the passing of Jose “Pepe” Gonzalez. He was 70 years old.

Gonzalez is best known for his work on Vampirella. Starting with Vampirella #12 in 1971 and together with Archie Goodwin, Gonzalez created horror classics that have stood the test of time as some of the finest examples of the comics medium. His work was thrilling, sensuous and beautiful. He brought the character to life, elevated her to an icon and, most deservedly, won over a legion of fans who have never forgotten him. To this day, many would say his was the definitive rendition of the character.

He was one of the greatest artists comics has ever seen. He will never be replaced and he will be sorely missed.

Joe Jusko had this to say: “I can honestly say that my life long affinity for Vampirella was born due to the discovery of Jose Gonzalez’ breathtaking work. From the splash page of Vampirella #21 through the very last panel, my 12 year old eyes had never seen a woman drawn in comics as Gonzalez drew them; beautiful, mysterious, sexy (but never slutty). I have forever tried to capture the glamour and sensuality that he brought to the character, but as all who have tried since have always come up tragically short. There will always be only one definitive Vampi artist in most readers’ eyes and he will always be the great Jose ‘Pepe’ Gonzalez.”

* Did Dr. Manhattan shoot his load the first weekend?

Depending on whom you talked to this week, the opening weekend box office for WATCHMEN was great or underwhelming. Things look a little clearer after the first night of weekend number two.

From Variety:

Warner Bros./Paramount’s comic book epic “Watchmen” fell 78% from its opening day landing third Friday with an estimated $5.4 million from 3,611 theaters. Pic’s eight-day cume currently stands at $73.3 million.

Did all the fanboys decide they didn’t need a second viewing? Was word-of-mouth outside the nerd bubble not great? Were people scared off by Dr. Manhattan’s package?

* In other nerd news

Time.com’s Nerdworld blog interviews annotator extraordinaire Jess Nevins. (Disclaimer: Jess and I went to grad school together and his work has appeared in my magazine.)

9. Have you, as an annotator, ever gone down in defeat? Are there things in the LoEG books that you just can’t solve?

Oh, heavens, yes. When Moore & O’Neill get into areas which I don’t know anything about and which are ill-represented online and in print–1950s British comic book science fiction, for example–I’m at a complete loss, and some of their references stump even the collective brains of the people who contribute to the annotations. In the Black Dossier, for example, Kevin O’Neill drew in spaceships from various British Fifties sf comics, and if he hadn’t identified them for the print version of the annotations, they would have remained a mystery to us all.

Moore sometimes jokes about trying to stump me. I feel a pain in my head when he says that, because if/when he ever tries to do that, I’m not just stumped, I’m uprooted and thrown into a woodchipper.

*Since there was no Lost column this week…

A week without a new Lost means an extra week for people to scrutinize the most recent episode looking for clues about the statue or how to put all the various time traveling threads together. The coolest thing I read (don’t remember where) was that the hieroglyphs that showed up on the countdown clock are on the Ajira airline tickets.

*A non-comic note for all you people who hate non-comics news here.

Sad news this morning for the pro wrestling business as word broke that Andrew Martin passed away at the age of 33. For those who watched during the “Attitude Era,” Martin worked for the WWE as Test, a beefy mid-carder best remembered for being coupled with a young Stephanie McMahon and feuding with her brother Shane. While not the best in-ring performer, many people raved about the match between Test and McMahon at Summerslam 1999. Once removed from the McMahon family soap opera, he slowly drifted down the card until being released a few years ago from the WWE after failing a drug test. Recently, he had been working on shows in Europe and Japan.

Posted by Mark Coale

Rod Gilchrist, executive director of San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum, died of brain cancer at age 58 on February 26th. The SF Chronicle has a full obituary up, explaining how he kept the museum going through boom and bust periods for comics and real estate. According to an email announcement by Andrew Farago:

In lieu of flowers, Rod’s family has suggested that you please send donations in his memory to the Cartoon Art Museum or Portola Family Connections.

A public memorial service will be held at the Cartoon Art Museum on Friday, March 20, beginning at 7pm. Please e-mail Andrew Farago through Facebook or at gallery@cartoonart.org for more information.

John Carbonaro, a longtime fan-turned publisher when he purchased the rights to the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, passed away at age 58 on February 25th, as reported by long time friend Robert J. Sodaro. Carbonaro purchsed the former Tower characters in 1981, and a rather long and convoluted rights battle with various entities prevented too much from being done with them subsequently. DC had planned a revival of the characters in the early 2000’s, but Carbonaro withdrew approval; however, DC did publish six Archive Editions of the original material.

Mark Evanier has some more remembrances.

According to Sodaro, Carbonaro did assign the rights to the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents to an heir, so we may still see them again one day.

Frontman of seminal Psychobilly rock band, The Cramps.

Cartoonist Michael Aushenker sent us a link that provides a bit more information on the enigmatic Patrick McGoohan, who died last week. Aushenker is also a staff writer for the Palisadian-Post, the weekly community newspaper of Pacific Palisades, CA, where the McGoohans lived since the late 1970s. He got the privileged chance to write the only obit that included extensive input from Patrick McGoohan’s wife, Joan Drummond McGoohan, whom he describes as “a sweet woman with the most adorable British lilt in her voice.”

‘’The Prisoner’ summed up what he felt,’ Joan McGoohan continued. ‘He thought it was very contemporary. He was an independent thinker. He followed all world happenings, the Middle East. He was a brilliant mind. All sorts of people, when they met him, they listened. Where it came from, I have no idea.”

The couple were regulars around the village that forms the center of the community:

Locally, the McGoohans frequented Sam’s at the Beach restaurant in Santa Monica Canyon. In the village, they dined at Modo Mio.

Joan McGoohan enjoyed a laugh at the notion that, in a sense, No. 6 never left ‘the village.’

‘He would get up at the crack of dawn, get the New York Times, and get some coffee at Mort’s or Starbucks,’ she said. ‘He wrote. Always, always.’

Famed novelist John Updike has died at age 76. Besides winning awards and being one of the best prose stylists of recent American letters, Updike was a friend of comics, having planned to be a cartoonist in his youth, and studied painting for quite a while. Or as Jeet Heer wrote:

Years ago while doing some research at Boston University on the papers of the cartoonist Harold Gray, the creator of the Little Orphan Annie, I came across a fan letter that was unusually eloquent. When I looked at the name of the bottom right hand corner of the type-written page it all became clear: it was a missive sent in 1948 by John Updike, then an aspiring cartoonist, when he was 15 years old. As I got to know Updike’s writing I started to realize that the letter was a simply one thread in a large and comfy biographical quilt. Like almost all American kids of his generation, Updike consumed comics even before he could read, so they were intertwined with his earliest experiences of art. Cartooning appealed to him as a potential vocation and he composed his first fledgling fan letters around 1942, when he was ten. After Updike settled on a literary career, he often returned to comics as a way of giving visual and mnemonic potency to his prose. His most recent writing on cartooning was his review earlier this year in The New Yorker of a much-disputed Charles Schulz biography. (For more on Updike and comics, see the articles I’ve written for the Boston Globe and the Guardian).

After the shocking double dose of death with Patrick McGoohan and Ricardo Montalban the other day, we know you were all wondering who would complete the sad trifecta. Somehow, Andrew Wyeth great as he was, just didn’t fit in. Now we see that Bob May died over the weekend. May was the man inside the Robot suit on Lost In Space:

He was a veteran actor and stuntman who had appeared in movies, TV shows and on the vaudeville stage when he was tapped by “Lost in Space” creator Irwin Allen to play the Robinson family’s loyal metal sidekick in the series that debuted in 1965.

“He always said he got the job because he fit in the robot suit,” said June Lockhart, who played family matriarch Maureen Robinson. “It was one of those wonderful Hollywood stories. He just happened to be on the studio lot when someone saw him and sent him to see Irwin Allen about the part. Allen said, ‘If you can fit in the suit, you’ve got the job.’”

Although the Robot’s voice (and warnings to Will Robinson) were provided by Dick Tufeld, May certainly contributed his part to pop culture with his top-notch arm waving skills and ability to sag when powered down. So let us now close this chapter on our TV heritage and just be glad that such giants walked among us.

I think I must have fallen in love with Patrick McGoohan the first time I saw him. It’s not hard to see why a cat-loving kid with no father might have been smitten with a cynical widowed veterinarian with a small daughter whose lives are changed by a resurrected tabby cat. Following a viewing of The Three Lives of Thomasina, my family must have known I was a fan, as the eerie Scarecrow of Romney Marsh and episodes of Secret Agent Man were added to my TV diet.

It would have been no surprise, then, that in 1968 we tuned in for the debut episode of something starring McGoohan called The Prisoner, purported to be some kind of espionage follow-up to Secret Agent Man. Within about 3 minutes we knew it was something else entirely. To a small child, this experience can only be graded as having been a total mind-fuck. The appearance of “Rover” — the big white balloon watchdog of the sinister Village — and its subsequent engulfment of someone who unwisely broke the rules was so terrifying that I think I nearly puked. Despite my agitation, the whole family turned in for just about every episode, right up to and including the last two, baffling outings which took everything viewing audiences of the 60s took for granted about TV and exploded them into psychedelic confetti. (The outrage in the UK actually forced McGoohan to move to Los Angeles.)

(more…)

In a day that has sent pop culture fans reeling, we’ve also lost Ricardo Montalban. Best known as the white-suited smoothie from Fantasy Island, the Mexican-born star had an early career in musicals before becoming a regular as a Latin lover, spending time with Tattoo making dreams come true, and making perhaps his strongest impression as Khan, the scenery-chewing but delightful villain in STAR TREK 2: THE WRATH OF KHAN.

Truly, it is a sad day for nerds, with Montalban and McGoohan gone in a single day.

The Beat will surely have more on this later, given her love of the Prisoner. This is just a newsflash until she posts later.

The AP story:

LOS ANGELES – Patrick McGoohan, an Emmy-winning actor who created and starred in the cult classic television show “The Prisoner,” has died. He was 80.

McGoohan died Tuesday in Los Angeles after a short illness, his son-in-law, film producer Cleve Landsberg, said Wednesday.

McGoohan won two Emmys for his work on the Peter Falk detective drama “Columbo,” and more recently appeared as King Edward Longshanks in the 1995 Mel Gibson film “Braveheart.”

But he was best known as the title character Number Six in “The Prisoner,” a surreal 1960s British series in which a former spy is held captive in a small village and constantly tries to escape.

Posted by Mark Coale

Eartha Kitt died yesterday at age 81. Many people are called “legendary,” but Kitt truly was, as a singer, dancer, and actress. Julie Newmar may have been the #1 Catwoman on the campy Batman TV show, but Kitt was probably the most feline and villainous. As a cabaret singer she was an unsurpassed stylist, and we were lucky enough to see her at the Hollywood Roosevelt. She was a scary lady, but one who played by her own rules and won.

Majel Barrett Roddenberry, widow of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, passed away today at the age of 76.

She had just recently finished voice work for the new STAR TREK movie, reprising her role as the voice of the ship’s computer.

In the original series, she played Nurse Chapel, as well as Number One in the original Star Trek pilot, “The Cage.”

As the news is just hitting the wires, this will likely be expanded later tonight and tomorrow.

Posted by Mark Coale

The pinup queen is dead at 85.