The Sept. 22, 2007, installment of the NPR show Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me! features Kevin Smith as the guest on the "Not My Job" segment. This is a weekly game in which a celebrity with impressive credentials is asked three questions concerning a field in which he or she doesn't work.

It's a funny, surprising sequence.

Now, back to work ... (Wrapping up work on the next issue of CBG -- for which I still have to put together an editorial and the actual Beautiful Balloons installment after I finish copy editing other stuff.)

I link to Mark's blog every day and, this small world being as tiny as it is, I'd like to add a note to two of his recent posts.

(1) He recommends the book Son of Harpo Speaks! -- as do I. But some might be intrigued to know that my daughter, Valerie Thompson, handled the book design for the Bear Manor volume. (And just between us, she says Bill Marx was wonderful to work with.)

(2) Mark also provides links to two articles about Richard Beals, and I was delighted to read them. Valerie and I first met Beals at a Friends of Old Time Radio convention in Newark years ago and have always been impressed with his magnificent performances and professionalism. Not only is he the voice of Speedy Alka-Seltzer, he's also the voice of countless cartoon and radio children (Ralph Phillips in two Chuck Jones cartoons, two of Roger Ramjet's American Eagles, etc.). Valerie had the opportunity to play a bit part in a re-creation of a Suspense show in which he starred decades ago; I played Lois Lane to his Jimmy Olsen in a Superman re-creation. He's one of the world's best examples of turning a seeming disability into a triumph by determination and hard work.

It's only with Episode 19, ".07%," that a commentary opens with the speakers identifying themselves clearly. Thanks, folks! Not only that, but it's also the first commentary in which it's pointed out that there have been a series of online comic-book stories that provide background for many of the characters and that show motivation. For example, in the story arc "War Buddies" (starting with Chapter 24 of the online comics) readers will learn that Linderman's philosophy was first articulated by Peter and Nathan's dad years earlier.

Thanks to voice similarities, I'm still not clear which of the commentators says, "I wonder if people on the boards realize we read them," but you can take it as a given -- especially for this series, which is so multi-media-involved.

If you're curious about the online comics (and I still haven't found a convenient format for reading them; print is easier for a while yet), you can start with the first installment and go on from there. (At the moment, the total has reached Chapter 50: "Blackout" Part Two.)

This commentary is fun for the insights into production of the show, including the ways scripts can be modified during filming and even when the commentators are seeing a pre-effects cut.

I was surprised to find that there were chunks of Episode 20, "Five Years Gone," that I didn't remember until rewatching. Perhaps I had the feeling that, as a possible future, it was something that wasn't going to happen? In any case, the commentary was fun, consisting as it did in the three actors making fun of each other in a relaxed chat. We learn that Sendhil Ramamurthy took three and a half weeks to grow his beard out to the "future" length -- and that the Oval Office set was the one used in the film Dave and was correct to scale. And that Jack Coleman says, "I think I look younger five years in the future." Fun.

With a weekend relatively free, perhaps I can wrap up commenting on the Heroes comment tracks. We shall see. In any case, I'm back at it. In an earlier post today, I've identified the speakers on the two episodes, but I must say that, even with the information, it's not always a slam dunk to identify who's saying what.

I think most of the remarks on the 17th installment ("Company Man") come from the director. At least, there's an extensive discussion of influences in how the script was shot: a discussion that could have been led by the episode writer but that tends to focus perhaps more visually. Really, folks, such occasional remarks as, "As the director, I found it helpful to recall The Desperate Hours," or, "As the writer, I took Cape Fear as a guide," would have been a big help. Other influences in the filming: Out of the Past and Dog Day Afternoon.

One scene that was dropped from the final filming was a sequence in which HRG rescued baby Claire from the burning building in which her mom had been assumed to have died. The information that he was the one who had saved Claire would have been a nice addition to the story.

Comments included that by this point special effects were being put together at a nightmare pace and that the burning house sequences had been carefully set up, repeatedly rehearsed for blocking, and painstakingly (literally) produced. (Matthew Armstrong as Ted Sprague did his own stunt work in the scene, and Jack Coleman remarks, "I'm here to tell you it was warm in there.")

With the 18th episode ("Parasite"), an amusing aspect of these commentaries is that the commentators play coy for a time about the identity of the performer playing Linderman -- whereas, as a viewer when the show aired, I'd figured it out as soon as the opening credits were shown. And people shouldn't be watching the commentary until they've seen the episode without it, anyway. Hee.

Commentary on "Parasite" ended up a bit more focused on the technical details of writing, casting, directing, and special effects -- including the comment that "Company Man" had wrapped up only shortly before it was broadcast. Appreciative remarks include that Jessica has much better posture than Niki and that, even if the camera isn't on her, Hayden Panettiere will cry, if the scene calls for her to be weeping. Influences on the final edit of the episode: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Constant Gardener.

An estimate of the number of people who work on each episode of the show: 250.

And here are some news snippets. For actual details, keep checking the CBGXtra site: Inkworks has the license to do SPIRIT cards, both film and Eisner comics sets. The new "Spider-Man brain trust" is writers Dan Slott, Zeb Wells, Bob Gale, and Marc Guggenheim. She-Hulk will be written by Peter David and have "more punching, less legalese." There will be many, many Skrulls in the activities of The Avengers. Cable will be back in '08. X-Force will return. Jim Shooter takes over Legion of Super-Heroes with #37. Jim Lee auctioned off a store appearance for the benefit of the CBLDF -- and a Minnesota store won with a bid of $7,500. Bat Lash will return, written by Sergio Aragones and drawn by John Severin. Sergio will also be writing The Spirit. March 6, 2009, is the scheduled release date for the Watchmen film. Keep checking CBGXtra for details on these stories and more. It's late and I have to catch a plane tomorrow. Did I mention I have a toothache? Yawwwwwnzzzzzzz.

Do you have yours, yet? Jimmy Palmiotti handed me a copy of the Image title from Garth Ennis, Amanda Conner, Paul Mounts, and him. Third printing, and it's back to press. Woo hoo! Amanda was focused on drawing a convention commission, flanked by a sign warning Jimmy not to bump the table. Hee!

The first thing you do when you get to the gate, of course, is look to see if you spot another comics person heading to the con. Don't see anyone so far.

"I am annoyed. Many of the items in Pile 'A' do not belong there but instead belong in places 'B,' 'C,' 'D,' and so on.

"So I start to move things about. Items from Pile 'A' which belong in Place 'B' are taken to Place 'B' where I discover Pile 'B' which contains items which have strayed from other places."

Those are the captions from two panels from Brian Bolland's "Moving Things About" full-page essay, which ends, "Our time on this planet is but brief, hardly more than a blip. For me, much of that time is spent … moving things about."

So on this Sunday of Labor Day Weekend, I was Moving Things About in the upstairs "study," so-called out of deference to what it used to be. I was actually not looking for anything. It was, rather, an attempt to clear a spot in which I could dump stuff.

But what should I find, sitting under a box top containing a miscellany of tiny junk, but a small stack of papers and three photo albums. The papers included my parents' mimeographed publication  The Cricket #1 ("a periodical of culture and reefinement") complete with epigraph "You plays cricket, drinks tea, an' lifs the pinky when you holds the cup ..." [by Walt Kelly] dated June 1949, when I was 6. Within that issue was an essay by Mom that began:

BEST SELLERS

So many friends have asked me in grim or pathetic tones, "Do you approve of comic books?" that I feel I must make some public statement which I can hand out to such gals and run for cover while they are reading it. The question, of course, makes about as much sense as "Do you approve of books?" but it is hard to say this without being thought impertinent or irrelevant by the questioners.

Later in the issue is an essay on "Periodical Browsing" that includes the conclusion:

The largest number of periodicals in our household seems, in spite of culture and reefinement, to be made up of comic books. Most of our collection are really intended to be comic -- that is, funny. Most of them are published by the Dell Publishing Company and portray the doings of urban children (Little Lulu, Henry) or urban animal child-substitutes (Walter Lantz, Merrie Melodies, Walt Disney, Tom and Jerry, etc.). The cream of the crop were, in the recent past, Our Gang, Raggedy Ann, and Fairy Tale Parade (still Dell) with the excellent drawing, interesting stories and amusing dialogue of Walt Kelly, Dan Noonan, and Morris Gollub; but these three gentlemen seem to be deserting the comic book business and two of the publications are no longer in existence. The least painful comics still on the market other than the ones I have just mentioned seem to be the Disney ones. I should recommend a recent special, still on the stands in Canton[, New York] -- "Donald Duck in the Treasure of the Andes" [the now-classic Dell Four Color #223 "Lost in the Andes" by Carl Barks, anonymous at the time] -- as the best of the recent dime publications for the four-to-eight year old. We do seem to have accumulated a number of Superboy, Wonder Woman, and Bat Man [sic] opera, but these do not hold the attention of our six-year-old for more than five or six readings. Even Raggedy Ann can beat that.

In the midst of conjecture about early fanzines with comics references, I offer the fact that there were amateur magazines in the 1940s that provided adult critiques of comics in addition to the SF fanzines that focused on such material as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Those fanzines were not the match flame that ignited the field of comics collecting that continues today, but they were certainly published.

For quite some time now, I have pretty much compulsively wandered through the DVD section of stores that have one -- even when my mission to the store might be to, say, buy gloves or storage bins.

Yesterday, in the course of a trip to the recordable DVD shelf of Best Buy to buy a bunch of 8x DVD+R discs (because my aging RCA DRC8040 DVD recorder won't recognize blank discs of 16x or above, so, when I can no longer find 8x discs, its use as a recorder will be gone) ... Oh, let's start a new sentence. On the course of a Best Buy trip, I stumbled over the second season of The Greatest American Hero, labeled at $32.99, for $14.99. I hadn't even known it was available, much less available for $15.

Then, in the midst of walking through Target, I found the fifth season of Smallville (list at about $60, ordinary Target price something like $24) for $19.99.

And at the moment, I'm in the midst of the Heroes DVDs, having just finished the sixth episode. And that's not to mention the Collector's Edition of Serenity, the culmination of one of my favorite TV series that has no true connection with comics. I could spend the entire Labor Day Weekend without cleaning my house.

But I won't. I won't.