Comics

Call it a laughter explosion. Ten years ago there were fewer than 20 comedy clubs in the United States. Today there are some 225 of them out there, dedicated to making people laugh for a $10 to $20 cover charge and the price of a drink or two. It's a growth rate of nine clubs a year for the last quarter of a century. And thousands of comics are laughing their way to the bank. They can find work on some 700 stages where comics are featured, not to mention the growing number of comedy shows on television.

The Rodney Dangerfields of Mummery say that cutting time off their comic performances in the New Year's parade is no laughing matter. Murray Comic Club President Rich Porco says he'll cooperate fully with Mayor Rendell's challenge to speed the parade, but he's tired of Comics getting blamed for delays and rowdiness. "We're stacking people more tightly. We're discouraging conversations with sidewalk fans. We're urging immediate reaction to signals by starters and officers to keep the parade moving," Porco said Monday night as he issued marching orders for his Comic army of 1,900 clowns, wenches and characters.

Don't tell the kids, but Julius Tarshis, the man who used to make the color plates for the printing of Batman, Superman and other great comic figures, loved the Sistine Chapel. "When he went to Rome, he sat there for four hours looking at the ceiling," said his daughter, Sandra Herbets. "He flipped out - literally -when he went to Europe and Spain. My mother would walk out (of a museum) and come back and he would still be there. " Mr. Tarshis, 87, who studied to be an artist, but who made his living as a photoengraver for comics, died Tuesday at his home in Meadowbrook, near Jenkintown.

The odds of succeeding as a stand-up comic are pretty small. First, you play in smoky bars for all the food you can eat, then graduate to opening in Chattanooga, Tenn., for a country-and-western act. Then, if you slay 'em on all the college campuses and People magazine does a paragraph-long profile, maybe you get a shot on cable television. Cable has turned into an electronic Borscht Belt for comics who would be big. It's the slippery middle step between local and national fame.

Can't we have other continuous-plot comics besides "Gil Thorp"? We used to have Mary Worth, Brenda Starr, Dick Tracy, etc. And why is "Gil Thorp" relegated to the back pages? Everyone tears the paper apart looking for it. My kids went through a snowstorm to get the Daily News to see what happened to Gil. MARION VANDERGRIFT, Philadelphia

"The more you drive, the less intelligent you are," theorized Miller, the spaced-out auto mechanic in Repo Man. And now, with Speed Zone - at last count the third film about that yawning cross-country car race, the Cannonball Run - you have irrefutable proof of his theory. A moving violation in more ways than one, Speed Zone stars SCTV alumni John Candy, Eugene Levy and Joe Flaherty as entrants in the unsanctioned road event that is the cinematic equivalent of a demolition derby.

Stan Wischnowski is the editor of The Inquirer 'You have removed several really good comics. . . . You indicate some can be found online. What if one does not have a computer? You have crammed all the comics onto one page, and puzzles on another. . . . You have changed your editorial pages, which was no improvement. . . . What's going on here?!" These sentiments of a longtime reader are representative of the mail I've been receiving as a result of recent changes in the paper.

"Doesn't Pat Buchanan look like the kid you went to school with, the one who was always beating up the kid who looked like Steve Forbes?" Another "Late Show," another riff from a Letterman monologue. It's the day after the Iowa caucuses, and Dave is ready for a season of political jokery. Same as it ever was. But in election year 1996, the state of political humor is not what it was in the 1960s and '70s, when Dick Gregory, Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce attacked serious issues with wit; Vaughn Meader and David Frye sold millions of albums by impersonating presidents; and Johnny Carson's nightly monologue was as important to the TV age as Will Rogers' musings were to the Depression Era. "It has to do with the climate of entertainment" today, says Paula Poundstone, who has done comic coverage of the political conventions for "The Tonight Show.

The Amazon Queen is put out. Hercules and other warring males are muscling in on her and her gals. "Stupid men!" she spits. "You have no chance against us as long as we wear Aphrodite's magic girdle!" What's amazing about that line is not that a character in a Fringe cast would use it, but that someone else did: It and all the lines in Super Heroes Who Are Super! from Plays & Players come straight from the comics - in this case, the very first Wonder Woman, from 1942. Ten actors, scripts in hand (and in the case of Melissa Lynch, looking great in her red Wonder Woman dress)

The woman blinked in the spotlight, shrugged on the stage, stared at me and smiled like she'd just swallowed a raw eel. "I'm going to heckle myself: Get yourself a job!" she said. That got a laugh, unfortunately. Alas, the woman was bombing; up until that line, few of the 87 amateur comedians at the Atlantic City Comedy Stop had even snickered. The participants ranged in age from 18 to antique, and had come from as far away as Virginia and Massachusetts to compete in the Comedy Stop's Fifth Annual Comedy Showdown.

The 11th annual East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention celebrates the African American experience in comic books Friday and Saturday. The convention will offer an awards ceremony, film screenings, youth workshops, a parade, a comic-book marketplace, and other events at the African American Museum in Philadelphia and the Enterprise Center in West Philadelphia. Convention activities begin at 6:30 p.m. Friday at the museum, with a free reception and ceremonies for the Pioneer and Glyph comic awards.

So, what does the old misogynist have to say about lesbians? Surprisingly little. 1812 Productions gives us David Mamet's Boston Marriage, a mildly amusing comedy about two women whose relationship is discreetly termed a "Boston marriage," a 19th-century nicety of phrase. Anna (Suzanne O'Donnell) and Claire (Grace Gonglewski) are two wildly overdressed women who, as middle age creeps up on them, have strayed from each other. Anna has found a sugar daddy who has bestowed many goodies upon her, including a huge jewel hanging around her neck.

Jean Giraud, 73, a French comic-book artist whose dark, intricately drawn fantasy worlds profoundly influenced graphic novels worldwide and U.S. science fiction films like Alien , Tron , and Avatar , died last Saturday at his home outside Paris. Mr. Giraud was seen in the comic-book world as a kind of artist-avatar of the unbounded interior human landscape. Mr. Giraud's pen name, Moebius, referred to the disorienting, curved plane known as the Mobius strip. In France, where the line between popular and serious art often blurs, he was a source of national pride.

"For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three hours a day, five days a week. In this instance, I chose the wrong words. . . . My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. " - from Rush Limbaugh's apology to Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Rio Linda Entertainment in Broadcasting (EIB) Comedy Club! It's now time for tonight's headliner.

DALLAS - The bulk of a man's childhood comic-book collection, including many of the most prized issues ever published, sold at auction Wednesday for about $3.5 million. A copy of Detective Comics No. 27, which sold for 10 cents in 1939 and features the debut of Batman, got the top bid at the New York City auction. It sold for about $523,000 with a buyer's premium, said Lon Allen, managing director of comics for Heritage Auctions, the Dallas-based auction house overseeing the sale.

* THE WALKING DEAD. 9 p.m. Sunday, AMC. * COMIC BOOK MEN. 10 p.m. Sunday, AMC. IN THE AGE of the DVR, caring about audience flow is supposed to be, well, so 2007. We record what we want, we watch when we can. AMC must not have gotten the memo, because starting Sunday it's following the return of "The Walking Dead" with the premiere of Kevin Smith's "Comic Book Men. " It might look like a match made in geek heaven, but it's more than the pairing of a show based on a comic book series with one about the people who buy, sell and obsess about comics.

Create your own superhero on Saturday as the African American Museum in Philadelphia concludes its four-part series, "Outlined in Black: Creating Superheroes - A Comic Book Workshop for Youth and Young Adults. " The workshop, taught by acclaimed illustrator and artist Eric Battle, is inspired by the life of enslaved African American Robert Smalls who became a Civil War hero and a five-term U.S. Congressman from South Carolina. Families also can learn about the significance of black superheroes and the meaning of heroism.

His skin is a preposterous shade of yellow more appropriate to a Kool-Aid flavor. His bald oval head is crowned with a topknot tied with a red bow; he has squinty eyes and buck teeth that extend over his lips and the most garish yellow-on-green outfit you'd ever find in a circus supply store. Meet Chop-Chop, a comic book character who made his debut in 1941 in the first issue of the long-running superhero comic series, Blackhawk . Ugly, almost inhuman, the rotund guy would make for a great villain.

Funny or Die, the comedy website founded by Will Ferrell, is pointing the way for Web-based entertainment companies by combining the scrappiness of an Internet start-up with A-list talent that attracts viewers. What started as a lark for Ferrell and writing partner Adam McKay has become a profitable company, with revenue approaching $30 million this year, according to a person with knowledge of the Los Angeles-based business. Funny or Die's third show on cable TV, Billy on the Street , started Thursday on Madison Square Garden Co.'s Fuse network.

IN RESPONSE to state Sen. Vince Hughes' op-ed piece on an extraction tax in the Marcellus Shale region, I have one question for him which he probably won't dignify with a response. Why didn't the state Legislature under Ed Rendell impose an extraction tax on gas companies when the Democrats had control of the governor's house and the state Legislature for two years? My theory is that both sides were readily taking campaign contributions and didn't have a problem with it at the time.