You have to be a certain age and have grown up in NYC to really get this, but Drew Friedman and brother Josh Alan Friedman have created an online magazine all about the making of the single comic strip “The Joe Franklin Story.” The strip appears in the new edition of ANY SIMILARITY TO PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD, Friedman’s seminal collection of strips about the eerie twilight world of syndicated TV before cable, a world of goniffs and mensches and dames, where Ethel Merman and Ernest Borgnine were married and Rondo Hattan roamed the woods outside.
Friedman is also celebrating the release with an art show this Friday at the Josh Eder Gallery and at MoCCA.
[Via TCJ]
I had the pleasure of meeting Joe Franklin recently.
He seems like a guy who couldn’t be happier than to hang out with a bunch of his pals (while rejecting frequent phone calls) in an unglamorous office piled over with showbiz memorabilia. His (squeaky) VCR fills out the room- forever playing poor dupes of old 50s variety shows…I guess no big surprise there.
Joe gave me his card and one of his regulars told me it was a collectors item. I put it in my collection.