Two recent deaths in the world of comics: Larry Todd and Bob Foster.

Man, the hits just keep on coming over the past week or so; actor John Amos has died at the age of 84.


Among other things, he was well known as the pater familias in the 1970s sitcom Good Times. But he had a long career in both film and television, and seemed equally at home in dramatic and comedic roles. I always liked seeing him - he had an amazing on-screen presence and just seemed to class up anything he appeared in.

I remember John Amos in the short-lived show The Funny Side. Teresa Graves played his wife, a few years before she starred in Get Christie Love.

Actor and Broadway star Ken Page passed away at the age of 70.
Known for playing the Lion on the original production of The Wiz, Old Deuteronomy in Cats. A brilliant voice and singer. Best known to the world as Oogie Boogie in Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas.

He also had a slight comic book connection; he played the blind computer hacker Cheesecake, in the short lived Sable tv series, based on Mike Grell's Jon Sable, Freelance series, from First Comics.  He was Sable's primary intel source, replacing the character of Harold, a Little Person who worked in the police clerical department, in the comics.  The series also featured Rene Russo in one of her early, pre-movie fame roles, as Eden Kendall, Sable's publishing agent and love interest.  Page's portrayal and Russo's legs were about the only thing worth watching in the series, which was broadcast too early to be gritty and realistic, like the comics, and not stylistic enough to make it stand out.  Lewis Van Bergin starred, after mostly playing heavies, on tv, though he had also played Willie Garvin, in the tv pilot film for a potential Modesty Blaise series, starring model Ann Turkel (who was also Richard Harris' girlfriend, at that time, or thereabout).

For reasons I don't recall, I attended a game at Yankee Stadium on May 30, 1980. Luis Tiant pitched for the Yankees. He had a shutout going but the manager decided to take him out with two outs in the 8th inning. Tiant dropped the ball on the mound instead of handing it over and then threw his glove into the stands before entering the dugout. The Yankees won 6-0.

One for those of a certain age who were online before the Internet on these things called BBSes that we connected to with a dial-up modem, and who downloaded files using the early file transfer protocol Xmodem: Ward Christensen, who invented Xmodem and co-created the first BBS, thus becoming the butterfly whose flapping wings spawned the online world as we know it today, has passed away at 78.

He was a Chicago area guy who co-developed the first BBS software, CBBS, while stuck at home after the big blizzard of 1978. It's wild to think that while I was walking through and playing in the hip-deep snow from that blizzard, a local guy was about to change the world.