Members of this forum might like to know that Dick Siegel has died. Siegel was a member here for many years, posting as Klar Ken T5477.
Dick often shared hints of his comic book writing projects here, and often discussed his work as an editor and writer for Weekly World News and National Enquirer. He had an extensive comics and film bio, besides his work as a journalist, humour writer, and pop culture historian.
Here is his IMDB page:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0797000/bioHere is a profile of Siegel from GQ, from around the time the Enquirer was seriously being considered for a Pulitzer because of their coverage of the John Edwards political scandal:
Edwards was the first major story the Enquirer broke online. "We're the last of the Mohicans in terms of discovering our Web site," Levine says. They caught Edwards at the Beverly Hilton after that week's paper locked; worried that Edwards would attempt to spin the story before next week's edition, they posted the story on the Web site on Tuesday morning.
The Enquirer's full-time Web staff consists of one guy. Dick Siegel is in his fifties, works out of a cubicle decorated with color rod comic-book covers from the '60s; the fact that he's an obvious pop-culture junkie ("I was able to write Fess Parker's obit, or 90 percent of it, off the top of my head, which is scary") makes him the ideal man to run the Enquirer's Web site, where Old Hollywood types—Natalie Wood, Ingrid Bergman—tend to get more hits than Justin Bieber and the Jersey Shore kids. (By way of illustration, he pulls up a recent blog post, sourced to Carrie Fisher's Twitter, about speed fiend eddie fisher.)
"My forte is not journalism," Siegel says. "I'd be fired. I had been working at the late, lamented Weekly World News. That was after my film jobs—I'd been an independent-film cinematographer. Really bad horror movies. Including one that I wrote, about zombies at a women's prison."
He tells me that the Weekly World News gig was good training for what he does now. You learned to write short stories, in AP style, even if they concerned the travails of Bat Boy, "and present them in a serious manner, even if the punch line was a joke."
But it makes sense that someone with Siegel's background wound up at the Enquirer. The tabs are a form of rogue pop culture. They're vehicles for celebrity adoration, but they burrow, termitelike, into the sanctioned narratives of American fame. They're camp—a form of fantasy that revels and resists. They're a comic-book, zombie-movie draft of Hollywood history, right down to the zingy sobriquets.
"It's like professional wrestling," Siegel says. "When we wrote about Tiger Woods's wife, we always described her as 'livid,' so now she's always 'livid Elin.' And Rielle Hunter is 'the New-Age Temptress.'"
Heroes and villains, in primary colors. "That's what separates the giant scandals from the everyday scandals," Levine says, explaining to me why Tiger Woods and Edwards, stepping out on his cancer-stricken wife, were tabloid rocket fuel. "If somebody is a hero and they do something unthinkable, something unconscionable, if the betrayal is so overwhelmingly dirty and sickening, that's what makes what we do."