The Law Is A Ass #451: I Don’t Care How Many Times You Repeat the Adjective, The West Wasn’t That Wild

Bob Ingersoll

By day Bob Ingersoll was an attorney in the Cuyahoga County Public Defender Office, Appellate Division in Cleveland, Ohio, until he retired in 2009. But in the “Real World” he has also been a freelance writer since 1975, when he sold his first comic-book story to the late, lamented Charlton Comics. He’s still at it and, in addition to his long-running column “The Law Is a Ass” has sold stories to DC, Marvel, Innovation, Now Comics, Comico, Kitchen Sink and others; as well as co-authoring the novels Captain America: Liberty’s Torch and Star Trek: The Case of the Colonist’s Corpse. Bob is married with children, which is about as close to Al Bundy as he cares to get.

3 Responses

  1. Tony Collett says:

    I could’ve told you this plan wouldn’t work back in 1981 when Secretary of State Al Haig said he was in charge during President Reagan’s assassination attempt.
    I think Laura Roslyn would say the same thing, and she was on another planet.

  2. Brian Perler says:

    The episode MAY have been inspired by real-life events, sort of. In the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln , Lincoln wasn’t the only target. That same night, a co-conspirator made an unsuccessful attempt to kill Secretary of State William Seward, and a third was supposed to kill Andrew Johnson, but he lost his nerve and fled before even making the attempt. (They had also planned on killing General Ulysses Grant, but he had left Washington DC unexpectedly that day.)

    Of course, Booth and his co-conspirators weren’t looking to get one of their own made President, it was more an attempt to weaken the government to help revive the Confederate cause. But the similarity to the Wild Wild West episode (simultaneous attempts on the President, Vice-President, and Secretary of State) does make one wonder if the writers were aware of the historical event, but then tried to change things up by giving their version a nonsensical motive?

  3. Bob Ingersoll says:

    Brian,

    it’s quite possible that writers Earl Barrett and Robert C. Dennis knew of the plans to have the assassinations extend beyond President Lincoln, and used this historical fact as a springboard for the episode. I don’t know that they did, but it is entirely possible.