Sunday, July 20, 2003

Blogging From the San Diego Freeway

I'm posting this from the carpool lane of the 405, just past the transition from the 5. Traffic is medium-to-heavy all around me as people head north and I find myself wondering how many of them are returning home from a wonderful Comic-Con International. Up ahead, there's a huge U-Haul which looks like it's --

Sorry. I just realized I'm not on the freeway. I'm home. After five hours of driving, I feel like I'm still on the freeway but actually I'm in my office with a comfy keyboard instead of a sweaty steering wheel. The commute was an ordeal both ways but in-between, I had a terrific time and if you were there, so did you. (Matter of fact, a lot of you were there. I was delighted at the number of folks who came up and said you check out this page every day. A few even slipped me cash, saying they didn't have a PayPal account but felt a gratuity was overdue. It felt odd but, hey, you take it where you can get it. There were one or two moments where people tried to engage me in conversation while I was solving some problem relating to one of the 7.320 panels I hosted. If you caught me at one of those moments and I seemed disinterested in what you had to say, my apologies. I was interested in whatever you had to say; honest, I was.)

Today went quickly. At 12:30, my long-time chum (going on 35 years) Tony Isabella and I ganged-up to interview Larry Lieber, who is invariably referred to as "Stan Lee's brother." He is, of course. Just as Harpo was Groucho Marx's brother, Ira was George Gershwin's brother, Robert was John F. Kennedy's brother, etc. The relationship shouldn't utterly obscure genuine individual accomplishment, and Larry was the other writer, the one besides Stan, in the early days of the Marvel Age of Comics. Later, he became primarily an artist and has now been drawing the Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strip for 17 years. That gives him the longest run of anyone who's ever illustrated that character's adventures, to say nothing of the fact that his work has been more widely-circulated than any that has appeared in the comic books. Larry is a fascinating gent and, again, you'll have to wait 'til some magazine prints the transcript to hear all that he said. But the audience (which included another famous brother, Sal Buscema) was fascinated not only with how erudite Larry was on the subject of doing comics but how honest and self-effacing, as well.

Then I had an hour signing my new book at the TwoMorrows booth and that quick, last-minute jaunt around the exhibit hall, followed by several eternities in that carpool lane. It's good to be home but it was very good to be there. Gotta go unpack...

P.S. I took down the sidebar link to the list of panels I hosted at the con. But for those of you who want to see what you missed, here it is.

• Posted at 11:12 PM · LINK

Still Con Blogging

And still reminiscing. The first comic book convention I ever attended was a New York affair in 1970. Going by the calendar (never a very reliable guide to how long things last), it was three days but from where I was, it seemed like twenty. So much was new, so much was exciting. Now, flash forward to this Comic-Con International, which is ostensibly four days, or four and a half for those of us who arrived the night before. How startling to find it almost over when it seems like a good twenty minutes since Carolyn and I checked into the hotel. Time to start packing, for God's sake. Yesterday went particularly fast, despite the fact that I moderated five (5) panels, one after the other, commencing at 10:30 in the ayem with a panel on the history of Western Publishing Company, Dell Comics and Gold Key Comics. Mike Royer, Maggie Thompson, Len Wein, Frank Bolle, Jerry Eisenberg and I talked and answered questions from a highly-interested audience...and I guess I should explain about Jerry: He's one of the most brilliant designers of TV animation but we didn't have him there to talk about that. His father, the late Harvey Eisenberg, was one of the great "funny animal" comic book illustrators — the main guy for years on the Tom & Jerry books that Western produced, plus he also turned up in the Disney books, the Hanna-Barbera titles and everything else they could get him to do. Like many who labored so anonymously, his work has been much-loved but the lovers never knew whose work it was they were loving. Assuming the con will let me, and I have every reason to assume they will, we'll do more panels in the future about Western and try to shine the spotlight on more such artists and writers.

At Noon, we had the annual Golden Age Panel with Howie Post, Harry Lampert, Irwin Hasen, Mart Nodell, Murphy Anderson and an unusually feisty Julius Schwartz. This was followed at 1:30 by the annual Sergio/me panel, also featuring Stan Sakai and Tom Luth, with whom Sergio and I do Groo the Wanderer and other silly books. Attendees of this panel received the rare and much-coveted honor of watching me eat lunch as we answered questions.

At 3:00, I ran across the hall to moderate a gathering of three legends of science fiction: Forrest J Ackerman, a still-feisty Julie Schwartz...and the incomparable Ray Bradbury. Ray is still confined to a wheelchair due to one or more strokes but from the waist-up, he's still Ray "The Martian Chronicles" Bradbury. I took the three of them through the saga of their three-way friendship: In the thirties, the L.A.-based Ackerman and the New York-based Schwartz struck up a correspondence which led to Ackerman contributing to The Time-Traveller, a small-circulation mimeographed publication which Schwartz produced in 1932 with his friend, Mort Weisinger. It was the first science fiction fanzine ever. Ackerman also participated in a small s-f fan club in Los Angeles, which is where he met Bradbury. Later, when Ray travelled to New York (via a gruesome Greyhound bus) for his first science-fiction convention, it was because Forry had loaned him ninety dollars, which he later paid back by selling The Los Angeles Times on street corners.

It was at that convention that Bradbury met Schwartz who had become an agent for s-f writers. Two years later, Julie sold a story of Ray's — the first one ever to be purchased by an editor. As it happened, Schwartz was planning a trip to Los Angeles anyway, so he decided to deliver the good news and payment in person. He drove to L.A. and his first night there, hooked up with a friend and went out to get some dinner. By coincidence, the restaurant was across the street from where Bradbury was hawking newspapers. Schwartz recognized his client...and that's how Ray Bradbury found out he'd become a professional writer. Julie walked up and handed him a check for $35, less the 10% commission.

Bradbury spoke eloquently and passionately about a range of subjects, including the space program's shameful (to him) neglect of Mars. He's just finished an article for Playboy on the subject, so those of you who buy Playboy for the articles can find out his thoughts on the topic. He also spoke with even greater passion to those in the audience who aspire to write, urging them to follow their own muses and to not listen to "any damned fool" who tells them how and what they should write. It was a short but wonderful hour and I doubt anyone who was present will ever forget it.

Then I ran next door to host the Cartoon Voice Panel with — hope I don't leave anyone out — Joe Alaskey, Rob Paulsen, Lauri Fraser, Kathy Garver, Mark Hamill, Jess Harnell, Billy West, Gregg Berger, Bob Bergen, Greg Berg and Maurice LaMarche. Not much I can say about this except that we had a packed dais and a packed house, and the audience seemed to love what they heard. We read scripts from Fractured Fairy Tales and Pinky & The Brain, and everyone on the panel did about eleven voices and that's about all I have to say on the matter.

I party-hopped the evening away and staggered back here to the Hilton (from whence I am currently blogging) way too late. Got a lot done...but darned if it doesn't feel like this con has lasted about the time it takes to microwave a Hot Pocket. In a couple hours, I go over to interview Larry Lieber for my last panel, then I sign books for an hour and get on the San Diego Freeway. Now, there's a place where time moves like molasses...

See you later from my home computer.

• Posted at 9:59 AM · LINK