Gail Simone is one of the better writers to enter the comic book field in the past few years but that has nothing to do with why I'm posting this at her request. I'm posting it because Lea Hernandez is a great talent and a great lady. Please do what you can to help...
Early this morning, the Texas home of award-winning writer/artist Lea Hernandez, my friend and co-creator of the graphic novel Killer Princesses, caught fire and burned. Half her house is now gone, and the rest is smoke-damaged. In addition, she lost at least six of her family's beloved pets, two dogs and four cats. If you knew Lea, you'd know how devastating that is.
She's lost a great deal of her family's possessions, including irreplaceable art. She doesn't yet know the full accounting of what's been lost at this time.
Most know Lea as the brilliant creator of such works as Rumble Girls and Cathedral Child. She drew the Marvel Mangaverse Punisher book, and has drawn for Transmetropolitan, among many other accomplishments. She is also the co-founder and original editor for Girl-a-Matic, one of the most important venues for female-friendly comics created to date.
She's also my friend, and it's entirely possible I wouldn't have a career in comics if she hadn't asked me to write Killer Princesses for her to draw.
And finally, Lea is one of the last great firebrand hellraisers in comics.
Lea has two (wonderful, amazing) special needs children and right now they need a place to stay and some clothes to wear. More than that, they need some help, and fast, in the form of donations to her PayPal account. Lea's a proud person so I'm going to ask for her. This is important, and a great chance to do a wonderful thing for a creator who has consistently enriched this industry we all love so much. Please, take a moment and send whatever you can to Lea's PayPal account and help make this time a little bit less painful for someone who would do the same for you if the positions were reversed.
If you're a retailer, I ask that you set up a donations jar. If you're a creator, I ask you to think of how devastating this would be to your career and donate what you can. If you're a reader, I'm asking you to take a moment and hit the PayPal link. You'll be doing something heroic and you'll feel great about it, I promise.
Donate (PLEASE) to her PayPal account at divalea@gmail.com.
Finally, if I understand the story correctly (as told to me by Lea's good friend and current Girl-a-matic editor), it was Lea's daughter hearing the smoke alarm that allowed the family to get out in time, so for God's sake, do everyone you love a favor and CHECK YOUR SMOKE ALARMS.
Thank you so much for helping. Really, any amount you can send will make a difference. That's all I can say.
And also, if you have a blog or a myspace account, please spread this around as best you can. Every little bit will help and every eye that sees this might be someone who donates.
Sincerely and gratefully,
Gail Simone
Nothing I can add to that except that if you've been thinking of making a donation to this website, send it to Lea instead. Our field needs people like her to be drawing and creating, so the sooner she gets her life restored to normal, the better off we'll all be.
Governor Schwarzenegger has vetoed the bill that would have established Universal Health Care in California. Here's the statement he issued explaining why. There may be some argument for his position with regard to the dollar costs — I don't have enough info to calculate that, nor do I have the math skills. But I wonder if anyone at this stage has enough information to evaluate the price tag...or even if it could possibly be worse than what we have now in this country. Where I become suspicious of the reasons for the veto is when he says...
I want to see a new paradigm that addresses affordability, shared responsibility and the promotion of healthy living. Single payer, government-run health care does none of this. Yet it would reduce a person's ability to choose his or her own physician, make people wait longer for treatment and raise the cost of that treatment.
Every time someone in this country opposes any sort of government-controlled health program, they trot out the claims that it would strip people of the right to choose their own doctors and force them to submit to the poking, probing and prescriptions of doctors selected by the government. That was said by those who opposed the national plan proposed by Hillary Clinton in 1993 and it was an outright lie, as anyone who read the plan could clearly see. The bill Schwarzenegger is vetoing is pretty explicit in saying you could choose your own physician. You can see the text of it here.
There's a bit of double-talk in a claim that under a government-run health program you'd be limited in picking your own doctor. Under a system of total free enterprise, you're limited in picking your own doctor, too. In fact, if you can't afford decent medical care, you're very limited. I suppose someone will point out that very rich people — like, say, multi-millionaire actors — can pretty much get the doctor of their choice...but your average Californian cannot. A pretty horrifying percentage of them, when they get sick or injured, have to just go to some hospital's emergency room and wait for hours upon hours to see whoever's on duty and receive a little assembly-line care. A half-dozen times the last year (once for myself, the other times for someone else), I've had to be in those emergency rooms. Anyone who'll tell you the current system isn't broken obviously has not.
As for the claims that the bill he's vetoing would "make people wait longer for treatment and raise the cost of that treatment," I'm also skeptical. I'd love to hear the explanation of why those things would occur. I suspect there isn't one, other than some general distrust of government involvement.
I believe we will soon see the kind of government-run single-payer Universal Health System that Schwarzenegger is nixing and that Republicans have long opposed. We'll see it established in some states, work in those states and then become national. Businesses increasingly want it so they can get the responsibility of employee insurance off their backs. The medical community seems to want it because they see how the present system is not working. Your average citizen/voter either wants it or would if people weren't scaring them with claims that they'll have to go to a doctor they don't like and even then, they'll have to wait months to have that broken leg or bleeding treated.
It'll happen. It's just that a lot of people are going to die or at least suffer from the current, inefficient system before that happens.
To the best of my knowledge, today is not this possum's birthday and I'm not putting this photo up instead of buying him a present. I'm putting it up because I just looked out at my back porch, saw him there and thought you'd enjoy a peek at him.
Today is the birthday of my collaborator and Best Friend (Male Division), Sergio Aragonés. This is a day when I traditionally post a photo of him on my website instead of buying him a present. It's cheaper, I don't have to worry about sizes, and he can't return it.
September 7, 2006
