How did I? By having a nice dinner at a fine Japanese restaurant with even finer company. Neil Gaiman was in town on a press junket in conjunction with the new film he co-authored, Beowulf, which even now is being hotly debated all across the Internet by people who haven't seen it yet. Hey, why let a little thing like that stand in the way of a strident opinion?
Anyway, Neil and I have been planning to get together for din-din for some time now so we dragged along Sergio Aragonés (who in the above photo looks like he has part of his mustache caught in his teeth) and I brought my lovely friend Carolyn and Neil brought his terrific daughter Maddie and his assistant Cat, and a friend of Cat's named Red. We all went to my favorite place to eat cooked food with teriyaki sauce on it while Carolyn eats sushi. Good food, good people, good conversation.
And I'm posting this to give a public "thank you" to Neil for contributing the perfect foreword to the forthcoming (it's actually coming out, people) book, Kirby: King of Comics from Harry N. Abrams Publishing. The book is heading towards publication and I should have a firm release date to announce here shortly…but it's looking like early February of '08. When it's out, you'll all get to see what a dandy thing Neil wrote for it. I'm telling you, this guy's going to go places.