Ron Goulart, R.I.P.

More bad/sad news: My buddy Ron Goulart — author of more books than most people have read — died this morning, the day after his 89th birthday. I don't know how many books Ron wrote and I wonder if even he did. A lot of them had other folks' names on them as author, sometimes even William Shatner's.

Of the many I could have stuck in the above graphic, I picked After Things Fell Apart because I liked it a lot and the title seems sadly apropos today.  His Wikipedia page has a partial (partial!) list of books that came from his typewriter and his glorious imagination…and as you'll see if you take a peek, other names were on a lot of them.

He was a great lover of comic books and a fine historian of the form.  He dabbled now and then in writing for comics and at one point, collaborated with artist Gil Kane on an ahead-of-its-time newspaper strip called Star Hawks.  The last time Ron and I were together — which I now sadly realize was too long ago — we had a long talk about how he wished he fit in better with the comic book field but kept finding more comfort in prose writing.

He was awfully good at it. He was awfully good at everything he did.