I've been collecting and reading comic books as long as I can remember — and I can remember back for most of my 73 years. It was not something I ever hid the way you might hide a shameful bad habit or something that made people question your I.Q.

Every so often over the years, some fellow reader/collector has asked about if I've ever been mocked or criticized for love of that reading material and they're amazed when I tell them the answer is "Almost never." And you could lose the "almost" if I'd never ventured near local science-fiction fandom of the late-sixties and early-seventies.

I was also a reader of science-fiction…some of it, anyway. I favored the kind that was anchored on the planet on which I resided in time periods not too far into the past or future. Before we had comic book conventions in Southern California and for a few years after the first one in 1970, I sometimes mingled with the local s-f crowd and attended a few such conventions but I didn't fit in with that group. Their cons all seemed to be there largely for the consumption of alcohol with one's friends. I didn't have many friends at these gatherings and I didn't and still don't imbibe — ergo, the not fitting-in.

I never faulted anyone for what they read or drank but at these particular s-f events, the air was often thick with condescension towards those who read comic books. You'd think people who themselves were mocked or called "nerds" for their tastes in fiction would be more tolerant of someone else's…but no, not there and then.

One older female fan used to lecture me that Comic Book Fandom was an unfortunate outgrowth of Science-Fiction Fandom and oughta stay that way…or better still, disappear entirely. What they read was for sophisticated adults and what "we" read (drawing a firm, uncrossable line with that "we" there) was for the kiddos. Her suggestion was that there was something wrong with us for not outgrowing it.

The last such lecture I got — this would have been around '73 — was from a guy wearing Spock ears and brandishing a plastic phaser that fired little multi-colored discs. One of these…

Understand please that I'm talking about certain s-f fans I encountered; not all and certainly not any these days. I haven't been to any pure s-f conventions for close to a half-a-century. At the kind of cons I attend, everyone's interests seem pretty welcome and it's often hard to tell where one category leaves off and another begins. At WonderCon this year, I was showing my friend Gabriella around and explaining to her that a gathering like that is a convergence of loosely-associated interests: Fantasy on TV or movie screens, videogames, comic books, animation, anime, cosplaying, Lego, Funko Pop, model kits, toys, artwork, prose novels, collectible items, newspaper strips…and on and on.

And the worst thing that anyone has to say about someone's interest is "I'm not interested in that."

I feel very "at home" in such surroundings. I feel I'm among friends even though I might never have met 98% of them. I didn't feel that way at the early science-fiction conventions I attended. Too many people there were too damned defensive about being faulted for what they liked.

Lots of people have lots of things to say about Kilmar Armando Abrego García, that gentleman who due to an "administrative error" was shipped off to El Salvador. Politifact corrects a number of things that are being said and which are not true.

Debuting this Wednesday on the CW Network — and other channels in other countries later this year — is a new TV series created by my friend Brendan Foley. If you were a fan of his work on Cold Courage or The Man Who Died — which you were if you saw them — you owe it to yourself to tune in for Sherlock & Daughter. It stars David Thewlis, who you might know best from the Harry Potter series, as the master of all detectives and Blu Hunt, who you might know from The New Mutants as Amelia Rojas, who might or might not be the daughter of the eminent Mr. Holmes. Early reviews describe it as "a high-quality, well-made adventure and mystery series" and we could always use one of those.

Here's a little preview…

The Showrunner is the Emmy-nominated James Duff (The Closer, Major Crimes, Star Trek: Picard) and the writing crew also includes Micah War Dog Wright and my good buddy Shelly Goldstein. With talent like that involved, I've got my DVR set to record it and you should set yours. In my time zone, it's on at 9 PM.

Randy…

I'm keeping odd hours but at some point, I'll be awake when everyone else is awake. For now, here's a look at the impact that The Fantastic Four made on some of us in the sixties, courtesy of my pal, Gary Sassaman…

Thanks to all who sent the latest waves of Good Health Wishes. I'm taking a little vacation from anything stressful or which interferes with sleep. Not answering the phone. Not responding to most e-mails. I just need a little peace 'n' quiet and I'll be fine, thanks.

Steve Benen itemizes just some of the spectacularly-wrong assertions we've recently heard from our Secretary of Health and Human Services. Putting this man in charge of our nation's disease prevention is like putting the Reverend Jim Ignatowski in charge of…well, anything.

Thanks to all of you who wrote to wish me improved health. I'm sure I'm going to be fine but I am going to take it easy — in terms of activity that includes blogging — in the coming week. I just watched some video of the Celebration of Life I hosted last Sunday and I was amazed. I was exhausted but I thought I did a much better job of not showing it. In the video, I look like the kind of person who's about twenty-four hours from being rushed to the Emergency Room on a gurney…which I was. When that video's posted here in a day or three, you'll see what I mean.

I keep forgetting I'm 73 years old and while I don't think a number like that should prompt you to act like an old person, it doesn't hurt to keep in mind that maybe you can't do everything you did fifty years go. I can write faster now than I could then but that might be the only thing. Anyway, thanks for the concern from those of you who were concerned.

We are tentative fans — "tentative" meaning we haven't seen it but are hopeful we'll love it — of Boop the Musical, which opened recently to mixed reviews at the Broadhurst Theatre on Broadway. I probably won't get back there until later this year and I hope it's still running. The folks I know who've see it — cartoon fans, all — have been unanimous in their praise. The critics who I've seen panning it seem to be saying "Why the hell is there a musical on Broadway about an old cartoon that no one cares about?" So there are two views for you.

One of the many things that interests me about it that they did one of those "video diaries" covering the making of the show. Four installments have been released so far. Here's Part One…

…and here's Part Two, Part Three and Part Four. I wish more shows did this. I really liked the ones for Something Rotten and Catch Me If You Can.

Trump insists that sanctuary cities are "death traps." Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post says there's zero evidence that's true.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — who's about as qualified to be the Health and Human Services secretary as I am to be lead ballerina in The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky — claims that the measles outbreak in Texas is subsiding. The folks at FactCheck.org have looked at the actual numbers, as apparently R.F.K. hasn't, and they say that's not true. It feels like Trump tells his people, "No matter what we do, say it's an overwhelming success. Enough of our followers will believe it!"

That's where I am now…home from four nights in a hospital. And I can hear some of you saying, "Huh? You didn't mention anything about being in a hospital" and it's true, I didn't. I figured I wasn't worried about my health so there was no reason any of you should be. Briefly, I had an attack on Monday morning. I wasn't sure what kind of attack it was but it was sure painful. I'm guessing it felt like whatever a heart attack feels like but I have to guess because I've never had a heart attack and still haven't.

In fact, just about every doctor-type person I encountered the first 24 hours of this experience ran tests on me and said with great certainty, "You didn't have a heart attack," which is always a nice thing to hear. Okay then…that left the question of what the hell it was.

Those pains stopped on their own about an hour after the 911 responders got me to the Emergency Room and I was thinking maybe they were just going to send me home. But no, the examining physician said, "No, we're not letting you out of here until we figure out what it was and how to prevent it from happening again." I wasn't about to stop them from doing that so all Monday evening and much of Tuesday, they ran test after test after test and finally arrived at this conclusion: I had passed a gallstone. Once it fully passed, that was when the pains had ceased but it had left some toxic infections in my bloodstream. So then I had to stay two more nights until intravenous antibiotics had obliterated most of those infections.

This morning, they said, "Okay, you're out of here." Next week, I'm meeting with a surgeon who will decide if the best thing to prevent this from happening again is (a) Laparoscopic surgery to remove the remaining stones from my gall bladder or (b) complete removal of the gall bladder. So we'll see.

I'm still a little sleepy and woozy from four days of eating and drinking almost nothing. Part of that was because I always seemed to have a test pending of which they said, "You can't eat or drink before that test." But when I could eat, I couldn't eat because while the medical personnel in this hospital were first rate, whoever was prepping the meals was a culinary Incredible Hulk. Simply awful and inedible.

I gather from the reactions of the orderlies who picked up my largely-untouched trays that they were used to seeing 90-some-percent of each meal return untouched. I do not understand how a facility that can do such great work saving folks' lives can do such a bad job feeding those people. I couldn't even eat the plain white rice or the diced carrots. Seriously.

But I'm home and I've had actual food and all is mostly well. It's interesting to me — maybe not to you but to me — that this thing hit me just as I was finished with two projects with urgent deadlines: The Mike Schlesinger Celebration of Life which I arranged and hosted, and making the last little fixes on the book about Charles Schulz, which had to be finalized. If the gallstone had done its damage two days earlier, both those projects would have suffered more than I did.

Anyway, this is why posting was light here for a few days. I felt I owed you an explanation. And please — I do not want to hear about your hospitalization or your experience with gall stones or what you learned about them from reading some website or anything. My policy in life is to have real good professional doctors and to listen only to them. I believe I had the best-possible treatment and I can only regret that it so often comes with the worst possible meals.

Here's a pretty good history/analysis of the forever-controversial film by Bob Fosse, All That Jazz. I've seen this movie a number of times and I always like some things in it and dislike others…except it's never the same likes and dislikes from one viewing to the next…

The New York Times runs down Trump's long history of saying things about global trade and the economy and tariffs that just plain ain't true.

And if those aren't enough for you, here's a rundown of false and misleading statements about American relations with China, Japan and the European Union. The hits just keep on comin'!

Here from 1957 is an episode of This is Your Life focused on Buster Keaton. Buster doesn't look too pleased to be surprised like this — but Buster never looked too pleased about anything…