If you follow comics, you already know how well Colleen Doran draws. Turns out she's also real good at gathering info for folks — particularly freelancers — who don't have good health insurance.

You know, everyone predicted this would be a nasty, mud-filled presidential campaign. But no one thought the worst insult these guys would find to hurl at each other is, "You're a celebrity!"

Out in Studio City, which is in the "valley" part of Los Angeles, there's a place called the Sportsmen's Lodge. It's a hotel and it's a coffee shop and a bar but its main function is as a venue to hold banquets, meetings, weddings, receptions, parties, etc. It's very large and has many rooms of all sizes for such events, and it's known for quaint and lovely surroundings, mediocre service and the worst, most overpriced banquet food you ever tasted.

The place has endured for many years, partly because it's something of an institution and partly because if you need to hold a meeting or a luncheon, there aren't that many other options around. But it also sits on a huge swath of very valuable real estate so there have been constant rumors that someone was going to plow it all under and build a mall or something more lucrative. Thus, people were not surprised to read a series of recent news stories announcing its closure. Here's the lede of one typical one…

Venerable Sportsmen's Lodge closing down
ASSOCIATED PRESS – July 16, 2008
LOS ANGELES — The end is near for the venerable Sportsmen's Lodge, a San Fernando Valley oasis where generations of celebrities and politicians dined and drank among gardens and trout ponds. The 63-year-old Studio City restaurant, bar and banquet hall has lost its lease and will shut down New Year's Eve. Lodge owner and president Patrick Holleran says a nearly yearlong attempt to extend the lease failed.

Pretty straightforward, right? The place is closing…and we have this from an unimpeachable source, the owner of the Sportsmen's Lodge. End of story? Not quite…because here's a story from the same press service and it's dated the same day…

Sportsmen's Lodge to get facelift, new tenant
ASSOCIATED PRESS – July 16, 2008
LOS ANGELES — Extensive renovations are planned for the venerable Sportsmen's Lodge, a San Fernando Valley oasis where generations of celebrities and politicians dined and drank among gardens and trout ponds. Steve Afriat, a spokesman for the property's owner, says the 63-year-old restaurant, bar and banquet hall will undergo renovations after January, when the current tenant's lease expires. The 200-room Sportsmen's Lodge Hotel and Patio Cafe next door is already being renovated.

I dunno what happened here and I'm not sure I care — obviously some dispute between the guy who owns the land and the guy who owns the business and I assume they'll thrash it out. In the meantime, did you ever see a professional news service contradict itself so totally on the same day? And in stories that appear to have been written by the same person?

Borys Kit of The Hollywood Reporter agrees with me that the Comic-Con International oughta stay in San Diego, and comes up with some other good reasons why.

But I will quibble with one thing. I've been going to these cons since they began and watched them morph from primitive events where the attendees were all teenage boys and the big topic was who should be in the Legion of Super-Heroes. The con has turned into a place where major filmmakers and stars and writers and artists and the movers 'n' shakers of the entertainment industry converge, and the hall is full of adults and families and even attractive women. Isn't it about time we drop this stupid "geek" talk, like everyone there is sexually retarded and living in their parents' basement?

It's bad enough that every video news report trains its cameras almost wholly on the half-a-percent of folks roaming the halls in bizarre costumes. I mean, I understand that slant. It's the first and only approach that would occur to a really shallow, go-for-the-easy-story reporter…but I've largely come to expect that on the news.

What I don't get is why no one seems to have grasped that the real story is that the attendees aren't geeks; that they're the target audience for mainstream entertainment for all ages and probably a lot smarter and hipper than you'd find at the average shopping mall anywhere in this country. The comic book industry is catering to a more adult crowd and defining much of Hollywood's future…and journalists are recycling all the old jokes about Star Trek fans of the seventies not being able to get a date.

I'm not even sure what the word "geek" means in this day and age but it has something to do with being outta-sync with the tastes and interests of the majority. Which does raise the question of how long movies like Iron Man and The Dark Knight have to be Number Uno at the box office before it dawns on some people that it's all popular culture, emphasis on the word "popular."

Sergio and I were just over at the Farmers Market (this place), a great spot for lunch in Los Angeles. We were finishing our meals in the upper patio when we suddenly heard interesting, energetic music from below and wandered down to see what it was. Turns out it was a group called the Masanga Marimba Ensemble…a troupe of young folks who bang away on seven Guatemalan and Zimbabwean marimbas while one of them plays rather traditional drums. The Market had engaged them to play for a few hours this afternoon and they were quite wonderful, attracting a large crowd that stood there, clapping along and occasionally dancing to their infectious rhythms. During their break, I bought a CD that they had for sale. That's how much I liked them.

You can hear a few samples of them if you prowl around on their website and even order the same CD if you like what you hear. I'm going to keep an eye on that site to see where and when they're performing again.

Sorry I didn't post anything yesterday but I've been busy for about the last twenty-three hours. Got up at 7:30 yesterday, worked on a script for an hour. Got dressed and left the house around nine. Stopped at a McDonald's for breakfast and arrived at the funeral for my pal Greg Burson at ten.

It always seems odd to say that a memorial service was nice or well-done, but Greg's was. His two sons and his brother spoke. Gary Owens spoke. Greg's one-time agent, Jeff Danis, spoke. I spoke. Voice actress Sharon Mack spoke. Burson would have been amused that two voice actors who are often confused with him — Gregg Berger and Greg Berg — were both in attendance.

The service adjourned to the gravesite up the hillside. Getting from where we were told to park our cars, walking down a slope to the burial spot, looked to all like a plot by Forest Lawn to drum up business. One of the older woman there was thinking aloud that she should not bother trying to make the long, hard walk back up to the road. "Maybe I'll just stay here and let them dig me a hole," she said.

But she was in the caravan that then drove over to the Tam O'Shanter, a fine nearby restaurant, for post-funeral eats. Then I drove over, picked up my friend Carolyn, and we went up to hike around Griffith Park for a while. Then I took her to a Korean grocery store to buy vegetables and Miso. Then I took her home. Then I sped to my house to meet my contractor to discuss what men are going to do to my home in the coming weeks. Then voice actress Laura Summer came by to pick up a CD I'd made her of her work on Garfield. Then I drove over to a nearby hospital to see someone. Then I drove over to my mother's house, stopping at a Gelson's Market on the way. Then I drove back to the hospital to deliver something from Gelson's to my friend there.

Then I came home, sat down here to write and apart from food breaks (for me and to feed cats out back) and bathroom visits, I haven't done anything but work on a script and write this. I think maybe I oughta go to bed, don't you? Good night, Internet. See you in the morning. Oh, wait. It is morning…

How to watch the Beijing Olympics online.

John Edwards was right. There are two Americas. And you're apparently allowed to have a woman in each.

Boy, there are a lot of reasons to be disgusted by (or disappointed in) John Edwards today. You can almost pick and choose the ones you want to feature. Having the affair is a moral and human failing but it's also just plain foolish. Anyone who aspires to high office in this country oughta know that there will be powerful forces out there, paying money to people who can expose this kind of thing…and I still don't get why he thought he could meet with "the other woman" at the Beverly Hilton in the middle of a press junket and not be spotted.

His confession/ apology is pretty lame, too…like he thinks if he grovels enough, someone will still give him a shot at the White House someday. Maybe he could run on a ticket with Gary Hart.

I keep getting e-mails asking me why I haven't reviewed or recommended Blake Bell's new book, Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko. There's an easy answer to that: Insufficient time to give it the thorough, attentive reading it obviously deserves. But just flipping through it and reading a hunk here and there, it's obvious that it's a very handsome book full of well-chosen Ditko art, and that Blake has done a fine job of digging out as much biographical info on his subject as is humanly possible.

Ditko is, of course, famous for being reclusive and refusing to grant interviews — a policy that makes you J.D. Salinger to some people. Those who've spoken with him lately say he is perturbed by some of the "prying" that's being done in print and on video into his life. My impression, admittedly remote (I haven't spoken to Ditko or exchanged correspondence with him in twenty years but we have mutual acquaintances) is that he's bothered less by the attention than by the conclusions and interpretations. He often declined interviews by saying "I prefer to let my work speak for itself" and is now stunned that everyone does not hear the same thing from it.

If he reads Blake's book, he will probably find plenty to disagree with, which of course doesn't mean that he's right and the book is wrong. Matter of fact, if ever there was a comic book artist whose work left itself open to disparate analysis, it's Ditko. In what I've read, Blake avoids the easy, oft-made mistake of trying to see everything as a slavish representation of something from the works of Ayn Rand. He also does a great job of reminding us just what was so great about Ditko's work when he was able to really be Steve Ditko…and that's about all I want to write about the book until I have time for a cover-to-cover read.

You can order a copy of it from Amazon by clicking here. If you look around on that page, you can probably find one of those exciting Amazon package deals where you can order Blake's Ditko book and my Kirby book together for $52.79, a discount of $0.00 from the price of buying them separately. All you save is one click but, hey, if you can save one click a day, you might avoid Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.