On Monday, the Rasmussen daily tracking poll in the presidential race had Bush up by two points over Kerry. We told you then that before the week is out, that poll would give Kerry a 2-3 point lead over Bush. And sure enough, they now have Kerry three points ahead of Bush. I'm guessing it'll be Tuesday or Wednesday of next week before they have Bush in the lead again.

And hello from the Comic-Con International, where rumors abound that attendance figures are exceeding all expectations. One can also hear many a horror story of local hotel room pricing. At my hotel last night, as I was checking in, a gent who arrived sans reservation, was trying to convince the next desk clerk over that he was so important and such a good customer of the chain that they simply had to find a room for him. The clerk was trying in his best, polite Front Desk manner to tell the guy that his chances of securing lodging there this weekend were about the same as Linda Ronstadt's of playing the Aladdin. I'm not too happy with the room I did get but when I think of friends who are paying thrice these fees at Super 8 Motels, I can't complain too much.

So what's to report besides the very size of this convention? The last few years, that's generally been the Big Story, dwarfing all others. I did a signing this morning, had two swift business-type conferences, then it was up to Room 8 to host three panels in a row, all well-attended.

The first was a delightful chat with my friend of ~37 years, veteran comic book artist Mike Royer. And boy, does it feel odd, though not incorrect, to refer to Mike as a veteran. When we met, he had only been assisting Russ Manning on Tarzan for a year or two, and he'd recently started drawing stories for Creepy and Eerie. Soon after, he became Jack Kirby's inker and later went on to a tidy career with Disney where, among other duties, he was the main designer of Winnie the Pooh stuff for the Disney Stores. It was a good conversation — even I learned things — and when I find out who's going to print it, I'll direct you to the transcript.

Then we had the Golden/Silver Age Panel with, from left to right, Tom Gill, Sid Jacobson, Gene Colan, Jack Adler, Frank Springer, Frank Bolle and Harry Harrison. There were many highlights but few in attendance will forget Harrison telling of the time he and his then-partner, Wally Wood, decided to play a little joke on their editor. It was a common prank for artists to finish a page normally and then to do a little pasteover to change a drawing or two into something outrageously filthy. Once the editor and the staff had been properly shocked and/or amused, the pasteover could be peeled off and the art would be suitable for publication. That's what Harrison and Wood figured would happen once when, drawing a western scene of a horse rearing up, they added in an enormous, diseased phallus. Everyone at the office laughed but somehow, no one remembered to peel off the offending member before sending the book off to the printer. It was on the presses, seconds from seeing print, when someone caught it.

[NOTE TO SELF: If I ever host another of these Golden/Silver Age panels, we have got to keep the dais down to six, preferably fewer. These guys have too many good stories to need seven of them up there.]

Then my third panel of the day was the Sergio and Mark Panel…where, among other revelations, we announced two upcoming mini-series projects we've agreed to do for Dark Horse. Not sure of the exact titles yet but one will basically be Groo Meets Conan and the other will be Groo Meets Tarzan. No, I am not kidding.

Didn't get to talk to as many people as I'd have liked, today. If you were one of the folks to whom I said a fast, insufficient hello while racing past you to a panel or meeting, my apologies. And with four panels scheduled for tomorrow (Friday), it'll probably be more of the same.

I am told from a source within The Tonight Show that they've been trying for weeks to book Michael Moore and have finally snagged him for next Thursday night. This could be an interesting interview as Mr. Leno seems to have more reservations about Moore and his tactics than some other hosts the filmmaker has faced.

Since I'm away from home and laptopping it, I'm unable to read all the articles about the 9/11 report that was released today. But Fred Kaplan seems to have a pretty solid overview.

I agree with Avedon Carol that we ought to have real ballots. We should also have standardized voting procedures so that folks in the poor neighborhoods don't vote on machines that are more likely to misread their ballots than those counted in wealthy terrains.

I disagree slightly that receipts wouldn't be necessary if we had real paper ballots. What I would like to see is a system where you vote via touch screen and the device spits out a little card that lists all your votes in plain English…and also has them encoded in a little barcode at the bottom. Instead of signing in to vote when you arrive, you would instead sign in as you leave, verifying that the receipt card accurately represents your votes.

On the way out, you could — totally at your choice — let poll watchers or reporters scan the barcode part of your receipt. This would be roughly the equivalent of participating in an exit poll, as many of us do now, but it would be easier and have more value. If the tally in a given precinct was wildly off the exit polls, it would probably pinpoint error or fraud in counting. Someone could also check to see that the barcoding matched the votes, minimizing another possible area of screw-ups.

Vote fraud and error are both possible with any system. The argument against the old-fashioned paper ballots — and this was not without some merit — was that they were counted in precincts without central oversight. My mother had the voting at our house a few times in the "paper" day and also early in the punchcard era. If we got all our buddies together to run a polling place, there'd be really nothing stopping us from marking a lot of Republican ballots "spoiled" and replacing them with ballots marked for Democrats…or vice-versa. Touch screens were supposed to eliminate that possibility…and I guess they have, though they've created more dark holes than they've filled. I really think the best system of all would involve me being able to take home a certified copy of my vote. Then some proof is in my hands, not theirs.

…so I might as well report something about hotels for the Comic-Con. A friend of mine writes me that he has had to cancel his trip due to lack of an affordable place to stay. Says he, he had a reservation at a motel in Chula Vista, which is about fifteen minutes from the Convention Center. Then a story appeared in a San Diego newspaper that said hotels were getting $500 a night for rooms during the con, and his motel cancelled his reservation and told him he could have it back but the price would now be $700 a night. (I gather they can do this because he hadn't paid in advance for the first night.) This is for a motel room that — I just looked — advertises normal rates of $52-$62 on the Internet.

Out of curiosity, since I already have my hotel room, I just used Travelaxe, which is a wonderful and free piece o' software that can usually find you the cheapest lodgings on the web, and looked for a room for Thursday night through Sunday morn in or around San Diego. Couldn't find anything under around a thousand bucks for three nights…and these were at places that are 10+ miles away from the Convention Center and ordinarily go for less than a hundred a night.

Back in the seventies, I had a friend who lived in Los Angeles and commuted each day to the San Diego Con. That is, instead of getting a room down there, he drove home each night and slept in his own bed. Hotel rooms were something like $20 a night then and there was no shortage…but he calculated the gas prices and decided that by going back and forth, he'd save enough cash to buy a copy of some old issue of Action Comics after which he lusted. We razzed him and pointed out that he was foregoing 5-7 hours of convention each day and spending it instead on the 5 Freeway, which is always a joy. We thought he was insane then…but like a lot of people we label insane, he may just have been ahead of his time.

I don't have many details — only that he "died two weeks ago" — but I wanted to note the passing of Rudy Palais, one of comic art's most distinctive sylists. In his day, which was roughly from the beginning of comics into the sixties, he (and his brother Walter) worked for most of the New York publishers, and I believe Rudy started with a job in the Harry "A" Chesler shop in 1939. He worked briefly for DC on Doctor Mid-Nite, for Holyoke on Catman, for Quality Comics on Blackhawk, Doll Man and Phantom Lady, and for Charles Biro on the original Daredevil. His most notable assignments were a 20-year tour-of-duty drawing intermittent tales for Classics Illustrated and a number of horror comics he drew in the fifties, especially for Harvey. (He also drew for the early EC crime and horror titles.)

His work was quite organic, and some scholars of the form have compared his horror work favorably to that of "Ghastly" Graham Ingels, noting that like Ingels, Palais had a way of making creepy things ooze right off the page. In the sixties, Palais turned up in the pages of Charlton comics. I believe his last art was for The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves — very odd, impressionistic short stories — and then he did some lettering work for them before retiring from comics around 1969. I never met the man but I followed his work and you could tell that he really cared about doing good comic art.

Posting will be light here the next few days as I haul my panel-moderating butt down to you-know-where. I'll try to put up reports on what's transpiring but can't be certain I won't be too busy/tired.

Pre-convention fatigue set in last night around 11 PM, which is later than usual. There comes a time when in the hustling and bustling to get things done, one pauses to wonder if the trade-off is worth it; if life would not be better to forego the joys of the con if it also means avoiding matters of packing and driving and compressing one's whole life for transport. You know that on the other end, it'll probably seem like a great deal but for the moment, it sure doesn't feel that way.

I also know that at some point, I will have to cope with post-convention fatigue. We'll discuss that when it arrives. I'm guessing Sunday afternoon at around 5:30.

Not much else to say before I pack the computer. If you're at the con and you see me and you want to tell me how much you love logging into this website, I won't put up a struggle. After each con the last few years, I've gotten a few notes from people who said, "I wanted to talk to you but you always seemed so busy." That may not be so. When I worked for Hanna-Barbera, I think I developed the habit of looking busy when I was doing absolutely nothing…just in case Bill Hanna walked past my office. (Mr. Hanna didn't like it when his employees seemed to be moving less than his cartoons.)

If you're not at the con, we'll miss you. Do try to make it next year. You'll have a very good time…all except for the moments, before and after, of convention fatigue. And even they aren't so bad once you see what you get in exchange.

Continuing with our theme of news sources that tell us what they think we want to hear: I think Internet news polls are just about worthless. In fact, they're less than worthless. Not only do they attract the most passionate and unrepresentative voters (many of whom can figure out how to vote multiple times) but they wrongly convince people of trends that may not exist. They're just a cheap scam to get you onto the website and to keep you there a little longer, clicking away.

All that said, I had to laugh out loud at the one I just noticed on the CNN site (on Lou Dobbs' page). Kind of a lopsided vote there…and of course, it's all these people voting in a completely unverifiable, easy-to-rig manner to say that they want voting to be more verifiable. You kind of wonder what's on the mind of those who voted against paper receipts. The only semi-logical argument I've ever heard against them is that, supposedly, receipts might make it easy for people to sell their vote, in that they could then prove to the person paying them that they'd voted as ordered. The problem with that argument is that absentee ballots make vote-selling even easier and no one is against them.

Nothing annoyed me more about the 2000 election than all the Bush partisans trying to pretend that the irregularities in that election were a minor detail and telling Democrats to "get over it." It was like some of them were afraid that any expressed concern about more accurate voting would further taint their boy's "victory." I have never been convinced that a different guy would have wound up in the White House if every voter who was qualified to vote and wanted to vote had done so and been tallied as per their intent. But I was sure disappointed that I never heard a prominent Republican say that they were uncomfortable with the way their guy got in.

I have a lot of running-around to do today so here's a link to the website for the Comic-Con International, where attendees will find all sorts of useful info, like maps of the shuttle bus routes and schedules for celebrity-type autographs. You'll also find the latest programming info, including last minute changes.

And here, one more time, is a link to the list of events I'm moderating at the con. Anyone who attends all thirteen is eligible for the big cash prize jackpot which in years past has always been won by me. Experts agree I have the inside track again this time…but you never know.

So about twenty minutes ago, I'm sitting here writing out notes for my Comic-Con programs when I hear (a) tires squealing, (b) the sound of something hitting something else and (c) a strange roaring sound. In that order. Out I run and I see that one block south of me, a car has smashed into the hedges around a neighbor's house. The roaring sound is water gushing because in the process, the car knocked over a fire hydrant. In fact, the rear end of the car is over the broken hydrant so rushing water is bubbling up under the car and out into the street.

I run back in, call 911 and report the above. "Was anyone injured?" a man asks me. I tell him I didn't get close enough to tell. He says they'll send someone and I run back out and hike down to the scene of the collision.

One other person is there — the driver of the car, apparently unhurt. He is smoking a cigarette and kind of half-chuckling about how his relatively-new auto is probably now a total write-off. He comes over and tells me that another driver, who was driving like crazy, ran him off the road and kept on going. I tell him what I heard and also that I reported the accident. He says, "Good, but I'm seriously drunk" — and it's somewhat obvious that he is. I am not certain I believe his story about another driver but I figure someone else gets paid to think about such things.

Three fire engines pull up. The first man off the first one asks me if I was driving the car. I say, "No, I'm the one who phoned it in. He was driving," and I point out the seriously drunk guy, who is standing there, lighting another cigarette. Firemen scramble into action, blocking off the road and then working to turn off the water. About three of them begin interrogating the driver as an ambulance arrives and I figure my work there is done. As I start for home, I run into a neighbor who says he was awakened by the crash so he threw on some clothes and came out to see what happened. I tell him as much as I know. He points out that the occupants of the house where the accident occurred are either away or very sound sleepers. There's no one outside except the driver, the firemen, the ambulance crew and two spectators (us). The neighbor and I both decide to head to our respective homes and I come in here and write this.

I just looked outside. The fire trucks are gone but two police cars are there, probably talking to the driver. The water is off. The car is still sticking out of the hedge. And I'm going to bed. Good night.

If you're going to San Diego, beware of people selling cheese in the streets. There's enough cheese inside the convention, anyway. (I cribbed this item from Heidi MacDonald's The Beat. If you read it regularly, you won't need me.)

I was also interested in this opinion piece by Thomas Frank. Frank has been making the rounds, advancing a theory that I believe is not without merit. It's that the Republican Party courts votes and wins elections by pounding the idea that they represent "traditional American values" — pro-gun, anti-abortion rights, anti-gay, protect the flag, Mom, apple pie, etc. — but that these are not the true values of the Republican leadership. The argument is that they gain power via those issues but then use that power primarily to push a pro-business agenda.

I think Frank may be overstating his case. Certainly, there are Republican leaders who push those "red meat" issues for real, and you can't expect either party not to put on a little show for its base in an election year. But I don't think it would hurt the Democrats to remind people that being able to get a decent job and health coverage are also "traditional American values."

I was interested in this piece by Michael Kinsley on ways to make a military draft fair…or as fair as humanly possible. I tend to think conscription can never be fair and unless you have a war that America views as overwhelmingly necessary (like stopping Hitler), it can only lead to a military that is largely full of people who don't want to be there.

The solution? My feeling is that we'd have a very strong and efficient volunteer army if this country were as willing to pay money to the soldiers who fire weapons as they are to enrich the companies that make them.

I am of the opinion that an awful lot of the news coverage we receive — more than we sometimes think — is skewed not to advance any agenda but merely to tell some or all of us what we seem to want to hear. I don't think too many people really believe Fox News is "fair and balanced" but I think they find a certain comfort level in the way it softens or spins things for Conservatives…and certainly Liberals have many places to go where bad news for their side won't be shoved in their faces. Just as it's good in broadcasting to cater to specific age demographics, it's financially prudent to make your news pleasant for certain groups. We tend to go looking for news that reinforces our beliefs and makes us feel that "our team" is winning.

For those of us who follow polls, we can almost always find encouraging data. This weekend, for instance, you have this poll saying that Kerry has pulled into the lead in the "battleground states" of Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Mexico, and that he's even in North Carolina, a state Bush expected to win easily. At the same time, this poll shows Bush well ahead in Arizona, a state the Kerry side probably thought they could win. You can even find your good news in the same place on different days. Today, Monday the 19th, the daily Rasmussen Poll has Bush up by two points…but since the poll has a margin of error of plus or minus three points, that's a tie. Later this week, I'd wager, you'll be able to click that link and have the Rasmussen folks tell you that Kerry has a two or three point lead over Bush. Again, it'll be a tie…and it may be that not one person has changed his or her mind in the interim. But doesn't it make you feel a wee bit better to see your guy is ahead? Even if it's by a meaningless point or two?

One thing about which the polls seem to be in sync: They all say that by an unprecedented percentage, most voters have their minds made up. This may be why the announcement of John Edwards as Kerry's running mate did not provide as much of a "bounce" in the polls as that kind of event usually brings. A "bounce" usually comes from the undecided or vaguely-committed, and there aren't as many of them this time. I still think a number of possible events — including the much-mentioned Big Terrorist Attack — could change a lot of minds that are now supposedly set in concrete…though I'm not sure which way. The Bush side seems to be positioning for all possibilities: If there is such an attack, they'll tell us it proves the terrorists are trying to get Bush out of office because they know he'll fight them harder than Kerry. If there is no such attack, they'll tell us it proves the Bush team is doing a great job and that they foiled that Big Terrorist Attack. Ultimately, this election may come down to which one of those arguments they wind up using and whether anyone buys it.