Veteran comic book artist Stan Goldberg had a stroke three days ago.  Yesterday, he was moved from the hospital into hospice care.

Stan is 82 and had been making a miraculous recovery since he and his wife of 47 years, Pauline, were injured in an automobile crash last year. They amazed everyone by showing up for the National Cartoonists Society gathering last May in San Diego, and Stan was hoping to (but could not) make it to Comic-Con two months later.

Stan was born in 1932 in New York and went to work for Marvel when he was 17, primarily as a colorist. In fact, there were periods at Marvel when Stan either headed the coloring department or was the coloring department. He colored all the early super-hero titles in the sixties. He was the man responsible for Spider-Man's costume having the colors it has. He was the man who made the Hulk green and so on. The artists whose work he colored all thought he was terrific.

He also had a long career drawing, usually in what we think of as the "Archie" style. He occasionally did something more realistic but mainly drew comics like Millie the Model for Marvel, Swing with Scooter for DC and Archie for Archie.  Most of these were unsigned and some that were signed were signed with someone else's name since the Archie company didn't like to find out their artists were drawing that way for competitors.

No one has ever totaled up how many pages Stan drew of Archie and his friends but the total was certainly well into the thousands. That association lasted for 40 years, ending in 2010 and he was startled and puzzled when it did end. For the last decade or so with them, he was not only kept busy but did many of their most prominent works, including the Archie newspaper strip, the much-publicized Archie-Punisher crossover comic and most covers. He told friends that he honestly did not know why they had suddenly decided to dispense with his services.

He stayed busy. He worked on other projects including Simpsons comic books and a nice array of Archie parodies and knock-offs. In 2012, the National Cartoonists Society presented him with its prestigious Gold Key Award, and he and Pauline were active in the group, Parents of Murdered Children, which they joined after the tragic slaying of their daughter Heidi, who was then a college student.

As I mentioned, he is now in hospice care.  His family thinks he would welcome cards and notes sent to…

Stan Goldberg
c/o Calvary Hospital
1740 Eastchester Rd.
Bronx, NY 10461

Please do not attempt to call.  But mail cheered Stan considerably during his long hospital stay from the traffic accident and it could do it again.

He has always been known as one of the most prolific, nicest artists in the comic book business and someone of whom I have been very fond. Everyone is. You'd have had to be a pretty rotten human being not to love Stan Goldberg. He would sit with me for hours at conventions or N.C.S. gatherings telling tales of the early days of Marvel. He was one of the last eyewitnesses to those days and very proud to have been a part of them. This is news that hits hard because he was always a wonderful artist and an even more wonderful person.

Several readers of this site wrote to the Avast company and pointed them to my posting about the problem I was having cancelling my service with them and getting a refund for the portions of it which have never worked. At the same time, at the suggestion of a few of you, I posted a message on the Avast forum on Facebook.

I don't know which of these was responsible but this morning, I received a flurry of e-mails from Avast telling me how to cancel and get money back. Thanks to all of you for your help.

Lewis Black remembers his friend, Robin Williams.

Mr. Black also had some Lewis Black-style anger at Rush Limbaugh for rather typical Rush Limbaugh remarks about Robin. I agree, of course, with the sentiments…but the trouble with them is that that's the level of anger that Lewis Black directs at broken parking meters or silly advertising campaigns.

I have a number of e-mails to get to here about Mr. Williams and about Depression but they'll have to wait until the weekend.

Our friends at the Criterion Collection, who do the classiest DVDs and Blu-rays of classic movies, have given Harold Lloyd's Safety Last the treatment. I'm still waiting for my copy but these folks have never disappointed me. Here's a snippet from one of the special features on this release which you can order here…

Here is why everyone needs health insurance. Kevin Drum cites an article which found that at one hospital, a patient was billed $10,169 for a lipid panel. This is a very simple test that is ordered for most people at one time or another and sometimes the bill is for as little as $10. That's probably about what my insurance actually pays when I get one of those. Why was someone billed for more than ten grand?

The researchers have no idea. No insurance company will pay $10,000 for a lipid panel, of course, so the only point of pricing it this high is to exploit the occasional poor sap with no health insurance who happens to need his cholesterol checked. Welcome to health care in America. Best in the world, baby.

Those who want to nuke Obamacare will argue that the free market will bring costs under control. Well, it never has…and health care is not and can never really be a free market because you can't really go shopping about and getting estimates when your life may be on the line. It's not a free market from the perspective of the health care providers either, because they're legally and morally obligated to treat a lot of people who can't pay or will never pay…so they make up for it by socking it to the guy has (a) a little dough, (b) no insurance and (c) high cholesterol.

If my mother had not had excellent health insurance and was forced to pay full retail for the health care she required her last twenty years, she would have lost her home and all her savings and I might have lost mine…and she still would have had to do without certain treatments that kept her alive.

The New York Times documents that celebrity deaths do not always happen in threes.

I think this is one of those places where people stretch reality to make it fit a myth. Famous people die all the time. Every time two really famous people die within a few days of each other, someone seizes on the next celebrity of any magnitude and says, "That's the third!" But since the time span and the level of celebrity are both undefined, you could make this "rule" work for two celebrities, four celebrities, five celebrities…

And I hear there will be more artists present than just the ones listed here…

Sasha Frere-Jones writes about "Weird Al" Yankovic. I too discovered the weird one on Dr. Demento's radio show long ago and always thought he was really good at what he does. I met Al (briefly) a few years ago and was genuinely impressed with how nice and humble he seemed to be. I think, listening to his music, I always knew he'd be like that.

Ed Kilgore thinks people should stop making an issue of how many days of "vacation" the President of the United States takes. I think I've said that myself on this blog and I think I even said it when Bush was in office. It's not like these guys are ever lying on the beach, miles from a phone and unreachable. The Commander-in-Chief is not necessarily neglecting his duties when he's not in the Oval Office, just as he's not necessarily working when he is there. It's what he does or doesn't do we should criticize, not where he does or doesn't do it.

Last Tuesday evening, I attended a meeting of Yarmy's Army, a local (we meet in Beverly Hills) group to which I belong. It's kind of a social club for folks in show business, mostly male, mostly comedians, mostly older. I'm one of the younger members. We meet the second Tuesday of every month and whoever shows up shows up and we sit around and tell stories, plus the club does some good in terms of benefits for worthy causes and just plain helping each other.

This week, we had a record turnout for two reasons. One was that it was the birthday of one of the club's original members, Pat Harrington, Jr. You all know Pat from One Day at a Time and his work with Steve Allen and many other gigs. The other reason is that a lot of the guys felt the need to sit around and swap anecdotes about Robin Williams. The group's president/leader (I'm not sure what his title is) Howard Storm knew Robin pretty well, having crossed many a path on the comedy circuit and also directing episodes of Mork and Mindy. Several members had appeared on that series. A lot of the stories they told Tuesday evening went roughly like this…

So we're rehearsing and I have this line. Robin is supposed to say a certain line and then I say my line. But the problem is that he never says his line. He's saying all this stuff that isn't in the script I learned so I'm waiting and waiting and he doesn't say the line that leads into mine. I finally go to the director and ask, "When do I say my line?" And the director says, "Whenever you can."

I've heard from others who worked on that series that Mr. Williams' tendency to ad-lib the script has been greatly exaggerated; that while Robin did improvise material at times, what was also happening there was this: The scripts were constantly rewritten throughout the week of rehearsals and Robin, who had a great memory, would often throw in lines from earlier drafts…or alternate lines the writers had pitched to him. At least a few writers on Mork resented the assumption, made in some articles and everyday conversation, that if a line on the show was funny, it must have been a Robin ad-lib. No…and a lot of things Robin said on stage which sounded like spontaneous thoughts were also just the output of a good memory.

One of secret skills of most stand-ups is that even when the material isn't fresh, you make it sound like it is. Make it sound like you thought of it on the spot, even. I remember the first time I saw Robert Klein perform in person. He said a lot of things I would have taken as sudden thoughts on his part had I not heard them, verbatim and with the exact same pauses and delivery, on his albums. Bill Maher will often chuckle during a monologue as if he too is surprised and amused at what just came out of his mouth. None of this is considered dishonest. Performing comedy material is an exercise in acting. It's why some stand-ups become, as Robin Williams did, very fine actors.

Something I learned when I got involved in magic was this: Sometimes, a trick is more impressive when you know how it's done. The secret to some skills is a gimmick — a box with a false bottom, a prop with a hidden spring, etc. — but sometimes, it's a move that the magician spent months learning and practicing. There's card magic you do with a trick deck that contains extra aces…and then there's card magic you do with a normal deck and a lot of dexterity and misdirection. The lay spectator doesn't know which he's seeing but someone with a basic knowledge of magic can really be dazzled. He or she knows how hard that trick is to do because they know (approximately at least) what the magician is really doing to make it look like the Queen of Hearts turned into the Three of Clubs.

It's the same with performing humor. At the Comedy Store, I saw other comics dazzled by Robin Williams. That was the setting in which he was most likely to ad-lib and just blurt out any silly concept that appeared in his head at that moment…and he did, often. But you could also see him mentally juggling — and in real time — bits and lines he'd uttered before, fitting them in wherever they fit in. In a way, it was like a great magician making you look at his right hand so you wouldn't spot what his left was doing. Robin's speed was often his misdirection and it impressed the hell out of his peers. It also pissed off a few of them when lines he was recalling and using were not being recalled from his own repertoire but from theirs.

He admitted in several interviews that he'd done that…said something on stage and then realized later (or been told) it was something he'd heard, not something he'd invented. Some in the business forgave it. An agent for comedians (not Robin's) said to me once, "So what if 2% of what he says on stage isn't his? 98% of it was the most inventive comedy being done today." Others disputed those percentages but I think even those who felt they'd been pickpocketed admired the man's skills. I always thought those who dismissed him as a knock-off of Jonathan Winters were underestimating Williams. He was of the same species and the inspiration was undeniable…but he was also the only one of its kind. And sadly now, there is no one of his kind. That's what happens when you're the only one.

Back here, we highly recommended The Marx Brothers TV Collection, a new DVD set full of clips and whole episodes from when Groucho, Harpo and/or Chico appeared on some TV program. That piece will also tell you two ways to order it.

I'm not the only one who liked this set. Here's a rave review from Leonard Maltin. Why did we both like it? Because of material like this clip…

So I've been trying to cancel my subscription to Avast Anti-Virus and also to get a refund on another product they sell which just plain won't work on my computer.

Their Customer Support phone line offers two options. You can talk to their Tech Support department 24/7. You can talk to their billing department during working hours. Either one will tell you the same thing: To submit a support ticket and ask for a refund. They will tell you there is absolutely no other way to get money refunded from the Avast company.

So you submit a support ticket. This is not easy because the website doesn't tell you that's what you have to do to request a refund. It makes it look like that's just for tech support and comments. But you submit a support ticket and you get back a form message that tells you your support ticket has been received and you will receive a response within two working days.

I submitted my first refund request support ticket on 8/4/14. I submitted my second on 8/5/14. Today is 8/13/14 and I have heard nothing. There appears to be no other way to reach the Avast company.

I'm having my credit card company block further charges to my card but they won't get involved in extracting refunds from a vendor.

I'll let you know when I hear from Avast. If I hear from Avast.

Fred Kaplan on the situation in Iraq. The most important thing to remember seems to be that not all military actions over there are the same.

Kiel Phegley covers a panel we did at Comic-Con to honor the late Bill Finger, the man who ought to be formally recognized as the co-creator of Batman. I suspect that at some point, some relative of Bob Kane will realize what it's doing to Bob's reputation that Finger is not so recognized and it will finally happen.

Kim Criswell sings "The Trolley Song" for the BBC with the John Wilson Orchestra. How come I know the words to all these songs but the chorus has to read them from books? And why is Stephen Colbert conducting an orchestra and calling himself "John Wilson?" An obvious alias…