Ezra Klein notes that the popularity of Obamacare has a lot to do with whether pollsters are referring to it as "Obamacare." I'd like to see them ask people how they'd feel if Congress repealed Obamacare and replaced it with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. I have the feeling a lot of people would say, "Great! Anything is better than Obamacare!"

This is a Tale of My Father but it's also the story of how I broke into the profession which I've now been in for…well, it's 44 years, almost to the day.

I got out of high school in June of '69 and said to mine old self, "Okay, if you're going to become a professional writer, now's the time." I was 17 and I'd actually submitted a few things to comic book editors before then…but only because they'd asked me.

Previously, I'd written a lot of letters to comic book letter pages. This was back when comic books actually had letter pages and I've given up on my long-ago pledge that all of mine always would. But most of them had them then and I think about 90% of the letters I sent in were published…some rewritten a lot by the editors not because I hadn't said what I'd said well but because I hadn't said what they wanted the letters they published to say. Like, I wrote a letter in to Wonder Woman saying I hadn't liked the latest issue and someone — perhaps the book's editor, Robert Kanigher — had omitted a "not" here and there and completely rewritten one or two sentences so suddenly, I liked that issue. Heckuva thing to do to a 14-year-old kid who isn't being paid.

Still, I was proud to have so many of my letters published and my father, when I showed him the issues, acted like I'd just sold my first novels to Random House for a huge advance. You could see the faintest glimmer of hope in his eyes: Hey, maybe my son isn't destined for a life of poverty and heartbreak if he tries to become a professional writer. That kind of glimmer.

Little did either of us know. Getting into a comic book letter page back then wasn't as great a feat as it seemed. All you had to do was construct sentences with nouns and verbs in them and get the punctuation vaguely right. As I would learn when I got into the industry, very few letters were received and most of them weren't far removed from a Crayola® scrawling of "I LIKE YOUR COMIC" with the "E" backwards. Still, I felt a little closer to my beloved comic books since I was in them, albeit by a technicality…and my father had that glimmer. And my letters led to three separate editors — Mort Weisinger and Jack Miller at DC, Dick Giordano at Charlton — encouraging me to write and submit scripts for their books. That sure made all that letter-writing worthwhile…or looked like it might.

Weisinger had me write some Jimmy Olsen stories, rejected them all, then suggested I do a Krypto story for the back of Superboy. Miller had taken over Metal Men and wanted me to take a crack at that book. Not only would that have been a nice credit but I might have displaced Robert Kanigher as writer, thereby exacting some revenge for him rewriting my letters. Giordano needed ghost stories.

I had more or less written-off comic book writing as a job. Today, thanks to the Internet and Federal Express, folks who write comic books can and do live anywhere. Back then in every interview I read in fanzines, editors insisted you had to live in New York or reasonably near their offices. Born 'n' bred in Los Angeles, I had no intention of migrating, especially after I was accepted by U.C.L.A. So I just thought, "Okay, so comic books, as much as I love 'em, aren't something I'm destined to write." I could live with that but as it turned out, I didn't have to. The industry in its odd way came looking for me starting with those invites from editors.

They led to a lot of scripts being rejected but then in rapid succession, each of those three editors did the same two things in this order…

1. He accepted a script I'd submitted and congratulated me on making my first sale and then…
2. Before he processed the paperwork to pay me for that script, he got fired.

Well, to be technically accurate, Mr. Giordano wasn't fired. It's just funnier to say all three got fired. After telling me he wanted to buy a script I'd submitted for The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves, Mr. Giordano quit Charlton to accept a position at DC where one of the editors he replaced was Jack Miller, who had just told me he was going to buy a script I'd written for Metal Men. But Giordano didn't get Metal Men and that writing assignment was filled, not by me.

I was not disappointed or discouraged at all. I'd written-off comic books, remember. This was all bonus stuff to the career I expected to have. It was like someone had told me, "You may have won the lottery" and then called back to say, "No, you didn't." I was back where I'd started and since I regarded the scripts as batting practice, I'd suffered no real loss, especially since I'd been wise enough to not tell my father what I was doing.

(I was not, however, wise enough to not tell my friends at the Comic Book Club. For months thereafter, every time a new issue of Metal Men, Superboy or Dr. Graves came out, a couple of members would heckle me, "Hey, when are these alleged scripts of yours coming out, liar boy?" If you are an aspiring writer and you learn no other lesson from me, learn to keep your mouth shut until you actually have the check. Even when it seems 99% certain, wait until you have the check…and to be real safe, wait until it clears.)

All of that happened before I'd graduated from University High (rah!). Once I did, I had to figure out what would be my next…really, my first step. I didn't like submitting to editors in far away cities. I decided that at least to start, I wanted to try and sell an editor in the L.A. area so I could go in, talk to the guy and learn more about what I'd done right or, more likely, wrong. I scanned the newsstands and discovered that Laugh-In magazine, based on the then-popular TV show, was published in Los Angeles. In fact, its offices were right up there on Highland Avenue in Hollywood, not far from the comic book shops I visited via bus about once a week. So I bought the current issue, went to the comic shops and found a few back issues to buy, and studied them that evening. Then I sat down and wrote six articles in the style of the magazine, which resembled a low-budget MAD more than it resembled the TV series.

The next day, I took the bus up to Hollywood and Highland with my six articles and walked a few blocks to the building that housed Laufer Publishing Company. I stood outside for a few minutes, steeling up my unsteeled courage to go in and try to sell my writing cold to a total stranger. That was the first time I'd ever done that and it was darn near the last.

Finally, I went up, found the receptionist, cleared a hot tub of phlegm from my throat and said, "Could you tell the editor there's a struggling young comedy writer here who'd like to see him?"

Without missing a beat, she picked up the phone, pressed a button and said, "George, there's a struggling young comedy writer out here who'd like to see you."

I could hear most of what he said through the receiver and then she repeated it for me: "He said if you come back in an hour, he'll give you all the time you need." I thanked her, went out and got a slice of pizza, then came back and sold the editor three of the six articles I'd written the night before. He said, "If you don't mind waiting about twenty minutes, I can have them cut you a check right now." I said I didn't mind waiting twenty minutes for that and I wondered to myself how he'd manage to get fired before those twenty minutes were up. Somehow, he did not…and I walked out with his urging to submit more and an impressively large check.

It was way more than my father was making per week and he didn't understand. He thought I was selling drugs or something. Was the check even real?

As it turned out, it was but it was the last money I'd make from Laugh-In magazine. The editor wasn't let go twenty minutes after deciding to buy something I'd written but he was, two weeks later. In fact, they not only fired him, they fired the whole magazine, shutting down production. It was so unexpected that the editor hadn't even gotten around to reading the second batch of material I handed in…so none of it was purchased and the material I'd sold him that first day never saw print.

Still, it was a definite step up in my career. This time, at least, I'd gotten a check before my editor was fired…and I did wind up writing other things for Laufer's ongoing publications which were mostly in the area of teenage fan stuff and movie star gossip.

My father couldn't understand my "salary" — and he kept using that term, which was part of the problem. I'd made a lot my first week working for this company. I made nothing the next week. I made something in-between the week after. He understood the concept of a freelance writer but he had a little trouble with the concept of freelance pay. I wrote things every week but I didn't get paid every week…so weren't they cheating me those weeks? It all averaged out to a decent income, a notch higher than his…but what the hell was my salary? And how come I was home so much instead of going into an office every day like he did?

I mean, that's how jobs worked, right? You went into the office all day, worked from 9-to-5 or 8-to-4 or some set hours…and then on payday, they gave you a check for a fixed amount, less deductions. My checks also didn't have any deductions. What was that all about? (He worked for the Internal Revenue Service, remember…) And when he asked me when payday was, I had to say, "I don't know. I think they pay me whenever they get around to it."

I was actually doing rather well as a professional writer. My first six months, I made more than he was making…but it all seemed very suspicious and unKosher to him. And unsteady. He was right about the unsteady part…but as I began to sell to more and more markets, I got fairly confident that I could keep it up for a while, maybe even the rest of my life. Now, I just had to convince my father. One of these days when I write one of these, I'll tell you how I did that.

Kim Thompson, co-publisher at Fantagraphics Books, died this morning from the lung cancer he'd been battling since last February. He was 57 years old and he passed with his wife Lynn at his side. His other partner (and friend of 3.6 decades) Gary Groth has posted a much better obit than I could ever assemble — so I'll just tell you a little about Kim…

Kim was a man of great humor and industry.  He had a great laugh — a really great, from-the-gut laugh, the kind only found in people who love the world around them enough to find things funny.

The vast body of books of comic art he published, edited, nurtured and otherwise midwifed testify to how good he was at all he did.  The overflowing shelf of Eisner Awards also makes the point, though not as well. Check out the books themselves.

He had a passion for presenting the best material Fantagraphics could get its mitts on and presenting it in the best possible way. I knew this before Carolyn and I started working with him to bring forth the collections of Walt Kelly's Pogo…but I don't think I expected to like working with Kim as much as I did. He met every problem with grand spirit and you could hear the gears whirring as he tried to figure out, "Okay, how do we solve this and make the book better?"  That was always his first concern.  I'm not sure he even had a second concern but if he did, it was a distant second.  It's so sad to lose a guy like that.  So sad.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy visit New York in 1932…

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal famously said that his party, the Republican Party, had to stop being The Stupid Party. A nice sentiment…but he just wrote an editorial that is kind of based on the assumption that Republicans are so stupid they'll believe any negative thing about Democrats. You can read it here and it's kind of amazing. It sounds like it was ghosted by Michael Savage or one of those "Liberals suck the blood of young virgins" talk show hosts like Michael Savage.

I have a lot of smart, reasonable right-wing friends but every so often, I run into someone who has an image of liberals that bears no resemblance to reality; that reminds me of when I was sitting in a comic book editorial meeting one time and the assignment was to create the most hateful, evil villains in the history of the medium. (The meeting never led to an actual published project but there were exchanges like, "How about if they have a ray that will torture every man, woman and child to the point where they will all commit suicide just to end the pain?" "No, that's too nice..")

I don't for a minute believe that Governor Jindal thinks the Democratic Party is 90% of what he says it is. I'm just kinda stunned that he thinks that's the way his followers should be thinking. Maybe somebody oughta remind him that all conservatives live in trailer parks, practice incest, hate minorities, worship Jesus but loathe the poor, etc., etc. Here are some other folks who think Jindal has not just jumped the shark but pole-vaulted over Sea World…

Kevin Drum on how John Boehner may let immigration reform pass but in a way that allows many members of his party to condemn it.

This kind of thing is not new. A lot of our Congressfolks and Senators are secretly for a lot of things they say they're against and vice-versa. Years ago, after Tip O'Neill stepped down as Speaker of the House, he appeared on an interview show — I'm thinking it was Lou Gordon's — and he discussed this. Said Tip, one of the secrets to his job was being able to count votes in order to be able to give the guys on his side (Democrats) permission to vote contrary to the party position. There was a bill — I don't recall what it was — that Democrats wanted to pass and Republicans didn't…but there were Southern Democrats who'd pay a price for that at the ballot box. So O'Neill said something like, "I had to make sure we had enough votes so certain Democrats could vote against it and scream about it but it would still pass. Every one of those guys wanted it to pass and would have voted for it if that had been necessary. But in their districts, it was not popular and…well, they were pretty damn happy when I could tell them, 'I've got enough votes locked up. You can vote against it.' One of them went out and denounced it as a monstrosity and an affront to human decency."

Okay, please do this for me, people. My longtime friend Carol Lay has a Kickstarter up to fund her newest comic book creation, Murderville. I've known Carol for years and everything she has written or drawn (and especially both) has been worth your attention and patronage. This will be a great comic if it happens but I'm worried it ain't gonna happen. It's looking like she's about to fall just a little too short.

Go to the Kickstarter page. If you've never backed something over there, this would be a great time to sign up and get your tootsies wet. If you have backed Kickstarter projects before, you know the great sense of satisfaction 'n' pride you get from helping out a great talent and helping them to avoid the compromises and shadows of corporate funding.

Pledge whatever you can. The $25 level is a tremendous bargain. You get a copy of the comic book on paper, a copy as a PDF plus an original signed sketch by Carol. The sketch alone is worth twice that. The $100 level gets you a page of original art from the book — also worth twice that amount. At least.

I don't ask you for much. I haven't even hinted lately that if you enjoy this site, you could show your appreciation by sending bucks my way. Instead, I'm asking you to send them Carol's way because that's where I'd rather see your money go. Let's make this happen. You will write me someday and thank me for putting you on to it.

Leonard Maltin informs us that memorabilia from the late Clayton Moore is going up for auction. I only met Mr. Moore once but he was — the term is unavoidable — a real straight-shooter. He was quite devoted to doing right by the character who made him famous. When I met him, he was making a personal appearance at a Lone Ranger restaurant — a chain that didn't last long, perhaps because the food was so painful, it made you want to bite on a silver bullet. He gave a masterful performance that day, meeting and greeting folks, many of whom probably didn't grasp that this wasn't just some actor who'd been hired to put on the costume. This was the real guy from the TV show. He talked to everyone perfectly in character and when he became aware that I was more interested in meeting Clayton Moore than the Lone Ranger, he took me aside and talked to me as Clayton Moore. But not in front of others. In front of others, he had to be the Lone Ranger…and boy, was he good at it.

About half an hour ago, I posted a long piece that concerned, in part, a now-defunct seaside oasis of amusement in Southern California called Pacific Ocean Park.  Here's a look at the place when it was relatively sparkling and new.  By the time I went there in the mid-sixties, they should have had signs that said that in order to ride the rides, you had to be at least as tall as the cockroaches…

Barack Obama has finally found a way to bring this nation together: Americans of all ages, races and creeds do not want us to get involved in Syria. Well, maybe that should be Americans of all ages, races and creeds who are not John McCain. Anyway, Fred Kaplan tries to grasp what Obama is thinking by dipping a toe or two into dangerous water.

Here's an image that shows you why the Republicans may not win all the elections they want to win for a long time.

As I've mentioned here the other day, my father had this horrible, horrible job at the Internal Revenue Service. If another kid at school pulled the old "My dad can beat up your dad" line, I'd fire back with "Oh, yeah? Well, my dad can audit your dad!"

But that was a hollow threat as mine was not an accountant. Matter of fact, he really didn't know how to make out tax forms any better than most people. Friends and family members would ask him to do their 1040s for them and rather than say no — he hated to say no to anyone about anything — he'd take them on and then my mother would sit down with the manual and figure out how to fill in the forms. She sort of enjoyed it because then she got to see how much money everyone made.

My father's position with the I.R.S. was as follows: If you hadn't paid your taxes in, oh, more than five years…or if an auditor had ruled that you owed more taxes and you hadn't coughed up yet…you'd receive a visit from my father. So he went through life with a lot of people hating to see him and then taking their anger (often, self-anger) out on him.

His usual mission was to negotiate some sort of payment plan with you…but he had no power to sign off on one. He'd go over your finances and suggest, "Well, can you pay thirty dollars a week?" That would be a huge hardship for you at that point but you'd grudgingly agree to do without lunch on weekends so you could pay the thirty. Then he'd go to his superior who'd look at the proposed plan and say, "No. Tell them it has to be fifty!" And he'd have to return to you with the bad news.

You can probably name more painful tasks than that…just nothing that would have caused my father more grief. He simply felt too sorry for people who were in financial trouble, especially if it wasn't their fault and if they had kids to feed. Few things made him more upset than a case where children were suffering because their parents were spending all their money on liquor or hookers or anything of the sort.

And one of those other few things began in 1969 when a man named Richard M. Nixon took office. During those years, the policy in his office — dictated from on high — was to sock it to lower-income folks and to let the rich ones, especially Republican donors, off lightly. He'd come home some days and say, "Another poor person has to pay more so that one of Nixon's multi-millionaire friends can pay nothing." One time, I heard him yelling in the living room and rushed out to see what he was yelling about.

The news was showing a party that the then-president had thrown at his "Western White House" in San Clemente. It was Nixon surrounded by many of his friends and my father was pointing at certain of those friends and saying, "I had a case on that one and that one and that one…" Some of this came out in the Watergate Hearings and it made him very happy. A few years ago, I met John Dean, the Nixon lawyer who'd spilled most of the beans, and I thanked him for doing that. On behalf of my late father.

My male parent was supposed to keep his cases confidential, even from his family, but I occasionally heard about one. He had a case — a very long, ugly case — against a man who was prominent in the animation business. It dragged on for a few years with my father playing Inspector Javert to the animator's Jean Valjean but it was finally settled and I think the fellow lost his house in the process. Two decades later at a cartoon festival, June Foray introduced me to the animator and he stared at me for a long second.

"Evanier…" he muttered, trying to remember. "I knew someone once with that name…"

"Oh, it's a very common name," I quickly told him. "I run into ten or twenty Evaniers a day." (I think there are less than twenty in the entire country…) He never did place it.

There were other cases on famous people, including a prominent TV right-winger who scolded liberals for not loving their country enough. My father seriously pondered ways to "leak" to the press how though this fellow may have loved America, he was doing everything possible to never pay it a dime. Ultimately though, Bernard Evanier was incapable of doing anything illegal or unethical…and to be honest, a little afraid of losing the only job he thought he could do or get.

My favorite case of his that I knew about involved a rather shoddy (but beloved by many) amusement facility out in Santa Monica called Pacific Ocean Park. It was in operation out there from 1958 to 1967. What happened in 1967? My father closed it down.

Or rather, he helped close it down. The owners owed the government millions. The place was falling apart and a lot of the rides were still operating even though the departments that monitor such things said they were on the verge of being declared unsafe. Making the necessary repairs would have cost more than P.O.P. could be expected to gross over the next few years. My father attempted to negotiate a deal where the owners would be able to remodel the park and bring its attractions up to code, make a profit and then pay their back taxes…but the math simply wouldn't work. When it all fell apart, the word came from above: Shut 'er down! And one morning, a veritable S.W.A.T. team of taxmen did just that.

My father had to get up at 5:30 AM to be there at seven when they moved in. Every entrance had to be padlocked and posted with a notice that the owners would face felony charges if they touched the locks or attempted to gain entrance. That was the easy part. The tough one was that everything in the park had to be inventoried and all the perishable goods (ice cream, hot dogs, etc.) had to be removed from the premises. He came home that night around 10 PM, dead tired but proclaiming proudly, "We did it."

Before he collapsed into bed, he watched the 11:00 local news where the shutdown was the lead story. In it, he heard people denouncing the "Gestapo tactics" of the I.R.S. agents who'd taken away their beloved playground…and there he was on the screen, being likened to Nazis for doing his job, trying to collect what was owed. It was not one of my father's happier evenings.

He hated being thought of a villain by anyone. He knew it came with the job and he understood why people despised the Internal Revenue Service. He said, "I hate paying my bills too but I do it." A few days later, he sat me down for a father-to-offspring chat in which he repeated something he'd said to me on several previous occasions: "Do whatever you want with your life, son. Just make sure you can make a living at it and you love it."

I'd already told him that I intended to be a professional writer…a goal I set around age six and never really considered changing. I sometimes changed my mind about what I'd be a professional writer of and there was a point in there when I wanted to be a writer-cartoonist — though never a cartoonist without the writer part. But I couldn't conceive of a future in which I wasn't a writer. I still can't.

A few years after that particular talk with him, I graduated high school and got serious about pursuing my long-planned profession. I got lucky right away. My first week trying in earnest, I made about three times as much money as my father was then making per week. But it took a while before I convinced him that I could really do it on a regular basis. I'll tell you about that in the third one of these…coming soon to a blog near you.

Bernie Sahlins has died at the age of 90. If you don't know who that was, you shouldn't be faulted. The man kept a very low profile…but he was one of the founders of Second City and one of the most important people to impact American humor in the latter half of the twentieth century. Go read the obit and learn about a man who discovered and/or nurtured more prominent comic actors than just about anyone you could name.

Because of what day it is…

A lot of folks seem to think that we're about to get two announcements of major Supreme Court decisions, possibly one tomorrow and the other the following Monday. One may be a victory or defeat for Gay Marriage. The other may be a victory or defeat for Affirmative Action. About all it's possible to predict is that two or three justices are solidly on each side in both cases and that there are one, perhaps two "swing votes" that will decide each issue. Remember when the Supreme Court decided the important stuff 8-1? Or even 9-0?

Beyond that, SCOTUS watchers have had a pretty bad track record lately predicting the swingers so I'm ignoring them. I'm also going to ignore CNN, which has gotten the last few major verdicts wrong after they were announced.

The decision on Gay Marriage, whatever it is, won't stop that movement. Might slow it down but won't stop it. A recent poll in California now shows a 22-point gap with residents of the state supporting letting gays marry by a margin of 58% to 36%. That's wide enough that if it ever came to another ballot, the opposition would probably just toss in the terrycloth. Heck, by the time it could be put to another vote, it might gain another ten points. That's about how fast opinion has moved on this issue. It's moving that way in most states.