I'm posting this from the carpool lane of the 405, just past the transition from the 5. Traffic is medium-to-heavy all around me as people head north and I find myself wondering how many of them are returning home from a wonderful Comic-Con International. Up ahead, there's a huge U-Haul which looks like it's —
Sorry. I just realized I'm not on the freeway. I'm home. After five hours of driving, I feel like I'm still on the freeway but actually I'm in my office with a comfy keyboard instead of a sweaty steering wheel. The commute was an ordeal both ways but in-between, I had a terrific time and if you were there, so did you. (Matter of fact, a lot of you were there. I was delighted at the number of folks who came up and said you check out this page every day. A few even slipped me cash, saying they didn't have a PayPal account but felt a gratuity was overdue. It felt odd but, hey, you take it where you can get it. There were one or two moments where people tried to engage me in conversation while I was solving some problem relating to one of the 7.320 panels I hosted. If you caught me at one of those moments and I seemed uninterested in what you had to say, my apologies. I was interested in whatever you had to say; honest, I was.)
Today went quickly. At 12:30, my long-time chum (going on 35 years) Tony Isabella and I ganged-up to interview Larry Lieber, who is invariably referred to as "Stan Lee's brother." He is, of course. Just as Harpo was Groucho Marx's brother, Ira was George Gershwin's brother, Robert was John F. Kennedy's brother, etc. The relationship shouldn't utterly obscure genuine individual accomplishment, and Larry was the other writer, the one besides Stan, in the early days of the Marvel Age of Comics. Later, he became primarily an artist and has now been drawing the Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strip for 17 years. That gives him the longest run of anyone who's ever illustrated that character's adventures, to say nothing of the fact that his work has been more widely-circulated than any that has appeared in the comic books. Larry is a fascinating gent and, again, you'll have to wait 'til some magazine prints the transcript to hear all that he said. But the audience (which included another famous brother, Sal Buscema) was fascinated not only with how erudite Larry was on the subject of doing comics but how honest and self-effacing, as well.
Then I had an hour signing my new book at the TwoMorrows booth and that quick, last-minute jaunt around the exhibit hall, followed by several eternities in that carpool lane. It's good to be home but it was very good to be there. Gotta go unpack…
P.S. I took down the sidebar link to the list of panels I hosted at the con. But for those of you who want to see what you missed, here it is.