Monthly Archives: April 2017

Every few years, the contract between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers expires and a new one must be negotiated. Sometimes, the negotiations are simple and sometimes, they are not. When they are not, it is because someone at the AMPTP — or at at least one of the member companies that comprise the AMPTP — decides he or she can be a hero and advance his or her career by engineering a deal that pays the writers less or at least denies us cost o' living increases.

I joined the WGA on April Fool's Day of 1976 so I have been through many of these and sometimes been fairly close to the negotiations. It is my observation that these dust-ups are never about what's "fair," at least from the Producers' standpoint. And when they say things like, "The business is hurting…everyone needs to understand that and accept some cuts," that is always, 100% of the time, horseshit. For them, these dickerings are only about one thing: Getting as much as possible. The less we get, the more they get.

Whenever Renegotiation Time rolls around, my guild assembles something called the Pattern of Demands — a wish list of things we'd like to discuss. Many times, it is a waste of time because the studios simply refuse to address anything on our list. Their negotiators literally end the meeting if our reps bring out the list. One of the Producers' lawyers in years past liked to say things like, "We are never going to let these sessions be about what you want. They will only be about what we are willing to give you."

If anyone does look at our Pattern of Demands, they'll see items about increased compensation but they will also always see issues that are not directly about money. We want our work to be respected more. We want to be listened-to more on creative matters. We want minorities (including older writers of any color) to be given more consideration. We want our credits to be protected and so forth. Call these the non-monetary issues.

There are people in management at the studios who care about such things but we tend to not negotiate with those folks. The people we deal with only care about the money and with keeping as much of it as possible for their employers. If they address the non-monetary issues at all, it's because they think they can trade one of the unimportant non-monetary issues for an important monetary one. In the '85 negotiations for instance, the Producers demanded a change in credit procedures that would have gutted the WGA's ability to control who received screen credit. They didn't really care about that. They just wanted to be able to say, "Okay, we'll drop our demands about credits if you drop your demands about money."

Because we care (somewhat) about the non-monetary issues and they don't, sometimes that works. Indeed, in '85, they dropped those demands but in the same bargaining sessions, we accepted for other reasons a lowering of the fees we were paid when films or TV shows we wrote were put out on home video. The former cost them nothing. The latter cost us billions. From the Producers' standpoint, that was a wildly-successful negotiation. That year, I don't think they ever even listened to anything we had in our Pattern of Demands.

Even factoring in that our brief strike that year cost them some cash, the guys who engineered that deal for them were superstar heroes. It was like they'd made a dozen movies as lucrative as Star Wars or Titanic. Each time we embark on a new negotiation, there's someone there who dreams of doing that again.

It has been my observation that Writers Strikes all start the same way: Someone at the AMPTP makes an assessment of how strong and united the WGA is at the moment: How willing is the membership to go on strike? If that assessment is way too low, there will probably be a strike. The Producers will agree among themselves to offer us X as a final, non-negotiable offer. They will also agree among themselves that if/when (almost certainly when) we turn down their final, non-negotiable offer of X, they will offer us the really and truly final, non-negotiable offer of Y.

Y will be a tiny bit better than X. The theory here is that maybe, rather than reject that offer and go on strike, we will grab Y and congratulate ourselves on a huge victory, forgetting that Y is still "The Producers get more and the Writers get less."

It's kind of like if someone came to you and said, "We're going to kick you in the crotch ten times" and you said, "The hell you will, I won't stand for that" and they said, "How about if we kick you in the crotch five times?" and you yelled "Deal!" And then as they were kicking you in the crotch the five times, you were yelling between shrieks of agony, "I sure outsmarted them on that one! ARRRGHHHHH!"

When they lowball us on X and we then don't accept Y, that's when you have your long strikes…because the Producers have a great deal of trouble moving off Y. They have a rule of unanimity. The major member companies of that Alliance have to agree on all offers and sometimes, they aren't able to do that.

In '88, they agreed on X and Y — terrible, terrible offers to lower our pay and health benefits at a time when the industry was raking in record profits. But given our spectacular fold in '85, I guess they couldn't resist trying it again. The "X" offer was the equivalent of "Last time, you let us kick you in the crotch fifty times. This time, we're going for a hundred." The "Y" was only slightly less awful.

And that's a lesson we all learned back then: Once you take a bad offer, you're setting yourself up to get an even worse one next time.

But they had drastically underestimated the Guild that time. Owing to better leadership and the lesson of '85, we were much more united, much more willing to resist. We voted down X by a much wider margin than the Producers had expected and we voted down Y by almost as much.

The AMPTP couldn't agree on another offer and there was also a stubborn determination to not let one labor union "win" a strike, lest others get the idea that maybe they too could. So we had a strike that lasted 155 days. That was what it took to get to a deal that they could have given us in the first place if they hadn't figured we'd grab Y or maybe even X.

So now it's time to play this game again. Negotiations are ongoing and the Guild leadership has voted unanimously to ask for a Strike Authorization from the members. This is not a vote to strike. Understand that. It is a vote to empower the leadership to call a strike if they feel it is absolutely necessary.

I am sure they will get that authorization but the magnitude will be critical. If it's by 51% or even 70%, the Producers will figure that the Guild is weak and divided and that a lousy offer will be accepted. They'll assume that even if we do go on strike, it won't last long. If the vote is 90% or over…well, that might make them think a bad offer won't be cost-effective. (The vote will not be 100% or even a few points shy of that because some of those voting will be writer-producers or writer-directors and some of those folks vote in what they see as the best interests of their non-writer functions.)

The voting begins Wednesday and you can kinda figure out what I hope will happen. Some articles on the state of the negotiation can be found here. In the video below, you'll see members of the WGA Board and Negotiating Committee urge a "yes" vote and explain why it's important.

The Guild currently has excellent, responsible leadership and I'm optimistic that they can bring back a deal that everyone can live with without work stoppages, picketing and all the ill feelings and ancillary damage that come with a strike. But they need to have the membership behind them and a strong Strike Authorization would be the measure of that.

There seem to be some new members who, not having lived through these skirmishes before, think we should not threaten to strike so as to show we're "reasonable." That has never been what happens. If you announce you're willing to consider a dreadful offer, that's what you'll get.

Some also seem to think that voting for a Strike Authorization is the same thing as voting to strike. No. A strike results when we get a take-it-or-leave-it offer we cannot possibly accept and we have to leave-it. To give our leaders a Strike Authorization is to give them more power in the negotiation — power that will increase the likelihood that we will get an offer we can accept.

Most of you reading this aren't WGA members who'll be voting but I would hope you'd at least understand that if we strike, it will not be because we enjoy it, or because we want to kick the Producers in their crotches. We just don't want them to do that to us. Listen to some of our leaders…

A rant about stars who haven't started their 8 PM concert by the time on this post.

I have some catching-up to do here…

• Of great note is this piece by Jonathan Chait. Last week, Trump declared that he'd had "…one of the most successful 13 weeks in the history of the presidency." Chait explains why it hasn't been at all successful and it also hasn't been 13 weeks.  In fact, it still hasn't been 13 weeks even though to some of us, it feels like 13 years.
• And Kevin Drum says much the same thing.
• Chait also makes the case that Trump, whose shining qualification to be prez was that he was a Great Negotiator, is turning out to be a pretty lousy negotiator. He's also turning out to be George W. Bush with the extra added ingredient of racism.
• Much of what Trump is doing in Syria is the same thing Obama did in Syria, no matter how Trump may deny or disguise it. As Jeff Stein notes, Democrats have about the same reaction to Trump's bombing as they did to Obama's but Republicans who hated what Obama did love the same thing when it comes from The Donald. Gee, I wonder what's different.
• And if you want to know what's up with Syria — and I couldn't blame you if you didn't — read Fred Kaplan on the lack of a forward-thinking strategy. Also, read Fred Kaplan on how Trump may outdo Richard Nixon when it comes to making our enemies think we have a madman in charge. This time, it may be true.

On a lighter side, Stephen Colbert continues to get high ratings but he says he'd gladly trade them for a better president.

Kevin Kline discusses things going awry on stage…

Several folks have written me about the United Airlines incident to suggest that the passenger, Dr. David Dao, was at fault for not quickly complying with police orders. Others have linked me to this article allegedly by a pilot's wife giving the company's side of it.

She's right that the airlines have the right to just kick a paying passenger off a flight. Back in 2012, United Airlines was in serious P.R. trouble. This is not a new thing for them and back then, my buddy Joe Brancatelli wrote this article. It was about how airlines have all the rights and passengers have none…and that equation has not changed. And she's correct that sometimes, the airlines need seats to shuttle their employees to where they need them to keep the system functioning.

Where she starts to lose me is when she brings up 9/11 and couches matters in terms of security. That's a nice, all-purpose excuse which the airlines could use to justify any kind of misbehavior. ("Trans-Debris Airlines is sorry that we had to lock your six-year-old son in the overhead baggage compartment and give his seat to one of our corporate executives but there were safety concerns which we're not at liberty to explain, especially since 9/11.") I didn't hear anyone claim they needed to remove Dr. Dao from the flight because someone thought he was a hijacker.

And she really loses me when she rebuts the statement, "It's the airline's fault for not planning better!" by writing…

You obviously have no clue about the complexities of aviation travel and should do some research. There are about a million and one things that can cause a crew shortage including but not limited to weather, maintenance, weather, connecting fight delays, weather, FAA timeout regs, and did I mention weather?

In the incident in question, no one has cited weather or any of those other situations as a justification. No one has suggested that if, say, a hurricane was about to hit, an airline might not be justified in making some decisions that inconvenience passengers. I also have this strange hunch that the airlines — not just United but all of them — have been having 'round-the-clock meetings to discuss how to avoid this kind of thing by planning better. Yeah, this whole brouhaha would not have happened if Dr. Dao had behaved better. It also would not have happened if United had figured out they needed that seat before he was told he could board the plane.

It is true that we, as consumers, don't always understand all the invisible-to-us reasons why some businesses do what they do. That does not mean our complaints are wrong or that we should stop making them. I don't really know how my sewage system works but if it starts emptying into my sock drawer, I'm going to at least suspect my plumber has done something wrong. In the meantime, Matt Yglesias has a good, long article on what's wrong the airlines today. [SPOILER ALERT: It's because so many of their customers care about getting the lowest price and nothing else.]

You've all read and heard about the guy who was dragged off a United Airlines flight and injured in the process, even though he'd done nothing wrong except maybe choosing to fly United. You may also have seen some articles that made him out to be not the best human being because, after all, some people deserve whatever happens to them.

You may even have seen some clueless apologies from United for what happened. Rex Huppke tells us what they should have said.

I've gotta tell you: I've never had good luck with United. I stopped flying it years ago after one horrible experience. What made it horrible was not that something went wrong but that when it did, there was absolutely no one to talk to who could or would straighten things out. Ideally, you'd like there to be a department or a counter where you could go and someone there would have said, "That shouldn't have happened, sir. On behalf of the company, I apologize and we'll do everything we can to make things right." But there was no such person to say that. I waited 45 minutes in a line at a woefully-understaffed Customer Service counter to finally be told they didn't have any authority or interest. If they wanna undo the damage to their reputation, they ought to be looking to improve in that area.

Marc Summers has hosted a helluva lot of TV shows including Double Dare, Couch Potatoes, Unwrapped, The Home Show and What Would You Do?, plus he turns up on the Food Network more often than Kosher Salt. He's also been the producer of a good portion of the helluva lot of TV shows on which he appears — obviously, a skilled and industrious guy. Today, he appears on Stu's Show where its host, Stu Shostak, will pry out the story of how Mr. Summers, who got into TV as a page, made it from the second-lowest job in show business to being one of its busiest performers. (First-lowest is hosting an interview show on Fox News.)

Stu's Show can be heard live (almost) every Wednesday at that Stu's Show website and you can listen for free there and then. Webcasts start at 4 PM Pacific Time, 7 PM Eastern and other times in other climes. They run a minimum of two hours and sometimes go to three or beyond. Then shortly after a show concludes, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are 99 cents each or you can save a ton o' dough with Stu's "Buy three and get a fourth one free" offer. Well, maybe not quite a ton…

White House press secretary Sean Spicer was speaking today about how Syrian dictator Bashar Assad was a horrible person because he used poison gas on his own people. Not that long ago, we were hearing how Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was a horrible person because he used poison gas on his own people. So here's what I want to know…

What is it about gassing your own people that makes you so awful? Wouldn't you be pretty dreadful if you used poison gas on anyone? Would we think more highly of Assad or Gaddafi if they'd gassed people in neighboring countries? Someone help me out here.

The group Pearl Jam was just inducted into the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame…and here, making the speech that notes the honor, is David Letterman…

I thank you all for hundreds (I haven't counted — might be thousands) of condolence notes and let me make the following clear: I am fine. Honest. The loss of Carolyn was a long, wrenching, maddeningly-inevitable process and I did most of my mourning and crying in increments along the way.

I was sad when she could no longer walk. I was even sadder when she could barely talk. Well before Sunday night when she finally stopped breathing, I had lost my Carolyn. She was alive the last few days only on a technicality. I'm sure everyone who's "been there/done that" will understand how one of the many emotions that accompanied her official passing was a sense of relief — for myself as well as for her. The last week or two redoubled or maybe retripled my hope that by the time my death is looming, there'll be a legal, mature process via which I can elect to opt out of the final, painful months.

It may be different for you but I cope with tragedy by hurrying to normalize my life. My view is that when you lose a loved one, it is not necessary to grieve and mourn and be in pain for a long period of time. I have seen people do this because, it seemed to me, they thought that was expected of them; that it was somehow disrespectful of the deceased not to visibly suffer for their absence. I tell people who lose mates or parents or close friends, "You don't have to do that. You don't have to sick yourself up and damage your own life to prove you loved them."

You can if you want to but you don't have to. When I go, I hope all my friends and loved ones really, really miss me for about an hour and then go on with their lives. The last thing I'd want to do is harm those lives. If there's any sort of memorial service for me, I may leave a letter for someone to read aloud. It would essentially say, "Get over me." (Note: That is not the same as "Forget me.")

Carolyn was just so splendid in mind and spirit. Experiences we shared and feelings I felt will be with me forever, no matter who may henceforth blunder into my silly ongoing existence. I came to this way of looking at life — or the lack, thereof — when that previous lady friend died on me. I also learned not to think of her death — which in that case was jarringly unexpected — as something she'd done to me. I know someone who is still angry at their mate for getting killed in a car crash and that is truly a self-destructive way to view something like that.

Life goes on, except when it doesn't. I appreciate all the advice in those e-mails and Facebook messages but I am fine. Just as Carolyn would have wanted me to be.

People have written to ask if they can make a donation somewhere in her name. Sure. Of course. I support two charities and Carolyn liked both of them. One is The Stray Cat Alliance, which deals with the epidemic of feral felines. The other is Operation USA, which does a lot of the same things, only for human beings. These two efforts are always grateful for any legal tender you can send their way and they put it to very, very good use. Carolyn was very big on the concept of helping others, as are they.

I have much to do in the next week or two but I will be normalizing activity on this blog, a.s.a.p. Thank you all for putting up with my absence, and for the many nice notes.

A truly lovely person left us last night around 10 PM. Carolyn Kelly was, as many of you know, the daughter of the great cartoonist Walt Kelly, creator of the newspaper strip, Pogo. She was also a cartoonist in her own right and some years after his death when the strip was revived for a time, she briefly drew her father's greatest creation. I occasionally said that she was his greatest co-creation but she thought that was excessive and asked me to stop saying it.

Though she dabbled in other cartooning and in animation, most of her artistic endeavors were in the area of book design. In 2011, she united those skills with a passionate desire to see her father's work properly preserved and made available. That was when she began working on the award-winning series from Fantagraphics Books that is reprinting that glorious feature.

She not only co-edited and designed the books and painted the covers but with a devotion that transcended mere editorial conscientiousness, supervised and sometimes personally did the necessary restoration work. On many of the older strips, only imperfect source material was available so precision surgery had to be done if these books were going to be done right. Carolyn did her part of it right using one of my computers and my drawing table. She often put long, long hours into just one daily strip to get it the way her dad had originally drawn it.

That devotion was one of the reasons the books have not come out as scheduled. So was the difficulty finding good-enough source material. And yet another was medical: Her original co-editor, Kim Thompson, died of cancer in 2013. By a cruel coincidence, Carolyn was dealing with her own cancer problem at the time.

Carolyn would have wanted everyone to know that Gary Groth, Eric Reynolds and the other folks at Fantagraphics have been sympathetic, understanding and heroic in taking the blame for a tardiness that was not of their making. Volume Four will be out later this year and the rest will follow on schedule. She very much wanted the series to be completed, thereby restoring and preserving her father's magnum opus for all time and I promised her that will happen. The books won't be the same without her but her overall design will endure and fortunately, we have reached the period chronologically in the strip for which there is source material that needs much less restoration.

For a long time, Carolyn believed she was winning her battle against breast cancer. This was before it became other kinds of cancer in other body parts. The first diagnosis, after all, was more than twelve years ago and she was still with us…sort of. In the three years preceding last April, she was largely confined to her apartment for weeks at a time, rarely leaving for any non-essential reason.

Last April though, the pains and tumors reached a stage that necessitated her hospitalization. She was there for a month and then we moved her to a Skilled Nursing Facility, then on to Assisted Living. It was so very sad and though everything credible was tried — as well as a few incredible things — there didn't seem to be any way to stop the spread of the disease. The last few weeks in hospice have been particularly ghastly.

Many of you are aware of the reason I witnessed Carolyn's struggle, up close and personal. For around twenty years with occasional intervals off, Carolyn was the woman in my life. I met her at a Comic-Con International in San Diego. She first attended one year when asked to accept the Hall of Fame Award for her father. She returned the following year to see her dear friend Maggie Thompson, and to intensify a quest to find out whatever she didn't know about her father. Because Walt was married three times — Carolyn was born of the first marriage — she missed some sections of his life.

Not that father and daughter weren't close at times. My favorite of all the many internet arguments in which I've been engaged was years ago on a newsgroup about cartoonists. A gent there insisted that Walt Kelly often used flexible-tip pen points on the Pogo strip in the mid-fifties. After checking with Carolyn, I politely informed him on that public forum that he was in error; that Kelly had done all that with a brush. He posted back indignantly, "My source says he used a pen." I replied, "My source was sitting on his lap when he inked."

Now and then, she really was. Later, after Walt moved out and divorced her mother, there were periods when he gave Carolyn art lessons, let her stay in his New York apartment and — always — encouraged her in her career. Still later, as he was dying out here in California, Carolyn — who then lived in New York — traveled west and slept on the floor of his hospital room for weeks, working with Kelly's third wife Selby to care for this man they both loved dearly.

That was in 1973 but still, around a quarter-century later and after she moved to Los Angeles, Carolyn was trying to learn whatever more there was to learn about him. At one point, Maggie said to her, "You ought to get to know Mark Evanier. He may be able to help you."

That's how I met her in 1996 and it was not, as they say, love at first sight. Not long before, another "woman in my life" had died — this one most unexpectedly and at a much younger age. I really didn't want to get too involved with anyone else just then, if ever…but Carolyn was lovely and funny and charming and very bright and not the kind of lady with whom one could have a casual, short-term relationship.

So we were friends, just friends for a time. Then in 1997, I was hired as the story editor of an animated TV series called Channel Umptee-3 and Carolyn called and asked if I could get her a tryout to work on the show as an artist. I did and she was hired — by someone who didn't even know I'd arranged her audition. (Look fast and you can spot her screen credit in this video of the show's opening and closing.)

That somehow led to actual dating and…well, you know how these things go. If you believe in omens, you may like this one: The first night Carolyn spent at my house, I awoke in the middle of the night, slipped downstairs without waking her and went to the kitchen for some much-needed juice. As I sipped, I glanced out at the patio where I put out dishes of cat food for the feral felines in the neighborhood.  There, feasting on Friskies, was a live possum.

It wasn't wearing a striped shirt like Pogo does but it was a live possum, the first one I'd ever seen out there. I stood there and actually thought, "Boy, I'm lucky I'm not dating the woman whose father drew Alley Oop."

I wish I could say it was a perfect union but there were fights and separations, mostly about things that now seem frivolous and silly. I guess they always do after you lose someone you love.  The last few years, the quarrels were mostly about matters of medicine and sometimes about trying to get the Pogo books to press. In recent months, it's been all about the cancer and it's been painful in all the ways that pain can affect us.

She was one of the most compassionate people I've ever encountered; the kind who never met a person in need — even total strangers — without wanting to help them in some way. In fact, one of the things we argued over at times was my feeling that she was putting way too many other people, including me, ahead of her own needs.

Carolyn had many, many talents to accompany all that niceness. In addition to cartooning and book design, she would crochet magnificent scarves and hats.

Also, she was a superb cook and it was never a matter of slavishly following someone's recipe, not even her own. She would invent on the fly, adding in some of this and a lot of that along with a pinch of something or other, all selected and measured on sheer instinct. That meant the final product was always surprising and when I said, "Hey, this is great. Can you make it again?" her usual answer was that she wasn't sure what she'd done but would try. The next time, it would not be the same but it would usually be even better.

There was an innocence of spirit within her and a fascination with every single thing around her. I am the kind of person who goes somewhere to get there. She was the kind who stops to look at everything along the way, say hello to every passing cat or dog and smell every flower.

She also had the greatest smile I've ever seen on a human being. It was organic and real with nothing lurking behind it but sheer delight.

It was truly a smile you could trust and it was on a person who even if she'd lived to 110 would have been dying way too soon. Maybe there's someone reading this who could resist falling in love with a person like that but I sure couldn't.

I'm going to miss everything about her, even the things that occasionally drove us apart…and what I think I'll miss most of all is that smile. It was a great smile, a superb smile, the kind of smile that could make you want to spend the rest of your days close by, doing things that would make it appear.  Whenever it did, it cheered you greatly because it was — like the person it adorned — absolutely wonderful. I could really use one of those smiles right about now.

I am still healthy. This blog is still more-or-less closed but soon to reopen and when it does, I'll post some observations and stories about Don Rickles and other topics I've missed.

Before he passed, comic creator Jerry Robinson inaugurated the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing — an honor presented each year at the Comic-Con International in San Diego. The award recognizes a writer of comics who produced a splendid body of work but who did not receive proper recognition and/or financial reward. At the time Jerry proposed this award, that was all too true of Bill Finger.

These days, Finger is acknowledged for his contributions to his most important work…but since others are not, the award lives on. This is the annual announcement that as its Administrator, I am now open to receive nominations and suggestions for the 2017 presentation. We give out two of them. One is a posthumous award. The other is for someone who is happily alive and who can (we hope) be there to receive it in person. Here's what else you need to know…

1. This is an award for a body of work as a comic book writer. Every year, a couple of folks nominate their favorite artist. Sometimes, they don't get that "writer" part and sometimes, they argue that their nominee qualifies because their favorite artist has done so many comics, he must have written one or two of them so we can give him this trophy. Wrong. It's for a body of work as a comic book writer. Got that? Also, "a body of work" is not one or two comics you liked written by someone relatively new to the field.
2. This award is for a writer who has received insufficient reward for his or her splendid body of work. It can be insufficient in terms of recognition or insufficient in terms of legal tender or it can, of course, be both. But this is not just an award for writing good comic books.
3. And it's for writing comic books, not comic strips or pulps or anything else. We stretch that definition far enough to include MAD but that's about as far as we'll stretch it.
4. To date, this award has gone to Arnold Drake, Alvin Schwartz, George Gladir, Larry Lieber, Frank Jacobs, Gary Friedrich, Del Connell, Steve Skeates, Don Rosa, Jerry Siegel, Harvey Kurtzman, Gardner Fox, Archie Goodwin, John Broome, Otto Binder, Bob Haney, Frank Doyle, Steve Gerber, Robert Kanigher, Bill Mantlo, Jack Mendelsohn, John Stanley, Don McGregor, Richard E. Hughes and Elliott S! Maggin. Those folks, having already won, cannot win again.
5. If you have already nominated someone in years past, you need not nominate them again. They will be considered for this year's awards.
6. If you nominate someone for the posthumous award, it would help if you also suggested an appropriate person to accept on that person's behalf. Ideally, it would be a relative, preferably a spouse, child or grandchild. It could also be a person who worked with the nominee or — last resort — a friend or historian who can speak about them and their work. And if it's not a relative, we would also welcome suggestions as to an appropriate place for the plaque to reside — say, a museum or with someone who was close to the honoree.

Would you like to nominate someone? If so, here's the new address for nominations. Nominations will be accepted until April 24 when all reasonable suggestions will be placed before our Blue Ribbon Judging Committee. Their selections will be announced some time in May and the presentations will be made at the Eisner Awards ceremony, which is Friday evening at Comic-Con.

Just want to assure you all that I am fine (if a bit sleep-deprived) and that normal posting on this blog will resume shortly. I had a great, if fatiguing, time at WonderCon this past weekend and I'll be telling you about that when I resume telling you about everything.