I spent most of this afternoon at a hospital out in the valley where my longtime friend Scott Shaw! is recuperating from surgery. Let me give you an idea of what "longtime" means in this case…
The entity we now know as Comic-Con International started life as the Golden State Comic Con in 1970. A gentleman named Shel Dorf is generally credited as its founder and while that's not wrong in some senses, I believe others had a lot to do with it, including a fellow named Ken Krueger and a bevy of comic fans in San Diego. In '70, a few months before the first con was held, Shel took most of that bevy on a field trip to the home of Jack and Roz Kirby in Thousand Oaks, California.
Scott Shaw! was in that bevy — exclamation point and all — and that's when he and I first met. So we're talking a month or three over 45 years here. Later on, we worked together on any number of comic books and TV shows…and he even moved in with me for a brief time when his first marriage ended, thereby creating an Odd Couple with two Oscars and no Felix. We have a lot of history there.
A "shattered ankle" (that's his term for it) put him in the hospital and caused him to miss this year's Comic-Con so I went out to see him and he appears to be doing quite well. In fact, in the four hours I was there swapping stories with him, his doctor and a couple of other medical-type folks came by to interrupt our punch lines and tell him he was doing quite well and would be heading for home soon.
He was feeling a lot better and because of that, I was feeling a lot better when I left.