That's a photo of my best friend (male division), Sergio Aragonés. Posting his picture on my blog is way cheaper than buying him a birthday present.
People keep asking us, "How did you two meet?" Between around 1966 and 1969, there was a thing called the Los Angeles Comic Book Club that met every Saturday afternoon at Palms Recreation Center, which was (and still is) located not far from where the San Diego Freeway crosses the Santa Monica Freeway. A whole bunch of teenagers would gather there each week to buy comics, sell comics, trade comics but most of all to talk about and argue about comics. I was not the founder but I was its president.
In the group's history, we had one guest speaker. It was Sergio. One of our members saw in a magazine article that Sergio lived in L.A. (in Beverly Hills, actually) and found him listed in the phone book. The member called him up and invited Sergio to come to one of our meetings…and he did. That was the first time we met, though we didn't talk much that day. Later, I ran into Sergio at a number of local events relating to comic books and we got to know each other.
I believe this was in 1968 so year after next, it'll be fifty years I've know this man. We will have been collaborating on comic books for about forty of those and in all that time, we've had exactly one argument that lasted more than thirty seconds. That one lasted about three minutes. That's pretty good.
We get along fine because of mutual respect. I get along with him because I know he is a brilliant humorist and cartoonist and a very smart, very nice man.
And he gets along with me because I know things that could get him arrested, deported and used to drum up support for that stupid wall Donald Trump wants to build. He probably could get Mexico to pay for that wall if he promised to keep Sergio on this side of it.
Happy Sergio Day, my friend. Please take the twenty minutes to draw the next issue of Groo before you go out celebrating.