I've received a number of e-mails disagreeing with me on the year that the San Diego Comic Con moved from the old San Diego Convention Center to the new San Diego Convention Center. And it sure would be a lot easier if all these correspondents agreed with each other but they don't.

So I may have the year wrong, in which case I will make the correction. But it'll be a little while before I have time to do the digging necessary to arrive at an unquestionable answer. If any of you have solid proof and could send it my way, you could save me a lot of time.

The other day in this post, I said that this year's Comic-Con International would be the 56th one and therefore my 56th one. It no longer says that in that post because I received a flurry of e-mails from folks who said my count was off.

This prompted me to try to recall how I'd arrived at the number I cited and I realized how: Someone — an acquaintance of mine — told me that number and I just assumed it was correct.  I forgot that I have acquaintances who don't know what the hell they're talking about.

I decided to do some research and my own math and in so doing, I realized why there's a confusion.  Here is my list…

1. 1970 – Golden State Comic Con – U.S. Grant Hotel
2. 1971 – Golden State Comic Con – Muir College, U.C.S.D. Campus
3. 1972 – San Diego's West Coast Comic Convention – El Cortez Hotel
4. 1973 – San Diego Comic-Con – Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina
5. 1974 – San Diego Comic-Con – El Cortez Hotel
6. 1975 – San Diego Comic-Con – El Cortez Hotel
7. 1976 – San Diego Comic-Con – El Cortez Hotel
8. 1977 – San Diego Comic-Con – El Cortez Hotel
9. 1978 – San Diego Comic-Con – El Cortez Hotel
10. 1979 – San Diego Comic-Con – Convention and Performing Arts Center
11. 1980 – San Diego Comic-Con – Convention and Performing Arts Center
12. 1981 – San Diego Comic-Con – El Cortez Hotel
13. 1982 – San Diego Comic-Con – Convention and Performing Arts Center
14. 1983 – San Diego Comic-Con – Convention and Performing Arts Center
15. 1984 – San Diego Comic-Con – Convention and Performing Arts Center
16. 1985 – San Diego Comic-Con – Convention and Performing Arts Center
17. 1986 – San Diego Comic-Con – Convention and Performing Arts Center
18. 1987 – San Diego Comic-Con – Convention and Performing Arts Center
19. 1988 – San Diego Comic-Con – Convention and Performing Arts Center
20. 1989 – San Diego Comic-Con – Convention and Performing Arts Center
21. 1990 – San Diego Comic-Con – Convention and Performing Arts Center
22. 1991 – San Diego Comic-Con – San Diego Convention Center
23. 1992 – San Diego Comic-Con – San Diego Convention Center
24. 1993 – San Diego Comic-Con – San Diego Convention Center
25. 1994 – San Diego Comic-Con – San Diego Convention Center
26. 1995 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
27. 1996 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
28. 1997 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
29. 1998 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
30. 1999 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
31. 2000 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
32. 2001 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
33. 2002 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
34. 2003 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
35. 2004 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
36. 2005 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
37. 2006 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
38. 2007 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
39. 2008 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
40. 2009 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
41. 2010 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
42. 2011 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
43. 2012 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
44. 2013 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
45. 2014 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
46. 2015 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
47. 2016 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
48. 2017 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
49. 2018 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
50. 2019 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
51. 2022 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center
52. 2023 – Comic-Con International – San Diego Convention Center

So what's the confusion?  I can explain.  My list does not include the one-day "test" con they held in 1970 before the first "real," multi-day convention, the three-day bonus con they held in November of 1975, the two "at home" cons in 2020 and 2021 or the "back from COVID" event they held in November of 2021. If you want to count any or all of them, you can say there have been 52, 53, 54, 55, 56 or 57 of these gatherings.

Take your pick.  The convention operators ignored the test con and the bonus con when they celebrated the 2019 event as Comic-Con #50 so I didn't count the test con or the bonus con either.  I didn't count the two "at home" ones because we were all "at home" and I didn't count the November 2021 one because it was labeled as a Special Edition.  Unless someone finds fault with the above list, I'm sticking with this year's being #53.

One of the routines that took Bob Newhart to stardom…

Jonathan Chait explains why Donald Trump's latest economic proposals are just another part of the G.O.P. crusade to make sure that the richest people pay less tax and the poor and middle class pay more. 'Twas ever thus.

Steve Benen says that Trump wants business leaders who fail to support him to be fired. How does Benen know this? Because Trump wrote on Truth Social, "Business Executives and Shareholder Representatives should be 100% behind Donald Trump! Anybody that's not should be FIRED for incompetence!"

And Eileen Sullivan brings us the latest on Rudy Giuliani's crusade to see how much legal and financial trouble a man can be in at one time. Go, Rudy!

Comic-Con International has announced me as a Special Guest for this year's event which convenes in a little over a month. I'm not sure what's so special about me being a guest there because it's, like, the fiftieth time.

Actually, if you're interested in the stats, this will be the 54th of these conventions. That's not counting the one-day "test" con they held in 1970 before the first "real," multi-day convention. It's also not counting the three-day bonus con they held in November of 1975 and the "back from COVID" event they held in November of 2021.

It will be my 54th convention and I will be hosting fourteen panels over the four days. Before someone asks: My record was hosting sixteen and appearing on one other at the 2008 Comic-Con. As you can see, I've cut back in my old age.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is making the rounds promoting his autobiography which I intend to read. I think the man is a genuine hero who has been accused and attacked by politicians who "are angry at him for being a doctor instead of a politician." What I just surrounded with quote marks is not my phrase. It's what one of my doctors said to me when this country was in the depths of the novel coronavirus. He likened the situation to when patients get mad at him for telling them what the test results say as opposed to what those patients want to hear.

He went on: "Politicians are like spoiled children when someone outranks them on something. Well, doctors usually outrank non-doctors when it comes to matters about medicine." I was reminded of that when I read this piece about Dr. Fauci's recent interview with MSNBC host Ari Melber…

According to Fauci, Trump got the idea that COVID could be treated with hydroxychloroquine — an off-patent antimalarial used for autoimmune diseases — from Fox News' Laura Ingraham. This was despite warnings to the contrary from global health officials; eventually, according to Mediaite, the drug was linked to nearly 17,000 deaths across six countries during the pandemic.

"But I had to continue to tell the truth," Fauci told Melbar. "And he said, 'Why do you keep doing this to me?' Because it's the truth. I'm telling the American public the facts. Hydroxychloroquine doesn't work."

I have doctors I trust and I don't mean that they're infallible. They're just right way more often than, say, a layperson no matter how many online articles he or she has read. And they're right way more often than Laura Ingraham or Donald Trump. If you'd like to join me in Dr. Fauci's memoirs, here's an Amazon link.

The new all-cartoons/all-the-time channel MeTV Toons launches next Tuesday with what is truly an all-star lineup. If they were programming for me, I'd hope to see fewer cartoons I own on DVD, fewer recent ones and some more obscure programs. But (wisely) they aren't programming for me and I expect to see some of the less-seen, non-superstar cartoons hidden on shows on their schedule like Cartoon All-Stars.

And you also have shows like Popeye and Pals that, along with the spinach-devouring sailor, will be showing non-Popeye Max Fleischer cartoons. Or The Woody Woodpecker Show running non-Woody Walter Lantz cartoons or Casper and Company running vintage Paramount cartoons with or without that friendliest of ghosts. Also, check the schedule for Totally Tuned In, which has cartoons from the Columbia studio like Mister Magoo and The Fox and the Crow. You haven't seen those often, have you?

That oughta please everyone…well, everyone who can get the channel, that is. Here's a place to search and see where it might be available in your market and if that fails you, try this list. If no local station carries it, it's on at least two streaming networks — Frndly TV and Philo — and I'll be watching it on Frndly. Oughta be a treat.

I have, you may be surprised to learn, a Willie Mays story. It's one of the many, many things in my life I owe to a wonderful man I worked for named Lee Mendelson. You can read all about Lee here but if you don't have time to click, just know that for many, many years, he was the producer of the Peanuts and Garfield cartoons.

Years ago when I was still working for him, Lee's production company hit some nice, round number anniversary and Lee decided to have a big celebration. He made up a list of people who had contributed to its success and he flew us all to Sebastopol, California for a big party and paid for everything. I mean, he paid our meals, our airfare, our transportation from the airport to a hotel, suites at that hotel, everything. Saturday night, there were buses to take us from the hotel to a local country club for the party itself.

Mike Peters, who draws the comic strip Mother Goose and Grimm, and I rode the bus together to the club. When we walked in, we saw two men standing at a bar talking: Charles Schulz and Jim Davis. Mike said, "Wow! The two richest cartoonists in history!" I think Lee had even paid their ways there…although Schulz probably just drove or took a taxi over from his ice rink.

The party was filled with people you never heard of and I'd never heard of. At one point, Lee took me around and introduced me to some of them. I only remember the name of one of those people so I'm going to make up names for the others. You'll recognize the one real name in what follows.

Lee said, "Mark, this is Harvey Fenstermacher. Harvey was the cameraman on the first documentary I made in 1962…"

I said, "Nice to meet you, Harvey."

Lee said, "And Mark, this is Sam Shlabotnik. Sam was the lawyer who helped me arrange financing to open my first office…"

I said, "A pleasure to meet you, Sam."

Lee said, "And Mark, this is Murray Whatshisname. Murray was the liaison to Coca-Cola when I sold A Charlie Brown Christmas to CBS…"

I said, "The pleasure is all mine, Murray."

Lee said, "And Mark, this is Willie Mays."

I said, "Homina-homina-homina…"

It was Willie Mays. Willie Freakin' Mays — and Lee introduced him to me in the same matter-of-fact tone as he'd introduced his cameraman, his lawyer, his liaison to Coca-Cola. Okay but this was Willie Mays. I am not an expert in any sense about baseball. The last time I really followed it was when I collected the trading card that illustrates this post. But even I know that if you were in a room full of baseball history obsessives and you said Willie Mays was the greatest player of all time, no one would give you much of an argument.

And there he was in person, tolerating me shaking his hand for an abnormal length of time while I tried to think of something coherent to say to him. I gathered he was used to reactions like mine.

Lee went on to introduce me to his barber and his insurance man and his dentist and to Tommy Smothers and a few more folks who'd been important to him in his life but I made a point of later getting back to Willie Mays. I apologized for my stammering reaction and he couldn't have been nicer. I told him that when my father once took me to a Dodgers-Giants game at Dodger Stadium when I was ten, we and everyone in our section of the bleachers was, of course, hating on the Giants…

…but we couldn't hate on him. I think I said, "…though we were all disappointed that you caught every one of those long flies to center without slamming into any walls."

He chuckled politely and said, "Well, I had my off days…"

And that was about all he said. Mr. Mays was not a great conversationalist. I guess when you're the greatest baseball player of all time, you don't have to be.

The Arby's up on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood has closed or is about to close. I was never wild about their food there but for about two years, I was often on the KTLA lot a block away, writing (mostly) variety shows for Sid and Marty Krofft. When in need of a fast lunch, that Arby's was the best option. The other eateries within walking distance of the lot either did not meet my food-allergy-driven needs or were not the kind of places one could dash in and dash out quickly with something edible.

So I went to that Arby's often — once with two of the Bay City Rollers. Thus, I had the full experience of hanging out with two rock stars, the Rollers being rock stars in the same sense that what Arby's sold us were roast beef sandwiches.

Arby's has a scant presence in Southern California. I've been in other cities where they seem to exist at every freeway off-ramp. Near me, not so much. With the Hollywood one shuttering, the nearest Arby's to me is eight miles off — not far from LAX. I've driven-thru a few times in the past few years and I dunno if the chain has improved its chow or the one in Hollywood was just not one of the best ones but I liked what I got at the eight-miles-away one a lot more.

I also developed a fondness for the company because of the way they handled the Jon Stewart matter. During his first hitch on The Daily Show, Mr. Stewart often made out like an Arby's was the worst-possible place one could get alleged food. Someone at Arby's corporate level was wise enough to go along with the joke. They sent free meals to the Daily Show office, named a sandwich in his honor and in 2015 when he stepped down from that program, went to the expense of making a special one-time commercial to air during his final broadcast…

How can you not feel at least a little friendly towards a company like that? They may not have the meats but they have a sense of humor.

I haven't had an Arby's sandwich in years. For some reason, none of the ones in L.A. have any sort of delivery option, not even via a third-party service like Doordash or Grubhub. Even while the Hollywood one was open, I could get delivery from McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, Chick-Fil-A, Subway, Five Guys, Ono Hawaiian and hundreds of other restaurants — some a lot farther away than that Arby's on Sunset — but not Arby's. Jon Stewart, telling all of America their food might make you ill, got free delivery but I can't even pay for it. It's just not right.

From The Ed Sullivan Show for April 25, 1965: Two numbers by Freddie and the Dreamers — the British group that your parents were supposed to like…

Regular readers of this blog should probably be grateful to Brian Dreger, who sends me some of the best questions I receive — like this one…

You've said that your earliest writing work included comic books for Disney's overseas market. I'm curious why you were only working for the overseas market. Was it because you were new and the new people started out working on the overseas content? Was writing for the US market a goal to eventually achieve, or was the overseas market just as important as the US market?

The two "markets" were of equal importance to everyone involved…but you've made me think of a story I don't believe I've ever told here, at least in full. So settle back. This may take a while. In fact, I should probably post one of these…

Okay, you've been properly warned. I grew up wanting to be a writer but for the longest time, I wasn't sure what I could be a writer of. This was back when I thought (wrongly) that I'd have to pick one area and stick with it for all or most of my career. Comic books, though I loved them dearly and owned more of them than anyone I knew, were not high on the list, This was not so much because I didn't want to write them but because every interview I read of someone who worked in comics said that to write for the publishers in New York, one had to live in or around Manhattan.

I didn't. Nor was I ready to scratch off writing for television — live-action or animation — by relocating to the east. I also had some sense, especially after I met Jerry Siegel, that the comic book industry didn't treat its creative folks all that well.

There was a brief time when I almost did sell a couple of comic book scripts by mail — to Dick Giordano (then editor at Charlton) and to Mort Weisinger and Jack Miller (editors at DC) but it was only because they'd asked me to submit to them. They were impressed somehow with letters-to-the-editor I'd sent in…and it was kinda funny: Giordano was going to buy a script I wrote for Ghostly Tales but then he left Charlton for DC and I somehow didn't connect with him there.

Weisinger was about to buy a script I'd written for Superboy but then he was taken — kicking and screaming, I later heard — off the Superboy comic. Jack Miller wanted me to write an issue of Metal Men but before that could happen — to my surprise and I think his — he was no longer on the DC staff.

It felt like there was a secret rule then for comic book editors: If you even think of hiring that kid out in Los Angeles, you lose your job. So I just wrote off writing comics…and it wasn't really a disappointment because I'd never thought it could become much of a reality. This was shortly before Jack Kirby moved out to Southern California.

Now, you might be thinking, "You were living in Los Angeles. Why oh why didn't you start submitting scripts to the Gold Key Comics office (based in L.A.) or to the Disney Foreign Comics Department (based on the Disney lot in Burbank)?" And the answer is that I didn't know about the latter…and it just plain didn't dawn on me to submit to the former.

As you probably know, I started working with Mr. Kirby in early 1970, teamed with a great guy named Steve Sherman. Jack believed (then) that the only way to elevate one's self in the comic book business (then) was to create a new comic. Taking over an existing book, no matter how well you did it (then) or how much its sales soared (then), would probably not translate (then) into much more money for you. It was why Jack really didn't want to take over Jimmy Olsen at DC in 1970 and didn't want to return to Captain America at Marvel in 1975. He would have preferred to only create new books and I think it was a bad decision on those publishers' part to not let him. I believe both companies made a number of very bad decisions as regards to Jack Kirby.

But that was how it went at the time. One day, Jack suggested that Steve and I create some new comics. None of us were quite sure just what we'd do with these ideas but if Jack thought it was a wise move…okay. He knew the business a lot better than we did.

So Steve and I spent a few days throwing around ideas and we came up with six concepts for new comics. They were all different enough from what was then being published that they genuinely qualified as Fresh Ideas — but not so different that they wouldn't fit in on the newsstands. That's the sweet spot you usually want to hit. We wrote up presentations and pitched them all to Jack and he said they were all terrific. But of course, that was what Jack said to almost anyone who showed him an idea or art samples, no matter how crude. The only times he didn't give out with encouraging words were when he was shown something that looked lazy or plagiarized or, as was sometimes the case, both.

At the time, Steve and I were talking a lot with my friend Mike Royer, who had not yet wrangled the assignment of inking Jack's then-new books for DC. Mike was working for a great many other markets including Western Publishing, which was the company that published, along with so many other things, Gold Key comics. One day, he mentioned to me that Gold Key was looking for new, original comics. We had nothing to lose so Steve called their offices and got an appointment for us to meet with Chase Craig, who was the editor-in-chief there.

We went in, met Chase and told him our six ideas. He listened politely and seemed to think a couple of them had possibilities — but he warned us that it was not up to just him. A whole lotta people within the company had to say yes. We left him copies of our presentations and a week or two later, he sent them back to us with a nice note that said, approximately, "I'm sorry but I couldn't get anyone else interested in them." Very professional. Not in the least surprising.

Only much later, I realized that if I'd started submitting scripts to Chase for the comics he was editing — the Disney comics, the comics featuring Bugs Bunny and his cohorts, Woody Woodpecker, etc. — he would have given them professional consideration and I might have begun selling him scripts a year or two earlier than I did. That, alas, just plain did not occur to me. Ah, hindsight.

And if I had thought of submitting work to Chase, I probably wouldn't have followed through because of someone else…

I used to go visit Alex Toth — one of the greatest comic artists of all time and a man who, I did not then realize, had some serious anger issues at everyone in the industry. On one visit, I mentioned to Alex that Steve and I had tried to sell some ideas to Chase Craig. Alex exploded, yelling about how Chase, for whom he had once worked, was a horrible, evil, incompetent Spawn of Satan…or worse. He was someone to be avoided at all cost.

That's what Alex told me and it took many years before I learned two things about Alex. One was that he talked that way regarding just about everyone in the industry. The other was that he was wrong at least 90% of the time. He wasn't the main reason I didn't pursue writing for Chase but he was a reason.

Some time passed. Mike Royer finally got the job as Jack Kirby's inker. To thank me for my role in that — and because he no longer had time to pursue it himself — he told me about the Disney Foreign Comics Department. One of the eighty jillion revenue streams at The House of Mouse was that they'd sell foreign publishers the right to publish comic books featuring Mickey, Donald and other Disney Superstars…and then they'd sell them the reprint rights to the comics of those characters that Western Publishing was creating.

In most of those countries, there was a huge demand for Disney comics — so huge that after the publishers in those countries bought and translated the Gold Key material each month, they still needed way more pages. To fill that void, Disney set up a division on their Burbank lot that bought more stories and art — hundreds of pages each year that would never be published in this country. Mike had some sort of "in" there and was going to try working for them before he got the job inking Jack's work, which was a full-time-and-a-half gig.

He told me who to contact there, I did and I began selling them scripts. A very nice man named George Sherman was my editor there and it was also in his job description to be a kind of liaison to Western Publishing. One day, he and Chase were talking and the conversation went something like this: George told him he thought some of the scripts lately for the comics Chase was editing were weak. Chase agreed and explained that a couple of his best writers had recently retired or died or something. Most of the folks working for Chase were people with decades of experience in the animation and/or comic book business so they had a tendency to retire…or die.

George said something like, "We've got a kid writing for us whose work we really like" and he sent Chase Xeroxes of a couple of stories I'd written for the division. Chase liked them and one life-changing day, I got a phone call from him asking, "Can you write scripts like that for me?"

I gave it a whack — cautiously at first but it only took an assignment or two for me to realize Alex Toth could not have been more wrong about Chase Craig. And I mean "wrong" the way I'd be wrong if I told you that Hannibal Lecter was a real person, a nice guy and a helluva great gourmet. A lot of people in the comic book industry have been good to me — honest, benevolent and helpful — but if you made me pick a Top Three, it would be Jack Kirby, George Sherman and Chase Craig, not necessarily in that order. Here's a photo of Chase at his desk…

I wrote a lot of comics for Chase, originally when I was attending college at U.C.L.A. Writing for him was such a good experience that I got to thinking that maybe I oughta quit college — where I was learning absolutely nothing that would ever be of any use to me — and become a full-time writer. Chase did not know I was thinking that when on one other life-changing day, he told me, "If you could write a lot more scripts for me, I could probably buy almost all of them."

I'm probably not remembering his words exactly but I definitely recall sitting in his office after he said what he said. Then and there, I decided to quit U.C.L.A. — which I did. I am not suggesting that would be the proper move for someone else in different circumstances at a different time but it was the absolute right move for me at that moment. I hedged the decision a bit by enrolling in some part-time curricula at Santa Monica City College but soon quit that, too.

So this has been a very long, long answer to the question as to why I didn't try writing comic books for Gold Key earlier than I did. I probably could have given you this as a one-sentence answer: "There was an opportunity there but I was just too friggin' dumb to see and take advantage of it." I can now think of many times in my life I've made similar mistakes and there have probably been many more I don't know about.

Here's a cute segment from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. I think this is from February 19, 1967 but I could be wrong…

Thank you to the billions of you (it feels like) who sent me a link to this article about a guy who really, really loved Garfield. I appreciate the gesture but I don't need any more.

It's Father's Day so here's an article I first posted here on 9/21/14. It's about my father but it's also about my grandfather — two very kind, wonderful men…

I know people who love to drive…and I'm not talking about NASCAR and road racers and such. I mean: People who just love to get behind the wheel of their everyday car and go someplace…or even not go someplace. They'll go for a ride for the sheer pleasure of going for a ride. Somewhere here, I'm sure I've written about a gent who worked with me at Hanna-Barbera in the seventies who had a three-hour daily commute…and that was just one way. He was fine if not delighted with spending six hours — a quarter of his day and an even higher percentage of his "awake" hours — driving on the freeway.

I do not like to drive. To me, it's no pleasure. It's a chore. Often, it's a necessary chore and often too, the result of that drive makes it well worth the chore. But just driving is to me about as joyous as wheeling the trash cans out to the curb on Wednesdays and wheeling them back in on Thursdays. You do it because you have to do it in order to make some aspects of your life work the way you want them to work.

My father loved to drive…but mainly, he loved to drive friends and family around. He had no desire to be a taxi driver or a chauffeur but he loved to drive me to school or drive my mother to the market or drive my Aunt Dot to the airport. He sometimes got annoyed if a friend or loved one wouldn't let him do that, especially if they spent money on a cab. He'd say with a note of hurt in his voice, "Why didn't you let me drive you?"

He was, as I hope I've made clear, a very nice man who enjoying doing things for those he loved or even liked. This was one of the few things he could do for most of them. I'd like to think that some of that primal kindness has rubbed off on me. Clearly though, the Love of Driving was not hereditary.

My mother hated to drive. It made her extremely nervous. Other things did too but with other things, she could calm her fluttering nerves by smoking. When she drove, she was too afraid to not have both hands on the wheel and her total attention on anyone or anything she might hit within a radius of about twenty car-lengths.

She did not drive when the two of them lived back in Hartford. The train system and the occasional cab got her where she wanted to go and my father didn't drive much back there, either. But Los Angeles is, let's face it, Los Angeles and when he moved out here in 1951 and she followed him out to get married, he began driving everywhere. He even drove them to Las Vegas to get married. When she said, "Maybe I should get a driver's license," he always said, "No, you don't need one. I'll take you anywhere you need to go." And he did. She was happy to have it like that.

Finally one day when I was somewhere around ten years of age, there was an item in the newspaper about a child who'd died from an injury because his non-driving mother hadn't been able to get her son to a hospital in time. At that moment, my parents decided my mother should learn how to drive and have a car. There were, after all, times when he was off at work. So driving lessons and a car were all arranged but it put her under so much stress, I wondered if maybe I should have an emergency where she had to rush me to a hospital. Just so it would all seem worth it.

Her dislike of driving was not like my dislike of driving. I didn't get mine from her. Hers was out of sheer dread of hitting someone or something. She sometimes went weeks without getting in the car…and when she did, it was to go to a market two miles away on a Sunday morning, driving 25 MPH in the right hand lane. You would have loved everything about my mother except driving behind her.

For the reasons stated, my father encouraged her to get her license. For other reasons, he discouraged me. As I crept up on the age where a boy starts thinking about that, he'd say things to me like, "Oh, you don't need to drive. I'll take you anywhere you want to go." He meant that.

Between the ages of about 10 and 14, I was actively building my comic book collection by going to used book shops around Los Angeles. There were a lot of them then and most (not all) had a section devoted to old comics. The standard price was a nickel per comic, six for a quarter. An annual (double-sized issue) was treated as two comics.

Many a Saturday, my father would say to me, "Would you like to visit some bookstores today?" The answer was always yes.

I'd studied the Yellow Pages and made a list of all the ones that seemed close enough to visit. They pretty much broke down into two groups: Those to the east of us and those to the west of us. When my father volunteered an outing, I'd choose three or four stores in one direction. A few were conveniently clustered together. Down near MacArthur Park — then as now, a rather sketchy part of L.A. — there were three situated so my father could park once for all three.

He rarely went in with me. He'd find a parking spot and sit there, reading a newspaper while I went from shop to shop, looking for issues I didn't have. I carried lists but rarely referred to them. With lightning precision, I could ruffle through piles of old comics, spotting those I needed. Of course, at stores that sold six for a quarter, I always made my selections in multiples of six.

That mathematical requirement had the effect of broadening my reading horizons. I had my little mental list of comics I purchased and ones I did not. I'd select every as-yet-unowned issue from my list on the premises and find that I had 59 comics. To get full value for my money, I had to buy sixty…so that's when I'd try some comic I hadn't collected before. If I liked it — and I almost always did — I'd start searching for old issues of it on the next bookstore expedition.

I was in Bart's Books out on Santa Monica Boulevard one day when I needed to select two more comics so I'd have some neat multiple of six to purchase. At that moment, I was not a collector of war comics but I picked out two and took them home. The next visit to Bart's, I left with more than a hundred war comics.

I built quite a collection thanks to my father's generosity with his time. He was delighted when I'd stagger back to the car with an armload of comics. "Find some good ones?" he'd grin. I always told him I had, whether I had or not.

He wasn't thinking that they were a good investment; that some day, those comics would go for a lot of money. He also wasn't thinking that reading all those comics would lead to a career for his little boy. He was just thinking he was making me happy…and he was.

Around the time I hit fifteen, a lot of those bookstores began closing — the start of a long economic trend that has made that kind of business almost extinct. The stores that were around began charging more than cover price for their old comics — sometimes, a lot more. I had new friends who were into collecting and sometimes, we'd take the bus up to Hollywood Boulevard and the shops up there. So my father and I stopped making our Saturday morning runs.

Still, he was always available and eager to drive me anywhere I wanted to go and dismissive of my thoughts of getting my own car and license. If he'd had his way, I would never have learned to drive and he would have shlepped me around, well into my forties. Among other problems, that would have cooled off my dating considerably.

Around age 19, I finally learned to drive. My father was due to get a new (used) car then so instead of trading in his Buick Skylark, he gave it to me when he purchased something else. I liked the freedom I got from driving — the ability to go where I wanted when I wanted, but that was about it. Just getting in the car and driving didn't do anything for me. I always had to want to go somewhere.

About that time, a duty fell upon me. I had to stop someone else from driving.

My mother's stepfather — the man I called Grandpa — lived with my grandmother in Hartford. The two of them came out to visit every few years and every time they came out, he did the same thing. He'd go out in our back yard and work. Grandpa loved yard work and he'd always find something to do out there, ripping out an old hedge or planting a new one or something. He would have been heartbroken if we'd told him, "No, Grandpa. The yard's fine. Nothing for you to do out there." So we let him putter.

One day when he was out trimming our lemon tree, I was summoned into our living room. My father was there and my mother and my grandmother. They sat me down and my mother said, "Mark, there's something that needs to be done and we've been discussing it and we think you're the one to handle it." At that moment, if you'd given me a hundred guesses what they were talking about, I wouldn't have gotten it.

My mother continued, "Grandpa's eyes are not good. He's had a few minor accidents behind the wheel lately and his motor skills aren't right for that anymore. We've decided he must stop driving." My father and grandmother nodded grimly. It was for his own good…and also, I suppose, for the good of anyone he might run over.

"We've decided it will hurt less coming from you," my mother said. "We'd like you to be the one who tells him."

I looked over at Grandma and now saw that she was crying. Then I looked over at my father and realized he was crying, too and my mother was starting. I thought, "Gee, everyone's crying" and then realized that I was no exception.

Grandpa, I guess I should mention, was 81 years old.

We decided to get it over with so I thought for a few minutes about how to phrase things. Then I took some lemonade out for him, sat him down in one of two patio chairs we had back there and said it as simply and directly as I could. As I recall, the opening was: "The people here who love you, myself included, have made a decision. This is only because we love you. It is only for your own good." And then I told him. I made it clear we were not asking him to consider it and it was not open for discussion. We were saying he was going to stop. No arguments.

He was a sweet old man and the possibility of killing or injuring himself was of less importance to him than the possibility of killing or injuring someone else. And to the extent that killing or injuring himself was important, the worst part of that would be to turn his beloved into a widow or at least a full-time caregiver.

Once he grasped what I was telling him, he fell silent for a few long minutes. He cried a bit. He thought it over. Finally, in a quivering voice, he said, "Well, I knew I was going to have to stop someday. If you all say it's now, I guess it's now."

Then he hugged me and we changed the subject. That evening as we all headed for my father's car so he could drive us to a restaurant for dinner, Grandpa got in behind the wheel first and announced, "I'll drive!"

He got a big laugh, then he moved into a passenger seat for the rest of his life. I'd like to think it was longer than it would have been if we hadn't done what we'd done.

I thought of that incident often. I thought of it a lot as my own father neared that age and what I thought was, "It's not going to be that easy with him." It wasn't just that not being able to drive would make him feel old. It was worse than that. It would make him feel useless.

I thought about it a lot when he turned eighty. He was still quite capable of driving an automobile but, I wondered, for how long? As it turned out, it was about five months. He had a heart attack. It was his third and it was the kind his cardiologist described as, "Maybe not life-ending but life-changing." He would not be back to normal functioning soon, if ever. A week or so later, he had the life-ending kind.

When someone close to you dies, you look for that silver lining, however thin and fragile it may be…some way to "spin" the death in a way that's more comforting to you. I had no trouble doing that 22 years later when my mother died because she really wanted to go. She was verging on blindness and a life which did not contain one single thing that brought her any joy; just a constant, overpowering guilt that she had become a horrendous burden on her only son.

With my father, it was different…kind of. As I explained in another of these pieces, he dreaded being someone who required 24/7 care like a neighbor of ours who went literally senile. The constant care that man required — dressing him, feeding him, changing his diapers — destroyed his wife's savings and, eventually, her health. When my father was told he'd have to go home in a wheelchair, he immediately began fearing he'd wind up like that neighbor. I know because he told me that…many times.

When he had that last heart attack — the one that ended his life — I told myself the timing was right. He certainly did not want to go home in a wheelchair. He certainly did not want caregivers to be brought in and a ramp built on the front porch of his house and the money he could otherwise leave to my mother to be spent on keeping him alive. He especially didn't want that if there was little or no chance he'd ever recover to the point where he could walk and go out and get in his car and drive somewhere and do something useful.

So I was really glad we never got to that moment when I had to sit down with him and say to him what I had to say to Grandpa. Because that would have had the same effect on him as that last heart attack. And I would have felt in a way like I'd caused it.

Every year, most of the current TV shows do some sort of outreach to Emmy voters. Here's a video of a live event recently done for The Daily Show which may prove to be a fruitless effort to snatch one or more from the grasp of Mr. John Oliver. It's a bunch of clips followed by a good Q-and-A with Jon Stewart and others from that program…