I-CON-ic Moments

I'll be among the guests at I-CON 30 this weekend at Stony Brook University, the annual comics and sci-fi convention. It's a family affair this year, with Laurie, Chuck and Rebecca also on the guest list. All of us will be appearing on a variety of panels; in fact, I believe there is one point on Saturday afternoon where each of us is on a different panel!

I've lost track of how many I-CONs I've attended over the years. I was a regular attendee in the 80s and 90s when I was still working at DC Comics, but I've been there less frequently over the past decade.

Perhaps my favorite was the year I got to chat with Scott Carpenter, one of the seven Mercury astronauts who made space-flight history back in the 1960s. I actually had a connection with Carpenter. My Uncle Jimmy had been a NASA engineer and for a number of years had worked at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, where the astronauts were also based. As a result, my cousin Peter went to school and was friends with Carpenter's son Marc, as well as the sons of Gus Grissom and Wally Schirra.

Though it was more than two decades later, Carpenter remembered my uncle and that the community they all lived in was named, coincidentally, Stony Brook. We'd been talking for awhile when we realized that we each had to appear on panels. And both of us wanted the chance to go to the men's room before them. I mentioned that we referred to that as Schwartz's Law: "Never go anywhere without going first."

Carpenter countered with his own story. "After I made my space flight, I was in a ticker-tape parade with (then-Vice President Lyndon) Johnson and he said to me, 'Now that you're famous, there are two things that you should never pass up. One is a free lunch and the other is the chance to go to the bathroom.'"

And that is what we now refer to as Lyndon Johnson's Corollary to Schwartz's Law.

**

"Back in the day" one of my regular activities at I-CON was an interview by Howard Margolin for his "Destinies" program on the Stony Brook radio station. (It still airs Friday nights at 11:30 on WUSB 90.1 FM.) We would talk about what was going on in the comic book business and projects I was working on. Howard would edit the recording and air it a few weeks later.

The one we did in 1988 took place shortly after I had returned from my visit to Ireland to see the prototype computer program a company called Grafascan was using to do comic book color separations. I told Howard that while this program would initially be used only to translate the traditionally hand-colored guides into a form that could be used for printing, I foresaw a time in the future when colorists would be "painting" the pages right on the computer screen. At the time, it sounded like something out of a science fiction movie.

After each interview, Howard would ask me if I wanted a copy of the recording and I would say yes. But neither of us was in any particular rush for it, so there were times when a few years would pass before got them. In 1993 Howard gave me a collection of four or five interviews, including the one we had done in '88.
As we were driving home that evening, Chuck popped the tape in and there I am, talking about how computer coloring was going to change the look of comics forever.

Well, five years later, it had happened and Chuck was just staring at me, asking, "When did you record this?"

Now, of course, twenty-three years after that interview, I'm sure there are plenty of comics fans who can't remember when the books weren't colored on a computer.

**

For those of you who will be there and are interested in tracking me down, I'll be at the following:

Comic Book Trivia - Saturday from 11:00am - 12:00pm in SAC 308 (with Chuck)

Would You Mess with Forbush Man if You Saw Him Walking Down the Street? - Saturday from 12:00pm - 1:00pm in SAC 308

Comics We Wish Were Collected in Trade - Saturday from 2:00pm - 3:00pm in SAC 308 (with my pal Bob Greenberger)

The Haunted Journey into the Secret Vault of Suspense - Saturday from 3:00pm - 4:00pm in SAC 306

Dwayne McDuffie Tribute - Saturday from 5:00pm - 6:00pm in SAC 306 (also with Bob Greenberger)

1970-1985: An Age Undreamed Of! - Saturday from 6:00pm - 7:00pm in SAC 308

"Ducky Birthday!"

My sixth birthday might be the first that I have a specific memory of. That's because it snowed and the neighborhood kids who came to my party all showed up wearing boots. When the party ended and it was time for them to leave, none of them could remember whose boots were whose. (Well, they were a bunch of six-year-olds, after all!)

But the most memorable birthday was probably my 18th, back in the day when reaching that age meant you were old enough to drink but not old enough to vote. The events of that day back in 1969 were immortalized in a Hobart Pumpernickel story, one that contained very little variation from how it actually happened.
For your amusement, some excerpts from "Ducky Birthday, Dear Rob."

It was 6 PM on the first Friday during Easter vacation. It was also my birthday. To celebrate, I had spent most of the day sleeping.
The telephone rang. It was Peeved Matchklinger. "Hi, Rob," he said. "What are you planning on doing tonight?" "I don't know yet."
"Oh, well, Ellen and I are going to the drive-in and we wondered if you wanted to come along and take notes."
"I don't think so, Peeved. Janet asked me to come over and look at her brother's new goldfish."
"Oh, then do you want a lift?"
"That would be a nice thing for you to do," I replied.
"I'll be over at 8:00."
"Then I'll see you at about 9:30." "No, no. I'll be there on time as a special treat for your birthday."

At 8:15 I heard a car horn outside. I looked out the window but didn't see a car. Five minutes later, Peeved, having turned the car around, pulled up in front of the house. I walked out to the car.
Ellen Ribbonhouse handed me an already-opened bag of walnuts, some of which had been eaten. "Here's your birthday present," she said.
"Walnuts?" I asked.
"Why not?" asked Peeved.

"You're only fifteen minutes late," I said to Peeved.
"That means he's early," said Ellen. "When he's only fifteen minutes late, that means he's early."
Peeved smiled proudly and said, "Have a walnut."
I tried to crack the nut with my teeth. "It would have been nice if you had gotten me a nutcracker to go with them."
"George Washington could open walnuts with his hands," said Ellen.
I tried to open the walnut with my hands. It cracked open. Ellen and Peeved began to cheer about having a potential future President in the car with them.

A short time later we arrived at Janet Hoot's house. There were a number of cars parked nearby. "Looks like a lot of people came to see the new goldfish," said Peeved.
"No, Peeved," I said. "They all came because they think they're having a surprise party for me."
"It'll be a surprise," he said.
We walked into the house. I was surprised. I didn't know half the people there and they didn't seem to care that I had walked in.
Ginsy Alansberg walked up to me and started to laugh.
"What's the matter with you?" I asked. I handed him a walnut. "See what I got for my birthday? Walnuts! They gave me walnuts! Have a walnut."
I walked around the room giving everyone walnuts.
When I got back to Ginsy, he was still laughing. "Wait till you see what we got you."

I walked over to look at the birthday cakes. Ellen had baked one and had drawn a moose head on it with walnuts. Janet and Anita Gravel had baked the other one, a sponge cake they had cut in half to make two circles, each of which had "Rob" spelled on them with pecans. Janet had named the cakes "Mae West" because of their shape when they had come out of the oven. Somehow, I didn't think the two cakes looked at all like Mae West.

Ginsy came over and handed me a card. I read it. "Violets are blue, roses are red. They were out of primal chickens so we got you this instead."
Windy Malsh handed me a live duck. Harry Gerriton came down the stairs and handed me another duck.
"Two ducks?" I said.
"Not just two, said Ginsy, still laughing. "We had to buy six of them."
"Six ducks!!!!"
"Aren't they cute?" said Ginsy. Windy came down the stairs with the other four ducks in a box.
I looked at the duck in my right hand. "Oh, they're cute, all right. Do you know what this cute little duck just did in my hand?!?"
"Don't you just love them?"
"Ginsy, what am I going to do with six ducks?"
"Um... well, you could...um...I don't know."
I put the two ducks into the box and went to wash my hands. Then I went to the phone and called home. When my father answered, I said, "Six ducks. They got me six ducks."
"Live ducks?"
"Yup, six honest-to-goodness-real-live-ducks!"
"Talk to your mother."
My mother got on the phone. "Tell Ginsy that he can take care of the ducks for you and you'll come to visit them at his house."
"Ginsy, my mother says you should take care of the ducks and I can come visit them."
"Doesn't your mother like ducks?" asked Ginsy.
I said goodbye and hang up the phone.
"Don't you even want to take two of them?" asked Ginsy.
"My dog would think they were delicious."
"Let's go over to your house and show you mother how cute the ducks are and convince her to let you keep them."
"You go! I'm not going."
With that, Ginsy, Harry, Windy, Harry's sister Beenie, Amly Coldspleen, and Dynne Ledofsky left with two of the ducks for my house. Peeved and Ellen left too, saying that they would be back soon.
I put on my coat and went to visit Frodo Shnyder, who was sick and unable to attend the party. I walked down the street muttering, "Six ducks! They got me six ducks."

I arrived at Frodo's house and rang the doorbell. He opened the door and said, "Come on in. There's a phone call for you."
We went up to his room and I picked up the phone. It was Janet Hoot. "Where are you?" she asked.
"Well, since you called Frodo's house and I'm talking to you on his phone, where do you think I am?"
"What did you leave for?"
"I came to visit a sick friend."
"It's your party, you know."
"I know that. But half of my party went to my house to sell my mother six ducks. The other half are people I don't even know!"
"Are you coming back?"
"Of course I'm coming back. I want a piece of cake!"

When I got back to Janet's house, the party had returned. Ginsy came over to me and said, "Your mother loved the ducks and said you could keep all six."
"Where? At your house?"
"Actually," said Amly, "your dog loved them. He gobbled them up."
"My dog always wanted a pet," I said.

Janet had been lighting the candles on the cakes. There were eighteen of them in the moose cake and one in each half of Mae West.
Everybody sang "Happy Birthday."
Before the song was done, Janet was telling me to hurry up and blow out the candles. I think she was afraid the cake would blow up if the flames got too close to it.
Somebody told me to make a wish. I did and blew out the candles. The wish didn't come true. The six ducks were still there.

The ducks did not come home with me, nor did they go to "Ginsy's" house. They spent the night with "Harry." The next day, with my friends finally convinced that the ducks could not live in my bedroom, we brought them to a local dairy farm, where they joined cows, chickens, and other ducks. And lived long, happy, pro-duck-tive lives.

As a matter of fact, so have I.

Jury Duty

I was first called for jury duty in the fall of 1980 and ended up sitting on a grand jury that met every Wednesday for about eight months. During that time, we heard testimony and were presented evidence regarding a number of cases and we handed down quite a few indictments. And while driving to the courthouse in Mineola during rush hour was not my favorite thing to do, it did provide a break from my daily train-and-subway commute to Manhattan.

That stint apparently got me some brownie points because it was more than a decade before I was called again. There were three summonses during the '90s and one in 2004: Three more to Mineola and one to Federal Court in Brooklyn. Only one resulted in my getting picked for a jury -- a civil case that was settled "out of court" while we were sitting the jury room on the day the trial was supposed to begin.

==

After you've been called for jury duty, you now get a six-year "pass" in Nassau County, so, since I'd last been there in 2004, it was not so surprising that I received a summons to appear this week. The way it works, you are assigned a number and you call each evening to see if you have to show up the following day. I was not needed on Monday, but my number came up for Tuesday.

I drove to Mineola and joined about 400 other folks in the main jury room. We first were shown a video (the same one they showed in 2004 and, possibly, earlier) with Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer extolling the importance of our judicial system. The video includes a reenactment of a 12th century "trial by endurance" in which an accused man is bound and tossed in the river. If he floats to the surface, he is guilty; if he sinks, he is innocent. Happily for the accused and his family, he sank like a stone and was judged innocent before he drowned.

After the video, one of the judges came in and welcomed us. He reminded us of the importance of our presence and said that even if we were just sitting and waiting, we were providing an important service to the judicial system. When he meets with attorneys on the various cases assigned to him, he is often able to persuade them to come to a settlement simply by pointing out that there are juries waiting if they cannot.

Unlike 2004, when I spent most of the morning waiting to hear my name, I was the third person called for the first jury pool. Thirty-five of us were called and sent to a small room nearby. There, after attendance was taken, we were told that we were being bussed to one of the other buildings. With our "Juror" name tags now hanging around our necks, we boarded a bus and were driven... across the parking lot! (One can only presume using the bus is necessary to make sure we did not lose any slow walkers along the way.)

In the second building, the thirty-five of us were ushered into a room with a table and twelve chairs and the heat cranked up to "bake bread." The court officer who escorted us told us we would be there for only a couple of minutes, but since he had to close the door, we might want to open the window. In legal parlance, I guess "twenty-five" is considered "a couple" because that is how many minutes we were in there.

After we heard someone in the hall say, "Where are the other 35 jurors?" the door finally opened and we were told that we would be taken upstairs to a courtroom. Turned out that after we had arrived, a second group of thirty-five potential jurors had also been drawn, put into an identical room next door, and now all seventy of us were the pool for a case.

Unlike the courtrooms you see on TV and in movies which appear to have seating for a few hundred people, the one we were escorted to was long and narrow and, by the way, did not even have enough seats for seventy potential jurors. With some of us again standing, the judge introduced himself and the attorneys and gave us a quick overview of the case. Then, the first fourteen names were called and those people went to sit in the jury box. However, before anything else could happen, the judge and attorneys had an unrelated matter to deal with, so we all had to leave the courtroom and go back downstairs to the waiting room for "a few" minutes. Thankfully, the court officer decided that we did not have to be closed into the oven-room, so most of us milled around in the hallway instead.

It turns out that "a few" and "a couple" are interchangeable terms because it was another twenty-five minutes that we waited till we went back upstairs. With fourteen people now seated in the jury box, there were enough seats in the courtroom for the rest of us. The judge asked each of the jurors a few questions about prior jury service, involvement with law enforcement, and possible employment or personal conflicts since the case was scheduled to begin next week. As a result of these questions and with the agreement of both attorneys, four of the potential jurors were released and sent back to the main jury room where they would again wait for their names to be called for another pool. Four more of our original seventy were selected to replace them.

The assistant district attorney introduced herself, explained a little about the case, and then began questioning jurors. When she finished, the defense attorney took his turn, but, since he did not think he could finish before the lunch break at 12:30, we adjourned. We were told that we had to be back by 2:00 -- once again to the waiting room downstairs -- and then would be brought back up to the courtroom.

I had brought my lunch with me, so I walked back to the car and sat and ate it, reading the newspaper. It doesn't take me an hour and a half to eat lunch (or read the paper), so I strolled over to the main jury room and had a cup of coffee in the cafeteria. I called Laurie and the office. I went outside and watched the grass grow. At 1:50, I went back to the waiting room, joining the rest of the group.

It was "a few" (or maybe "a couple") of minutes before we were brought back to the courtroom. The defense attorney finished asking his questions of the fourteen folks in the box. Then the judge told us that we all had to go stand in the hall while he and the attorneys had a discussion. When we came back in, the judge reminded everyone that not being selected for the jury was not a reflection on their character, merely a decision reached by the attorneys as they tried to assemble a group that would be best for their case.

Of the fourteen people, three were chosen for the jury. The rest were sent home. The trio were sworn in and told they had to return next Monday at 10:00. Another fourteen names were chosen. Among them was a woman who was not fluent in English; neither attorney nor the judge felt she would be an appropriate juror, so they sent her home. (This after she had been there for six and a half hours.)

We had a rerun of the first round of questioning, with a couple more people being excused and replaced by the judge. Both attorneys had their time and we were again sent out in the hall. After another "couple/few" minutes, we were called back. This time, eight of the fourteen were selected.

Still needing one more juror and two alternates, they started the procedure for the third time. Fourteen more people. Fourteen more sets of questions by the judge and the attorneys. Another "couple/few" minutes in the hallway. When we returned to the courtroom, the dozen of us who had not yet had our names called were thankful that they'd managed to agree on their last three jurors so that we did not have to go through a fourth round.

By now it was almost 4:30, so we all had to go back to the main jury room to be officially dismissed. There a clerk collected our juror cards and scanned them into the computer and printed out our "thanks for coming" certificates. I went out to my car and drove home.

And that is how I did my part for our judicial system. I'm sure they'll be calling me again in 2017.

A Job for Superman

In one of the many Superman stories I wrote, I had the Man of Steel save an island full of people from a tsunami. He used his heat vision to slice through its rock base and then lifted the entire island into the air above the onrushing wave. Once it passed, he lowered it back into place, with everyone and everything safe and intact.

I don't recall ever writing a story in which Supes dealt with a meltdown at a nuclear power plant, but it's a safe bet that at least one of my fellow writers put him in such a situation. And I'm sure he handled it as easily as he dealt with the tsunami, with no loss of life and minimal property damage.

And, of course, in Superman: The Movie, he stopped a massive earthquake along the San Andreas fault and then undid most of the damage by turning back time. (Something that he can't do in the comic books, by the way.)

Unfortunately, there is no Superman to save the people in Japan who have faced earthquake, tsunami, and now a potential nuclear meltdown. There are only the thousands of "ordinary" people performing search and rescue operations. And the exceptionally brave group of workers trying frantically to cool the reactor by any means possible.

It is easy for a writer to spin a tale in which the hero saves the day in the nick of time. In the real world, we know it doesn't always work out that way. So we can only hope and pray.

Shameless Self-Promotion

I've been asked by a few folks who have enjoyed reading my novel why I haven't been promoting it more. Since I don't have any good answer to that question, here's a peek at the prologue to "The Junkyards of Memory." (The book is available at amazon.com. Or you can order a copy from lulu.com by clicking on the icon on the right side of this page... and even get a 15% discount!)


She could hear someone knocking, but she couldn’t tell whether it was nearby or far away. She turned her head, looking around. Doing so seemed to take hours of infinitely exhausting effort.

The door, she finally decided. Someone was knocking on the bathroom door. “Go away,” she tried to say, but the sounds that came from her mouth were nothing more than a garbled groan.

The knocking on the door became louder, more frantic, and was now accompanied by someone calling her name. “Go away,” she tried to say again, but the words were unintelligible even to her own ears.

If only she could get up, go to the door, and tell him that everything was all right. Then he would go back to watching TV or reading a magazine or whatever he should have been doing instead of bothering her. She wanted to get up and tell him to leave her alone, but she could not make her body obey.

She pushed down on the floor with her hands, hoping that this would somehow propel her to a standing position. Her hands -- or the floor -- were covered with something wet and sticky. She stared at her fingers, trying to decide what the red stuff all over them was.

The knocking on the door stopped. There was a brief rattling of the doorknob. Then there was no sound. She relaxed in her efforts to stand up. He had given up and gone away.

There was a loud “wham” and a jolt that she felt through her entire body. He must have slammed against the door, trying to force it open. Too bad for him, she thought. She was leaning against it.

She looked at her legs. They were pressed against the base of the toilet bowl. It would be almost impossible for him to get the door open while she was in this position on the floor.

She felt him hit the door again, not as hard this time, it seemed. He wasn’t going to get in, she thought. She stared at the mess on the floor around her, hoping somebody would eventually clean it up.

Suddenly, accompanying another loud “wham,” she felt herself falling sidewards away from the door as it was pushed open. Her face hit the sticky floor, her cheek right next to the magazine she’d scrawled on not so many minutes ago...