Making the circuit of doctors again and trying to finish a script that should have been done — well, never mind how long ago.

Gotta go.

Marvel has released THE ESSENTIAL MAN-THING Volume 1 and THE ESSENTIAL DEFENDERS Volume 2. Both titles would be comprised largely of my work, and the stories are some of my very favorites from the ’70s.

I’ve added Amazon links to both titles in the sidebar at the right. If you purchase the books through these links, I get an extra few cents a copy.

So, this Christmas, give the gift of… Gerber.

For yourself. For a loved one. For almost anyone you’d like to mindfuck.

(And as a first jolt, let them know their present won’t arrive until, say, Little Christmas.)

Back from the hospital. When the doctor went in to insert Stent No. 3, he discoved a tear in the artery that could have come open at any time, rendering me, uhm, well, lifeless. He wound up inserting three stents rather than one. Apparently the strategy worked, as I’m still alive to type this.

I got very lucky again.

The cat seems better.

Tomorrow I go to the hospital to have the the third stent inserted, as explained in this prior post. This one is a little more complicated than the first two, because there are branches off the artery. There’s a small chance — about 10% — that as the stent is inserted, a chunk of the plaque it dislodges could block one of those branches, causing an extremely mild heart attack. The doctor says less than 1% of the heart muscle would be affected, and once the pain subsides, I’ll never know the difference. Still, the prospect produces a little anxiety.

If all goes well, they’ll keep me in the hospital overnight for observation; standard procedure. If I’m one of the 10%, I’ll have to stay another day or two; also standard procedure.
So I may miss posting for a day or two, despite my new resolve to do it daily.

Anxiety of one sort or another has taken a very large toll on my work — or rather, on my output of work — for the past decade and a half. It’s something I need to master. Soon.

More on that another time…

Odd day.

One of my cats is sick. One of my friends is going through some major emotional upheavals. One of my brain cells is functioning…I think. (Or it does.)

Tuesday should be more productive.

Songs About Writing Songs? “I Write the Songs” is pretty much the definitive answer, isn’t it? (Read the comments to my previous post, and this will make sense. Of a sort.)

You may have noticed my near silence over the past couple of weeks.

There’s a lot going on.

Mostly it has to do with battling blockage and drubbing deadlines — an uphill battle — but there have also been some health issues that I’ve been hesitant to discuss.

When I finish up the script I’m writing now, I’ll post the good news and the — well, not *bad*, exactly — more like “suspenseful” news. And the stuff about Zauriel and Doctor Fate that we haven’t gotten around to discussing. (Argh.)

I’d also appreciate it if loyal readers would nag me to post *something* here every day, even if it’s just three whining lines about not getting enough sleep to write anything.

A nice piece about Dave, who died this week, on CNN.com. As most of you know, he and Len Wein co-created the “new” X-Men.

Dave and I only did a couple of stories together. It’s probably been the better part of thirty years since I last spoke to him or his wife Paty, but I always liked both of them. It would be difficult to find two more sincere lovers, or lovers of comics.

The two people most responsible for my career in comics are Roy Thomas, who hired me as a proofreader at Marvel Comics in 1972, and Dr. Jerry G. Bails, who, like Roy in his fannish days, had the patience and graciousness to correspond with, and take seriously, a 14-year-old nuisance with a million questions about artists and writers and the comics of the 1940s.

I’ve just learned from Mark Evanier’s blog that Jerry died this week.

I am greatly saddened.

Mine will be spent with a frozen dinner, a desperate deadline, and maybe a DVD — if I’m lucky.

May yours be more exciting.

Nothing terribly profound.

I’m surprised and hugely pleased that the Dems didn’t blow it.

If they prove they can govern, they’ll retake the presidency in 2008, and that’s fine with me, too — as long as they *lose* one house of Congress in 2010. It’s become abundantly clear that, at least most of the time, either the House or Senate has to be controlled by the party that’s not in the White House. Otherwise, as we’ve just seen with the Republicans, arrogance runs rampant, compromise becomes impossible (or irrelevant), and corruption becomes a given.