Business, as opposed to the more traditional lack of business, accounts (mostly) for my absence.
A café pal, who lives in his truck, had it impounded, along with most of his possessions, due to unpaid tickets and has been sleeping outside. He asked for something to read, so I gave him a “Best Ride,” upon which he has not commented.
A friend (and prior reader), whom I’d met in college and went on to become (a) a newspaper reporter and (b) attorney, after frequently expressing his intent to purchase “Bob on Bob,” came by the café and picked one up. He has not commented either – though someone purporting to be him e-mailed he was in the hospital for knee surgery and asking I wire funds to a relative.
J___ , another repeat customer, picked up “Cheesesteak.” A retired physician from Hawthorne (“Where the Beach Boys are from”), he gave me a reminiscense from his childhood. He said he had hundreds (or was it a thousand) he was thinking ot publishing, so I shared, without his asking, my general approach.
J____, the poet/therapist, bought both “Bob on Bob” and “Cheesesteak.” (“Beyond admirable,” she said of the first and “You are a true scholar,” of the second.) A couple days later, she led me into a discussion of the absence of darkness in my work. (She has a perfectly reasonable preference for memoirs in which narrators confront and rise from theirs.) Coincidentally, a couple days earlier, I had looked at my journal from 60 years ago. “Boy, was I miserable,” I’d thought. (It was a period friends and I could seriously say we did not know anyone who was happy.) But now I look back with – and write from – a fond (and recognizably fortunate) bemusement at it all. (It is not just the Lexapro.) The darknesses remain undiscussed – or undiscussed darkly.
Then there was D_____, a 40-something Bay Area native now living in Germany. (A self-described “late starter in academia,” he works in “human-centered digital health.”) He was in town visiting family and had been led to me because he had a recently revived interest in Golden Age comics and had heard I knew about them. (After reading my article on ECs, he invited me to speak at an art museum in Berlin. I explained I never went further than San Francisco these days and then, usually, only for medical reasons, and asked if Zoom would work. I was already fantasizing this might be where I would donate my archives when he admitted the idea for my talk had not gone beyond his head so far, but he would bring it up with a curator.) We had a delightful conversation, which veered into his scraping together nearly the full cover price of “Bob” and acquiring a copy – upon which he has not yet commented.
In other news…
1.) No news on the Air Pirates film.
2.) Shown work of a words-and-pictures artist that interested me, I emailed to ask if I might write about her. Assuming she did not know me, I told her the venues where my piece might go. She said she did not regard herself as a cartoonist, which ruled out tcj.com, but having checked out First of the Month, found it appealed. So that it where I will be aiming.
3.) Speaking of tcj,, the last article I submitted has been read by an editor, who received it with a less-than ringing “pretty good.” However, unbeknownst to me, one of the creators whose work I’d discussed had been the target of outrage in the indie comics world because of his alleged harassment/abuse of trans-sexual women (and others). This was an elephant whose presence in the room I had missed, and which the editor felt needed addressing lest the internet ring. So I have been working on that.
4.) But the BIG STORY is “MESSIAHS.” The cover is done! It’s a knock-out – and if I knew how to transfer it from an e-mail, I would post it. All that seems left is selecting the illustrations – one per piece. Then it should nearly be ready to go. I have expressed my preferences; Fantagraphics will see what it has, and I will scan and send them the rest. I can barely contain myself from drawing up the list of invitees to the launch party.
So many Bob Levins on the Internet; I'm the Bob Levin who writes.