Loma Prieta

The Internet reminds me that today is the anniversary of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which the country saw live when it interrupted a World Series game between the Giants and the A's. I don't think I've ever written about that day, but it was memorable.

My town of Santa Rosa was about 120 miles north of the magnitude 6.9 temblor's epicenter but it sure walloped us. I was working as a chemist at the time. The quake hit at the end of the day, 5:04 p.m., and at first I thought I was feeling faint, as if the room were spinning. A second later I realized it really was. 

When you grow up in earthquake country, you learn to immediately drop and get under something heavy, like a desk. Running out of a building is a good way to get hit by chunks of falling building. But I looked at my coworkers and realized we all had the same simultaneous thought: our lab was inside a concrete tilt-up structure that, if it collapsed, would pancake like a house of cards. Also, we were surrounded by dangerous acids, solvents, gases and chemicals that, if they mixed together, would be a poisonous, caustic, flammable brew. Anywhere else would be safer. Everyone exited expeditiously.

I got to the front parking lot and saw something I will never forget: the blacktop rippling in waves, with cars and trees bobbing up and down like boats on a stormy sea.

When things calmed down, a small crew, including me, put on gear and respirators and checked out the lab. We had some cleanup to do but nothing dangerous, and got everything buttoned up within an hour or so.

After securing the lab, I rushed to our baby daughters' daycare provider, only to be told that Karen had gotten there first and everyone was fine. Robin and Laura had been sitting inside a laundry basket when the quake hit, and rode it out as if it were a kiddie roller coaster. They had great fun!

I chose this photo of a broken section of the Bay Bridge because it reminds of something that happens in a crisis: information is in short supply and any scrap of news can get exaggerated and twisted. 

In the minutes after the quake, we heard radio reports that the Bay Bridge had collapsed. Everyone went ashen; that bridge is a major artery, and if the whole thing had gone down during rush hour the death toll could have been in the thousands. In fact, just one small section of the bridge fell, causing one unfortunate death, so although the Bay Bridge was out of commission for a while it was basically OK. It wasn't until quite a bit later that we learned the collapse of the Cypress Structure, a double-decker freeway, had killed 42. 

I was surprised to find that people far away, such as relatives living in other parts of the country, knew a lot more about what was happening than those of us living it. I experienced that disconnect again later.

The Naked Emperor

Fair Warning: Political Post! Yesterday at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump decided that instead of taking questions from the audience, he would play them songs from his playlist while he danced along. For 39 minutes. 

Trump called out songs to his "DJ," probably some poor kid backstage holding an iPhone, and then did his stupid fisty swaying dance while urging the crowd to dance along. Again, for 39 minutes. 

At a town hall where he was meant to talk with swing-state voters.

I mention this because my jaw is still dropped and I'm not seeing the mainstream media making a big deal about it. Just imagine . . . imagine if Kamala Harris or Joe Biden had walked into a town hall meeting with voters, cranked up their tunes, danced alone in the center of the stage for more than half an hour, and then left. It'd be a top headline for weeks, while Republicans--and many Democrats--would scream that they were mentally unfit to run and serve.

They'd be right. And they'd be right now.

This should be Trump's "Emperor's New Clothes" moment in which his unfitness is inarguably exposed for all to see, but I doubt it will be. Just look at South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem on stage with him. In video she looks confused but completely plays along, clapping her hands and doing the "YMCA" dance. That's the problem: everybody still plays along while the naked emperor dances.

250 Words on Art Supplies

Some artists are very particular about their art materials. I’d call myself mildly particular. In my experience, your paper, paint, ink, brush, pen, etc. can work for or against you. At best, they can feel less like lifeless tools and more like collaborators that make you better. 

I remember working on my graphic novel Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow when I seriously wondered if I’d forgotten how to draw. Nothing came out of my brush or pen right. It all looked like garbage. 

Trying to diagnose how I’d completely lost my mojo, I realized that the trouble began when I switched from one brand of art paper to another. I don’t know if it was smoother, rougher, or more or less absorbent, but when I switched back to the old stuff I immediately fell back in the groove.

More recently, I painted a watercolor for my wife, Karen, for which I’d bought a sheet of premium 300-pound cold-press paper. It was literally the finest paper I’ve ever worked with. Laying down paint felt like gliding a knife through velvet butter. 

I swear that paper could read my mind. We communed. It was beautiful.

You’ll notice I haven’t offered a shopping list of my ideal art supplies. That’s because mine wouldn’t necessarily be yours, and vice versa. I know professional cartoonists having very nice careers using printer paper and ballpoint pens (or digital devices). Try everything once and see what speaks to you. The right tools might be telepathic. 

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Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS

Comet party in the middle of the street with the neighbors! Sharing stellar wonders with good people makes them just a little cooler. Photo by my neighbor Mari Haber, who had the best camera-phone in the bunch. 

Catch it in the west in the next day or two, unless you plan to see it next time. That’ll be another 80,000 years or so.

Review: Geek Girl Authority

Here's a nice little review from Geek Girl Authority of the new anthology for which I wrote and drew a story, Marvel Super Stories: Amazing Adventures. 

I was one of 15 contributors and am only mentioned in passing, but what I appreciate about this review is that writer Avery Kaplan captures the intent and heart of all the stories. I share Kaplan's view that the best types of superhero stories are low-stakes everyday tales, which is why I gave my heroes a quest to recover a stolen pizza.

"Whether in the library, classroom or at home, this title is sure to be a hit with your young readers."

250 Words on Closure

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Monday until I run out of good ones.]

Seven years ago this week, wildfires throughout California devoured thousands of homes and neighborhoods, including mine. It’s an apt time to reflect.

Seven years can feel like a day or a lifetime ago. Sometimes it’s as if it all happened to somebody else; other times, it’s painfully fresh. Karen and I and our friends, neighbors, and community handle day-to-day life just fine, but the PTSD is real and you never know what’ll set it off. Something as subtle as a rumble in the distance or a warm autumn breeze makes the hairs on the back of your neck rise.

I still walk into rooms and reach for light switches that aren’t there. Karen and I still look at each other blankly and ask, “Do we have that thing, or did we used to have it?”

Sometimes people ask about “closure,” but in my experience there’s no such thing. There’s just your old life that’s gone forever, and your new life that began that day and continues to build. That new life isn’t much support or comfort when you’ve only lived it a few days, but after seven years you’ve built enough new experiences and happy memories that it has some weight to it. A new foundation in a new land.

I’m not even sure closure is something to be sought. The jagged seam where your old and new lives collided will never be smooth. Why should it? We survived a hell of a thing. Now it’s a part of us.

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250 Words on Ewoks

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Monday until I run out of good ones.]

In college, I knew a girl named Debbie. We worked together on our university’s bus system, called Unitrans. I drove double-decker buses and Debbie was one of the conductors who took fares, rang stops, and kept riders safe. It was a fun job.

During school breaks, Debbie made movies. She once returned talking about playing an Ewok in the next Star Wars film. Nobody knew what an Ewok was. You can see her in Return of the Jedi; she’s the one who crawls over to mourn its dead mate. Under layers of latex and fur, she’s heartbreaking.

Debbie had a tremendous career after graduation. She played Thumbelina in Total Recall, the Tiny Avenger in In Living Color, and had roles in Seinfeld, Men in Black, ER, Boston Legal, Grace and Frankie, and much more. 

I saw her signing autographs at Comic-Con International in San Diego a couple of times. I wanted to stop to say hello but her queue was always long and I was always on my way to something else. I even knew my opening line. “I bet I can say one word that will make your entire day,” I would have said, before pausing and adding: “Unitrans.” Next time.

You know where this is going. Debbie Lee Carrington died in 2018. Learn the lesson: take the opportunity, say hello, make someone’s day. You may not get another chance.

Some Star Wars fans dismiss Ewoks as a cynical merchandising ploy. Never me. It’s different when you knew one. 

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Happy National Comic Book Daughters Day!

Christmas is nice, Halloween is fun, but today, September 25, is one of my favorite holidays because it's a two-fer: National Daughters Day and National Comic Book Day! And I'm in the rare (unique?) position of being able to combine them because my daughters have appeared in every graphic novel I've done! 

In the past I've posted images showing my girls in my published books, but here's something new: my family, including my daughters, as seen in an unpublished graphic novel I've completed but whose fate remains uncertain. We're in the middle of a large crowd scene, which is a nice place to hide caricatures of yourself and people you know.  

Happy National Comic Book Daughters Day, Chiquitas!

250 Words on the O'erhanging Firmament

 

Most people who live in the cities or suburbs don’t see many stars. Certainly fewer than a hundred. 

A journalist friend who grew up in the country once wrote a newspaper piece on myths about the Milky Way and was surprised when I pointed out that most of his readers had probably never seen it. The edge-on glow of our galaxy’s arms was part of the familiar landscape to him. 

I’ve been to some remote places that had good “seeing,” which is what astronomers call the viewing conditions. Clear still air. I remember three that were so extraordinary they nearly overwhelmed me. Instead of a hundred stars, you’d swear there were a hundred thousand. So many stars, so bright and dense, that I couldn’t find even the most familiar constellations among them. So much starlight it felt heavy.

One: I was a Boy Scout, maybe 12, camping in the Sierra Nevada, sleeping bare-faced under the sky. Two: I was driving home from college, near the border between Napa and Sonoma counties in northern California, where I pulled my car over to gape. Three: a few years ago near Taos, New Mexico, when the Milky Way was truly bright enough to read by.

My freshman astronomy professor said that most people only pay attention to the world below their eyeline, ignoring the half of the universe that’s overhead. To be fair, in many spots there’s not much to see up there. But in the right spot, it’ll take your breath away. 

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Amazing Adventures Coming Soon!

The unboxing this morning. Always a thrill to open a package and find newly published books that you had something to do with.

Life Achievement Unlocked! I wrote about this back when I did the work, and soon it will be out in the world: a six-page Avengers story I wrote and drew is part of MARVEL SUPER STORIES: AMAZING ADVENTURES, the second anthology featuring superhero stories by people who don't normally do them, aimed at middle-grade readers. A short stack of books arrived on my step this morning and will be available to everyone else in November.

As I told Editor Charlie when I pitched my story, this really was a bucket list item for me. I collected Avengers comic books for years, and at one point had every issue ever published. I am inordinately proud and excited that my story is one of 15 in this book, including ones by much more renown authors like Jarrett Krosoczka, Judd Winnick, Dean Haspiel, and John Jennings. As far as I'm concerned, my story is Avengers canon. It really happened.

I plan to attend one book launch event in the Bay Area in early November that I'll announce when it's announcin' time. A couple of other contributors are scheduled to be there. If more events get set up, I'll let you know!

WOO HOO! 

The title spread of my little contribution. I drew the picture on the left, which is of the Beast, a founding X-Man and long-time Avenger, who stars in my story. I didn't write the intro text on the right but it's swell. One of the challenges we faced with my story is that my knowledge of Avengers lore--who's a member, where their HQ is--is out of date, so we framed my story as an adventure from their past.

I thought a few process junkies might enjoy seeing my original art compared to the published page. This is what I mean about my knowledge being out of date: when I was young, the Avengers HQ was the Stark family mansion in Manhattan. Not anymore. But I really wanted to draw the mansion, and honestly I drew the heck out of it. For this job, lettering and coloring were done in Photoshop (letters are a typeface I made of my own hand printing).

250 Words On Growth

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Monday until I run out of good ones.]

I’ve been surprised that my sixties have marked a period of tremendous personal growth, by which I mean organic materials growing out of my body in new and alarming ways and places.

First, from inside my nostrils and ear canals, hairs in a riot of textures and colors intent on tickling and harassing me. Also, more startlingly, right out on the very tip of each ear, a little crabgrass patch of hairs poking up like wiry antennas craning to pull in a distant TV station.

When you’re 11 and a school nurse hands you a pamphlet titled “Your Changing Body,” they never mention that someday you’ll be shaving your lobes.

Seborrheic keratoses are brown scaly waxy lumps that, as one medical website colorfully describes, “look as if they were dripped onto the skin by a candle,” and my epidermis churns them out. They’re benign, if you consider looking like the Fantastic Four’s Ben “The Thing” Grimm benign. 

The ones I can reach, I scrape off with a fingernail. You’re not supposed to do that and it’s not supposed to work, but I do and it does. For those on my back that I can’t reach, I see a dermatologist, who freezes them off with liquid nitrogen.

At my last visit, she looked and said, “Wow, that’s a lot.” After treatment, I asked if she’d gotten them all. She shrugged as if to say, “I’m not a miracle worker. Make peace with the reality that this is how you look now.” 

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After the Lahaina Fire

The newspaper article in this link reports what Karen and I were up to yesterday afternoon. 

Karen's old boss, county Supervisor James Gore, called Tuesday and said he wanted to bring a busload of folks from the international "After the Fire" conference to our neighborhood, and asked if Karen could say a few words and I could provide a couple of signed copies of A Fire Story. One particular point of the visit was to show a contingent from Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii, which was wiped out by fire a year ago, what a neighborhood looks like seven years after it burned to the ground. 

Karen spoke, then I spoke, and Gore spoke. We told them our story, and assured them that if they face every day with purpose and work together as a community, they'll get through it. I gave my book to the mayor and a city councilwoman from Lahaina. The mayor, in turn, gave Karen and me little pins from their city. We told them they're not alone. 

We hugged, we cried.

I found myself unexpectedly moved--"unexpectedly" because I've told my story in a lot of places to a lot of people, many of whom had lived their own version of it. I thought I'd gotten used to it. I think this was different because it was on my turf, in a little neighborhood park that was the only plot of grass and oaks that survived the fire, and the Maui folks' trauma is still so fresh and raw. 

I'm not fond of my quote in the linked article. "Punch them in the face" was said as a joke and doesn't necessarily come across like one in print. But I think we were able to provide some real-life insight and advice that we can only hope they find helpful.

It was a good and sad event.

250 Words on Odd Numbers

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Monday until I run out of good ones.]

People like oddness.

Magicians know that most folks, asked to pick a number between one and five, will say three. Most asked to pick a number between one and ten will say seven. 

When I was young, my Grandma taught me my first lesson in art composition: objects grouped in threes are more pleasing to the eye than those grouped in twos or fours. I don’t know how she knew that, she wasn’t an artist, but she was right. We are drawn to the balanced asymmetry of odd numbers. 

One odd number is “Belphegor’s Prime,” Belphegor being a high-ranking demon in Hell whose cursed number is 1,000,000,000,000,066,600,000,000,000,001. It’s a palindrome—the same forward and back—with 13 zeroes on either side of a 666 in the middle. It’s also a prime number, indivisible by anything but 1 and itself. A similar so-called “beastly palindromic prime” is 700,666,007. Sinister!

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung and physicist Richard Feynman both extolled the prime number 137, which seemed to surface in their work more often than it should, hinting at some inscrutably deep pattern in the universe. Some scientists wouldn’t be surprised if, when the Theory of Everything that unites subatomic quantum mechanics with cosmological relativity is finally discovered, its formula has a “137” in it.

One of my favorite numbers is 51, because it’s 17 x 3 but somehow seems like it shouldn’t be. 

Of course, according to writer Douglas Adams, the Ultimate Answer to Everything is 42. How odd that it’s not odd.