Prolific comic-book artist Jim Mooney, who as far as I and many other people are concerned was the greatest Supergirl artist who ever lived, passed away on Sunday.

He and I only worked together once, in 1976. We only met face to face once, in 2006. And strangely, without realizing he had passed, I was talking about him on the day of his death.

The panel above, from the March 1977 of Omega the Unknown, in which the character Gramps grieves for Mamie while Omega watches, captures a little bit of my mood today.

When the Dreaded Deadline Doom meant that fill-in issues were required on Omega, then editor-in-chief Jim Shooter took me and Roger Stern out to a restaurant at which he told us that we were to plot issues of the magazine overnight. Whether or not we should have messed with the grand plan begun by creators Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes isn’t something either of us really thought about. When you’re 21, and want to write comics, those thoughts just don’t pop into your head.

We were each assigned an artist. My story was to be drawn by Jim Mooney, who was the regular artist for the series, while Sterno got Lee Elias, who by doing a fill-in issue would help get the book a couple of months ahead.

I had loved Mooney’s artwork since I was a kid, first from the adventures of Supergirl, which he had drawn in Action Comics, and later in Dial H for Hero. Since Jim lived in Florida then, we had no interaction other than through my written plot. The story appeared early the next year in issue #7. It wasn’t until three decades later at the 2006 San Diego ComicCon International, where he sat behind a table in Artists’ Alley, that I was able to chat with him and tell him how much it had meant to me at the time to see him bring my story alive.

But as I mentioned above, that’s not the end of this. Because two days ago, I was talking about that issue the same day Jim Mooney died, completely unaware of his passing. On Sunday morning at the World Horror Convention, I was on a panel about censorship along with Rocky Wood and Michael Shea. Even though I’d had no plans to mention it, since the focus was meant to be more contemporary, near the end of the panel I suddenly remembered the only two moment of censorship with which I’d ever been involved. One of them took place in that issue of Omega the Unknown, and it had to do with Jim Mooney’s artwork.

The panel above isn’t as Jim had originally drawn it. It had to be altered in order to pass muster with the Comics Code Authority. (Click on either of these two panels to see them larger.) In the third panel from the end of the issue, the villain of the story escapes from Omega, punching a policeman as he runs off. Since one of the rules of the Code was that no villainy was allowed to go unpunished—with, I seem to recall, a specific taboo against getting away with abusing authority figures in that way—we had to remove the policeman from the image. As you can see, it looks weird, as the villain is now swinging at empty air.

It didn’t matter that punishment would come in a future issue—Blockbuster couldn’t be seen as escaping unpunished even for an instant. And so Wite-Out was applied, and the morals of America’s children were once again safe.

Monday afternoon, leaving Salt Lake City, I surfed the Web on my BlackBerry while sitting on the tarmac waiting for the plane to push back from the gate. I was over at my Friends page, and in that moment, as far as I was concerned, Jim Mooney was alive. But then I refreshed the page, and I discovered the sad news through a posting of Jim’s death in an entry over at Keith R.A. DeCandido’s blog. It was eerie to find out about it in that way, and even spookier that I had been speaking of Jim just 24 hours or so earlier, not knowing that, depending on the time, he was either dying or had already died that day.

I wish I could have known him better, but my path took me away from comics. If you want to find out more details about Jim’s life and work, check out Mark Evanier’s blog.