Thanks for fighting the good fight, Pete.

I keep trying to watch this without crying … but I can’t. Aside from the power of the song itself, there’s something about seeing a man once reviled now redeemed that gets to me.

Rich Buckler, best known for having co-created the character Deathlok the Demolisher and for his art on Fantastic Four in the mid-70s, turns 60 today.

But years before he did either of those things, he drew a convention sketch for an annoying teenager with a sketchbook—me!

I have no idea what con I would have been attending in New York in late November of 1972. I think it might have been one of the first Creation cons. Anyone out there know for sure?

In any case—Happy Birthday, Rich!

I’m celebrating Jim Starlin’s birthday by dipping into my collection of comic-book convention sketches and posting yet another drawing done back when I was an annoying teenager (as opposed to an annoying adult). This one was done in the early ’70s, probably 1971.

The sketch is of Jim’s fanzine superhero, Doctor Weird, Master of the Macabre, who appeared in Star Studded Comics starting in the mid-’60s.

At the time, Jim was just starting to make the move from fanzines to working in comics professionally, while I was still a fan only. Six years later, in 1977, by then a comics professional myself, I had the misfortune of taking over as the writer on Captain Marvel following Jim’s acclaimed run … which meant that I had to open a lot of hate mail!

Happy birthday, Jim!

You may have turned 58 today, and have gone all Hollywood, writing scripts for such TV shows as Earth: Final Conflict, Mutant X, and Viper, but once upon a time you were a comic-book newcomer.

Back in 1972, when you were 21 and I was 17, we huddled in a corner near the elevators on the 18th floor of the Statler Hilton Hotel at one of Phil Seuling’s July 4th weekend comic-book conventions, and you drew this picture of your Iron-Wolf character in my sketchbook.

Well … at least I think it was 1972. It might have been as early as Phil’s 1971 con or as late as the 1973 one. But whichever it was, let this drawing be a reminder that tempus fugit … and also that my memory isn’t what it once was.

Here’s wishing you a birthday wish that the decades have left fewer holes in your memory.

Comic-book artist Michael Kaluta, perhaps best known for his work on The Shadow, turns 61 today. Kaluta is also known for forming—along with Jeff Jones, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Bernie Wrightson—an artistic collective called The Studio in the late ’70s.

In 1971, Kaluta won the Shazam Award, given by the Academy of Comic Book Arts, for Outstanding New Talent, and the following year, at Phil Seuling’s July 4th, 1972 weekend comic-book convention, he drew the image you see above right for an annoying kid named Scott Edelman who’d thrust his sketchpad at him.

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Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury, turned 60 today.

Do you think he remembers having drawn the sketch below at a Reuben Awards banquet in 1973 when he was but 25 and I was just a snotty kid with a sketchbook and a pleading voice?

Nah.

I, on the other hand, remember it very well. (There should be a word for that, the encounter which one party regards as meaningful and the other finds either meaningless or completely unmemorable.)

In any case, as I type these words, it suddenly leaps out at me—he was only freakin’ 25? And already helping to topple a president, with a Pulitzer only two years away? It makes me feel as if I haven’t done enough to justify my existence today.

Happy birthday, Garry!

Painter and poet Josef Čapek was born on this date in 1887.

Why should you care?

Because Josef was the older brother to Karel Čapek, the author of the 1921 play “R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots),” in which the term “robot” was introduced. And contrary to popular opinion, it was Josef, not Karel, who coined that word, as reported in this article written by Karel in 1933:

“Listen, Josef,” the author began, “I think I have an idea for a play.”

“What kind,” the painter mumbled (he really did mumble, because at the moment he was holding a brush in his mouth).

The author told him as briefly as he could.

“Then write it,” the painter remarked, without taking the brush from his mouth or halting work on the canvas. The indifference was quite insulting.

“But,” the author said, “I don’t know what to call these artificial workers. I could call them Labori, but that strikes me as a bit bookish.”

“Then call them Robots,” the painter muttered, brush in mouth, and went on painting. And that’s how it was. Thus was the word Robot born; let this acknowledge its true creator.

So let’s hear it for Josef Čapek, without whom there’d be no robots, leaving us all to live in a world in which Isaac Asimov had titled his famous collection, I, Labori.

Robert Silverberg was born 73 years ago today. Here’s a picture I took of a slightly younger Silverberg at the 2005 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow. See that photo behind him? That’s of a much younger Silverberg at the 1957 World Science Fiction Convention in London.

I’ve been reading Robert Silverberg for as long as I’ve been reading science fiction. And why not? Bob’s career is one year older than I am, since he published his first short story in 1954. (Though maybe I shouldn’t rub that in.)

Happy birthday, Bob!

Had he still been with us, Isaac Asimov would have turned 87 three days ago. Well … at least, that’s when he would have celebrated it, as he was never really sure of the exact date.

As he put it in his autobiography, In Memory Yet Green, “It could not have been later than that. It might, however, have been earlier. Allowing for the uncertainties of the times, of the lack of records, of the Jewish and Julian calendars, it might have been as early as October 4, 1919. There is, however, no way of finding out. My parents were always uncertain and it really doesn’t matter. I celebrate January 2, 1920, so let it be.”

So, in honor of that maybe/maybe not birthday, let’s step into the Wayback Machine. Here I am, visiting Doubleday’s Park Avenue offices to interview Isaac back in the ’70s for my high school underground newspaper. Click through the image for a better look at Isaac, garbed in his customary bolo necktie. I, unfortunately, can be seen wearing a puka shell necklace, which I guess I thought was cool back when I was 16 or so. At least I wasn’t wearing a headband!