All I have to do is go here and type (or paste) in the URL of the non-English web page I want to read in something approximating my native tongue, select the languages involved from a pull-down menu, and go for it.

I tried this with the La Cárcel de Papal comics blog in Spain I was telling you about yesterday and zap! All became clear. Sort of.

Clear enough to sate my curiosity about my book’s standing among at least a few of the Spanish locals who have discovered Dolmen’s well-produced hard-cover edition of Stuck Rubber Baby.

I would provide more details were I able to read Spanish, but since I can’t I can do no more than point the Spanish-speakers among you to the relevant web site so you can share the moment in a more comprehending way than I can.

Jaume also calls my attention to a Spanish comics blog called La Cárcel de Papal, which he deems "the most respected and important web site about comics" in his neck of the woods. Apparently SRB has earned plaudits there , since Jaume tells me it was given a 4+ rating, which is "is the best qualification you can get if you aren’t dead and aren’t [George] Herriman, [Harold] Foster or someone like that."

The blog’s review of my book (which was issued in a translation by Diego Garcia) is followed by a whole bunch of reader comments. These, of course, are similarly beyond the reach of my limited language skills, thus thwarting my natural impulse to eavesdrop madly whenever I’m the topic under discussion among strangers.

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I choose to believe that I would be pleased by absolutely everything that is being said by the commentors and am polishing up my blush of modesty accordingly.

If you speak Spanish and know otherwise, please be gentle as you shatter my illusions.

The catch? All of the artworks in question were unsigned — or rather, their signatures were hidden on the backs of the individual pieces so that a buyer could not know the identity (and hence the exact level of celebrity enjoyed by) the creator of his or her newly-purchased masterpiece until after their $99 had been forked over.

Above: Panels from a 1987 Wendel episode

If you were drawing comic strips about everyday gay life during the 1980s, you could only sidestep the subject of AIDS for so long. Whether you were HIV-positive or HIV-negative, it was just too unavoidably, cruelly in the middle of your consciousness.

Epidemics that are busily killing your readers and your readers’ friends by the thousands do not make comfortable subjects for cartoonists — but there the epidemic was, tyrannizing our lives and demanding the best of us while we feared (and often experienced) the worst.

That period of my career, during which my personal demographic — gay males — unwillingly occupied central spots in both the disease’s bullseye and the religious right’s crosshairs, not to mention the general public’s checklist of people who should not be allowed within breathing room of their offspring, is being summoned back to mind by my inclusion in an upcoming panel at MoCCA (the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art) that will be assembled in New York City as part of a multi-faceted fundraising effort by GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis).

The panel is tentatively called Out of the Pages: A Look Back at 25 Years of HIV/AIDS in Comics and will blast off at 6:30 PM on October 23. That’s over a month from now, but if you’re going to be in or near the Big Apple that evening and think you might want to come, GMHC suggests that you call 212-367-1176 soon to make a reservation. Seating space at MoCCA, apparently, will be limited.

Not surprisingly (given how tight a community us LGBT cartoonists can be), the panel is shaping up to be a reunion of old friends. Other cartoonists currently scheduled to participate are Allan Neuwirth (Chelsea Boys); Abby Denson (Tough Love); and Chris Companik (HIV + Me). Ken Gale, on whose WBAI longrunning radio show ‘Nuff Said I’ve spouted off in years past, will moderate the panel.

I hope some of you readers of this blog will be able to be there. And if you live too far from Gotham to come, please mention what’s brewing to your NYC-area friends.

Now here we are on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. If ever there was a day for considered reflections on the state of things, this is it. But no. Cartooning deadlines call.

I hope soon to resume more regular posts, but for now let me offer a reprise of my essay called "Two Years, Two Wars, and One Dog Ago." I posted it on my web site on August 9, 2003, as that year’s 9-11 anniversary approached. Sad to say, everything that was ominous about the George W. Bush presidency then has only grown more frightening since — and yet the country gave him four additional years to wreck the nation’s Constitution by re-electing him in 2004.

Maybe. Depending on what really happened with those Ohio voting machines.

In the wake of 9/11, I was numbed by a mixture of grief for the victims and outrage at the whole human race for not having evolved beyond such savagery, I wrote back then. And I was anxious at the thought of what hay our politicians might be poised to make from the tragedy while a jolted citizenry was preoccupied with private fears. What a golden opportunity to use public anger for unsavory ends!

I would be proud of my prescience if a lot of other people had not figured out Bush’s agenda with alarm just as urgent as mine by the time the Decider’s administration was two years along. But America, ever vulnerable to swift-boating manipulation, let the steamroller roll on.

My 2003 essay is too long for a blog post, but if you’d like to see what I wrote in its entirety, just click on this link.

It has taken a compliant and largely conscienceless Republican-led Congress to allow things to go as far as they have already. Will America be any smarter at the polls this November than it was in 2004?

Time will tell.

Robert Christgau, whose influential commentary on pop music began appearing in the Voice’s pages back in 1969, has been given the boot, along with four other senior editors who have helped keep the paper’s arts coverage sharp and localized. Three members of the art department have also been kicked overboard, including Art Director Minh Uong, who helped give Stuck Rubber Baby beautiful play — almost four full pages’ worth, plus an art clip on the cover — when my graphic novel was published in 1995.

That takes me back down memory lane, since it was Minh who helped me get over a prejudice I once had against letting my artwork be digitally scanned for reproduction.

Young designers these days must find it quaint that drawings were once photostatted, pasted physically into layouts, and then photographed onto fine-grained film for transfer onto printing plates. Film could lovingly preserve a drawing’s details in a way that scanners, in their early days, could not match — particularly when digital newbies who were just learning the ropes were pushing the buttons.

I now realize that I was unfairly generalizing from a single unfortunate experience. A well-intentioned but technically unsavvy gay publication hired me to do drawings that ended up being scanned at far to crude a resolution. To my embarrassment this made hash of my stippling and crosshatching. I was so horrified that I vowed never to submit artwork for publication unless only the old, film-based technology was used to reproduce it.

Talk about swimming against the tides of history!

With that bitter experience still on my mind, I winced when Minh Wong proposed reordering and manipulating some of my Stuck Rubber Baby panels digitally in the interest of a more effective showcase in the Voice. Would I stick to my vow? Four pages of free publicity in the famed Village Voice was nothing to be sneezed at when a new book was about to reach bookstores, but that doesn’t mean that my alarm at Minh’s suggestion wasn’t obvious.

Minh was patient and promised that I would be pleased with what he did. And I was. Knowing nothing of how fast things were changing in the digital revolution, I was unaware that resolutions of a far finer level had become available since that first bad experience.

So now Minh, my digital enlightener, is among the seven others newly-expelled Voice mainstays cited in today’s Times article. He’s talented and will do well, and he joins a distinguished list of past Voice contributors.

Long gone is George Delmerico, one of Minh’s art directing predecessors, who gave me my first break in the Voice and who subsequently published my drawings and comics repeatedly while his tenure at the paper lasted.

Gone also is longtime senior editor Richard Goldstein, who like Christgau seemed for years to be one of the Voice’s irreplaceable ingredients. Richard was shown the door a couple of years ago. There was a public dust-up as Richard filed a lawsuit for age discrimination, a lawsuit that recently ended with a settlement whose terms cannot be shared with even those who have supped with the plaintiff on Thanksgiving.

In 1981 Richard co-wrote (with Larry Bush) a prophetic essay called "The Antigay Backlash." I was invited by George Delmerico to draw a full-page comic strip to accompany the article. Though a Voice novice, I was given complete editorial freedom. They did things like that in those days.

"Sometimes I Get So Mad" served as my coming-out statement in a mainstream (as opposed to an "underground") publication. Angry and heartfelt, it was reprinted thereafter in a number of places, including The Advocate, where it laid the groundwork for Wendel, and in my book Dancin’ Nekkid With The Angels. It was an important professional landmark for me.

Richard and his partner Tony Ward became and remain close friends of Eddie’s and mine, which gives me an insider’s vantage point from which to report that my pal’s painful departure from the Voice, a professional divorce that once seemed unimaginable, has in no way laid my pal creatively low. Indeed, he is well along in writing a novel that will knock you dead when it is completed. Eddie and I have been given a peek. (And no, it is not a roman a clef about a mistreated journalist!)

Meanwhile, the Voice logo is still blue and rectangular, so not everything has changed. I see that the always amusing and occasionally trenchant Michael Musto is still on staff, as is theatre critic Michael Feingold. I remain personally grateful to both of these guys for lending a hand when I was desperately beating the bushes for money so that the half-finished Stuck Rubber Baby could be completed.

So the paper isn’t yet stripped bare of its veterans, even if it has been a long, long time since anyone could refer to it in the same sentence as the word "underground" without smirking. Believe it or not, there was a time when the Voice seemed rooted in, or at least aligned with, the ‘Sixties counterculture. Not that it was ever the East Village Other. But it was "hip."

Cartoonist/playwright Jules Feiffer (of whom I first became aware when Mad magazine reprinted some Voice cartoons from a collection called Sick, Sick, Sick) staked his claim to fame in its pages. Arthur Bell showed that outrageous journalism could be published from a defiantly gay point of view without anybody getting lynched. This heartened me at a time when I was trying to figure out how out of the closet I dared be when the viability of my cartooning career was at stake.

Reassuringly, Arthur Bell showed that a homo could even be accepted into the heterosensibility-drenched pages of Playboy. Homo Howard Cruse eventually followed suit. (Briefly. But that’s another story for another time.)

I’m sure that talented writers will continue to find a place in the Voice, but there’s little to indicate that there’s much of the paper’s old soul left in those offices where I once felt welcome. And maybe the regret I feel is just a sign of my advancing old-fogeyness.

I miss the feeling that something funky and journalistically radical was afoot down in Greenwich Village. But I guess that gentrification will always have its way, no matter what time-honored neighborhood ghosts get displaced by its advance.