But be that as it may, a three-hour drive lies between Boston and our neck of the mountains. Never one to shrink from exerting whatever effort it takes to achieve his goals, however, Phil came a-calling, accompanied by fellow conference-attendee Linda Adams, Young Adult Coordinator of the San Bernadino Public Library.

We had a great time, as Phil and I always do on the rare occasions when we find ourselves within visiting distance of each other. Anyone who has been around Phil will tell you that he is a ball of fire conversationally, and Linda was delightful to talk to as well. Eddie served his delicious chicken stew, Lulu the dalmatian licked faces all around, and I got comp copies of the new issue of Phil’s comic book series The Winged Tiger, which is good for many a chuckle while being awash in the enthusiasm for sheer creativity that makes all of Phil’s comics both perfect for kids and balm for the soul of anyone who’s feeling beaten down by the cynicism of our era.

Phil, of course, is the galvanizer and cartoonist-in-chief of Cartoonists Across America & The World, an enterprise that’s way too little known considering the good it does. Phil boldly calls himself "the Godfather of the graphic novel." (go to his web site to see why), and like the most devoted godfather that any of us could ask for, Phil travels the globe as an untiring advocate for the art form he has helped nurture from his college days onward. Being around him always gets my juices flowing.

True, James Gandolfini’s character has had a closer call this season than Fosdick ever did, hovering with dangerous ambivalence during his coma’s closing moments at the threshold of an enticingly lit "reunion party" where his dead mother and everyone he ever murdered were no doubt waiting to yell "Surprise!" if he stepped through the door—accompanied I’m sure by Nate Fisher, his dad, and five seasons’ worth of the precipitously killed extras from Six Feet Under.

But Tony has baggage (in the form of a metaphorical briefcase) from his life on planet Earth that he isn’t yet ready to turn loose of, and so he steps back from the unseen revelers and instead returns to the hospital where Carmela, the kids, and the extended Soprano "family" are holding vigil over his betubed corporteal self. So I gather that we will all be graced with his company for a few episodes more.

Since Gandolini is the uncontested star of the series, his character’s survival comes as no big surprise, but that didn’t keep me from vicariously experiencing my most harrowing hospital stay since my double-hernia surgery several years ago. I mean, poke around in my groin if you have to, but please don’t ever let me look down and see a hole in my belly as gory as the one Tony Soprano was sporting for a while!

Mob dramas awash in bloodletting have always been a hard sell for me — weak-kneed, violence-hating wimp that I am — so I avoided The Sopranos when the first wave of hooplah hit and continued to abstain until the third season, when I made the mistake of watching one episode and was quickly hooked by the intriguing characters illuminated by uncommonly incisive writing. Everyone else in America was already ahead of me, of course. That’s the story of my life; I was late in appreciating rock & roll, too.

Anyway, now that I’ve joined the Sopranos-loving masses and rented all of the DVDs to catch up on the shows I originally missed while suffering through the long drought leading up to this HBO season’s new, reportedly final bunch of episodes, I’m so pleased that my longtime friend George DeStefano has written An Offer We Can’t Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America.

While a lot of the mob movies George writes about with clarity and obvious insight I never saw and probably never will (yes, I saw the Godfather flicks and GoodFellas many years ago, but otherwise I’m largely a stranger to the films whose themes my pal explores), George’s chapters about The Sopranos pulled me right in.

It’s like batting reactions back and forth with a really smart college friend in the dorm, when you both should be studying but when both your heads are too full of ideas about a cool show you’ve just seen to crack the books. George offers a mix of intellectual analysis, occasional critical caveats, but more often straight-out grooving on the moments and characters he and I both dig. Good stuff to shoot the bull about after the spilled blood has clotted.

I won’t say a lot about Alison’s book right now, since I know how much her legion of fans will enjoy torturing themselves with curiosity between now and the book’s arrival in bookstores this summer. I will promise you, though, that you’ve got an interesting, touching reading experience ahead during which you’ll get fascinating glimpses of Alison’s personal history that will broaden even further the appreciation for her gifts and insights on life that you’ve already gleaned from DTWOF.

One thing that won’t surprise you, of course, is that it’s a damned good book.

Nina stopped being unknown to me when I met her at the 1989 edition of Comic-Con International in San Diego. I quickly learned that she is among the funniest cartoonists around, male or female. Just root around in some out-of-print bookstore bins until you find Nina’s Adventures, the Pentshack Press collection of the comic strips she was knocking out back when she was content to let her drawings sit in unmoving, hilarious grandeur on pieces of paper.You’ll be rewarded for your industry. (There are some online samples of Nina’s old strip here.)

Nina switched her sights to animation a few years ago and has already created some short-form Flash masterworks. Now I’m on the edge of my seat waiting to see Sita Sings The Blues, the full-length labor of love she is slowly creating bit by bit in her Brooklyn apartment.

It’s still years from completion I know, but the teaser clips viewable on her web site give a glimpse of the magic to come.

Now I see that she’s auditioning voice actors for Sita. That makes the project seem yet one more step closer to reality. She needs investors to help her move forward on the movie, though, so if you’re rich, run put some of your smart money on Paley. (And if you’ve got any left over, I could use a few grand myself.)

And speaking of my own petty needs, I know that some cynics among you may suspect that I’m raving about Nina today only because she wrote glowingly about Stuck Rubber Baby in the Nina’s December 29 entry of her blog. Hey, Nina’s and my mutual admiration society goes way back and transcends the blogophere by light years. Besides, I can’t help it if we both have discerning taste!

As inevitably happens when I get interviewed, of course, I threw out at least one undercooked remark that calls for subsequent modification. When Susan asked me how the "North Adams Experience" compares to the "New York Experience," I joked and am correctly quoted as having joked, "The New York experience is one of not getting stuff into a gallery, for one thing!"

It was all work I am proud to have done and proud to share with others because of my core belief that nothing good comes from puritan efforts to separate out the erotic parts of our lives and imaginations from the rest of our human comedy and declare those parts unfit to be portrayed in art. It’s also a branch of my work that goes unrepresented in my current show on North Adams’s Main Street, there being nothing to suggest that the average citizen of North Adams is of the same mind as me about sexual explicitness in cartoons.

I can identify. I felt the same way before my mind was expanded by underground comic books.

Leslie-Lohman, on the other hand, is not interested in displaying my cartoon depictions of anthropomorphized vegetables or silly comic strips about ghosts or my recent experiments with cartoon surrealism. I’m proud of those drawings, too, but they’re not what Leslie-Lohman’s gallery exists for.

So I’m still waiting for the social walls to erode that separate my erotic imagination from my non-erotic imagination. That will only happen when America loses its irrational terror of sex — sex as it’s experienced by everyday people, straight and gay: funny, clumsy, undignified sex between people grappling awkwardly for honest human contact and sensuality. Not the phony, sleazy, heavy-breathing sideshow-mirror distortions of sex that pass for erotic sophistication in today’s mass media.

Someday maybe we’ll allow all of human experience to be rolled together into one big ball of good-humored affirmation. Until then, be grateful that galleries like Leslie-Lohman exist to nurture explorations of humanity’s forbidden naughty bits. "Depravity" is often in the eye of the beholder.