Nobody under, I dunno, 40 will know what this sketchbook drawing from 1982 is talking about.

Sorry about that, kids. I’ll cater to the Youth Vote another time.

1. Sincere thanks from Eddie and me for the condolence notes left in the blog’s comments section last week, as well as for similar messages that have reached us by other routes.

2. I’ve lost so much time due to Evelyn’s death (and pressing work that got sidetracked because of her passing) that I may not be able to compose blog entries of any substance for a week or two. To avoid leaving a dreaded BlogVoid during this period, I’ll probably throw up raw, obscure artwork from my past for your amusement occasionally—like the sketchbook drawing above.

‘Bye for now.

On Valentine’s Day I made a return visit to White River Junction, VT, at the invitation of that city’s new creative crown jewel, the Center for Cartoon Studies.

CCS, which was conceived, founded, and is now overseen by graphic novelist James Sturm, offers a two-year course of study for aspiring comics creators ready to settle in Vermont and get serious about honing their craft under the tutelage of cartooning professionals like Jason Lutes, James Kochalka, Stephen R. Bissette, and others.

This was my second time to swap thoughts about comics with a batch of Steve Bissette’s students. Steve and I go back a ways, of course, having swapped war stories about the comics industry in various settings over the decades. Like hosts of comics fans, I had admired his talents from afar well before we found ourselves conversing face-to-face at assorted events where cartoonists congregate. Steve helped raise my profile beyond underground and gay circles by interviewing me, along with his co-author Stanley Wiater, for their 1992 book Comic Book Rebels, and when Eddie and I first moved to the Berkshires Steve was quick to invite me up to White River Junction to speak to the students in the CCS class he was teaching at that time. I enjoyed myself back then and had a similarly entertaining time this year.

Steve amazes me. In his alternate identity as a blogger, he puts me totally to shame. Where does he get the energy? Where does he find the time? It’s been two weeks since I visited CCS and only now am I managing to get my act together to compose a few paragraphs marking my trip. It’s a good thing it’s not up to me to funnel "breaking news" to CNN!

I learned recently that Steve and I both spent time during the 1980s collaborating with one "Jovial Bob Stine," the man who edited and largely wrote Scholastic’s Bananas magazine before mutating into R. L. Stine, the fabulously (and deservedly) successful author of the Goosebumps juvenile horror novels.

At the end of it all lies a new bedroom and bath designed especially for Eddie’s mom Evelyn.

And guess what? Soon everything you see in photo above must be cleared out to make the final stages of renovation possible. Where will it all go? Where will we eat? Where will we watch TV?

Uh… We’re working on that.

Oops! What’s that crunching noise I’m hearing behind me even as I write this?

And how is Evelyn faring during all this craziness? She has taken up temporary residence at nearby Williamstown Commons Rehab Center after a suspiciously convenient (and happily brief) hospitalization a couple of weeks ago. Once she has regained her strength she is (to put it mildly) eager to move into her newly created bedroom, where in the best possible scenario she will be able to shut her door, remove her hearing aids in order to obliterate all sounds of hammering and sawing, and pretend that everything is normal in the rest of the house until Eddie and I finally peek in to tell her that she can now make her way to the kitchen without tripping over a sawhorse.

The fact that the curriculum was simply conveying demonstrable facts about the demonstrably diverse makeup of New York’s community life carried no weight with this determined lady, who ultimately succeeded in have the curriculum in question quashed.

Last week I came across my sketched version of "The Educator,"my comic strip response to this controversy. It never found a home and hence was never re-drawn in finished form, but I still kind of like it.

First graders used to learn to read by reading books starring two bland suburban kids named Dick and Jane.

There were presumably no homosexuals living on Dick and Jane’s block, although Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat could occasionally be spotted lurking near their playground, awaiting his moment.

While admiration for a job well done is appropriate, the cartoonists among us will inevitably be tempted to do our own inelegant riff on the painting should an opportunity present itself — as exemplified by Laura Weinstein’s promotional graphic (at right above) for Lit Graphic: The World of the Graphic Novel, the exhibition of comics art that opened on November 10 at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

To be fair, snobbery hasn’t always been the culprit. Sometimes it’s just been habits of thought. Various of my perfectly open-minded art-loving friends acknowledge that they’ve never felt called upon to give much thought to Rockwell, thus allowing the widespread condescension toward the man’s accomplishments to go unexamined in their minds. One can’t keep up with everything, after all, and the need to worry about George W. Bush’s presidency has more urgency, perhaps, than any need to reevaluate the artistic legacy of a popular illustrator who, it must be said, never suffered from disdain among everyday folks.

Maybe I’ve got a personal agenda at play here. As the target of much (to my mind undeserved) condescension during my Barefootz years, I’ve always felt an affinity for the underrated Norman Rockwell. We schoolyard outcasts have to stick together.

Fortunately, time seems to be rendering a fairer verdict about Rockwell than have some art critics in the past. Decide for yourself. For sheer pleasure in looking at richly imagined pictures that have interesting stories to tell, the Rockwell Museum is the place to beat. And the Museum is assembling a big Rockwell exhibition that’ll soon be touring around the country as well, so original Rockwell paintings may not be as out of reach as you think, even for people who can’t make the drive to western Massachusetts.

I view the man as a master visual storyteller who knew how to portray characters that made ordinariness fascinating. Cynics may bristle at the unabashed "neighborliness" of those images and personalities made famous in the course of the artist’s long partnership with the SatEvePost, but those of us who like telling stories with pictures and aspire to do it well know when we’re seeing a fellow cartoonist in action.

Even if Rockwell’s stories were told on canvases instead of comic book pages, the man was clearly playing in our ballpark.

As was true when JM#1 hit bookstore shelves a couple of years ago and CNW brought together a panel to celebrate the occasion, WGBH Forum Network was on hand to videotape the proceedings. The newest recording will ultimately be posted on the WGBH web site (keep your eye on this spot for that); meanwhile, if you’d like to see the video of Jen, me, and Joan Hilty doing similar panel duty back in 2005, here’s where to find that little archival gem.

Typically, thanks to the usual crush of professional tasks that persist in preventing me from making blogging the core of my existence, it’s taken me a full ten days to post photos taken during this most recent Cambridge gabfest. But better later than never; here are a couple of the many images snapped by Jen’s beloved lovergirl and occasional photographic documentarian Emmalee Aliquo. (Not being a media whore like the rest of us, Emmalee has no web presence that Google or I could find; hence her name bears no hyperlink. But take my word for it, Emmalee is one cool chick and you should get to know her sometime.)

Tucked in among our audience, by the way, were two distinguished theatrical personages from the Boston area, Ed and Charlotte Peed, who just happen to be old college-era friends of mine on whom I hadn’t laid eyes in many a long year. Much fun was had as we lunched and caught up on our lives for a couple of hours before the panel began.

I got to observe Ed’s skills at close range in a play or two, though. Especially memorable was listening to him and occasionally viewing him in action from the vantage point of the garbage can I occupied throughout BSC’s 1967 production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Since I only popped into view a time or two during the play, otherwise snuggling in darkness amid mentholated cough syrup fumes (I got sick during the show’s run), I mostly experienced the auditory rather than visual aspects of Ed’s performance as Hamm. But I could tell, even from the odoriferous blackness of my trash container, that his performance was holding the audience rapt throughout the evening.

My dramatic high point in the show was getting to fearlessly eat a Milkbone dog biscuit as onlookers gasped. It comes with the territory if you’re going to play poor, legless, garbage-can-dwelling Nagg in Beckett’s black comedy of desolation, hiring a stunt eater being frowned upon in the world of serious theatre. Ed, who was cast in a more prominent role than mine, ruled the stage as a magnificently throne-bound Hamm. And in case you’ve never tried them yourself, I’ll spare you the trouble: Milkbones, while not actually tasting "good," aren’t quite as unpleasant to the taste buds of a non-dog as one might expect.

I don’t seem to have a photo of Ed in his Hamm role, unfortunately, but I do harbor a yellowing photo (see below) of him portraying one of the four somewhat spooky young men who spent two hours giving a fellow named Manchester Wintergrey the jitters in my 1967 Playwright’s Lab play The Sixth Story.

It’s a clear sign of advancing age when you respond to images of yourself recorded when you were forty with a rueful shake of your head accompanied by the unvoiced question: Who IS that child?

Crumb and S. Clay Wilson being unavailable, it fell to me, a one-time flower-powered longhair who by 1984 had discovered the convenience of a shorter trim, to acquaint a mainstream television audience with what we dope-smoking, acid-tripping counterculture cartoonists of yore had brought forth once we applied our comix-creating impulses to the dispensation of outrageous sexual fantasies, religious transgression, political belligerence and, in my case, cockroach-infested parables on cosmic matters—all in "easy-to-read comic book form."

The interview I’m talking about was one installment of twelve that were broadcast as a series under the umbrella title Funny Business: The Art in Cartooning. All episodes in the series concentrated on one aspect or another of cartooning. (WDCN subsequently syndicated the series to interested PBS stations across America.)

Veteran gag cartoonist and cartooning educator John R. Cassady (known to his friends as "Jack" or "Cass"), was the creator and host of the series. Cass and I had met shortly after my 1977 move to New York during gatherings of the now-defunct Cartoonists Guild.

Funny Business was seen widely enough in its day to generate fan mail from cartooning enthusiasts in various cities, but it never achieved a high enough profile to be a viable candidate for contemporary commercial re-release in DVD format. But that hasn’t stopped Cass from recently burning DVDs of individual episodes on his own for sale on his web site. I was made pleasantly aware of this welcome development when a jewel case through whose plastic cover my unlined face was peering arrived in my Massachusetts mailbox, courtesy of my longtime colleague and pal.

But having been propelled anew into the past by this artifact from my mid-career youth, when some interesting things had happened already but many even more interesting events still lay ahead, I find nostalgia trumping vanity. It was a fun day in Nashville, one during which I got to shmooze with the great New Yorker cartoonist George Booth, whose Funny Business segment was to be taped the same day as mine. Cass, a fellow southerner whose drawl from the interviewer’s chair combined with mine from across the set provided healthy balance to the British-to-mid-Atlantic phonics that typically crowd our Dixie quadrupthongs off the airwaves (unless a really stupid or really devious fictional character is needed for plot reasons).

Cass may have forgotten by now that at a certain point he opened my eyes to new artistic possibilities. He was, for the record, the first cartoonist in my orbit to educate himself about and then enthusiastically extol the merits of adding digital graphics to the ‘tooner’s toolbox.

Those examples told me more clearly than any lecture could have that my former misgivings were overdue for reevaluation.

At left: A cartoon by the Cass-man himself.