Two of the things I most love, together at last: post-punk music, and comic books. Mark Mothersbaugh as Iron Man? Perfect. Enjoy the rest here.

Here’s something I won’t be watching: Every Marvel movie stitched together into chronological order.

Which would still be shorter than something else I won’t be watching: every Peter Jackson Rings/Hobbit movie put together.

1. Now on page 321 of Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth. One question remains: Is it the worst novel I’ve ever read, or merely one of the worst? Given that it’s by a writer of otherwise extraordinary talent, it seems to qualify as the first.
2. Read over the table of contents of this week’s New Yorker. Twice. Finally handed the entire issue over to offspring unread. Usually can find at least one “Talk of the Town” item, or a review, or a “Briefly Noted” worth engaging. Not this time.
3. Still need to finish reading a script for a client. Also a stack — er, wait, four stacks — of books within reach waiting to be read. But, oh, the thrill of getting a new book to read. I keep salivating over the prospect of reading The Martian — surely a survivalist tale of the most difficult challenges.
4. One third of the way through The Filth, a collection of the 13-issue comic-book title by Grant Morrison that I picked up at Comic-Con this year. Typical of Morrison’s latter-day comics, it’s equally invigorating and incomprehensible. Once upon a time, one could enjoy his inventiveness while also understanding what’s going on. But that seems to have been 10 (or 20) years ago.
5. Various newspapers, mailings, magazines and other communications, including the latest issue of Inc. magazine, enumerating the “500 fastest growing privately held companies in America,” of which several at least are flat-out lying about their results. I’ve been to their websites, and if their businesses are anything like their online presence, they ceased to exist sometime during the first Bush admiseration.

More reading tomorrow, and every day hereafter.

In recent years, Comic-Con has become as well known for its crazed throng of attendees as for anything pop-cultural. Last night when the end of Preview night cleared the exhibit hall, the mass exodus was reminiscent of the mass of starving undead crushing Jerusalem in World War Z, members of the Con crowd determined to trample each other to gain a seat on the first shuttle rather than wait, oh, five minutes.

Against that backdrop, I saw a man coming the other way, with a friend to my left of him. I’m not exaggerating the crush of humanity semi-circling them, and couldn’t figure out why everyone was giving them plenty of room, or why they felt empowered to head in the wrong direction.

Then I noticed that the guy was blind. And that he had his right hand discreetly placed atop his friend’s shoulder for guidance.

Navigating Comic-Con is in itself challenging. Doing it sightless, and against refugee-scaled foot traffic? That takes guts.

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I was finally able, just now, to secure a room for myself and my compadres for this year’s Comic-Con, which is next week.

Unless you’ve tried in recent years to book a room anywhere near San Diego for the week of Comic-Con, you have no idea what an accomplishment this was.

That a Comfort Inn can cost this much is beside the point. One doesn’t price-shop successfully for this booking. (One can’t.) Staying 30 miles away, in Carlsbad, was no cheaper.

The success comes from being able to actually book the room, and to have it on the shuttle route, where the convention shuttles you around to various Con locations in town. The worse thing would be having no room; the second-worse thing would be having to drive into downtown every day when it’s packed with 150,000 people looking like a throng from “The Walking Dead.”

The above is taken from an email sent to me by Marvel Comics soliciting my interesting in buying an immediate download of #3 of their limited series “Original Sin.”

Let me just say that Marvel isn’t kidding when they promise, above, “ANSWERS AT ALL COSTS!”

I was sorry to learn tonight of the death of comics artist Dick Ayers at age 90. Ayers drew or inked a lot of notable comics, including Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos and Fantastic Four, and he may have been the last surviving Marvel artist of the early 1960’s*. The comic I most associate him with is the original Ghost Rider, a Western hero who predated the motorcycle-riding Ghost Rider (and who was later renamed Night Rider to eliminate that confusion).

But that’s not the primary way I remember Dick Ayers. Dick Ayers was also the first, or one of the first, pro interviews I got for the comics fanzines I published in my teens in the 1970’s. He lived in upstate New York, where a young artist named Rich Mayone who drew comic strips for my fanzine heard about him and was able to get an interview. Here’s how Rich pitched the interview to me (and I’m paraphrasing): “There’s a guy around here, an inker, who did a lot of Marvel comics. Mostly Westerns, but still, it was Marvel.” As is typical with 14-year-olds, neither of us had any awareness of, and probably not much interest in, what this artist had been doing even five years earlier.

*update, two-and-a-half hours later:  (Other than a guy named Steve Ditko!)

This really puts everything into a new light.

I had the great pleasure tonight of going to comic strip artist Stephan Pastis’ “reading” from his strip Pearls Before Swine at Vroman’s Books in Pasadena. Pastis is an affable and funny public reader of his own strip, accompanying himself with projected images of the panels he’s reading. My kids and I had a good time; so did the other 200 or so people jammed into a small upstairs room meant to accommodate perhaps 75.

During the Q&A, I couldn’t help noting the turnout — a standing-room-only crowd aged 8 through 80 — as well as his story of large crowds at all his bookstore signings. (For one in Texas, his event was moved from a bookstore to a church able to handle more people, where he delivered his remarks from the preacher’s post.) All across the nation, how did people learn of his strip and fall in love with it? Through newspapers. And how are those newspapers responding? By cutting down on the number of comic strips they carry, and shrinking their size. I have pretty good vision, but it’s gotten to the point where I have difficulty making out what the daily strips in the LA Times are saying. Moreover, the LA Times used to carry two sections of Sunday comics; now they carry three pages. When I pointed these things out, Pastis said, of course, “You’re preaching to the choir. We all tell them that. The comics are the most popular feature in the newspaper.” One would think that the publishers would want to run more of the most popular feature, not less. (But then again, one might think that newspaper publishers wouldn’t have gotten their classified-ad lunch eaten by a guy named Craig starting something called Craigslist.)

I also had a great time standing in a seemingly endless line talking books and reading with other people in that line. I discussed Hemingway, newspapers, and nearby over-priced bric-a-brac with the retired guy behind me, a teacher of economics for 35 years at a high school in a poorer area of Los Angeles who decried the complete lack of reading among children these days, despite the evidence all around him in the store, and espoused a love for the Wall Street Journal and a disdain for the slant he’s sure he’s reading on the front page of the Los Angeles Times every day. (“They should keep their editorials off the front-page reporting!”) At one point he mentioned his grandchildren in Texas; the guy behind him asked what time it is now in Texas, to which I said, “1956.”

I bought each of my kids a book, and picked up the new Pearls treasury and got Pastis to sign it for me — “That’ll be worth money one day!” my junior Uncle Scrooge offspring exclaimed — and then somehow made it out of the store without arming myself and my kids with another five or 10 books each.

Winner: “Garfield Minus Garfield,” which reveals the existential angst hiding behind the “comedy” by removing the cat.

Sample strip: