Daughter of Fear of Blogging

Happy New Year! And a belated Good Yule, Happy Chanukah, and Joyous Solstice!
Here's a link to a terrific show on NPR about comics people (including Yours Truly)and Chanukah, "Chanukah, a Time for Superheroes" :
http://streams.wgbh.org/online/play.php?xml=play/2006_12_17_super.xml
Last November I flew to New York to speak on a panel at the Jewish Museum, about their current exhibit, "American Masters of Comics Art," which, if you remember, included not one woman. It was a great panel, and the audience was with us all the way. Along with me on the panel were cartoonists Sabrina Jones, Joan Hilty, and Leela Corman, all intelligent, talented, and feminist. I'd like to say we enlightened everyone and changed a lot of minds, but I think the audience already was, like us, outraged that the show excluded women.
Next day, Steve and I moved on to the Big Apple con, right across from Pennsylvania Station. This longtime Betty and Veronica fan was delighted to see Stan Goldberg, the quintessential Archie cartoonist, and to get my picture taken with him. Then we had another women in comics panel, this time, along with me were Josie and the Pussycats artist Tanya delRio (check out her comic, it doesn't look like anything else at Archie Comics)and old friend Shary Flenniken (her funny as hell strip Trots and Bonnie ran in National Lampoon), whom I had not seen for far too long. We thought the panel was a bit small, so for another point of view, we recruited ex-DC editor Mariah McCourt from the audience. Mariah is, like the women on both panels, wonderful, intelligent, and feminist, and we had yet another great panel. Here's a photo of me, Steve and Mariah in New York, taken by comics journalist Heidi MacDonald.
Coming in February: if you live in San Diego, I'll be a guest at the San Diego National Cartoonists Society meeting on February 14th, and then back to San Francisco to conduct a workshop on writing graphic novels at the San Francisco Writers Conference on the 17th. That gives me the whole month of January to meet all my deadlines and continue to work on my next big book.
And maybe to get up the nerve to post another blog!