There's Nothing More Embarrassing Than To Have

Man Makes Plans . . . And God Laughs.

All The Preparation In The World Doesn't Avail You If You Can't Make That Imaginative Leap And Put Yourself In The Position Of The Characters You've Created, To Imagine What It's Like To Be Somebody Else.

As For Comics, One Has Only To Turn To The Characteristic Output Of Marvel Comics, For The Period From About 1961 To About 1975, To Find Not An Expression Of Base And Cynical Impulses But Of Good, Old-fashioned Liberal Humanism Of A Kind That May Strike Us Today, God Help Us, As Quaint, But Which Nevertheless Appealed, In Story After Story, To Ideals Such As Tolerance, Technological Optimism, And Self-sacrifice For The Benefit Of Others.

I Suppose There Is Something Appealing About A Word That Everyone Uses With Absolute Confidence But On Whose Exact Meaning No Two People Can Agree. The Word That I'm Thinking Of Right Now Is Genre, One Of Those French Words, Like Crêpe, That No One Can Pronounce Both Correctly And Without Sounding Pretentious.

Do What You Gotta Do And Stay Fly