| Peter David.net

Many, many years ago, I was in Las Vegas with my then-wife Myra, and we went to see a double bill of Joan Rivers and Robert Goulet. Rivers came on first. Most comics in Vegas did a normal set of about twenty minutes. Not Rivers. She was on for well over an hour. She was hysterical every minute, but part of me wondered why she was doing such an abnormally long time on stage.

We figured it out when Goulet came on.

He was drunk. Rivers had been out on stage for so long because backstage they must have been trying to sober Goulet up. Didn’t work. He staggered his way through three songs, forgot the lyrics to “If Ever I Would Leave You,” and picked a fight with a guy in the audience before finally staggering off stage. So he was a disaster. But Rivers was amazing.

PAD

digresssml Originally published May 25, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1436

The phone rang on my desk in the direct sales department at Marvel Comics. I’d been working there less than a week, but I’d quickly learned that whenever the switchboard got a phone call that they didn’t know what to do with, and they didn’t want to bother editorial with it, they invariably kicked it over to direct sales. More specifically, since I was the new guy, they kicked it over to me. “Direct sales,” I answered.

A kid’s voice on the other end said, with no preamble, “I was wondering, if Superman raced the Silver Surfer, who would win?”

“The Silver Surfer,” I said without hesitation.

“Okay, thanks,” he said, and hung up.

Of course I said the Surfer. I worked at Marvel. If I’d been working at DC, I would’ve said Superman. What else would you expect?

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