| Peter David.net

Caroline was born 12 years ago today.

As is the case with the births of all my daughters, I will always remember the circumstances of that day. Part of what I recall is the change in accommodations for fathers. When my other girls were born, I got to sit in a comfortable white plastic chair for hours on end. This time there was not only a couch for me, but when I tried to lie down on it, the nurse informed me it folded out into a bed. So THAT was great.

Kathleen was amazing. She started labor on the train home from work and didn’t even realize that it had started, assuming that it was Braxton-Hicks. We went to the hospital a little after midnight and she gave birth around 2:30 the following afternoon. For some reason, she became fixated on an article in the newspaper about the history of the latest tree that was put up in Rockefeller Center. She kept asking me to read her the article and I did so about twenty times.

I still remembering the nurse saying “Oh my God” shortly after Caroline was born, which alarmed Kathleen, until the nurse clarified that she was reacting to the size of Caroline’s feet, which were so large that they extended outside of the squares on the piece of paper for footprints. Caroline, as some of you longtime readers know, was named after Carol Kalish, the Marvel Direct Sales Manager who hired me as her assistant and launched my comics career.

She’s now 12 years old and has received her first report card from Middle School. She got all A’s. I couldn’t be prouder of both her and her mommy.

PAD

digresssml Originally published January 18, 2002, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1470

Picking up from last week, we’re doing a bit of time traveling backward and forward simultaneously, by reviewing the poll taken in this very column back in 1992 speculating as to the state of our little industry ten years hence… which is to say, 2002, i.e., now.

Yes, cast yourself back to the early 1990s, back when we were bombing the crap out of the Middle East and a guy named Bush was president. Back in that far-flung era bearing no resemblance to our own, fans believed that after the turn of the century: Marvel would be the top company; Image and Valiant were the two likeliest companies to be out of business; and the comic topping the sales charts didn’t yet exist. Now let’s see what else they, and we, had to say.

Continue Reading “The BID Poll Revisited, Part 2” →