Last night was the annual CAPS (Comic Arts Professional Society) banquet at the Porter Valley Country Club in Northridge, CA. It was very well attended by members as well as friends of CAPS such as voice actors Gary Owens and June Foray. It's rare to get cartoonists to dress up at all, but I've never seen so many cartoon ties in one place. I wore my Snoopy tie. Last year we honored Jack Davis. This year's honoree was member Stan Lee. A film crew was there, working on a feature documentary on Stan.

President Bill Morrison gave the opening remarks and co-founder Mark Evanier acted as MC. He opened with, "I had a very nice, long speech planned, but I'm on strike," referring to the current writers' strike in LA. Marv Wolfman was a guest speaker, and Scott Shaw! gave a special Stan Lee Oddball slide show tribute of his more esoteric comic book work, such as Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal. Pat McGreal had put together a video presentation of Stan's life compiled from various sources, which opened and closed with his segment on the gameshow I've Got a Secret. The best was seeing Stan's delighted reactions to all the jokes at his expense.

The climax of the evening was the presentation of The Sergio, a bronze award named after (current vice-president) Sergio Aragones. Stan gave a very nice acceptance speech getting in a few nice jabs of his own, and acknowledging that comics is a collaborative process and that the artists (and he named quite a few) should receive as much credit as he has.

Now to get to the good part: The food was great--prime rib and chicken served buffet style. I especially liked the marinated tomatoes and onions. The buffet table was center pieced with a huge palm tree made from pineapples. Chocolate-raspberry mousse was dessert.

A great time was had by all.

Here I am with Sergio, Stan, and The Sergio



With Rocket J. Squirrel, June Foray.