Welcome to The Corner Box with David Hedgecock and John Barber. With decades of experience in all aspects of comic book production, David, John, and their guests will give you an in-depth, and insightful look at the past, present, and future of the most exciting medium on the planet—comics—and everything related to it.

[00:24] John Barber: Hello, and welcome to The Corner Box. I'm one host, coming to you from Death's door itself, John Barber, and with me as always, the very lively David Hedgecock.

[00:35] David Hedgecock: You've been dealing with this for a while, John. I think I heard you were coming from Death's door three episodes ago. It's still lingering. You’ve got the ‘vid.

[00:42] John: I haven't been to the doctor, but the rest of the family has been. My son had a checkup. My daughter’s actually feeling really sick. Wound up giving her some nasal spray. It wasn't anything serious. Anyway, I'm not dead yet, David.

[00:54] David: Clearly. You look great though, John. Even though you say you're on the deathbed, I don't know that you've ever looked better.

[00:59] John: Actually, an insult to past me. Top to bottom. I don't know.

[01:06] David: That's the kind of pithy compliment that one can expect from a good friend. So, John, as we're recording this, something happened, I think just yesterday, and the reason I know is because my stock market ticker on my phone gave me a big alert that Netflix had popped 10%, gone up 10% yesterday. I was like, “what's going on?” I checked my phone, and they decided not to buy a comic book company, John, and it increased the value of the product.

[01:31] John: Oh, boy.

[01:34] David: Netflix is not going to buy Warner Brothers.

[01:36] John: A big twist, and Paramount's swooping in. It still has to clear all of the regulatory stuff, and essentially, it still follows, maybe even better, my thing about how weird it is that Warner keeps getting bought by weird little companies, or companies that don't have the longevity that it does, but yeah, Skydance is now going to own Warner Brothers, as well as Paramount. So, I don't know if it's going to be Skydance, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Warner, Skydance, Paramount, who knows?

[02:04] David: Skymount?

[02:06] John: Skymount.

[02:08] David: They should call them Skybound. That'd be cool. So, here's the thing. Dark Horse is happy today, because they're going to keep the license to Witcher. They're going to be able to continue to make Witcher comic books, but IDW might not be so happy right now.

[02:24] John: So, if I were Marie Javins, that'd be the first thing I'd be trying to do is grab Ninja Turtles and Star Trek, but Ninja Turtles, especially. That just fits in so well with the DC Universe.

[02:34] David: Carve that back immediately, right?

[02:36] John: To be fair, I am saying that as somebody that thinks that's what everybody should have been doing anyway. Ninja Turtles was a pretty hot property, regardless of if you were licensing it or if it was within the same company, but just being able to exert some internal pressure on yourself to bring Ninja Turtles comics to DC, presumably the property stays in--Who knows how they reorganize stuff? I didn't even put all that together in my head, but if you wanted a kids-forward media conglomeration, bringing together Nickelodeon and Warner Brothers is massive. That's everything.

[03:10] David: It's everything. Quite a big chunk.

[03:12] John: Man, I wish Rugrats got to meet Bugs Bunny. Well, now they're owned by the same people.

[03:17] David: Yeah. Oh, man. I'm not sure this utopian future is quite the utopia I wanted.

[03:24] John: Yeah.

[03:24] David: I think you're absolutely right. The first thing that DC Comics should do is bring that in-house, the second that contract's up. Not only do you launch that at huge number. We were talking about, if you put Skottie Young, and Jorge Corona on a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle relaunch, instead of a Lobo relaunch, that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle would do 5X what this Lobo comic's going to do, and I think the Lobo comic's going to do really well. I think they're going to do a really good business with that book, but if that same team is on Turtles, holy moly, man, and apply that to any top talent DC crew, with the DC ability to market and distribute, and man, it's going to be really crazy, if they don't take that. Turtles will be a Top 10 book.

[04:12] John: Yes.

[04:13] David: Period, and then once you add in the backlist, oh, my god. There's 30 years’ worth of history that they immediately own.

[04:20] John: No disrespect to the current IDW Turtle stuff. I mean, I love Tom, but the stuff people have had in, after Tom, have been A-plus. It's been great, but that marketing.

[04:32] David: It's more like when Marvel got bought by Disney, and then all of a sudden Avengers made a billion dollars. It's more that. Avengers was going to do really great, but once you got the Disney distribution muscle behind it, suddenly it's made a billion dollars, and I think that's what Turtles would be. Any of the creative teams over the last 10-15 years of Turtles have been, that book's fantastic. It's consistently way above average, and it has been for a long time.

[04:57] John: Yes.

[04:57] David: But this is just a different level of distribution, and different level of marketing power, and it's just going to tear the lid off of Turtles, man. It's going to tear the lid off, and then once you add the ability to mix and match some of that DC talent in there, as well.

[05:12] John: And the characters just casually have Batman be able to drop by.

[05:16] David: Right, which is already basically established. So, you can do that. So, you think they actually mix them into the actual DC Universe?

[05:22] John: No, I hadn't thought about that until I said it just now, but then I was thinking 
“they could ruin it, like WildStorm,” in that way.

[05:30] David: That Turtles universe is too diverse, and there's too many players, too many characters in that. I think you'd lose too much.

[05:37] John: This is so off-course for what we're going to talk about today. You know what they could do in the DC Universe? That could be DC's New York. They've got Gotham, they've got Metropolis, and New York exists in the DC Universe, and that could be owned by the Turtles. That could be where all the Turtle stuff, the way all of that Superman stuff happens in Metropolis, and Renee Montoya visits in New York, and then boom, million seller.

[06:03] David: Is Renee Montoya the new Question?

[06:05] John: Well, yeah, but I think she's been the new Question for about a quarter of a century.

[06:09] David: Oh, really? I don't pay too much attention to the Question, dude. Sorry.

[06:13] John: You know who that came up with? Yelena Belova, who literally has been Black Widow for more than a quarter of a century.

[06:20] David: That's crazy, dude. Really?

[06:21] John: Yeah, that was in 2001. Something like that.

[06:24] David: I'm getting old, John. Not only are things getting long in the tooth, but my memory's gone.

[06:33] John: Just to warn everybody, I did some research this time. This isn't off-the-cuff the way I was originally thinking about doing it. Please jump in, at any point, David, and I'm going to have to paint the listener a picture with words to get this thing going, because there's a particular way I want to introduce this to it. David, I'm holding something in my hands that only you can see. Do you want to describe it, or should I describe it?

[06:55] David: Well, I can take a crack at it. The title on the cover is “Anything Goes!” There's some text that maybe are different artists or different writers that are maybe on it, and then on the cover, the image of the cover has Cerebus the Aardvark, as drawn by, is that Neal Adams?

[07:13] John: That is Neal Adams.

[07:14] David: That's unexpected in 2026.

[07:17] John: A beautiful drawing of Cerebus by Neal Adams.

[07:19] David: Yeah, it's fantastic.

[07:21] John: Cory Adams colored it, his son. Also, a very nice coloring job. There's two particular interesting things about it. One is, usually you see Dave Sim drawing Cerebus. Like you said, this is Neal Adams, and the other is the circumstances that caused this comic to come into being, and what I would call a crazy, weird, and all-encompassing story that entails, and that, David, is what I wanted to talk about.

[07:45] David: I have never been more excited.

[07:46] John: Yeah. So, sit back, because I did some research, like I said, and frankly, I couldn't find anything anywhere that pieces stuff together the way that I wanted it to go, or build into it, and this kept growing in my research. So, the more I learned about anything, and particularly this, the more I've come to the conclusion that nothing ever really starts, but let's start, unexpectedly, maybe, with a guy named Byron Preiss.

[08:08] David: He was a publisher, right?

[08:10] John: He was a writer, editor, book packager, and publisher. Harlan Ellison called him a producer, like a movie producer, and I think that fits what he did, especially in the 1970s. He put together books, and he sometimes published them himself. Byron Preiss Visual Publications, I think, was the name of his company, but he put stuff together for other publishers. Later on, he would run iBooks. His last name was P-R-I-E-S-S, not Price, like you'd ordinarily spell Price. So, in the 1970s, he was in the forefront of trying to move comics off the newsstands and onto the bookshelves, to push comic books into the world of graphic novels, and as much as I think you and I grew up with this attitude, it's still crazy to look at it from today's perspective, but in the 1970s, comics were a childish, disposable medium, and not even a good one. They were kids' trash. They were generally looked down upon. Also, and this is the perspective part that I was talking about, they weren't old. They'd only been around for 40 years, and if you're 15 or even 20, that seems like forever, but as you get older, that seems like less time, but also, you can see the trajectory of history over 40 years fairly easily. You can see how things go.

So, in those 40 years that there'd been American comics, you've gone through the World War II superhero boom and bust, you had the more sophisticated crime and horror comics that led to the 50s Senate hearings about comics and juvenile delinquency, you had the superhero resurgence at DC, and the advent of Marvel, and that maybe pushed comics back into the college market, in a way that they hadn't been for a couple decades. Now, they'd been in the college market in the 30s and 40s, but adults read them. Servicemen read them. They weren’t everywhere, but by the 70s, Stan Lee was doing a lot of college speaking tours. Howard the Duck was super big on college campuses, but the comics were basically aimed at kids, but you also had the undergrounds of the 60s and 70s.

You had people like--off the top of my head--Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Trina Robbins, all sorts of people. I don't want to leave off everybody, but I will. We also had pop artists, like Lichtenstein and Warhol doing comic stuff, and then you had guys from the underground, like Victor Moscoso, who blended comics with poster art and made it into a pop art world, a genuinely popular art world. Last half of the 70s, you had the advent of the direct market in comic bookshops, and some of that underground countercultural sense merged with the European comics we were seeing come over via Heavy Metal Magazine. People since the 60s had been trying to push comics into being more socially relevant, the way Denny O’Neil did, or reacting to all that stuff I talked about, in visual ways, like Steranko and future Cerebus artist Neal Adams.

[10:48] David: Future Cerebus artist.

[10:50] John: But you also had a generation of Marvel and DC creators, like O'Neil and Adams, and Steranko, who grew up with comics and thought there was something more to the medium than had maybe been there already. Plus, you had the studio guys, like Barry Windsor-Smith, Jeffrey Jones, Michael Kaluta, who elevated the material they drew, but by the later 70s, they were moving into book covers and portfolios. It seemed like they were leaving comics behind. They didn't. I think it looked like that, and when they were doing comics, they were elevating the material they were doing, but it was still that same juvenile world. The direct market offered a chance to change that, but by and large, the publishers at the time were doing stuff that was similar to what Marvel and DC were doing. Star Reach called it Ground-Level Comics, where it wasn't mainstream, but it also wasn't underground.

Self-publishing had two really big successes by the late-70s, ElfQuest and Cerebus, but both of those are firmly planted in the mainstream fantasy comics genre, which was a big genre in the 70s. There's a lot of sword and sorcery stuff around then, but what Byron Preiss was trying to do was merge words and pictures into different formats, trying to elevate what comics could be. He did a couple books with Howard Chaykin and Roger Zelazny, where the prose intersects the pictures, in ways that was comics-like, but had the narrative heft of a prose book, of a science fiction book. Produced a series called Fiction Illustrated. It was a pocketbook paperback format. First one, I'm sure you remember this one, David, was Tom Sutton's Shlomo Raven: Public Detective.

[12:17] David: Oh, yeah, Shlomo. Everybody remembers Shlomo.

[12:20] John: But #3 was the one where Jim Steranko did Chandler: Red Tide. It was a paperback size. Every page had two pictures with a little bit of prose on it, but the pictures carried the narrative haft, or the weight of bringing the narrative forward, and Gil Kane was doing similar stuff on Blackmark and His Name is... Savage!, but if you were into the idea of comics as art, or as an elevated form of literature, you had very limited options in the 1970s, and you probably found yourself looking at Byron Preiss, at some point. Now, I'm about to get to where this actually intersects with what we're talking about. Preiss didn't only do comic stuff. He did all kinds of books, including some that were comics-adjacent, one of which was the Illustrated Harlan Ellison, which took Harlan Ellison's stories and, well, it illustrated them. It really did exactly what it said in the title. Steranko did "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman. Tom Sutton did one. Bill Stout did one. Originally, Bernie Wrightson was supposed to do it, but Wrightson wound up doing the Frankenstein illustrations instead.

[13:22] David: Oh, okay.

[13:23] John: Are you familiar with Harlan Ellison, David?

[13:26] David: Heard the name, once or twice. I don't think there was a day working with Chris Ryall that he didn't mention the fact that he was friends with Harlan Ellison. I think there's times where Ryall would walk into my office, and just say, “You know I'm friends with Harlan Ellison?” and then just turn around, and walk out. Pretty sure, that happened.

[13:41] John: I told you this story, where one day, early on at IDW, not long after I'd started at IDW, and I'd been at Marvel already, I wasn't a super little kid or something, but my phone rings, and I pick it up, and it's Harlan Ellison on the other side, looking for Jeff Mariotte, who used to be Editor-in-Chief at IDW before Chris. For Harlan, it was one of those brain fart moments. He just said the wrong name. I didn't want to let Harlan Ellison down. So, I was running around, like “Jeff Mariotte work here? Is there any way to reach him?” Ellison was very nice on the phone. I was starstruck, the same way I was when I met Bill Sienkiewicz at Marvel. It was one of those “whoa.”

[14:16] David: For our listeners, Bill Sienkiewicz is on John's Mount Rushmore, I think.

[14:20] John: Yes.

[14:21] David: Certainly, the guy that definitely cemented your love of comic books, I feel like.

[14:25] John: I think that's true. For all of our non-Chris Ryall listeners--there are a couple--Harlan Ellison was a science fiction writer. He was an enfant terrible of science fiction. He was this famously angry, arrogant writer. If you don't know any of his stuff, you probably know he wrote The City on the Edge of Forever, and Star Trek that he wrote, and famously had a huge falling out with Gene Roddenberry. Wrote for TV. Mostly a short story writer. This is something that, through osmosis, I'm figuring out here, of a weird literary world, compared to how it is now, where he would be publishing in Playboy and high-end markets of stuff. Playboy was a high-end market for short stories, at that time. I don't know. Norman Mailer might write something there, or something, and he'd be in there. So, in 1978, the Illustrated Ellison comes out via Byron Preiss, through Ace Books, and it gets reviewed in a magazine called the Comics Journal.

[15:22] David: Nice.

[15:23] John: Probably familiar with that. Not unlike myself, the Comics Journal came into being in 1976, when a young 20-something named Gary Groth, along with his business partner, Michael Catron, formed a company called Fantagraphics, and they bought an adzine called the Nostalgia Journal. Do you know what an adzine is?

[15:40] David: No. A zine that just publishes ads? Is that what that is?

[15:44] John: Bingo. It sounds crazy, but it would be like eBay, or something.

[15:49] David: I spend a lot of time on eBay. So, that makes sense.

[15:52] John: One of the famous ones that immediately got into a feud with Gary Groth and the Comics Journal was Alan Light's The Buyer's Guide for Comics Fandom, which eventually became Comics Buyer's Guide. That also started out as an adzine. The two of them got into a huge feud. That's going to be a recurring theme in the rest of this story, by the way.

[16:09] David: People getting into huge feuds?

[16:10] John: Yes.

[16:11] David: This is my favorite podcast right here.

[16:13] John: So, they transformed the Nostalgia Journal into the Comics Journal. Comics Journal still comes out today, still relevant to comics. It's in print, has a robust web presence. The Comics Journal today is focused on literary comics and art comics, and maybe some history of comics-type stuff, and it's pointedly dismissive of superhero comics, Big2-type comics.

[16:35] David: Yeah.

[16:35] John: Now, that attitude was also the attitude in 1978, but imagine that attitude existing in a world where there were no art or literary comics.

[16:47] David: Just angry with nothing else to fall upon.

[16:50] John: There was no Gallant for their Goofus.

[16:53] David: Is that in the Shlomo book? A Gallant for their Goofus? Is that a reference? Is that a Shlomo reference?

[16:58] John: I don't know. That's a good title for something, Gallants for Goofus. Imagine the Paris Review, if all you had were pulp magazines, and that's what the Comics Journal was trying to be.

[17:07] David: They built it in the hopes that they would come, I guess.

[17:10] John: Yeah, I mean, Gary Groth certainly had a vision of what he didn't want comics to be, and that's what comics were, and that really comes across. The thing I always think of when I think about those early years of the Comics Journal was this famous review they did of Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!, where if I remember this right--and this I didn't really super dig into. So, forgive me if I'm getting this wrong--but the thrust of the review was that, no pun intended, Mark Thrust--which is the character Reuben Flagg played when he was a p*rn star, before he became a Plexus Ranger--The thrust of the review was American Flagg! should be the bare minimum of how good a comic should be.

[17:45] David: That's like me saying you've never looked better.

[17:48] John: Yes.

[17:48] David: After you saying you're on Death’s door, me saying, “you've never looked better.”

[17:52] John: Exactly. “This isn't good, but it's less bad than everything else. It's just embarrassing everything else isn't better than this.” I'm paraphrasing, but anyway, that's where it was. Looking for elevated comics in a world that just didn't have them. Michael Dean writes this review of the Illustrated Ellison. This has nothing to do with the rest of the story, by the way. Michael Dean eventually becomes Editor-in-Chief of the magazine, and remains a contributor, as far as I know. He writes this review of the Illustrated Ellison, and it's not a positive review, which I think is, again, going to be a theme going on here. He reviews it negatively, and Ellison reacts to that review, also negatively, but Gary Groth reaches out to Ellison to do an interview. It's not just about Ellison's career, not even primarily about Ellison's career, but really about his thoughts about comics. This is hard to navigate these waters of what this was, at that time.

Ellison was an elitist snob when it came to stuff, but he was a very particular kind of elitist snob. He would be equally dismissive of Norman Mailer. I mean, by way, for instance, of somebody I mentioned, as he would be of people that weren't Robert E. Howard, that were writing Conan-like stories, but Robert E. Howard, he'd be great. He knew comics. He'd written some comics. He'd had his work adapted into comics, and he was this very respected science fiction writer. He was winning Hugo Awards every year for short stories. I think for a little while, it was like, “which Harlan Ellison story is going to win the Hugo this year?”

Funny total side anecdote here. There's a comic called Dial H for Hero that DC publishes. The gimmick is that this kid gets a phone, and when he dials H on the phone--because phones used to have dials. So, whatever number is associated with H, he dials that--and he gets a different superpower every issue. So, he becomes a different superhero every single issue, and they solicited readers to send in their suggestions to it, and it would be like, “Jimmy Smith, age 8, suggested this guy.” One of them is “Harlan Ellison, age 46.”

[19:50] David: Fantastic.

[19:51] John: And Ellison was known for being angry about the state of art, the state of the world, people. Groth and the Comics Journal come off as being very angry too, because they're a magazine dedicated to a thing that simply does not exist.

[20:04] David: Yeah, that'd make me angry, too.

[20:06] John: Got to be frustrating, right?

[20:08] David: Why can't I have this thing that I write about every single month?

[20:11] John: These two forces of anger and elitism come together into this one interview. The interview happens in 1979. Have you ever read this interview?

[20:22] David: No.

[20:22] John: Okay.

[20:22] David: The comics journal is too hoity-toity for me, man. I think the last time I tried to read it, they did an interview with Rob Liefeld, or something.

[20:29] John: Yeah, there's two interviews in the Comics Journal that I really remember ever reading, and obviously, I didn't read it, at the time, because I was three, or something, but it was this interview, and the one they did with Kevin Eastman after Tundra Publishing had collapsed, and that interview is amazing as well.

[20:46] David: Yeah, I would like to read that, actually.

[20:48] John: Yeah, I mean, that's another one I could talk about forever. We should, probably.

[20:52] David: All right. Maybe we should definitely do that.

[20:54] John: Back to the Harlan Ellison one. There's this conflicted feeling that comes through with Ellison, about how he feels about comics, because he's clearly very up on comics. He knows comics inside and out, but he's still coming at it from the perspective that this is what it is in 1979, which is a juvenile medium, compared to every other medium that you're going to find. He also has this thing that a lot of people do, but he always did, I think, acutely and persistently, where the stuff that he grew up with was better than the later stuff kids grew up with. Kids today, whatever they're reading, it's just a pale imitation of the thing that he grew up with, even though, if you really dig into it, it's Rudyard Kipling Adventure Stories in the Jungle Book give way to Tarzan, which gives you the […] into getting to Conan. It's already copies of copies of stuff, and it's not that he's not aware of that. He consistently looked back to the purity in the stuff that he read when he was pure of mind.

[21:49] David: That makes sense.

[21:51] John: The interview opens up. Two of them are talking. It's late at night. I'm going to read some quotes from this interview, get things going, give you the flavor of where this thing is. So, he's talking about his friend, Denny O’Neil.

[22:00] David: Famous writer-editor, Denny O’Neil. Most people might remember him from being the Batman editor, but he also wrote a very famous Green Arrow/Green Lantern buddy cop, where he dealt with some drug stuff.

[22:11] John: Yeah, and one of the big writers, him and Steve Englehart being of the big writers that brought Batman back into being the Dark Knight with Neal Adams and Marshall Rogers on art. So, this is Ellison. “Dennis has got the fatal flaw that I think is shared by many of these fellows. They pick the wrong idols. They worship at the wrong altars. When you're a kid, and you pick your idol, Jonas Salk or Charles Lindbergh, or Babe Ruth, then you've really got something to shoot for. When you pick for your idol, Jack Kirby, I mean, as nice a man as Jack is, he's a comics artist. He's top of his profession, but it's a very rarefied thing, and even Jack has finally gotten out of it, in other artistic areas. Dennis is one of the nicest and finest people I've ever known. I'd like to think he's a very dear and close friend, and I really weep about it sometimes.”

[23:03] David: Is he weeping because he's friends with him or weeping because Denny's so misguided? Either way, Jesus Christ.

[23:12] John: “I mean, not really weep, but it makes me very sad to think about it, because Denny could have been anything. He's got one novel to his credit--not a good one. Dennis had the ability to go to the top of the mountain, and you say, ‘why didn't he? What the hell is he doing at Marvel, and what the hell was he doing at DC for 10 years?’ I wish to Christ you are out of comics.”

[23:34] David: Fantastic. By the way, Harlan’s not wrong.

[23:39] John: Here's another thing. This interview is, while the centerpiece of what I'm about to go through in a big way, is in itself, something that could, and should, be unpacked over weeks and years of analyzing and thinking about what goes into this. I’ve got to admit, during the research of this, when I'm reading this interview, which is the length of some short novels, there were dark nights of the soul for myself, thinking about some of this stuff, about Ellison probably not being wrong about some of these things, even today. To anybody that isn't familiar with Ellison, one thing I would say is, I think probably, there was no better friend to comics than Harlan Ellison, in terms of a writer of his stature, from the 70s through, I don't know, the 2000s, whenever it opened up, and all sorts of people were really into comics, and it became cool to be into that stuff that. He wrote a lot of introductions, wrote a lot about comics. Eventually, took the medium very seriously. When I was a kid, there was a VHS tape with Harlan Ellison interviewing comics luminaries, like Moebius and maybe Stan Lee. I can't remember who was on it, but let's continue with this interview.

Again, that's Paragraph 2, and this thing goes on for a gazillion paragraphs. Here's another quote. “Time is very strange,” says Harlan Ellison. “I mean, the first time I met Gerry Conway, who the hell would have known that Gerry Conway would single-handedly ruin the entire comics industry? He's a classic example of the deification of no talent in all industries. He's not good, but he has it in on Thursday, and that's all they care about. Fill them pages.”

[25:26] David: 22 pages, good enough. Oh, man.

[25:29] John: This is one that I find fascinating. He's talking about Glen Larson. Not a comic book creator. Glen Larson's a TV producer. I assume, you and I both know him best from Battlestar Galactica.

[25:39] David: Oh, okay. Yeah.

[25:40] John: A lot of big time TV stuff in the 70s and 80s. Here's what Ellison has to say about him. “A man like Glen Larseny,” which is what he calls him. Glen Larseny, “does not understand that it is bad to rip off Smokey and the Bandit, and do BJ and the Bear. It's wrong to rip off Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and do Alias Smith and Jones. It is wrong to rip off Star Wars, and do Battlestar Ponderosa,” because Lorne Greene is in there.

[26:08] David: Right. […] Battlestar Ponderosa. Man, that's good.

[26:13] John: And I think that's fascinating, because all of culture is predicated on that now. You look at the thing that was successful, and you do it. I don't mean you and I, but I mean, that's what happens, right?

[26:23] David: Yeah, over and over, and over again.

[26:30] John: Here's another classic exchange here.

[26:35] David: Oh, man. I don't think I've ever been a bigger fan of Harlan Ellison than I am right now.

[26:39] John: This is Ellison. “You see, these guys have a very minor league talent, and to say ‘these people are wasting their talent’ is ridiculous. I mean, they're never going to be any better. What's the name of the guy who used to do--over at Marvel--he used to do--the worst artist in the field?” Gary Groth offers, “Don Heck?” Ellison says, “Don Heck,” and laughs. Groth says, “this is going to look good,” and Ellison says, “well, of course. You say, ‘who's the worst artist in comics?’ Don Heck, of course. Absolutely.” A little bit later, he says, “5,000 Don Hecks are not worth 1 Neal Adams, and I don't know Don Heck. I'm not sure I've ever even met Don Heck, and I mean him no harm when I say this. I'm talking about his work, talking about what I see on the page. Who was that guy that did Nova? Was that Heck?” Groth says, “Dick Ayers, or someone.” It was Sal Buscema, but as Groth says, “It's all the same.”

[27:36] David: Groth said that?

[27:37] John: Yeah.

[27:37] David: I feel like there's a little bit of Ellison playing to the crowd right now. I don't know. Groth's just eating this up. You know he is.

[27:44] John: Yeah. I don't know if I've selected the right quotes to do this. Groth is against everything in this. Ellison does like some things. He does bring up things he likes. He liked Chandler: Red Tide. Groth thought it was terrible. Ellison really liked Doctorow's novel, Ragtime. Talks about that a bunch of times, about how good that is, and Groth later on, years and years later, Dave Sim would do a parody of a Gary Groth interview, in Cerebus, that was really dead on and really funny, I thought, where everything was either Groth disliking something or acting as though he'd read it, when he clearly hadn't. There's a joke of “have you read this book?” “Possibly.” “What do you mean possibly?” But Ellison does come out liking stuff. He likes Howard Chaykin, who would work with Michael Moorcock on some stuff, and Ellison's really good friends with Michael Moorcock. So, he loves Michael Moorcock, but the two of them hate J.R.R. Tolkien. Moorcock and Ellison hate Tolkien. I don't know Groth's opinion, but presumably he hates him, because it's a thing.

[28:49] David: Yeah.

[28:50] John: Eventually, Ellison says, “you take a Don Heck. There's a reason why everybody thinks he's sh!t. That's because he's sh!t.” Groth says, “wouldn't you say, though, that even if Denny's stuff, the Green Lantern/Green Arrow books, were written as a book or any other medium, it would be laughed at?” Ellison says, “oh, sure, it was very sophomoric, but that's what comics are. Comics are sophomoric,” and maybe I should have had that one in earlier. That's the structure of a lot of this stuff, I guess. They talk about the Essential Ellison, about the logistics of making a book like that, and the compromises that have to be made, and Ellison thinks those compromises should be taken into account, and that the Comics Journal itself is compromised by pandering to the comics-reading public, which, I don't know, that seems a little wonky, but again, you could spend a year talking about this interview, and unpacking the self-loathing, the loathing of others, the loathing of your friends. I don't know.

Groth says, “I think there's an adult market out there,” and Ellison says, “it's called Heavy Metal.” Groth says, “I'm not talking about adults tripping out on acid once a month,” which is funny because Ellison is a regular appearance in Heavy Metal. I've actually got, within arm's length, a copy of Heavy Metal that has a Harlan Ellison story in it. They talk about it.

[29:58] David: Of course, you do.

[30:00] John: And Ellison brings this up, because he feels like he can't talk about Heavy Metal after he slams Heavy Metal, because in France, Metal Hurlant, Humanoids is publishing him in France, and he's huge in France, I guess, at that point. He's super respected. I forget the other writers that they had. It was a, I guess, he says, fast company to be in. He was very pleased with it. Didn't want to insult them. Here's one more quote along those lines, if you're up for it.

[30:25] David: Absolutely.

[30:26] John: This is Ellison again. “There are only three or four characters in fiction that are universally known everywhere, to children in Basutoland, to adults at the North Pole, and none of them are out of Shakespeare. One of them is Sherlock Holmes. The second is Superman. The third one is Mickey Mouse, and the fourth is Tarzan, and they're all trash. They were all invented as trash. They never aspired to be anything more than trash. Some of them became eloquent trash, but they were entertainments, cheap entertainments, and yet there was something universal there. There is a transcendent quality, and I think, in some way, and I don't want to overstate this or overemphasize it, I get the same resonance from the Silver Surfer. There's something there. Stan lucked into light years, to use the idiom, beyond anything else Stan has done, or that comics have done for a long time. I think that was there in Swamp Thing. I think they lucked onto something, and went with it as long as they could. It's a fragile thing.” They were talking about Stan Lee. Gary Groth is just like, “well, Stan Lee's the worst person in the world, because of all the mediocre Marvel comics,” and Groth's like, “what do you mean?” He's like, “well, the comics are sh!t,” and Ellison's like, “well, yeah, but Stan's pretty nice,” and the Swamp Thing he's talking about, to be clear, is the Len Wein/Bernie Wrightson Swamp Thing, the only Swamp Thing, at that point. Here, we get into how this leads to Anything Goes! All right.

[31:49] David: Okay. Anything Goes! is the comic book that you held up at the beginning of this conversation, for our dear listeners who are maybe lost in the plot, for a moment.

[31:57] John: If you remember, back when you were a teenager, when I started this, I was talking to you about Anything Goes! Yeah. So, later on, they comment that it's 1:00 in the morning, and we're again, nowhere near the end of the interview.

[32:08] David: 1:00 in the morning, they're only halfway through the interview?

[32:11] John: Yes.

[32:11] David: So good.

[32:12] John: Yeah. I think the interview ends at 4:00 in the morning. I think that this is really long. So, Ellison gets himself a drink, and he explains to a friend, a lady friend who's also in the room, what the Comics Journal is, and he's making up these mock serious articles about what the journal might do, like, “is the Hulk,” this is a quote, “a modern representation of the Faustian legend, or does Spider-Woman more perfectly represent contemporary woman's search for self-identification and self-fulfillment than the traditional image of Wonder Woman? Or Steve Gerber: why they threw me off the Howard the Duck strip?” Then he says, “Steve Gerber is crazy as a bedbug,” and here's where […]. “Gerber is as crazy as a bedbug, and if he isn't, Mike Fleisher is.” I'm going to take a quick break here, if you’re okay.

[33:08] David: Yeah, we'll throw on some break music for the listening crowd.

[33:12] John: You know what music we should add? Kate Capshaw singing Anything Goes in Chinese from the beginning of Temple of Doom.

[33:17] David: Oh, that would be perfect.

[33:32] John: Okay. So, Michael Fleisher, at the time it is, was a comic book writer, who's best known for writing The Spectre and Jonah Hex. Do you know Michael Fleisher's stuff?

[33:43] David: Yeah, from Jonah Hex. Only because I recently did a Jonah Hex deep dive, where I read the entire Palmiotti/Gray-written Jonah Hex series. It was 60 or 70 issues, which I really enjoyed. So, I was sampling some other Jonah Hex stuff, and I just happened to read some of the Fleisher stuff.

[33:58] John: Oh, I maybe read a little bit of his Jonah Hex. I've read more of his Spectre. The Spectre was appearing in Adventure Comics, and he's an agent of divine retribution, and has this limitless power that he uses to inflict punishment-fits-the-crime-type vengeance on the villains of the piece. Sometimes, it's just stuff, like having the bad guy get eaten by the alligators who he tried to stick on the Specter, or the gorillas that were the key to his death trap. One, he turns this vain, beautiful woman into an old woman, in a matter of seconds. So, she dies of old age. I think in the same story, he cuts a barber in half with giant scissors. They're gleefully twisted. This is the one that really sums it up for me. These bad guys are getting away in the car. So, the Spectre turns himself 50 feet tall, grabs the car, throws it into the stratosphere, and then we cut to a kid making a wish on a shooting star as the car burns up overhead. That kind of stuff, which in 1973/74, when this is coming out, this isn't the same stuff you were getting when Legion of Superheroes were teaming up with Superboy in Adventure Comics.

[35:01] David: Right.

[35:02] John: It was all Comics Code approved, funnily enough. People get turned into candles, and then melt. There's something about the fact that the Specter is utterly unstoppable. It isn't even a question about it. Nobody comes up against him, and is like, “well, I’ve got the power and can do anything against the Spectre.” No, he just does these retributions to these guys. So, then Ellison starts talking about Fleisher's recent novel. It was called Chasing Hairy. Hairy is a reference to a woman's reproductive region, and Ellison's talking about how deranged this book is. He's talking about his memory of this publisher's weekly review of it, that Ellison misremembers some of the quotes in it, but he's saying the Publisher's Weekly Review had said it had no social value. Ellison says, “it's about guys beating up women in the end.” Ellison says, “they light this girl on fire, and then she goes down on them. In reality, the book, which I haven't read, but by all accounts is not in favor of this kind of thing. It's a parody or pointing out bad male behavior thing, but in the actual book, apparently, the sequence was reversed. It was the bl*wjob, and then they lit her on fire.

[36:08] David: Jesus.

[36:10] John: Here's another thing. Details that, the sequence of what these things happen, are going to be very important to some people, and not very important to other people, as the story goes, and that conflict of whether people think it's important is going to cause problems.

[36:25] David: Yeah. Nice. Well played.

[36:28] John: Then Ellison says that Fleisher's stuff reminds him of H.R. Giger's work. Giger is the guy that designed the Alien in Alien. He's a bizarro, psychosexual Swiss painter. Young John had an H.R. Giger calendar when he was in high school. Ellison says of Fleisher, “it's like looking at the paintings of Giger. There's a genuine twisted mentality at work here. It's fascinating to look at, and I understand he's a very nice, pleasant man,” about Fleisher, and Groth says, “I understand he looks like an accountant,” to which Ellison jokes, “aren't all Texas tower snipers like that?”

[37:01] David: Oh, Jesus.

[37:02] John: He goes on to say--and David, again, this is foreshadowing--He says, “Fleisher, I think he's certifiable.” This is Ellison. “That is a libelous thing to say, and I say it with some humor. I've never met the man.” Then Ellison goes back to Giger, and tells this anecdote that Dan O'Bannon told him--Dan O'Bannon's the writer of Alien, and he wrote the Moebius comic, The Long Tomorrow--He told him about Giger--I have no idea if this is true, by the way. This is just an aside, but it's amazing--He told him this story that Giger claimed the dead body of his mistress after she had died, just unrelated to him, and instead of burying her, he has carpet beetles eat her flesh, and now Giger has the skeleton in his home. This leads Groth to bring up Fleisher's Jonah Hex story. This is one I joke about a lot, because this is what I want to do when I'm dead, where Jonah Hex is killed and stuffed, because that's where Jonah Hex winds up in the DC Universe. That's the end of him.

[38:03] David: That's how Jonah Hex ends? He's killed and stuffed?

[38:06] John: Yeah, well, I mean, the series keeps going, but all the stories take place before that part.

[38:09] David: Before that. Okay, I didn't know.

[38:11] John: At some point, but that was the canonical end of Jonah Hex.

[38:15] David: Okay.

[38:16] John: But what's relevant here is that, now Ellison's back on to Fleisher. Ellison says, “what's interesting is, the thing that makes Fleisher's stuff interesting was the same reason Robert E. Howard was interesting, and nobody else can imitate him, because Howard was crazy as a bedbug. He was insane.” Believe it or not, I'm leaving stuff out here. You should read this interview. This interview is up on the Comics Journal site. You can check it out right now. Ellison says, “Howard lived with his mother until his mother died, and then he went down, and sat in the car, and blew his brains out. Now, that's a sick person. That is not a happy, adjusted person. That shows up in Howard's work. You can read a Conan story, as opposed to--I mean, even as good as Fritz Leiber is, Fritz is a logical, insane, and nice man, or take the lesser writers, all the guys who do the Conan rip-offs and imitations, which are such garbage, because they are all manqué,” which is somebody that doesn't live up to their ambitions. I had to look that up. “They can't imitate Howard, because they're not crazy. They're just writers, writing stories, because they admired Howard, but they don't understand, you have to be bug f*cked to write that way.”

[39:19] David: This is why everybody likes Harlan Ellison right here, man.

[39:21] John: Yeah, sure. Well, you know what? Not everybody, David.

[39:26] David: As it turns out? All right.

[39:29] John: “Lovecraft,” Ellison says, “You can tell a Lovecraft story from a Ramsey Campbell story, from all the rest of those shlobos trying to imitate him, all the nameless yutzes shrieking like Lovecraft, they still have not got the lunatic mentality of Lovecraft, and the same for Fleisher. He really is a derange-o, and as a consequence, he is probably the only one writing who is interesting. The Spectre stuff was f*cking blood chilling, which it was supposed to be. I mean, he really did the Spectre, man. For the first time since the 40s, that goddamn strip was dynamite, and the first time they looked at what they were publishing, they said, ‘my god. We have turned loose this lunatic on the world,’ and they ran him off, and that was a shame, because Fleisher should have been kept on the Spectre forever. It was just the most perfectly nauseous, ghoulish thing for him.”

So, that gets transcribed, and that runs in the Comics Journal in 1980, and it comes out, and it explodes in the comics world. In terms of circulation, of reach to the general public, the Comics Journal isn't, and never was, a huge magazine, but at the time, there was nobody else covering comics like this. There was no internet, obviously, and general interest publications looked at comics as puerile garbage, and didn't care about them, other than maybe when Neal Adams takes the case of Siegel and Schuster, and gets them a pension from DC when the Superman movie came out. I mean, I don't even know what there was beyond fanzines. The Comics Buyers Guide, like I said in the beginning, that was out there, started as an adzine, like Comics Journal. It became more focused on news, and stuff, but Comics Journal had this specific angry attitude to it, and okay, like everybody in comics, we all read Rich Johnson's stuff. We all have, for decades, and you read it to get the gossip, or to see what gossip that we know about that is out there in public, and social media and YouTube, there's a ton of stuff that'll spill the tea these days, but in 1979, the Comics Journal is where you went to read interviews that weren’t just puff pieces.

Today, James Tynion has a PR person or PR people who get stories placed in the Hollywood Reporter when he's launching something new. Marvel and DC are part of Disney and Warner, and Paramount, or whatever, and they have media-trained people doing media trained interviews. They have hair and makeup people for convention panels. 1979 had none of that. So, even if the journal wasn't selling hundreds of thousands of copies, if you were in comics, you were probably reading it, or making a point of not reading it, and either way, your fellow comics creators are probably going to be talking about it.

Just as an aside, I told you last time, I was reading Dreadstar, and Issue #5, I think from 1983, has a one-page photo comic at the end, of Jim Starlin and his wife, and in that comic, Starlin is hiding behind his drafting table, reading the Comics Journal. So, this interview comes out, you're not going to believe, it hurts some feelings, David.

[42:24] David: What?

[42:25] John: Yeah. In a later issue, Ellison puts out an apology--sort of. I mean, he does, but I don't really think this is wrong. He has a strong separation between the person and the work. He's calling the work sh!t, not the person. For instance, he sees where he said, “you take a Don Heck, and there's a reason why everybody thinks he's sh!t. That's because he's sh!t,” and that's not what Ellison meant. He meant the work was sh!t. It was a slip of the tongue, and he called the man sh!t, and he apologizes about that. The same thing with Conway, and he didn't mean to come off as talking as badly as Denny O’Neil, I think, as he did. So, he apologizes, and Denny's the one, of all of them, that's his friend, but meanwhile, prior to this interview, Fleisher has put together an ad for that book, Chasing Hairy, to run in the Comics Journal, along with an interview with him. This ad is complete with a pull quote from Iron Man writer, and future Venom co-creator, David Michelinie. It has an illustration. I don't know by who. This went as far as Scott Dunbier, to try to figure out who it was. You weren't sure about it. I don't want to say anything, but it has the Spectre, Spider-Woman, Superman, Batman, and Ghost Rider, all reacting in horror as Jonah Hex reads Chasing Hairy.

He does do this interview at the Comics Journal. It runs four issues after Ellison's interview, comes out in the summer of 1980. Then Harlan Ellison gets a call from Gary Groth, who tells him that Michael Fleisher is mad about what Ellison said about him. So, Ellison tracks down Fleisher's phone number, calls him, because he didn't want his effusive praise of Fleisher to have been misconstrued, and he gets on the phone, and he says he'll write something to make it clear how much he likes Fleisher's writing. Again, he literally said that this is the only interesting writing in comics.

[44:18] David: Right, and Fleisher took offense.

[44:19] John: Right.

[44:21] David: Because he did insinuate that the only reason it's interesting is because Fleisher's bugf*ck crazy, but he also associated bugf*ck crazy with Robert E. Howard, and Conan the Barbarian. So, yeah, I can see how maybe you take that the wrong way, but I would have taken that as effusive praise, at that point, especially given the context of the rest of the interview, and how he's talking about everybody else.

[44:46] John: David, you have cut to the heart of the matter with that statement. Yes. That is at the heart of what is going to happen from now on here. Fleisher, from his perspective, says Ellison gets on the phone, and is super belligerent. Now, this is an aside, and this doesn't really have anything to do with the main narrative of this, other than one of the players fits in here a little bit, but it reminds me of something recent, and it's ironic, given that Harlan Ellison and Howard Chaykin do not get along. This, as near as I could tell, stems from Ellison having a very negative reaction to Chaykin's 1980s The Shadow series, and there was this Michael Chabon issue of McSweeney's in the 2010s. It was adventure themed, and it had an Ellison story in it, and it had Chaykin art on all the stories, except for Ellison's, by Ellison's request--demand, I think, is probably. So, this is totally unrelated, but there's this ongoing feud, present-day, in real-life, between Gail Simone and Howard Chaykin, and Howard takes shots at her in his e-mail newsletter, and a couple of weeks ago, Simone gave her version of the story.

She says she met Howard Chaykin at a con, she and her husband, right after she got the gig to write Wonder Woman. She goes up to Chaykin, a creator she admires, introduces herself. Chaykin asks what she's working on. She says, “Wonder Woman,” and Chaykin starts going on about how Wonder Woman is irrelevant to today's world. Simone says he keeps saying the same thing over and over, doesn't let her talk. In my experience, the technical name for this interaction is having a conversation with Howard Chaykin. To be clear, I wasn't there. I don't know the timbre or the tone of this stuff. Chaykin and I always got along great. I e-mail him to wish him well sometimes. I think we're all cool, but Chaykin's called me a C-word in conversation, because that's the way it goes. That's talking to him, and talking to him is a competition. So, when you flash forward to the pandemic era, Chaykin's doing a series called The Divided States of Hysteria at Image, and there's online--I mean, I don't know what you call it--discourse. A pile-on. There's a lot of people who look at a cover he does. It's a person of color who's lynched, with a slur written on them, and the internet gets mad. Now, Chaykin's position is “well, this is digging back into the archives here.”

We talked about this in relation--when I was like, “remember when I was super into Blackhawk?” And we talked about it then, we're a Chase we'd do these Blackhawk covers, where there'd be a swastika on it, and Howard Chaykin, if everybody in the world, is certainly not pro-Nazi. He was showing what the comic was against, but in the 2020s, for good or ill, that's not the attitude people would take about that. You can get people pretty mad at you if you put a swastika on your cover, even if you're Jewish, and even if the story is about professional Nazi fighters. So, Simone sees this, and she tweets that she finds the cover to be in bad taste, but she thinks it's reasonable to link to Chaykin's Twitter account. What he's got is, I don't want to say his defense, but his reasoning, or whatever, about the cover. Now, the thing is, materially, this is the same as sending all of your followers to go attack Howard Chaykin, which is how Chaykin takes it.

Throughout all this, I want to be totally clear, I don't know who, if anybody, is operating in good faith in this. I don't know if anybody's saying the version of the story that they really were doing, or if they're painting it differently. I don't know, but the thing that I take from it is that there's two people taking radically opposing views about the meaning of the same events, and I could imagine Harlan Ellison, being Harlan Ellison, comes off as belligerent, whether he's trying to be incendiary or not, and Ellison figures he can't apologize for complimenting Fleisher. So, Fleisher gets mad, and hangs up. Groth gets back in touch with Ellison, because Fleisher is threatening to sue, at this point. Fleisher wants them to print a retraction that he wrote, and I don't know if they ever would have done that, but Ellison tells him not to do it, because Fleisher would never sue, and regardless, Ellison is right there with Gary Groth all the way, and Fleisher does sue. Groth calls up Harlan Ellison. Groth, again, is this 23-year-old kid.

[48:50] David: Yeah, he's just there to complain about comics, and now he's getting sued.

[48:53] John: Yes, and he's worried about the legal costs, and Ellison's dismissive. He's just like, “I'm watching TV. I'm going to go.” Ellison lives in a world of courts and of suing, in a way virtually none of us do. Like you said, Groth's this early-20s guy, publishing a magazine about comics, and Ellison had just won a $300,000 lawsuit against Paramount, which he talks about in the interview, at one point. I think it was going on at the interview. By this point, it was over. Meanwhile, Groth borrows $5,000 from his parents, Ellison puts in another $5,000 for the legal fund, and it turns out, they both have insurance. So, that helps cover some of it, but the legal fees still add up, and eventually, this goes to trial in 1987.

[49:42] David: Oh, dear God.

[49:43] John: Seven years.

[49:45] David: Oh, my God. Sounds about right.

[49:47] John: By this point, in 1987, Fantagraphics is a comic book publisher. They started publishing comics in 1979, when they did the interview, but it was the 1982 series Love and Rockets that really put them on the map, and Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, their series is exactly the thing Groth was searching for in the journal, and it had some science fiction trappings early on, but it pretty quickly jettisoned them, and it becomes the series that focuses on Jaime's comics, the lives of two girls in LA, Maggie and Hopey, and then Gilbert writes about the people of the fictional city of Palomar in Mexico, and by 1987, they've got a larger publishing slate, and along with Raw Magazine that's edited by Art Spiegelman and Francois Mouly, they're fulfilling this potential of comics that the journal had set out to champion. This stuff exists now. Full credit, Groth really put his money where his mouth was. He was totally negative in this interview, but seven years later, he put a stable of creators together that are the foundation of what literary comics are today. He built this thing he wanted.

1987 was a lot more like 1980 than it is like 2026. Think about that for a second. That was 46 years ago. 46 years before 1980, there weren't comic books. There were comics, but not comic books, and in 1987, if you wanted to read Love and Rockets, you were going to a direct market comic bookstore, because there was no other place to get it. Maybe in 1987, you could find it. You'd find a collection at a B Dalton, or something, but it was pretty random. That was exactly the era when they started having the post-Dark Knight, Watchmen, Maus era of putting out paperbacks, and stuff, but set the Wayback Machine back a couple years earlier when that hadn't quite happened yet, and the suit hadn't quite come to trial yet, and the comic book world is divided about this lawsuit, which itself is funny. A creator is suing a company. You'd think that would be the side everybody'd be on, but that isn't necessarily the case. I mean, Harlan also had a lot of friends, but he also made enemies. Likewise, Gary Groth, the stuff he was writing in there, that really angered a lot of people.

So, according to an article by Rick Cusick in the Gauntlet Magazine, which is currently reprinted at harlanellison.com. You can check this one out, too. This is one of those several sources I dug into in this. Cusick says, “at the New York Comics Art Convention in 1981, a table full of cartoonists, including Frank Miller, Howard Chaykin, Peter Cooper, and others, sold sketches in support of Michael Fleisher. When Fantagraphics found out, it demanded and received table space in the same room, at the same time. A tense scene ensued, with artists Art Spiegelman, Gil Kane, and Burne Hogarth in support of Fantagraphics.” Now, this gets weird, because those names don't necessarily carry over to the future, or to what's about to happen. So, I don't know the accuracy of those names, outside of the article. I don't have any reason to suspect it, other than, especially call into question Frank Miller on that, but if there's one thing you're really learning here, comics people are f*cking nuts, and who knows?

So, by 1986, Fantagraphics commissions a six-issue benefit comic, where creators donated their time and comics to raise money for Fantagraphics to pay for their lawyers, and they called it Anything Goes! Now, the interesting thing about that, and where this all ties back together, is that it's a snapshot of where comics were, at that point, the comics that Groth and Ellison were talking about in their interview, and hoping for in their interview, and what was actually coming out, by that point. This is a partial list of the people who contribute to Anything Goes! Obviously, Neal Adams, Frank Miller, Lynn Varley, Gil Kane, Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, Jan Strnad, Mark Wheatley, Alex Toth, Mike Baron, Michael T Gilbert, Bob Burden, Marc Hempel, Alan Moore, Don Simpson, Sam Kieth, Jack Kirby, Joe Sinnott, Art Spiegelman, Dave Sim, Tom Luth, Marv Wolfman, Howard Cruse, Mike Kazaleh, Dan Clowes, Pat Boyette, Arn Saba, Trina Robbins, Marie Severin, Tom Orzychowski, Mort Todd, Peter Bagge, Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird, Robert Crumb, Don Lomax, Tom Sutton, William Messner-Loebs, George Metzger, Matt Howarth, Phil Elliott, Eddie Campbell, Mark Martin. There's more I'm leaving out.

[54:27] David: It's a murderer's row of 1986.

[54:29] John: Yeah, it's a total murderer's row, and it's crazy. This is what spawned all of this is. I'd read these issues before, when I was a kid. I've got another one somewhere, but the cover for #2 is a row.

[54:43] David: There's more than one issue?

[54:44] John: Oh, there's six issues. #2 has a Ronin cover by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley.

[54:50] David: Yeah, that looks hot.

[54:51] John: Right. #2 is probably the highlight of it. It has the Alan Moore and Don Simpson story, In Pictopia. Have you ever heard of that comic?

[55:01] David: No, I've never heard of any of this.

[55:03] John: Yeah. So, Don Simpson--

[55:05] David: Don Simpson. I think I see how you're tying all this together. The name Don Simpson is bringing back shades of previous podcasts.

[55:13] John: There's a version of it in print today from Fantagraphics and Don Simpson. It's weird, because it's not very meaningful now. When you read it now, it's fine. It's a B-rate Alan Moore story, and some nice enough art, but the idea is that there's this world where all of these old comic strip characters live, and they've retired, and they interact with each other, and there's the black and white district, and only the superheroes get the color district, and everything's segregated in these different parts, and it's the nostalgia of these better times. They're not the actual characters. They're analogs of them, but “leaving the Prince Features tenement, I ran into Red,” of Deadwood and Red, if you remember, “whose apartment is two floors down from mine, she was just arriving home. She had a sailor with her,” and that’s Mandrake the Magician going downstairs with Blondie, who, having been abandoned by Dagwood, is prostituting herself to sailors. Not only sailors, but Popeye.

[56:09] David: Right. Clearly.

[56:11] John: The dark, edgy, 80s stuff, but with that sense of nostalgia that Alan Moore brought to them, even when the stuff got super dark. The thing would come back out in 1963, that he did with Don Simpson and others, but the Supremium, or whatever it was, the Supremacy, whatever the place was in Supreme, but here's the funny thing about this. There's this line in this introduction that Gary Groth writes, where Alan Moore is the most acclaimed writer in mainstream comics, since, well, probably since there were mainstream comics, “and his new comic, The Watchmen, promises to be the best written comic coming out from a Big2 next year.”

[56:47] David: Right. That's awesome.

[56:48] John: Dan Clowes is in there, but Dan Clowes was writing Hipster Detective Lloyd Llewellyn. Issue, I think #5 has Ninja Turtles on the cover. They're all dressed like characters from Aliens. They're all carrying machine guns and shooting aliens. That winds up being a thing that is really influential in comics. So much of that Image stuff was from Aliens, even Cable, or something. It wasn't just action movies. It was specifically these guys, going around, carrying their machine guns. Wetworks, especially. That's just straight up, they're carrying the camera rigs that they turned into machine gun rigs, and aliens. It's a nothing strip. The actual comic is, the Ninja Turtles are running across the city to go watch drive-in theater showing Aliens, which at the time was a fairly current movie. Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott get together for the first time in 15 years, and they draw all the Pacific Comics characters that Kirby was doing, like Captain Victory and Silver Star.

[57:42] David: Oh, okay. That's cool.

[57:43] John: Spiegelman reprints an old strip he did. There's this weird mix of creators that, “those guys were around then?”

[57:53] David: Right. 1986 Sam Kieth.

[57:55] John: Two years later, he was creating Sandman. Of course, he was around. It still seems incongruous to me that he is in there with Alan Moore and Jack Kirby. Marv Wolfman writes a Dracula story that's terrible, but Dave Sim, I think, as far as I know, is the only one that actually writes this thing that is about the thing it's about. So, in the story, Cerebus has gone crazy, and this Harlan Ellison-like guy calls him “bugf*ck,” and then he goes nuts, and hacks him up, or whatever. It's mostly prose, and some illustrations. There's a caricature of Harlan Ellison there.

[58:30] David: Awesome.

[58:30] John: Most of the stories aren't really good, but it's insane to see all these creators together in the same place, banding together, I guess.

[58:40] David: Against another creator.

[58:41] John: Yeah.

[58:45] David: Awesome. I'm curious to know, A, why did it take so long, and why did the industry turn so hard on Fleisher? Is it just that Gary Groth won out? Comics Journal and Fantagraphics became bigger fish in the pond. So, everyone was kissing that ring, and Fleisher clearly didn't amount to much more?

[59:06] John: No, that's a good question. One, Fleisher was doing all right, by the time he got to 1987, which comes out in the trial. That's one of the arguments that gets brought up, is that he's saying that this hurt his ability to get work, but he was making about twice as much money in 1987 as he was in 1980.

[59:24] David: That's a hard case to prove, at that point.

[59:26] John: I don't know that everybody went on the side. Gary Groth's introduction to the Neal Adams Cerebus cover issue mentions that Neal specifically didn't want to take sides. He was just supporting everybody. He wasn't saying he was in favor of Fantagraphics, but he didn't want to see them go out of business because of this, either.

[59:43] David: Oh, okay. Gotcha. This lawsuit was really still damaging Fantagraphics, clearly, then. This charity thing really was legitimately to raise money to pay for their lawyer fees. Okay.

[59:55] John: Yeah, I've not heard anything to the contrary to that. There's nothing that comes out that's like, “and then they kept all the money.” That directly isn't the thing that really comes up. Other people are supporting Fleisher. Again, people are selling sketches, and stuff. People are selling original art. People are contributing to this. It's a big comics news story. It seemed like a--I don't know if there was some machinations behind it, but nobody really suggests that. It just seems like it took seven years, all the various depositions, and pre-trial motions, and stuff, but this story has also taken seven years. That's where I'd like to leave off here, and maybe do a Part 2 of this.

[60:30] David: Yeah.

[60:31] John: Which I call Everything Went!, in which everyone but Gary Groth dies.

[60:37] David: Oh, jeez. Are we turning into a murder mystery podcast, John? I didn't know. We'll probably have more listeners. We probably should do that.

[60:43] John: The story does continue. To me, the capstone there is just getting the solidification of the thing that they were originally talking about as part of this trial, for good or ill. Again, you'd walk through Anything Goes, and be like, “well, here's all the problems,” or whatever. Gil Kane does a nice His Name is… Savage! story in the first one. He does a cover. It's quite a package of stuff to go read, to see where things were, in that era.

[61:10] David: Yeah, I didn't even know that was a thing. I'm assuming that's something you could pick up off eBay for not too bad, right?

[61:16] John: No.

[61:17] David: Charity books are always interesting in that way, because I feel like their artists and writers are--I don't know--a little more experimental, a little more trying stuff, because it's usually for free, and there's the charity aspect of it, but you've got to find a way to make it interesting to you, when there's no money involved, outside of just the--I don't know--That sounds like a fun book that I didn't even know that existed. Anything Goes! So, Part 2, Everything Went?

[61:41] John: Where else in the world do you have a comic book, like #2 here, that's got Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Jack Kirby, Art Spiegelman, Jaime Hernandez, Don Simpson, Joe Sinnott, Dennis Fujitake.

[61:54] David: That's crazy.

[61:55] John: And In Pictopia is really the masterpiece of this. It's not that great today, but if you can set your mind for what the world was like back then, when this stuff hadn't been done before, it sets a template for a lot of stuff that follows. I think it won some awards. It's definitely one that people talked about for a long time afterwards. Then again, it’s I think the only story there that's in print. Oh, well, that might not be true. The Love and Rockets stuff might be in a Love and Rockets book, or something like that.

[62:21] David: Oh, it was actual Love and Rockets stories that were in there?

[62:24] John: Yeah. Here's the list of people--just throwing this out here--in this ad. This is the other thing. This time capsule--I mean, you just go through this, page by page, and be like, “fascinating stuff.” Here's the people quoted in this Love and Rockets ad. Alan Moore, Ben Krug from WBAI New York, Matt Howarth, Steve Leialoha, Steve Rude, Howard Chaykin, Moebius, Wendy Pini, Dave Shute, and Heidi MacDonald.

[62:50] David: Wow.

[62:51] John: Jack Kirby.

[62:53] David: Yeah, look at that. I'm going to go grab that. Well, I feel like I have to go grab it now, because I’ve got to know what's going on before we finish off the rest of the story.

[63:01] John: Yeah. The Art Spiegelman story about them bringing Walt Disney back to life. Long-running story from the 80s that they'd frozen him in 1966, when he allegedly died, and they make my hometown of Anaheim, California, the capital of the world, foreshadowing, not the last time Anaheim's going to come up in this story.

[63:20] David: All right.

[63:20] John: And then eventually, Disney rules the world, which is, in a way, a bit prescient.

[63:29] David: No. I feel like Skydance is making a good argument for them ruling the world right now.

[63:33] John: Yeah, no doubt.

[63:34] David: I'm on eBay. I can pick up all six issues, the full run, on eBay right now, for basically $30. Looks like decent copies. Not bad.

[63:44] John: Exactly.

[63:44] David: All right. Well, everybody, you've got your marching orders for the week. Run out, grab yourself at least Issue #2, it sounds like, of Anything Goes! from Fantagraphics. Find that wherever you can find it. Make sure you give it a read, and then we're going to be back for Part 2 of this Anything Goes! adventure that we're on.

[64:02] John: All right.

[64:03] David: Thanks, John. That was fun. I really enjoyed that. I was literally on the edge of my seat in parts of that. Harlan Ellison--man, he knows how to sling some mud.

[64:12] John: Yeah. Be back next week, and find out, folks.

[64:15] David: Oh, that's a cliffhanger. We've never had one of those. This is exciting.

[64:18] John: Thank you for joining us. Like, subscribe, tell your friends, tattoo it on your face, whatever.

[64:22] David: Tattoo on your face. I like it. The Corner Box.

[64:24] John: See you next week.

[64:25] David: Bye.

This has been The Corner Box with David and John. Please take a moment and give us a five-star rating. It really helps. Join us again next week for another dive into the wonderful world of comics.