[00:00:00] INTRO: 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.

[00:00:23] JOHN: Hello, and welcome to the Corner Box. David, I'm so deep in research I nearly called us the Comics Journal. Uh, I'm your host Gary—I mean John Barber. With me as always, David Hedgecock.

[00:00:37] DAVID: Who's Gary Groth's second in command? I don't even know who that would be.

[00:00:41] JOHN: I've had several nice conversations with his son, who works at, at Fantagraphics at, like, Comic-Con, going there and buying, buying books. He'll be at the table.

[00:00:51] DAVID: Oh, really?

[00:00:52] JOHN: Yeah, it's—it's not like he introduces himself, like, "I'm Gary Groth's son." But you can see his name's Groth, you know, on his Comic-Con badge. Could be somebody else, I guess. I don't know.

[00:01:01] DAVID: I feel like we've set a Corner Box record for how fast we derailed this entire conversation.

[00:01:07] JOHN: Yeah. Did we—did we get to your last name yet? Like, did we—did we cut in yet?

[00:01:12] DAVID: I'm not sure, actually.

[00:01:14] JOHN: David, it's been a heck of a week, though. This isn't even what we're talking about, but last time we talked, we were not at war with Iran. Like, I don't know if you recall that.

[00:01:25] DAVID: No, we weren't. And that was only seven short days ago, John.

[00:01:29] JOHN: Yeah. I think I left this call, went to go, like, get my daughter, checked my phone, and saw we'd attacked Iran. Not only did we attack Iran, but Mike Richardson, founder of Dark Horse, was attacked and, uh, lost. That was big. You know what I mean? Like, that's big news. I don't know if it's, like, shocking, but...

[00:01:50] DAVID: It's—it's not shocking to me, but it is—I agree—it's, like, legitimately an end of an era in, not—not just at Dark Horse, but in the comics medium.

[00:01:59] JOHN: So what we're talking about, dear listener, is Mike Richardson was let go, essentially—I mean, that's, kind of, how it was framed—let go from Dark Horse in 2022. Big private equity firm bought Dark Horse. So Mike Richardson sold, I'm assuming he sold most or all of his interest in the company at that time.

[00:02:18] JOHN: And this is why it doesn't really shock me, because usually in those kinds of deals, there's some sort of, like, sunset of the former, you know, C-suite, uh, which Mike certainly would have been part of as—as the publisher and CEO. So I think that sort of thing was probably, kind of, a little bit writing on the wall, but it's still crazy to think that Mike Richardson is not actively involved at Dark Horse and—and in the comics medium right now.

[00:02:46] DAVID: Yeah. And, like, I mean, specifically—and I'm not trying to insult video games here—but it's—it's video game guys coming in and running Dark Horse.

[00:02:55] JOHN: That's my understanding, is that there's a lot of people that were chomping at the bit to get to the point where they were making more video game art books because those are low-lift, big money makers. I think we both worked at a company where perhaps we heard a lot about the amount of money that they made on some of those things.

[00:03:13] DAVID: Yeah.

[00:03:14] JOHN: The end of the era is—is right to me. I mean, that—that sounds like the right thing, 'cause when you go back—when Dark Horse launched, it launched in the, you know, sort of, the tail end of the second wave of direct market publishers. You know, like, First Comics was still around, Eclipse was still around.

[00:03:31] JOHN: Both of them were, like, sort of—not on their way out exactly, but, like, they were making the decisions that would cause their downfall. I was looking through some Comics Journal stuff and, like, the debut of Dark Horse is not far off from First Comics doing, uh, newsstand distribution, which is—is sort of the thing that, uh, killed 'em.

[00:03:52] DAVID: Yeah.

[00:03:53] JOHN: But, Mike Richardson was a comic book guy. He was the owner of—of a comic book store owner, the way we're talking about Eclipse—or not Eclipse, um, Pacific Comics. You know, he ran Things From Another World and—and that was in Portland, and that's why all this comics stuff is in Portland, you know. That's why Image is there. That was, you know, Portland for a while was Marvel West. You know, like, they used to joke about that 'cause that's where Bendis moved, so everybody was moving around him. But all that is really centered around, like, Mike Richardson originally.

[00:04:26] DAVID: Yeah.

[00:04:27] JOHN: You know, as much of the stuff that—that Dark Horse—the various stuff Dark Horse did over the years, that it was always a comic book guy in charge. And there aren't that many of those in charge of comic book companies anymore.

[00:04:38] DAVID: Yeah, he really put Dark Horse on the map with the Predator comic book was the first, like—I remember that very specifically. I think it was Chris Warner cover, Predator cover, and just, like, the fact that they were doing new stories about Predator and it wasn't a movie adaptation. That was, like, the first time anybody, kind of, had been able to do that that wasn't Marvel, basically.

[00:05:03] DAVID: Or, I guess, maybe DC had done a little bit of Star Trek stuff at that point, but outside of Marvel doing some Star Wars stuff, I don't know that that sort of thing just didn't happen, especially not with an independent company like Dark Horse. Really put 'em on the map, and they really did a fantastic job of taking that and turning it into just, you know, hit after hit after hit.

[00:05:25] JOHN: You know, it's funny, if you, like, materially pull apart what was different between, like, Dark Horse doing Aliens and doing Predator versus what all these other publishers were doing. I—like, it's hard to put your finger on it, but there was a huge qualitative difference that was, like, so apparent when that stuff came out.

[00:05:43] JOHN: I mean, I remember the Aliens continuation was, like, kind of the—the first one, I think. Mark Verheiden and Mark Nelson. Verheiden wrote the Predator one as well, and, uh, like, he's still a going concern. He's a TV writer mostly, but writes some comics. Um, Chris Gage was just mentioning him to me the other day.

[00:06:03] JOHN: So he's, you know, very much still around. But, yeah, the continuation of the story, the—the—I mean, the way the Aliens adaptation was, like, the sequel to Aliens we all wish they had where they go to the alien homeworld and—you're doing all the stuff you'd never—you aren't allowed to do anymore because they're probably gonna make a movie of it. But there were no plans for another Alien movie. So they were, "Okay, go ahead and do—do comics with what happens to Newt next." And it's way better than Alien 3 was.

[00:06:33] DAVID: There was an Alien 3, John?

[00:06:35] JOHN: Yeah. It's funny, they've only ever had those two movies featuring the Alien. I don't understand.

[00:06:40] DAVID: And they were great, right?

[00:06:41] JOHN: Yeah, great. 100%. Yeah. Same thing in Predator. I mean, like, the—the first Predator comic was essentially the story of Predator 2. You know, like, there was, like, putting 'em in an urban environment. It was setting exactly the thing you were gonna do. And then, kind of, the biggest one of those things was Alien versus Predator, was made into two sterling movies that I've never seen.

[00:07:06] DAVID: Yeah, same.

[00:07:07] JOHN: Anyway, some incredible innovation there.

[00:07:11] DAVID: And then, you know, to go out and, you know, have the eye and the ability and the wherewithal to cultivate relationships and projects with, you know, Mike Mignola and Hellboy, and the stuff he did with Sin City, you know, with Frank Miller, like, and while it wasn't as successful, but to a lesser degree, the stuff that, you know, John Byrne was doing over there.

[00:07:33] JOHN: Well, the whole Legend line. I mean, those guys were all—like, that was the best non-Image Image company that there was.

[00:07:42] DAVID: Art Adams.

[00:07:43] JOHN: Yeah, Art Adams. Monkeyman and O'Brien.

[00:07:46] DAVID: You get two massive tentpoles out of that with Sin City, you know, fantastic movies made out of that, tons of material generated from Sin City. And the same with Hellboy, right? A couple of different movies. And like Alien, exactly two movies that are both very good.

[00:08:04] DAVID: And then, you know, decades of handling the Star Wars license, you know, Conan the Barbarian. Like, as the archivist for Conan the Barbarian now, like, the Dark Horse stuff, they—there's some fantastic stuff in there. Like, they really did a great job. I think I mentioned this a while back. I've been, sort of, dipping in and out of the Jewels of Gwahlur by P. Craig Russell. Oh, man. This stuff was just gorgeous. It is so—it's such a treat to, like, look at the art. Just, uh, an amazing steward of the properties that they had, and amazing steward of comic books in general.

[00:08:44] DAVID: They were into manga before, like, really anybody else. And all of that is Mike Richardson. You know, at the end of the day, he's—he's the guy on top. It really does feel like a full changing of the guard now. Because now we have the only company that still, sort of, the same is Image.

[00:09:02] DAVID: Because Marvel is now owned by Disney, DC's owned by somebody else every second Tuesday of the month, the Dark Horse is, you know, fully changed ownership into a private equity, IDW's, you know, Ted Adams has been out of IDW for several years, and the head of Boom is gone.

[00:09:22] DAVID: So we've got a full and complete, pretty much changing of the guard. I—you could argue that Eric Stephenson is a new—new guard, kind of, for Image Comics, but I—I think he's still part of the...

[00:09:34] JOHN: That's a tough argument to make.

[00:09:37] DAVID: Yeah. Yeah. And an argument could be made that Jim Valentino or maybe it was Erik Larsen, being part of the original six or seven depending on how you count, how many fingers you have, would be the last of the old guard for Image.

[00:09:50] DAVID: But I think Eric Stephenson's so baked into all of that DNA that it—it's still the same.

[00:09:57] JOHN: There's a continuity of it.

[00:09:58] DAVID: Great point.

[00:09:59] JOHN: McFarlane, Silvestri, Larsen, Valentino are still there. The two people they brought in were Eric—were Stephenson, Eric Stephenson, who was there from Youngblood number one. I mean, he was involved in Image from literally the first comic. Robert Kirkman, not that anything's changed with him, but is a hardcore comics guy. You know, like, I mean, he's also a TV guy, but, like, he was a comics guy first, and it was the comics stuff that I think really pushed him on there.

[00:10:27] DAVID: I would argue he's still a comics first, in—in pretty much every way he thinks.

[00:10:32] JOHN: Yeah.

[00:10:32] DAVID: Oh, totally.

[00:10:33] JOHN: Yes, yes.

[00:10:34] DAVID: And the way that company operates, I think, is still comics first. It doesn't feel like, at least in the aggregate, that this shift or this move to, sort of, big corporation-owned comic book companies doesn't feel like we're getting served as well as we probably should be or could be.

[00:10:54] DAVID: I'm a little bummed that Dark Horse—boy, the corporate speak in the announcement for letting Mike Richardson go was the most corporate speak of corporate speak.

[00:11:04] JOHN: Totally. And, like, looking at that as, like—I mean, like, I could sit here for just hours talking about all the Dark Horse stuff that came out over the years. Like, they launched with—with Paul Chadwick's Concrete. Like, that was, like, the biggest thing in indie comics for a long time.

[00:11:23] JOHN: That got me, kind of, thinking, like, where is Concrete these days? Like, what's that—I mean, like, not what publisher, but I mean, like, where's Chadwick? What's going on with that? I don't know, does he still do stuff?

[00:11:34] DAVID: I actually just saw an announcement in the last two or three weeks that he's coming back to do more Concrete. I don't know where or with who, but, yeah, Paul Chadwick just, sort of, disappeared for a long time there. I'm not sure what—what he's been doing. Probably making real money doing something else.

[00:11:53] JOHN: Dark Horse Presents was, like, one of the greatest anthologies of all time. Actually, uh, Cheval Noir, their—their European one was another one of the greatest anthologies of all time. But, uh, like, in Dark Horse Presents, the stuff that you'd see in that issue, Paul Pope doing a five-page non-story, just just sequential event or something.

[00:12:16] JOHN: Yeah. And then right next to Gray Morrow drawing Alien. I don't know, there was just, like, such a treat every month when it was in its heyday, you know, that you'd pick up.

[00:12:28] JOHN: Gerard Way, the part where they got Gerard Way to become a comic book writer instead of a rock star.

[00:12:35] DAVID: Yeah, that was—that was quite the move, right? And it all felt very much comic book. Like, it all felt like comic book first. You could maybe make some arguments that, like, maybe Timecop didn't, yeah, Barb Wire, things like that, maybe some things were a little more commercially—Richardson was also a pioneer in that way, right?

[00:12:58] DAVID: Like, he's—he's got a ton of producer credits on movies you wouldn't even think he would be involved with, and he is. So, uh, you know, and that was, I think, another one of the things that he pioneered, you know, was bringing some of these concepts to the movies and actually getting those things made.

[00:13:14] DAVID: Like, The Mask was a massive hit with Jim Carrey. It was a huge movie. But when you're reading The Mask comic book, you never felt like that was the goal. You read a lot of comic books, they feel like this—the goal for this comic book is to set something else up in some other medium.

[00:13:31] DAVID: And it's even on the big company, you know, Marvel, DC, which you would think that they would be more interested in publishing comic books for comic book's sake. If you look at Marvel and DC and you see when they're allowing comics to become comic—published for comic book's sake, that's when they have their greatest success in other media.

[00:13:50] DAVID: But even though they've got the blueprint staring them in the face, they don't want to follow it. Like, for me, selfishly, we'll think it's already done, but, like, I'm reading Den right now from Dark Horse.

[00:14:02] JOHN: Yeah, me too. Yeah.

[00:14:03] DAVID: These are gorgeous, beautiful compilations of material from Richard Corben, his Den project. And they are lovingly reproduced. Like, as far as I can tell, every—you know, we talked about this a little bit, but just everything shot from the original art. It's being re-lettered, you know, professionally by Nate Piekos.

[00:14:24] DAVID: But in a way that's deferential to the original material and the—and the original lettering. It's just a really beautiful package. That's not gonna happen with a video game head running Dark Horse. That's not gonna happen anymore. That's not a thing that a corporate company can figure out how to make money doing. You need a comic book guy to know that that's gonna make money and to know that if I spend an extra year on this project, I will over time make a lot more money doing that.

[00:15:00] JOHN: Yeah, I mean Den's a great example because that is something that is historically relevant, super important, really cool and beautiful, and, like, super trashy on a certain level. And I mean—I say that positively. A lot of publishers wouldn't, in the 2020s, have touched with a ten-foot pole or a ten-foot, you know, ding-dong. There's a lot of naked people in Den, for instance. All of them.

[00:15:26] JOHN: But that—that's, like, the sort of, like, salacious, kind of, like, "Oh, yeah, we want to be a—" I don't know, like, I—I'd be shocked if, like, Pantheon started putting that out, right? Like, there's a certain amount of, "We're prestige publishers now. Comics aren't the trashy underground stuff. They're middle grade and—and mid-range kids' stuff. They're movie pitches."

[00:15:52] DAVID: And that, kind of, speaks to my point, is, like—but at the same time, like, that is—yes, it's trashy, yes, it's pulpy, yes, it's all the things that are amazing about comics sometimes, right?

[00:16:03] DAVID: When executed at—at a certain level. When it's executed poorly, of course, there's not a lot to talk about there, but when you've got Richard Corben, you know, who's recognized as one of the greatest all-time artists, you know, the dude's literally won "greatest artist ever" award in France.

[00:16:20] DAVID: Then it's worthy of being collected in—in a manner that, you know, people can appreciate, truly appreciate the skill and the—the abilities that this guy was bringing to the table. And, yeah, like, that's just not gonna happen at Dark Horse anymore. It's—I'll be shocked if it does, right?

[00:16:40] DAVID: So where does it go? You know, where does it go? And—and that's—I'm sure there's gonna be others to pick up those batons and those banners and champion things, but Dark Horse was really good at that for a really long time, so it'll be interesting to see where they go.

[00:16:55] JOHN: Yeah.

[00:16:56] DAVID: On the other side of it, we did a lot of prognosticating confidently, John, very confidently, about, uh, Netflix buying, uh, DC Comics. We did a whole, almost a whole episode of our podcast talking about that. And, uh, John, that's not happening now. That—that also has in the last week or two, uh, completely changed. We have another private equity firm buying Paramount, which owns DC Comics.

[00:17:28] JOHN: Having bought Paramount, buying Warner.

[00:17:31] DAVID: Right, right. I guess it's, you know, from one corporate master to another. I'm not sure it really matters all that much. The thing that I find interesting about that, John, that I wanted to bring up to you and to our listeners, is that you read some of the financials behind this deal and it's, like, the group that is purchasing Time Warner, they're buying it for some like—I don't know, some ungodly amount—it's like 110 billion dollars, right?

[00:18:01] DAVID: And they already have, like, 10 to 15 billion dollars' worth of debt on their books. And Time Warner's up for sale because—not because it was making a bunch of money. It was—it's up for sale because it wasn't doing that great. This new conglomerate, this new entertainment juggernaut that's getting put together is gonna be on the books for, like—I don't know, 70 or 80 billion dollars' worth of debt, like, right out of the gate.

[00:18:27] DAVID: Man, that's a lot of debt to carry, especially when you're not making, like, multiple billions of dollars every year—which it's not. As fun as DC Comics is right now, I am really worried about it because, like, they seem to have hit this really nice little sweet spot over the course of the last couple years where they've—they've tightened things up, you know, the—the editorial is—I feel like firing on all cylinders, and they're making really smart decisions, and they've gotta be profitable right now, I'm sure they are. There's no doubt in my mind.

[00:19:04] DAVID: If you're making 200 million dollars a year's worth of profit and the company you're working under is 70 billion dollars in debt, like, 200 million dollars is not a very meaningful number probably. And I'm just wondering what that's gonna do to the publishing arm of DC, like, through no fault of anyone's at DC Comics right now. I can 100% see a situation where they kill that entire division and—and license out all those properties for other people to make the comic books.

[00:19:42] DAVID: And it's gonna be a—you get rid of all the overhead, you get rid of all the—the office space, like, all that stuff just goes away. You license all that stuff out to the highest bidder, and then the money is guaranteed and you do zero work outside of, like, you know, the three people that are gonna be harried and trying to approve, you know, 70 comic books a month. Whoever the licensing people on that are gonna—it's gonna be a nightmare. But I can see that scenario happening, and I just—it's making me a little itchy, John.

[00:20:18] JOHN: The valuation on the stock that they're paying is, like, so much higher than it was before. I didn't do any research on this, I was—I just, uh, I think I listened to a podcast about it yesterday, but it's, like, four to 16 times what the—the value of the stock was. It was, like, way, way higher. And that's why Netflix backed off. They're paying so much for this.

[00:20:41] DAVID: Netflix's move apparently is, like—they're happy because they got the bid up so high that, and then they walked away and left Paramount, like that whole group, basically hanging and buying something at, to your point, 15 times...

[00:20:57] DAVID: And Netflix is just gonna come in in two or three years and buy it for pennies on the dollar, I think.

[00:21:04] JOHN: I think they also get a bit of money off of it, off of—because they were in a deal when this other deal came in. I think they—I think some of the money goes...

[00:21:13] DAVID: Can you imagine, like, "Oh, the—Netflix is just gets a billion dollars for their part." "Oh, it's only a billion." Like, can you imag—what is going on? I don't under—how—I don't understand how this—this is already—we're way over our heads talking about this.

[00:21:30] JOHN: I agree. Well, you—this—I thought this was your area of expertise, but all right, whatever. The money is coming from Larry Ellison from Oracle, the father of the, what's his name, Ellison that runs Skydance that bought Paramount and is buying this.

[00:21:48] JOHN: And there's definitely lines that could be drawn in terms of, of controlling media environments that allow Larry Ellison to have more access to government contracts and data that is probably worthwhile without getting into, like, tin-hat conspiracy stuff.

[00:22:11] DAVID: Right. David Ellison, right?

[00:22:12] JOHN: David Ellison. He's the son.

[00:22:13] DAVID: He's the one that's making all the moves, right?

[00:22:15] JOHN: Yeah, he's in charge of it, but it's his dad bought him a company and now his dad's buying him another one. So, yeah, and—and we've seen David Ellison making significant changes to CBS News, Colbert going off the air, that kind of stuff. With CNN now in his portfolio, like, that's a potentially bigger change to how news gets processed, but whoever was watching CBS News...

[00:22:42] DAVID: Yeah, right.

[00:22:44] JOHN: I—I see your concern and share them with the comic book stuff. The thing that I think is, like, kind of most troubling is how James Gunn—if he's involved in the comic stuff—and I really don't know to what degree he is—but he seems to be a really positive effect of—of encouraging the comics to—to not have to follow the movie stuff, to—to be generating the stories.

[00:23:07] JOHN: You know, he's one of the rare filmmakers pointing directly to specific comics as things you should read and you're doing adaptations of recent comics. Like, he's clearly up on it. When you get these people coming in from other mediums that don't care about this stuff, be it movies, TV, comics—video games, the same thing holds true when it's—when it's just people looking for the profit, looking for the money or whatever.

[00:23:33] JOHN: There's not necessarily the level of taste that goes into this, or level of, like, "Oh, you know what, we shouldn't make six Batman TV shows." You're gonna have somebody looking at the bottom line and being like, "Well, why are we doing—why are we doing this?" You know, and like, artistic reasons aren't way far off the table—like, that's not valid.

[00:23:55] JOHN: And the idea of, like, "Oh, well—" which I'm sure is how Gunn was selling this, is, like, "You're building—you're building something, you're building pieces to get up to somewhere, not—not trying to just hit billion-dollar grand slams." Uh, yeah, I think their response to that would be, "Oh, okay, but let's just hit those billion-dollar grand slams instead."

[00:24:16] DAVID: Right. Just make the hits.

[00:24:18] JOHN: Yeah. I think DC Comics is in a really nice place. I'm really enjoying their stuff. Everything's precarious everywhere. We, kind of, joked about it last time about them getting Ninja Turtles or something. I mean, that's the—the reasonable version of it, but the unreasonable stuff is—maybe is more likely. I don't know.

[00:24:37] DAVID: I think with Netflix, the scenario where they're cultivating that company and letting it cook was much higher than—than this scenario where, and only because I feel like the pressure to get out from under that amount of debt...

[00:24:59] DAVID: I don't care what anybody says, that's—that's an insane amount of debt to carry on a book. And they have to part out stuff. They have to sell stuff off in order to make all that work. I don't think the plan is like, "Hey, we're just gonna make cool stuff and eventually pay this back."

[00:25:17] DAVID: I don't know, we'll see. I'm not saying that things are gonna change. I'm just saying, like, it seems more likely now, if—if for no other reason than—than that level of debt. Like, they're gonna have to get creative on some stuff, and I could certainly see a small comic book publishing division, you know, no matter what the amount of money they're generating, it's—there's no amount of money. The entire comic book industry doesn't generate enough money all combined to be of interest to a company at—at that size and that level of cash flow and debt. Oh, my god.

[00:25:54] DAVID: Anyway, I'm—I'll be interested to see how it goes. But that's not what we're here to talk about today, John.

[00:26:02] JOHN: We were hip deep, John.

[00:26:04] DAVID: We were. In a thrilling discussion about a comic book from about 20 years ago.

[00:26:10] JOHN: More 30 years ago.

[00:26:11] DAVID: 46.

[00:26:12] JOHN: 46 years ago, yeah. Where we left off, Harlan Ellison gave an interview, uh, in late 1979, published in 1980, with Gary Groth in the magazine the Comics Journal, where it was very incendiary. Ellison, kind of, said mean things, uh, about the work of various people. Uh, very deliberately didn't mean to say anything bad about anybody personally. He brought that up a couple times.

[00:26:38] JOHN: But ironically, one of the people who took issues with it was Michael Fleisher, a writer that Harlan Ellison singled out as being, like, exceptionally good.

[00:26:48] DAVID: Yeah, in a bizarre twist, the one guy who took the—the most offense was the only guy that Ellison actually spoke highly of.

[00:26:55] JOHN: Yeah. I mean, like, he's slamming Norman Mailer, he's slamming Titans of literature, but not Michael Fleisher, whose work he clearly effusively loves. That eventually that leads to Fleisher suing Gary Groth, the Comics Journal, and Harlan Ellison. And, uh, that's kind of where we—where we pick up.

[00:27:17] JOHN: Imagine, David, that you live in New York in 1986. And you go and you get your mail. And back then, mail was kind of exciting. Like, maybe you get a letter from somebody that you wanted to hear from, you know, or you'd catch up without having to pay for long-distance phone calls, which were pretty pricey back then. Uh, there's no computers or Facebooks or Twitters or text messages.

[00:27:41] JOHN: So you open up your mailbox and—uh oh, it's a jury summons. You're like, "Well, I guess I'll do my civic duty," you know, check in, see what I need to do, and you—you walk into a comic book writer suing a science fiction writer and a guy in his 20s running a magazine that seems to exist to complain about the state of comics, which you read when you were a kid and you've seen the newspaper articles about "Biff Bam Pow, comics ain't just for kids anymore."

[00:28:10] JOHN: And you're like, "Okay, fine. At least this will be quick." It took seven years to get to trial. But how long can the trial last? Four weeks, David. Four weeks of your life would be spent in that jury box.

[00:28:25] DAVID: That is a long time, man.

[00:28:27] JOHN: Yeah. Four weeks of testimony about whether Michael Fleisher wrote a story where, uh, guys made a girl give them a blow job and then let them on fire, or if they lit her on fire first. Or four weeks of repeatedly asking Harlan Ellison if he meant bug fuck in a clinical sense.

[00:28:46] DAVID: Bug fuck in a clinical sense? Is that really a thing that was asked?

[00:28:50] JOHN: Okay, to be fair, not exactly, but there is a lot of, "When you say he's certifiable, do you mean that clinically?" Like, there is a lot of that kind of stuff. So, Fleisher is suing for three points. He's suing, uh, one, against all defendants, that the Publishers Weekly review of his book, Chasing Harry, had been mischaracterized by Ellison in the—in the interview.

[00:29:16] JOHN: Two, to Ellison specifically, he maliciously and intentionally slandered Fleisher in the presence of Groth and Ellison's lady friend who was there for the interview. That's kind of weird because libel is what you sue somebody for in print. Slander is what you do in person. So he's suing them for the slander that occurred when the interview took place.

[00:29:40] JOHN: I guess it'd be—that's how that would be an Ellison thing and not a Comics Journal thing. Uh, I'm kind of presuming here, I'm not a lawyer, so—so my analysis might be off.

[00:29:50] DAVID: I don't know, that makes sense, though. I—I follow.

[00:29:53] JOHN: And then third, for all, Fleisher was further defamed by the Comics Journal issue 59 interview, a couple months later, with Ted White, the former Heavy Metal editor. A sample of that was—and maybe the gist of it was—that Ted White says, "Harlan was praising him as really off the wall, wasn't he? But he called him crazy or something like that?" To which Groth replies, "Certifiable and a derange-o."

[00:30:23] DAVID: Certifiable and a derange-o?

[00:30:26] JOHN: Uh oh.

[00:30:27] DAVID: He's not a derange-o. He's fantastic.

[00:30:29] JOHN: He's listening in from heaven, David.

[00:30:31] DAVID: Do you download the Corner Box there?

[00:30:33] JOHN: Yeah, we upload to that site.

[00:30:35] DAVID: Okay, good.

[00:30:36] JOHN: After the lawsuit's filed, the Journal obviously reports on it and gets a little, uh, provocative about it, which maybe seems to egg Fleisher on. I don't know, that's my analysis, but like elsewhere in the Ted White interview, Groth says, "I hope he is as inept in court as he is a writer."

[00:30:56] DAVID: Oh, damn.

[00:30:57] JOHN: Ellison, despite his shtick and his bravado, he knows how to play the game of lawsuits, and he knows to keep quiet while the lawsuits go on. Now, these varying methods of dealing with a lawsuit are gonna cause some future issues. This is some more foreshadowing, David.

[00:31:15] DAVID: I am shocked.

[00:31:17] JOHN: Warning the listeners, that's gonna be in the next part 'cause god knows I'm not gonna finish this time. So, after five years of pretrial maneuvering, depositions began in April 1984, with, uh, Fleisher, followed by Groth, Harlan Ellison, then Kim Thompson, who'd been brought on as co-editor of the Comics Journal and whose inheritance money would keep Fantagraphics afloat for a while or help keep Fantagraphics afloat for a while.

[00:31:48] DAVID: Because of this lawsuit or just in general?

[00:31:51] JOHN: Just in general as I understand.

[00:31:53] DAVID: Oh, man. Don't ever use your own money to pay for comic book publishing.

[00:31:58] JOHN: Kim Thompson remained at Fantagraphics for the rest of his life. Well, there you go. I'm the Kim Thompson to your Gary Groth, is that what—except I don't have any money.

[00:32:09] DAVID: Well, yeah, yeah, and—and don't die, David.

[00:32:12] JOHN: Okay, I'll try. Michael Catron, who was a Comics Journal consulting editor; Dwight Decker, who reviewed Chasing Harry in issue 57 of the Comics Journal, the issue after they interviewed Michael Fleisher himself—which was itself I think three issues after the Harlan Ellison interview, two issues maybe.

[00:32:33] JOHN: Joe Orlando, DC editor and at that time currently a Watchmen character, who was subpoenaed to give insight on Fleisher's removal from The Spectre in the early '70s; Mike Tiffenbacher, who was an editor of a magazine called The Comics Reader; Mike Gold, DC's then, uh, PR director, later be a—the editor there; Barry Golson, Playboy's executive editor.

[00:33:01] JOHN: And Dean Mullaney, who Ellison calls "beneath contempt," but is maybe better known as being the co-publisher of Eclipse Comics. He had sent a letter to Groth pledging moral support despite his disagreements with the Journal, but in his deposition, he changed tact. We both, kind of, know Dean Mullaney, so this is, uh, in the spirit of fun here to get into some of these details.

[00:33:31] JOHN: Mullaney in his deposition, he testifies or deposes or whatever you do in a deposition, basically saying the Journal tends to encourage people to say controversial things and that the Journal, like, pushes controversy, like, makes things sound even worse than they are, which are frankly accurate statements.

[00:33:53] JOHN: In the years since the interview, people think, when they hear Michael Fleisher, they think bug fuck.

[00:33:59] DAVID: Bug fuck.

[00:34:00] JOHN: Uh oh.

[00:34:01] DAVID: He's not a derange-o. He's fantastic.

[00:34:03] JOHN: He's listening in from heaven, David. Ellison implies that the change in Mullaney's attitude is due to his girlfriend and, uh, then Eclipse editor-in-chief Cat Yronwode hating the Journal because, as Mullaney calls it, they've been calling her names, they've been name-calling, which is probably a very reasonable reaction for her to have to the Comics Journal.

[00:34:28] JOHN: There's one other guy who's deposed. It's a big one, but I'm gonna hold off on that for a minute because he gets called to the stand as well, and that's, kind of, an interesting bit here. So, the trial, uh, kicks off in November of 1986, goes into December. It involves a whole lot of pedantry. Some of it's funny. It's Ellison arguing with opposing counsel a little. I mean, not too bad, he gets frustrated when the guy keeps asking the same question and it's—it's just a lot of going over details.

[00:35:01] JOHN: Like that stuff about, like, "Did you mean certifiable in a—a clinical sense, and if not, how did you mean it?" Not to get ahead of ourselves, but the reason we know about all of this is because, uh, after the trial and—in 1987, Comics Journal publishes the transcripts of the trial, which, uh, Groth says are edited for clarity, like basically so it's not endless objections that don't go anywhere, you know, they kind of maintain the—the flow of thoughts and they cut out some details.

[00:35:34] JOHN: And a few years ago, Cartoon Kayfabe did readings of these. So if you'd like to hear Jim Rugg and the late Ed Piskor read 'em and try to make sense of it, they're on YouTube and highly recommended. Like, their asides are great, and like even like how much the Fantagraphics crew of the 2020s enjoyed the reactions that those guys were having to these transcripts.

[00:36:00] DAVID: Okay, that's awesome.

[00:36:02] JOHN: Yeah. Or you can read 'em on the Comics Journal website. You kick in 30 dollars to get a subscription to their archives, which is also highly recommended. Like, there's a lot of—a lot of fun stuff in there.

[00:36:13] DAVID: 30 bucks for a whole year. That's pretty good deal.

[00:36:16] JOHN: It is. They're full scans of the issues, which is like fascinating in its own right because you're seeing this, like, pre-digital era on these early issues where you'd have ads for comics that are, like, literally typewritten. You know, like it's a photo of a typewritten page listing comics and prices.

[00:36:34] JOHN: I forgot that used to be a thing, and these are like the zero-budget versions of those Mile High Comics ads that you used to have in Marvel Comics, you know, the yellow ones. Fantastic. Anyway, though, the trial's going on. Fleisher, Ellison, Groth, they're all called to the stand. The Fleisher transcripts actually aren't reprinted in the Comics Journal, uh, apparently due to a miscommunication, uh, with the Journal's request to the court. Like, not anything specific to Fleisher, they just that happened to be the one they didn't—they didn't get.

[00:37:10] JOHN: Unless they followed it up later. I don't—I don't know that they ever actually printed those or—or got a hold of them. So there's good stuff, but, you know, no big surprises after everything we've, kind of, gone over in part one. And then they call that one big witness that I mentioned. And I mean literally big, like six-foot-seven, up to the stand, ready to be sworn in, lumbers none other, Jim Shooter.

[00:37:38] JOHN: Jim Shooter's a Wonderkind comics writer who started out at the age of 13 writing Legion of Super-Hero adventures in Adventure Comics, which would later be the home of Michael Fleisher's Spectre stories. By the time the Fleisher interview had run, though, he'd left comics and then returned as an assistant editor to Marvel in 1976, the same year as the founding of both the Comics Journal and myself.

[00:38:05] JOHN: And then two years later, almost to the day, Shooter became editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. David, he was 26 years old. You know, if I ever heard that, I was, like, young enough that I'm like, "Oh, that's cool." Not like, "What?" Can you imagine a 26-year-old being in charge of Marvel Comics today? It's just never gonna happen. He was 26, he'd already been in the comic book industry for a decade.

[00:38:31] JOHN: He'd left and come back. Like, yeah. Could I imagine a 26-year-old being in charge? I mean, it'd be wild, but yes, sort of, but—but not one that was—like the biggest things that he did, I think, were to create a DC-style editorial structure within Marvel Comics, where there was, like, a hierarchy and stuff instead of just the editor-in-chief and a bunch of people running around doing stuff.

[00:39:00] JOHN: I don't think you would have Marvel Studios or stuff. I don't think you would have gotten to that world if you hadn't had somebody doing that at some point. I don't know, it's just wild to think he was doing that at the age of 26. But, yeah, here he is a couple years later, still in his 20s, as an expert witness. But, David, he might have had his own motivations for being there.

[00:39:24] JOHN: Back in 1980, right after this Comics Journal—the—the Ellison interview came out, at the Chicago Comic-Con, the Comics Journal issue 60 interview subject, Jim Shooter. It's the issue after the Ted White interview that we're talking about. Like, all this stuff happens within months of each other. That interview has nothing to do with anything, it's just, kind of, funny that everyone involved in here was a cover feature on the Comics Journal that year.

[00:39:55] JOHN: In the six-month period, yeah. In 1980 Chicago Comic-Con, Jim Shooter announces that Michael Fleisher is going to write Savage Sword of Conan, your own Conan the Barbarian, and he is booed by what he estimates to be 500 people. That must have stuck with Shooter, because maybe a month or two later he's at the San Diego Comic-Con, 1980. He's stalking the halls, looking for something to, you know, quench the thirst in his mind, his endless search for knowledge.

[00:40:32] JOHN: And he sees there's a Comics and Morality panel. And he goes into it. And what he witnesses there sticks with him. It sticks with him so much that 30 years later, after someone invented blogs and Shooter has one, he recounts the events, remembering the words said there.

[00:40:51] DAVID: I feel like you're suggesting something there, John, and I'm not sure how—how I feel about that. Jim Shooter is a straight shooter, were you gonna say that? Were you gonna say straight shooter? Thank you.

[00:41:03] JOHN: Favor of the show Mark Evanier is moderator of this panel. Panelists include Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Al Hartley, who's an Archie Comics artist. Interestingly enough, and again not relevant, but interesting, his father helped pass the Taft-Hartley Act over President Truman's veto, which restricted union activities in the United States.

[00:41:29] JOHN: Charmaine Devona, who I'm not sure who she is; Scott Shaw; and B. Kliban. He's a Playboy cartoonist who had a book of funny cat drawings called The Cat or something. Here's Shooter's recounting of this in 2011 on his blog. "Evanier started by singling out and denouncing the works of Michael Fleisher, which he apparently found particularly immoral. Then he turned it over to the panelists. Marv—Marv Wolfman—agreed that Fleisher's stories were vile. Horror without the redeeming, noble or positive qualities present in his Dracula stories. Len talked about how superhero comics should be upbeat and positive, with only happy violence." Happy violence Shooter acknowledges was his—was Shooter's term, not—not Len's term.

[00:42:24] JOHN: "Scott Shaw condemned superhero comics in general, with special emphasis on the violence." Stepping aside for a second, to be fair, Shaw was really only interested in funny animal comics anyway, but there you go.

[00:42:37] DAVID: God bless him.

[00:42:38] JOHN: Back to Shooter, quotes from Shooter here: "Everyone condemned Fleisher as the worst example of what not to do. Except Kliban, who sat there silently. Finally, Evanier asked Kliban to comment. 'I think you're all a bunch of Nazi book burners,' he said."

[00:43:01] DAVID: I hope that's how it went down.

[00:43:03] JOHN: Shooter continues: "Right around then, I was thought to be a champion of morality in comics because of the Dark Phoenix thing. Word on the street was that I wanted her killed on moral grounds because Phoenix had killed a starship full of Shi'ar and a planet full of Broccoli People. My moral sensibilities compelled me to sentence her to death. Baloney."

[00:43:29] JOHN: "Do I think killing billions of sapient beings is immoral? Of course, but hey, these are comics and honestly, that's nothing new. Galactus, anyone? My own creation, the Sun-Eater? My objections to Chris Claremont's original ending to the Dark Phoenix saga had a lot more to do with the fact that it was a cop-out. 'Oh, she's okay now, let's all go home to Long Island.' What a limp let-down."

[00:43:58] JOHN: Fantastic. I'm just gonna enjoy, like, Shooter throwing in his ridiculous aside as I've been doing throughout this.

[00:44:09] DAVID: That is an amazing aside.

[00:44:11] JOHN: Yeah. Proving his bona fides of being, like, everyone in the audience if they noticed that Jim Shooter was there, which is difficult to not as he points out 'cause he's 6'7". All of them thinking, "What is Jim Shooter, paragon of morality in comics, think about this?" Presumably, that's what everyone in the audience is thinking throughout this.

[00:44:28] DAVID: According to Mr. Shooter himself.

[00:44:31] JOHN: Jimbo is what we call him. Jim humble Shooter. According to his words in 2011 on his blog: "So I started down the panel from left to right. I said—no, I ranted words to the effect: 'Marv, do you mean to tell me that it's more moral for a character to suck the blood out of a victim's neck than it is for Fleisher to have a heinous criminal turned into a board and sawed in half? Len, do you think we should all be forced to create only warm, fuzzy stories and that the readers should be forced to read only warm, fuzzy stories? Scott, you can do what you did to Stan's plot with anything by anybody, you can ridicule Shakespeare just as easily.'" During the course of the panel, Scott Shaw had made fun of a Stan Lee story. And Shooter's point there is valid. I think completely reasonable. It is a thing you see a lot people can you pull apart a story and make fun of it, it's the execution.

[00:45:29] JOHN: Anyway, back to Shooter's words in 2011. "Evanier, why did you make this a personal attack on Fleisher?" To the young woman I said more or less, "Who gets to decide what constitutes good moral content and positive values?" He couldn't remember her name in 2011.

[00:45:48] JOHN: And to Kliban, I said—and this is a real quote—"Mr. Kliban, you I respect."

[00:45:57] DAVID: Got the Jim Shooter seal of approval.

[00:46:00] JOHN: Yeah. So—he goes on a little bit later: "Evanier and company had lost the acquiescence of the audience big time. In my judgment, the book burners, how shall I say it, went down in flames. After the debacle, I was leaving. Kliban sought me out and introduced himself. He liked to be called Hap." You think that's setting up him calling him Hap. It—it isn't. He said, "You're the only other sane one here." I said, "I think we gave the crowd something to think about." Boom.

[00:46:38] JOHN: If that sounds unlikely, David... it's because it is extremely unlikely.

[00:46:46] DAVID: What? I thought we already established that Jim Shooter is the very paragon of truth and justice in our world.

[00:46:55] JOHN: The thing that I find crazy about this, David, and in a story it's all about people calling people crazy. What in the world is Shooter's motivation for or, like, thought process or around talking about this in 2011 in that way?

[00:47:14] JOHN: 'Cause I was thinking about it. Remember how I was recounting going to that Rob Liefeld panel, and where the Youngblood spaceship was somewhere, right? Like he—it—had gone to a paintball arena. I can't remember what city it was. But let's say I thought that that was like a really, like, poignant or interesting like capstone to the 1990s of like what happens to this giant spaceship they had built. Uh, it winds up in a paintball arena in, I don't know, Buena Park. You know, somewhere in Orange County I think Buena Park's a city in Orange County, but it could be.

[00:47:50] JOHN: But let's say I like remember that and then in like 30 years I'm telling this story and I'm like, "Yeah, and the Youngblood spaceship was in Buena Park." You know, okay yeah, my own like telling of the story reinforced my memory of it. But like I'm not saying that like Rob Liefeld said that like Jim Valentino should be drawn and quartered, you know.

[00:48:14] JOHN: Like, it'd be like just misremembering which Orange County city this—this paintball arena is in.

[00:48:21] DAVID: Right. Degrees of...

[00:48:24] JOHN: Yeah. This is like transparently not stuff any of those people would say. To the point that like if they were doing that, well that—that'd be huge. Like that'd be really big. Like you'd be like, "Marv Wolfman," you know, who sued Shooter and Marvel over the ownership of Blade. So Shooter, I—I wouldn't think would have any other motivation to characterize things this way.

[00:48:51] JOHN: Would say that? Mark Evanier? Well, okay, so Evanier's version is that he's the only one who mentions Fleisher. And he said he didn't care for the Spectre stories. Evanier says that most of the panel was—this is his words—"a loud religious debate" between Kliban and Al Hartley, neither of whom I'd be willing to bet had ever heard of Michael Fleisher.

[00:49:18] JOHN: In fact, Mark Evanier was, between this panel and—and the trial, was one of the planners of a—a fundraising event for Harlan Ellison for this trial. There was a—a Harlan Ellison Roast that was done, uh, for Ellison with his—on his behalf, with his permission and—and attendance, uh, that Evanier had helped organize with future Babylon 5 creator and Spider-Man marriage breaker-upper J. Michael Straczynski.

[00:49:50] JOHN: Get a load of this. The panel roasting Harlan Ellison consisted of Stan Lee, Ray Bradbury, Robin Williams... Popeye was roasting Ellison? Phil DeGuere, producer of the Twilight Zone TV show; Robert Bloch, creator of Psycho; Robert Silverberg; Star Trek writer David Gerrold; Paul Krassner, publisher of The Realist magazine; William Rotsler, science fiction author; and Ellison's lawyer Henry W. Holmes Jr. Sergio Aragonés was there, uh, drawing—drawing Ellison in caricature, and there was a limited-edition poster for sale by Frank Miller with a illustration for Ellison's short story Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman.

[00:50:47] DAVID: There's a gorgeous piece by the way.

[00:50:49] JOHN: It's neat. Yeah, yeah, it's—I've never seen it.

[00:50:52] DAVID: Oh, man, it's really nice. I really like it.

[00:50:55] JOHN: Evanier was also—he would later in his—in his obituary of Michael Fleisher, uh, years and years later, he would say, "Full disclosure, I was supposed to testify for the defendants, but the judge disallowed my testimony on a technicality." It seems real unlikely that even though he's on the side of—like he's on the opposite side, but not in the impinging on Fleisher's First Amendment rights side of it, he's very much on the open First Amendment rights side of it. That's the part that's the interesting twist to me, or the—the like this doesn't add up kind of thing, right?

[00:51:31] JOHN: He doesn't really have anything negative to say about Fleisher in anywhere else that I've seen.

[00:51:37] DAVID: What a weird thing to be defending. "We're not that big." "Man, nobody pays attention to us. We're just this tiny little rag of a magazine."

[00:51:48] JOHN: Yeah. What a weird position to be put in, like to downplay your own business. Yeah. What a weird industry we're in.

[00:52:01] JOHN: Well, John, that was good. We've been on for a while. We should probably sign off and—and let our listeners get back to their day.

[00:52:10] DAVID: Yes, thank you for putting up with that.

[00:52:12] JOHN: I'm loving this, the level of detail and study you're putting into this is fantastic. I'm enjoying it. I'm like a kid in a comic book shop, John.

[00:52:21] DAVID: Nice.

[00:52:22] JOHN: For more hard-hitting journalism, be back here next week for—the conclusion of this endless nightmare, uh, which I don't think will really even be as long as this. Otherwise, we'll be here talking with somebody exciting. Check your local listings. We might have a surprise special guest next week, so Part 3 might not be next week, but it will be soon.

[00:52:45] DAVID: Yes. Thank you very much.

[00:52:46] JOHN: Like and subscribe. I'm David, that's John. Christ, the other way around. Bye.

[00:52:51] OUTRO: This has been the Corner Box with David and John. Please take a moment and give us a five-star rating. It really helps. And join us again next week for another dive into the wonderful world of comics.