[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.

[00:00:22] JOHN: Hello and welcome back to the Corner Box. I'm one host here at home, safely, John Barber, and our man in the field, out where the stories happened, Mr. David Hedgecock.

[00:00:33] DAVID: Hi everybody.

[00:00:34] JOHN: You’re coming to us live and direct from Hawaii.

[00:00:37] DAVID: Normally I would be bragging about this, but since I've been here for the last three days, it has been raining nonstop and almost hurricane-force winds the entire time. So, not a lot of beach time for me yet, John, but it's coming. The good news is that I took that time to do a ton of writing. I am catching up on all the scripts that I've been owing artists and instead of, like, feeding them three pages at a time, I've actually getting up and catching ahead. So, it's been fantastic.

[00:01:05] JOHN: I took some time and read a bunch of stuff this week. I thought you were going to say that, and I was, you know, like, “Eh,” and like, “Oh, writing!” That’s actually way more productive. That's awesome.

[00:01:13] DAVID: Yeah, I had to—I've got so many ideas in my head that it's really nice to get them out on paper and get them off to the next guy to think about. So, vacation so far, even though I'm making lemonade out of lemons, John, and it's and it's going good. I'm enjoying it.

[00:01:28] JOHN: All right. We are here to talk about current events in the sense of a 30-year-old lawsuit.

[00:01:34] DAVID: Before we recap our listeners, because I think that we were potentially getting into the grand finale of "Anything Goes," but before that, John, do you know what the two best-selling Spider-Man books are right now?

[00:01:49] JOHN: The two best-selling Spider-Man books?

[00:01:51] DAVID: Yeah, they're the two best-selling books of the month, I believe, but they're definitely the two best-selling Spider-Man books of the month.

[00:01:58] JOHN: Ultimate Spider-Man?

[00:01:59] DAVID: No.

[00:01:59] JOHN: Oh.

[00:02:00] DAVID: It's the Superman/Spider-Man

[00:02:03] JOHN: Okay.

[00:02:04] DAVID: ...and the reprint of the Marvel Team-Up between Invincible and Spider-Man. Oh man. So John, here’s the thing. The two best-selling books and best-selling Spider-Man comic books of the moment, neither one is published by Marvel Comics.

[00:02:22] JOHN: Oh wow. And I just find that very interesting.

[00:02:26] DAVID: That's funny. One of them's not even new material; it's just a reprint.

[00:02:30] JOHN: That's pretty wild. What a weird world we live in.

[00:02:33] DAVID: Crazy, crazy times. But that Marvel Team-Up, though, I guess has a new McFarlane cover on it, which is probably driving a lot.

[00:02:40] JOHN: I mean, that's something. I mean, McFarlane hasn't drawn Spider-Man in 150 years.

[00:02:45] DAVID: 150 years, yes. Anyway, I found that very interesting. It looks like the Superman/Spider-Man book's sales are somewhere around half a million copies.

[00:02:56] JOHN: Huh.

[00:02:56] DAVID: And that reprint is doing some serious heavy lifting as well. It is a strange, strange place to be right now.

[00:03:02] JOHN: Yeah.

[00:03:03] DAVID: People want Spider-Man, apparently, John. Spider-Man and somebody.

[00:03:07] JOHN: Yeah, maybe that's the secret sauce.

[00:03:09] DAVID: Back when we were both working at IDW, there were times where I would—because DC was sort of struggling a little bit—there were times where I was like, “Man, in the next 12 months, we better get ready because DC's definitely going to start licensing their comic books out and we have to get ready, like, we have to start putting our proposals together for when that happens so we can get Batman, basically.” I know that I had real conversations about that with people, like, on more than one occasion. And now I feel like those same conversations are probably happening in the smarter publishers right now, but about Marvel. Especially when Marvel sits down and goes, “We can’t even sell our own stuff better than other people. Like, what’s the point? Just throw your hands up and throw it to the licensing department and walk away.” I hope they turn it around, John, I really do.

[00:03:55] JOHN: I don't know. Like, to be fair there, like, there is going to be a Spider-Man/Superman book next month. They swapped places with the Batman one, you know, the Batman/Deadpools, like, the best-selling one would have been from Marvel if it was the other way around, you know?

[00:04:10] DAVID: Yeah, yeah. I'm excited for both. I think I have both coming to me in my next shipment. Dude, have you been reading The Incredible Hulk, plus The Infernal Hulk now?

[00:04:22] JOHN: No.

[00:04:22] DAVID: That art on that book and that writing on that book really is, like, a top-notch book, and I don't know why people aren't talking more about it. The art on that thing, Nick Klein, his work is incredible on that book. I don't know, and the guys that they got coming in to, like, help out on the art when he's not able to make it, like Kev Walker. Just—I don’t know, man, that book's really good. So I will—I should give some flowers to Marvel right now. They are putting out a few things that I’m really enjoying, and that Infernal Hulk is definitely one of them.

[00:04:54] JOHN: I gotta check that out. I fell way behind on Hulk and just have never caught up. I just gotta bite the bullet and start buying some of this stuff again, because even though, you know, I could read it a few months from now on the app, I don't because my daughter's hijacked my iPad.

[00:05:07] DAVID: You should definitely jump back into that one. Infernal Hulk is—is definitely a recommended read. Phil Kenny Johnson is the writer on it and Nick Klein is the main artist, and really I’m there for the Nick Klein, but the story’s been super fun. It’s horror, basically. It’s, for lack of a better term, it was, like, superhero horror, like, not even superhero, just horror, which is not usually my bag. I’m not a big horror guy, but I’m really enjoying the story. So, I should throw some flowers Marvel’s way as well.

[00:05:37] JOHN: Cool. Yeah, yeah.

[00:05:38] DAVID: Should we jump back 40 years and do some more of the "Anything Goes"? Just like our listeners, I’ve had to wait a week before I can get to the conclusion of this thing and it’s been a fascinating journey so far. Can you do a little recap? Can you do a little recap?

[00:05:54] JOHN: So where we left off, our two main protagonists, Gary Groth and Harlan Ellison, had just been sued by comic book writer Michael Fleisher for, well, I was going to say disparaging remarks, but actually effusively positive remarks that Harlan Ellison had made in Comics Journal. They were both found not liable. While during the trial, the two co-defendants kept a united appearance, like I mentioned last time, they're not speaking to each other by the end of the trial. Ellison is mad at Groth's unprofessionalism in the form of the shots that the Comics Journal would be taking about the lawsuit, and Groth is mad at Ellison not paying and trying to get out of the financial obligations for the defense that they've had to put up for, again, eight years between the conducting of the interview and the climax of this trial. And we were talking about what was going on within the trial, which was reported on in the Comics Journal. They did, like, a post-mortem on the trial. They ran all the transcripts, but then also Charles Platt had covered the trial in an article. One of the mysteries that was still hanging around, perhaps for the readers: Who was Charles Platt? Well, he was, quote, a "confederate of Michael Moorcock." I don't remember where that word came from. It was in my notes, and this is the level of research that I'm doing here, which is that I get a good word like that but I can't remember where that came from. I don't think that's a word I would use. He was a confederate of Michael Moorcock, the science fiction writer who'd come up earlier in this story. Moorcock was also the editor of New Worlds magazine, which was a "new wave" science fiction magazine in the UK, which would publish Ellison. He was a friend of Ellison and Platt was actually the guy who replaced Michael Moorcock when he left New Worlds. According to Ellison, Moorcock had warned Ellison, "Do not trust Charles. Charles will betray you." Now, nevertheless, Harlan Ellison invites Charles Platt over to his house, late '70s, early '80s, I think early '80s. Now his house is known as Ellison Wonderland. Have you ever heard that phrase?

[00:08:04] DAVID: No.

[00:08:05] JOHN: We should have Chris Ryall back on the show to talk about Harlan Ellison's house and, I don't know if it's interesting, Clive Barker's house. Ellison's and Barker's are both near notably weird houses. Ellison, I think when he got the money, he made the dream house he had from when he was a kid where he wanted to live in William Randolph Hearst's

[00:08:26] DAVID: Oh, okay.

[00:08:26] JOHN: ...Hearst Castle. Ellison invites Platt to his house. Platt hits on Ellison's then-girlfriend, Jane McKenzie. Now, McKenzie corroborates this, though Platt says that she's mistaken and is conflating two separate events. That's the background on these two guys. In 1984, while this lawsuit hasn't come to trial yet, Harlan Ellison is at the World Science Fiction Convention in my hometown of Anaheim, California. And Ellison's at an award show. As a surprise, he calls up editor Larry Shaw to come up there. And Shaw is the guy who bought Harlan Ellison's very first story. Like, he's the first guy that ever hired him. Ellison brings him up and Shaw's in a wheelchair, he's got an oxygen tank, he's not doing super well. Shaw up there on the stage, he seems in good spirits and says, "I bought this fellow's first story, I hope to be around to buy his last." He's not. He dies shortly after. But Charles Platt is there, and he writes a piece in the Science Fiction Chronicle, which is published by Andrew Porter. Oh wait a minute, Andrew Porter, who's he? Does he have beef with Harlan Ellison? Of course he does. This one's over allegedly publishing some of Ellison's early work in an unauthorized edition. Now, we've kind of brought this up a couple times but never really got into some of the details. Around this era, Ellison was, I guess you could say, real protective of his intellectual property. We'd mentioned the $300,000 lawsuit about Paramount. It was actually Ellison and science fiction writer Ben Bova suing over, I'm sure you recall this, the short-lived Ernest Borgnine TV show Future Cop. You remember that one, right?

[00:10:09] DAVID: I actually do. But yeah, most people don't.

[00:10:13] JOHN: They said that was a knockoff of Brillo, a story that you had collaborated on. During that big interview that got this whole thing going, Ellison said a lot of shit about James Warren, the publisher of Warren Publishing. So Ellison Wonderland is the house. There's a website that I've spent some time at in these past few weeks called Ellison Webderland, and they have a listing of all of Ellison's stories including, like, the unauthorized adaptations Warren published of, like, A Boy and His Dog, you know, like, under a completely different title. Not having read that story, I'll trust them that they—it's so much an infringement that you might as well call it an adaptation. The way EC Comics adapted a few Ray Bradbury stories. Do you know that story?

[00:10:56] DAVID: No, I don't.

[00:10:57] JOHN: EC just straight up ripped off a bunch of Ray Bradbury stories, or maybe it was one first. I can't remember if it was one first. And Ray Bradbury's response was sending them a letter saying that you forgot to include my credit and my check. So they gave him a credit, sent him a check, and started adapting a bunch of Ray Bradbury stories from then on.

[00:11:13] DAVID: Nice. That's one way to do it.

[00:11:15] JOHN: Yeah. Ellison's two most famous lawsuits, though, were both about an Outer Limits episode that adapted Soldier. Now, the Outer Limits did it by the book, like it was an actual adaptation of the story Soldier. The reason it's more relevant is that some changes were made in the—in that version of the story that Ellison was involved in, so these other properties were more similar to the TV episode than the story. But those were both Harlan Ellison's intellectual property. The first of those has come up here, and that was when writer Bill Mantlo in 1983 ripped off that story in an issue of Incredible Hulk, issue 286. Three issues later, Marvel had a—a note in I guess the letters column that Ellison's credit fell off or something, but in reality Jim Shooter had made that deal with Ellison where Ellison was getting all of Marvel's comics from then on, which we talked about last time.

[00:12:11] DAVID: Oh, okay. That's how that happened.

[00:12:13] JOHN: Yeah. The other Soldier lawsuit was against a production company called Hemdale and the distributor Orion over the 1984 movie The Terminator. The settlement terms were undisclosed, but future prints of the movie have had and continue to have Ellison's name on them. James Cameron dismisses it as a nuisance lawsuit. What a bunch of crazy stuff this world is, right? I don't know. So Andrew Porter allegedly printed an unauthorized edition, published, and Charles Platt, who allegedly hit on Ellison's girlfriend at Ellison's house, writes this piece about the award that Ellison gave to Shaw, calling it an "obituary preview" and casting it in a light of Ellison harassing an old man at death's door. This is as classy and not stupid as the rest of this story goes. It's all downhill. We're going off a cliff here. So Shaw died on April 1st, 1985, and the next month is the Nebula Awards, which is—was then and still continues to be one of the two big science fiction awards. This is given out by the Science Fiction Writers Association of America. And Ellison, who is no longer a member I think at that point, he tells many people he's going to go there and punch Platt in the face. Now there are differences of, I guess, opinion about what happens next. Platt says Ellison came at him at the awards banquet and punched him in the face. Ellison claims, "I hit him so fucking hard I didn't hit at him, I hit through him. I hit behind that motherfucker."

[00:14:03] DAVID: Jesus.

[00:14:04] JOHN: Now I know what you're thinking. Did anybody see this? Yeah. Here's what Robert Morales, who would go on to create Isaiah Bradley with Kyle Baker—that's right, the Black Captain America from The Truth—he was there. And according to him in a article written by Rich Kusick in the Gauntlet magazine—no stories about Rich Kusick, he just wrote about this thing, it's reprinted at https://www.google.com/search?q=harlanellison.com—Morales says, "I'd gone in to get a drink for some friends of mine, and I went in, got two screwdrivers, turned around, and I just happened to be looking perfectly. I just happened to see Harlan's hand shoot up and punch Charles," you know? "Harlan's left-handed, so he punched him on the right side of the jaw. Charles bounced back against the door frame and kind of sank. And Harlan grabs him by the shirt collar and like lowers him down, really gently. Like haranguing him the whole time. I couldn't figure out what he was saying, but he was giving him this long lecture. He just sits him down, Harlan stands up, brushes himself off, and leaves Charles there. I was just totally stunned." Platt's version is that he bounces right back up, grabs onto Harlan's hand, and then refuses to fight him. To which Morales says, "All I can say is that sometimes you get hit so hard you don't even feel it and you just kind of blank out. A blow to the head will really knock you for a loop. You don't register it."

[00:15:32] DAVID: Fantastic.

[00:15:33] JOHN: Tensions continue between Ellison and Platt, the way tensions ordinarily go between people who like, don't like each other, right? And then eventually that changes, and in 1988 Ellison and Platt come to an agreement, a mutual non-aggression pact. I mean, I don't think that's usual. Like, maybe this is me. I either let things go or I let them fester. I never thought to handle it like statecraft. Surely that pact held and there's no more story, John. That's where you're wrong. We're in the '90s now. Harlan Ellison's doing a Q&A for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and he's asked about the fight and he tells the story. Now, he's also asked about Gary Groth and Harlan Ellison calls him, quote, "one of the most evil, mean-spirited, rotten little human beings I've ever met. He's a cockroach. He's a bum."

[00:16:32] DAVID: Fantastic. I love it.

[00:16:35] JOHN: Now I know what you're thinking now. Surely no one reports this, especially not a magazine run by Gary Groth. So Eric Reynolds reports this in the Comics Journal. In the article, it's not mentioned that it's a Q&A, which like so many things in this story, is really important to some people and not important to other people at all. Like not saying it's a Q&A implies that Ellison offered these things up, which I guess some would argue is different than answering a question. Eric Reynolds later on says he didn't think about that and could see how that's different. But I mean, like if you agreed to not talk about something, like you publicly agreed to not talk about it, and somebody asks you about it, saying, "I agreed not to talk about it," seems like the moral equivalent to not bringing it up. Not just telling the story. I don't know, like I said, stuff gets stupid, David, it gets really stupid. So whatever the difference between answering the question and offering the anecdote up wholesale is, the Comics Journal item gets Platt's attention and a month later, this is November 1993, Platt founds a group called Enemies of Ellison.

[00:17:53] DAVID: Fantastic. I love it.

[00:17:56] JOHN: This is a club that you can join for 14 dollars.

[00:18:00] DAVID: Is there a pin? Do you get, like, some letterhead?

[00:18:04] JOHN: We'll get to that. Enemies of Ellison, is that EOE? Okay. Got it. Now, this causes Peter David, writer of Incredible Hulk—different than Bill Mantlo, different Incredible Hulk writer, I know you didn't follow them up directly but pretty much directly. I think John Byrne wrote it in between, oddly enough. He’ll come up later, although just super minorly. John Byrne has nothing to do with this story. Peter David launches Friends of Ellison, which, credit where credit is due, in typical Peter David fashion that abbreviates much better to FOE or foe.

[00:18:41] DAVID: Nice. Perfect.

[00:18:44] JOHN: The membership there is free, anybody can join. And one of people who does join is J. Michael Straczynski. I think at that point best known for creating Captain Power, the TV show, but obviously he goes on to create Babylon 5, you know, has memorable runs on Amazing Spider-Man, still writing at Marvel Comics.

[00:19:02] DAVID: Yeah. He was good when John Romita Jr. was drawing for him, and then Mike Deodato came in and ruined it. I was really enjoying that Amazing Spider-Man run that he was on when John Romita Jr. was on it and then they put goddamn Mike Deodato on it. Anyway, keep going. 2026 Enemies of Deodato, EOD.

[00:19:24] JOHN: Well, funnily enough, he comes up in a little bit too.

[00:19:26] DAVID: Perfect.

[00:19:27] JOHN: This whole EOE versus FOE thing turns into what at the time was called a "flame war" on the then-burgeoning internet. At this point in time, that was a big deal there. Now, there was an internet in 1993, and if you were into it, you were a geek. You were a nerd. There were no Bianca Censoris or Jake Pauls at this point. If you were on the internet, you were into some combination of D&D, strategy games, video games, comic books, science fiction books, science fiction movies, Star Trek, and I think that's a comprehensive list. I'm kidding, and I'm especially kidding about being disparaging about it, but the point is that it's like incomprehensible from today's standards to look at how something like this could be a big deal on the internet. But it was. Like I mean today we're in a world where school shootings don't register on the internet, and here people taking sides about Harlan Ellison's jerkhood was a thing. I wasn't on the internet, and I remember this. I remember this stuff happening. So at this point, EOE pivots and becomes Victims of Ellison. The principal personnel are Charles Platt, managing victim, Andrew Porter, associate victim, and Gregory Feeley, consulting victim. And they launch a two-dollar newsletter. This is 1994.

[00:20:53] DAVID: I love the grifting off of this, that's my favorite part.

[00:20:56] JOHN: Now, yeah, this raises another question, though: Who was Greg Feeley? Well, he was a science fiction writer and reviewer, and he approached Ellison in the early '80s to help finish the editorial work on the book The Last Dangerous Visions. Now if you go back to part one of this, I think we brought this up really briefly, but this came up in the Comics Journal interview. Harlan Ellison had been editing a series of anthologies. Dangerous Visions, I forget the second one, and then there was going to be one more called The Last Dangerous Visions. These were cutting-edge science fiction stories, like that was the idea. At this point in the narrative, 15 years have passed since the Comics Journal interview at which point Ellison was talking about how late The Last Dangerous Visions was. And he gave this quote in that Comics Journal interview: "When is The Last Dangerous Visions coming out? And I give 'em the same answer that Michelangelo gave to the Pope: 'It'll be done when it's done.'" Evidently Greg Feeley doesn't take no for an answer and keeps pestering Ellison. And then finally Feeley publishes a list of all of the writers who have died while waiting for their work to appear in The Last Dangerous Visions. Ellison calls Feeley and threatens to flatten him.

[00:22:20] DAVID: Is Ellison a big guy?

[00:22:21] JOHN: No. No!

[00:22:22] DAVID: He's not a big guy. He’s 5'2", 5'1", like, I mean, like, he’s

[00:22:25] JOHN: Right.

[00:22:26] DAVID: ...he was not a big man.

[00:22:28] JOHN: Okay, that’s actually—I was like, am I misremembering how big Ellison was? He’s like a

[00:22:34] DAVID: No, he was not a big man. Like that is one of the funny things about him, that like, flat out if this guy were like The Rock or something, it would be like totally insane bullying stuff. But he's like almost invariably shorter than whoever he's punching or—or threatening or whatever. Like he's just a guy that does it, you know?

[00:22:52] JOHN: Right. That’s the difference.

[00:22:53] DAVID: Now I left out one victim from that original roster of Victims of Ellison. It's one of our other characters that has appeared in here, but we haven't heard from for a moment: Gary Groth, senior victim. Again, David, like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. These are professional adults and like, I can't even like begin to figure out where to go into this because this is just so goddamn dumb. Like, they just have little clubs and they—they're yelling at each other.

[00:23:25] DAVID: Are they yelling at each other or are they just yelling internally? They don't have, like—the two-dollar newsletter, there's like a firewall between them and

[00:23:37] JOHN: Like this is the thing, like Peter David is writing about Friends of Ellison in his "But I Digress" column in Comics Buyer's Guide. Comics Buyer's Guide has had beef with Gary Groth from moment one. From back when the Buyer's Guide for Comics Fandom turned into Comics Buyer's Guide and Nostalgia Journal turned into Comics Journal. Peter David had a column in this Comics Buyer's Guide, which was at this point a weekly newspaper about comics. Like it was the last page of Comics Buyer's Guide, which is a great location. Like that sounds kind of bad in the sense that like you'd have to read the whole thing. No, it means you can open the back page and you always know where his column is and it's the last thing you read if you do read it in order, but this is a newspaper, so like anything else you're thumbing through 60 to 100 pages of newsprint trying to find stuff. So you had like access to Peter David like you had no other writer at that time, you know? Like he was the only guy with a blog.

[00:24:35] DAVID: He had a big pulpit, yeah, for sure. That was a big platform for him to talk from.

[00:24:41] JOHN: You know, dumb stuff sometimes, it would be about, you know, serious comic stuff. And that’s where, you know, his feud with Todd McFarlane came in and—and all that kind of stuff. Now, one of the things he'd written about was the 1991 death of Marvel Comics Vice President of New Product Development, Carol Kalish. Now she and Peter had been in Marvel's sales team back before Peter David had become a writer at Marvel. And Peter and others, like, remember their colleague and the work she'd done. I remember the big point being that she was trying to introduce point-of-sale systems to comic book stores. And this is, I mean, even in the '90s but especially when we're talking about the mid-to-late '80s when she and Peter David were working together, comic book stores had like a metal box that they put money in. You know what I mean? Like if they had a cash register that was like fancy. It’s still like that to a degree. Like you can still find comic book stores like that. But the—the pizza place nearby here, my son really likes it, he loves going there. The guy that it used to be a licensed kind of franchise pizza place and then the guy that—that worked there bought it and now it's his own place and he was talking to me about his point-of-sale system yesterday, about how he's using it to track how many, you know, slices people buy and he's had to throw away less stuff since he's started doing it. That was a big deal, you know, it was a big thing that did help comic book stores and stuff. Peter David was also memorializing her as a friend, you know, somebody that he’d worked with and known for a long time. Gary Groth, meanwhile, wrote an article in Comics Journal called "Lies We Cherish: The Canonization of Carol Kalish," where he refers to her as selling "cretinous junk to impressionable children."

[00:26:30] DAVID: Jesus. He takes issue with the effusive praise of Carol Kalish for dying? What is this man's problem?

[00:26:40] JOHN: Peter David, according to Wikipedia and my recollection of events, was outraged.

[00:26:45] DAVID: That feels legit to me, I don't know, I feel like I’m on Peter David’s side on this one.

[00:26:50] JOHN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's in this context that a letter arrives at the Comics Journal from Peter David, excoriating them in general but specifically about the journal's coverage of two Carols: Carol Kalish and the exit of a disgruntled Fantagraphics employee, Carol Sobesinski. And Groth responds to the letter in the Comics Journal. They print it, they respond to the letter, and he tears into David and his CompuServe followers as he talks about them. And it's on that same CompuServe that David learns about the letter, not only the letter being printed but the letter being written. Because Peter David didn't send it.

[00:27:35] DAVID: What? Peter David didn't write that letter?

[00:27:39] JOHN: Oh my god.

[00:27:40] DAVID: He calls Fantagraphics and gets the late Kim Thompson on the phone and lays into him. Thompson says they'll publish a retraction but like the thing is, the Groth response wasn't just to respond to the points in the letter, it was like wide-ranging. Like what would the retraction be? "You're not a shitty writer and your CompuServe fans aren't morons"? So, trying to kind of, you know, defend them, Thompson faxes over a copy of the letter, complete with a return address, and it shows that the address matches the address on file they have for Peter David, which is why they believed it was a real letter. But the thing is, both addresses are identical and they're both identically wrong. They both have the same typo in the address. So presumably someone at Fantagraphics sent that letter. Given that it was mostly about Carol Sobesinski, a disgruntled Fantagraphics employee, one perhaps draws the connection that it was Carol Sobesinski that sent that letter. They do print a retraction and this satisfies no one. Now, part of this might be that there's endless and relentlessly stupid continuation of this behavior all over the place. The journal's covering it and they're complaining that the LA Times isn't covering the Victims of Ellison movement. I don't know.

[00:29:10] DAVID: The LA Times? It’s so stupid.

[00:29:14] JOHN: It's so stupid. Meanwhile, Comics Buyer's Guide runs an announcement that Fantagraphics is going to republish a pamphlet about the lateness of Dangerous Visions. This pamphlet was called The Last Dead Loss Visions and it's written by Christopher Priest, the British science fiction writer, not the Black Panther writer. Completely different guys.

[00:29:38] DAVID: I did not know that.

[00:29:40] JOHN: Yeah, there's a—a "new wave" science fiction writer named Christopher Priest who had that name before the Black Panther writer started using that name. Not that comics Christopher Priest hasn't written a lot of other things, just for the sake of shorthanding two people with the same name. Who's going to publish this? Fantagraphics is going to publish it and they're going to call it The Book on the Edge of Forever. Christopher Priest, like he's like kind of a top-tier writer. He's kind of a legendary writer in the same circles that Ellison is in. But he's more relevantly perhaps also Charles Platt's agent. And Platt had told Priest about the whole Victims of Ellison thing and Priest, who had resisted republishing the pamphlet that he'd just like self-published in the—in the UK, he becomes amenable to the whole thing. So Fantagraphics solicits it and Ellison's lawyer sends 'em a cease and desist. But the book comes out complete with a Drew Friedman portrait of Harlan Ellison on the cover. This is a book you can buy, The Book on the Edge of Forever. Ellison doesn't want to go to conventions where this book is released, so this becomes like a whole controversy that summer. Fantagraphics sees that as a form of suppression in the sense that like Ellison would say, "Well if Fantagraphics is going to be there selling that book, I'm not going to go," leading to conventions having to pick between Harlan Ellison or Fantagraphics or trying to tell Fantagraphics not to publish the book. Meanwhile, Kim Thompson is giving copies away at the Chicago Comicon just to get a rise and see what happens to

[00:31:11] DAVID: At that Chicago Comicon, J. Michael Straczynski writes on CompuServe: "I sat beside Harlan at the banquet. He did speak longingly of how wonderful it would be to stick his thumbs 1.2 inches into Kim Thompson's eyes, but this was followed by a statement that obviously he couldn't or didn't intend to." Now the journal prints the part about the fingers in the eyes but not the "he's not going to" part, which again, I don't know man, if you've never heard of Harlan Ellison, you're not really going to think he's actually going to stick his fingers into Kim Thompson's eyes. Again, this super matters to some people, not others. The journal offers a correction as well as running a one-third-page ad for the Victims of Ellison, but elsewhere in that issue there's an announcement that it's the end of Victims of Ellison and Platt returns the money that he'd been sent.

[00:32:04] DAVID: Why did he end it? Too ridiculous for at least one of them?

[00:32:08] JOHN: Here's the weird thing. I actually wrote most of that stuff prior to doing a lot of the research in part one and all of the research in part two. And like stuff just kind of grew and grew and what seemed reasonable, you know, at the time, that eventually you would just peter out, no pun intended. I don't know, maybe that isn't possible. Maybe something did have to happen. I don't know. Whatever the case, at least everything's put to bed and everybody's going to let sleeping dogs lie, right?

[00:32:41] DAVID: I don't think that's where this story's been going, John. I think you might be fooling yourself.

[00:32:46] JOHN: In 2006, Fantagraphics republishes the Harlan Ellison interview that's at the heart of all of this in a book called The Comics Journal Library, The Writers Volume 1. It has a bunch of different interviews from sort of the early years of Comics Journal, like that sort of late '70s period when it got good. It lists a bunch of the interview subjects with their credits, like particularly credits timed to the interview. So Denny O'Neil is Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Batman, and Marv Wolfman's Tomb of Dracula and Spider-Man. For Harlan Ellison, they call him "famous comics dilettante." So in a future Seattle Weekly article, Harlan Ellison says, "Gary published this thing even though he was going to lose money on it because he would geek me. I had warned Gary many times, 'Don't do this, leave me alone, get the fuck out of my face.' I sent him a postcard saying 'Go away and stop bothering me.' That's 15 years ago. He published it in the Comics Journal. He published a photo of an original manuscript—that postcard—and made fun of me." Groth says of Ellison, "Ellison did send a letter to our printers and our distributor prior to the book's print, threatening to sue them. I think it goes on to say I do remember that his lawyer called up and he asked to get copies of the book. Now, whenever Harlan Ellison's lawyer calls, I'm immediately suspicious. I mean, he assured us Ellison wasn't going to sue us. I just wanted as little to do with him or his lawyer as possible." From Ellison's point of view, he'd conceded that Groth had every right to publish the essay and he had his attorney call and ask if they could get a contributor's copy. In Ellison's words, "Groth wouldn't even give me a copy of the goddamn book on which my name appeared and he was using my name to sell this book." Here's a funny thing about Harlan Ellison and about specifically the words "Harlan Ellison" is they are a trademark of the human being Harlan Ellison. Harlan Ellison had trademarked his name. So there is an argument about them putting his name on the cover. But that doesn't exactly even come up because the next thing happens, which is later that same year, Comics Journal's Journalista blog—do you remember the Journalista blog?

[00:35:10] DAVID: I remember that.

[00:35:11] JOHN: Well, there was a good place to get news. They published an excerpt from an upcoming book called Comics as Art: We Told You So by Tom Spurgeon, who's a long-time journal blogger, and Michael Dean, who you might recall wrote the review of the Illustrated Ellison that started this whole thing back in the beginning. The excerpt from this forthcoming book included the quote from Groth: "Being a co-defendant with Ellison made me feel like I was in the Alamo, surrounded on all sides. He was always coming up with schemes to wheedle out of paying his bills. One was so brilliantly Machiavellian that it included both stiffing his lawyers and screwing me at the same time." In the lawsuit Ellison does file at this point, he points out that "Machiavellian" is misspelled in the—in the quote that he's suing about.

[00:36:12] DAVID: Oh my god, it's so petty. It's so perfect. So wait, so now Ellison is suing Groth?

[00:36:20] JOHN: Yes. Groth, who Ellison calls "a scheming pathological liar and little more than an obsessively vindictive and petty man trying to be a mover and shaker." Groth says of Ellison, "He's not part of our world. He's really entirely irrelevant. I wish I could be sued by somebody relevant." I guess you take the lawsuits you get. They actually managed to come to an agreement. This doesn't go to court. The agreement names Kim Thompson, who Peter David had remembered yelled at on the phone. And the agreement is that both sides must now refrain from making ad hominem personal attacks on each other, leaving them still free to talk about each other's works. The agreement says specifically "to review, criticize, or comment upon one another's work, writings, advocacy, public statements, or other public activities broadly construed." Like that's actually a fairly reasonable thing to come to. You're not going to insult each other. And I think that this really sums up this whole thing. This is from the Seattle Times: "Choosing his words carefully now that the case is closed, Groth said Thursday, 'Suffice it to say that I have mixed feelings.'" I think no statement could better sum up this adventure than that non-ending.

[00:37:50] DAVID: Suffice it to say that I have mixed feelings. Oh man.

[00:37:56] JOHN: What a journey, John. So stupid. The thing that keeps coming up for me is that Gary Groth and Fantagraphics, they're profiting every time they stir the pot, you know? Like they love the controversy, clearly. The controversy is the point. They will tease that controversy out, you know, they'll pull that out and create it.

[00:38:19] DAVID: But there's so many people willing to play the game with them. The thing that's just like stunning.

[00:38:26] JOHN: It's so stupid. I started off by talking about Byron Preiss, so I'll start to end this the same way. He published the John Barber favorite Be an Interplanetary Spy books in the 1980s, which were ghost-written by some comics guys. And then after Byron Preiss Visual Publications, he founded and was president of iBooks Inc. He was killed in a car accident in 2005 at the age of 52. Harlan Ellison continued championing comics, eventually doing a series at Dark Horse called Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor where he wrote intros to his stories that were drawn by Eric Shanower.

[00:39:07] DAVID: Oh, this sounds cool.

[00:39:09] JOHN: Yeah, and they included adaptations of his work by the likes of John Byrne, Teddy Kristiansen, Tom Sutton, David Lapham, and your favorite Mike Deodato. Ellison also continued courting controversy, defending Dragon Con founder Ed Kramer against child sexual abuse charges and in 2006, grabbing Connie Willis's breast at the Hugo Awards ceremony. He died after several years of ill health in 2014 at the age of 84. Comics as Art was released, minus the quote, in 2016 and is currently available from Fantagraphics. Outlasting Ellison by a decade, Jim Shooter, following a stint at Marvel, started Voyager Communications publishing Nintendo and WWF comics, as Valiant publishing, before pivoting to licensing Gold Key's Magnus and Solar, Man of the Atom, and then launching their own heroes, which are still around today. He got booted from there, launched a few other companies. He died of esophageal cancer in 2024 at the age of 73. Novelist Christopher Priest died in 2024. Eight months later, The Last Dangerous Visions was published by Ellison's estate executor J. Michael Straczynski on October 1st, 2024.

[00:40:34] DAVID: Charles Platt is 80. Eric Reynolds is the vice president and associate publisher of Fantagraphics Books, where Gary Groth still runs things. A shipment of their comics were blown up by Iran this past weekend, which was not a twist I had in the bingo card when I started writing this.

[00:40:54] JOHN: We didn't really get into too much of his beginning. He got his start in comics while he was working at Encyclopædia Britannica. He came up with the Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes, which he wrote and published, and that got him the attention of DC where he started writing comics. The year after the lawsuit, he took inspiration from an earlier trip to New Guinea and he started attending Columbia University. At the same time he was writing for 2000 AD, which is pretty rare for an American to write for 2000 AD. And then he attended the University of Michigan for grad school, finally leaving comics behind. He got his PhD in anthropology, published a book, Kuria Cattle Raiders: Violence and Vigilantism on the Tanzania-Kenya Frontier, in the year 2000 that was based on his PhD thesis. In 1999, while working for the International Livestock Research Institute in Ethiopia, he met Chaltu Lin Ruda, an Ethiopian native, and they married on June 24th, 2001, in Ethiopia. By 2002, according to the Comics Journal obituary for him, Fleisher embarked on a new career as a freelance anthropological consultant on research assignments for humanitarian organizations around the world. In 2007, this took him to Afghanistan and Angola. In all he worked in at least eight African and two Asian countries. Many of these projects were quite risky. Among other things he was involved in locating, mapping, and removing landmines in Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Afghanistan. He also investigated human trafficking in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Burundi. At the age of 75, Fleisher died from complications of Alzheimer's disease in Beaverton, Oregon, on February 2nd, 2018. The End, David.

[00:43:03] DAVID: Suffice it to say that I have mixed feelings. Oh man. What a journey, John. So stupid. The thing that comes up for me is that Ellison's complimenting someone, that's like the baseline of this entire thing. Is that it's coming from a place of goodwill misinterpreted 100% is what this entire thing's about. Fantastic. Oh, that was good, John. Hop on the research, buddy. I don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m proud of you.

[00:43:40] JOHN: You'd have to be crazy to have spent that much time looking this stuff up. I’m going to sue myself.

[00:43:46] DAVID: I think our listeners have been rewarded greatly by this journey you've taken us on. I know that I have, John. Thank you so much for doing that level of research and lifting on this particular project. I don't know what made you decide that this was the rabbit hole you were going to go down, but man have I enjoyed it.

[00:44:05] JOHN: Yeah. Thank you. Look for the book by John Barber coming out soon.

[00:44:10] DAVID: My notes here are only 11,000 words.

[00:44:13] JOHN: Oh my god, 11,000 words. I don't think I say that many words in two months. I think John, you did a great business there. I think we should leave it at that. We’ve got some good stuff coming up. We’re going to talk to Davey Bakes in the next episode.

[00:44:26] DAVID: Yeah, Comics the Magazine journalist Davey Bakes.

[00:44:31] JOHN: That's right. One of the more controversial shit-stirring Davey Bakes has been doing over at the new magazine. He should listen to these episodes and get some tips on journalism.

[00:44:42] DAVID: He doesn't even listen when he's on.

[00:44:45] JOHN: Neither do I. Thanks everyone for listening. We do appreciate that you do. And we'll be back next week. Thanks a lot, everybody. Bye.

[00:44:56] DAVID: Bye.

[00:44:57] 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.