INTERVIEW: Harlan Ellison, part 2
In the first portion of our interview (click here), Harlan told Martha Thomases all about the nature of humanity and probably became the first person to use the names Klimt, Frank Buck, Eddie Condon, and Sanjaya Malakar in a single sentence. We pick up our story right after some stuff about Gary Groth…
Well, that’s that. Anyway. The Dream Corridor. After ten years, the book is out.
CoMx: It’s just gorgeous.
HE: Isn’t it? You know what’s interesting? It’s gotten great reviews in Publishers Weekly, in Newsweek. It’s gotten great reviews in the mainstream. And nowhere in the comic world are they reviewing it.
CoMx: What’s made it in bookstores is not what the comic press writes about.
HE: Yeah, it would seem you’re right, Martha; and it breaks my heart. I love comics so, and want acknowledgement for them, beyond Crumb and Spiegelman and MIller. But the comics press for the most part only plays the flak-agents for DC and Marvel. They write about the superheroes. Here’s this book, this absolute gem, on which dozens and dozens of people broke their ass, Dream Corridor, and it contains the absolute last time that Curt Swan put a pencil to paper. We had the smarts to publish Colan as Colan, and then colored it, too. One would think: here is a book that really matters, what people say comics are supposed to be! And we can’t get a mention amidst all the talk about who’s going to be writing Birds of Prey.
CoMx: But you’re going to be reaching more people than Birds of Prey.
HE: Yes, I suppose.The book is selling out, but it’s cold comfort, kiddo.
CoMx: I don’t know your numbers, but I know that Birds of Prey is selling less than, say, 300 is selling.
HE: Mmmm. But is that really the point? Whatever the distribution may be is sort of commercialspeak. I guess I’m talking art for the people, not just feeding the adolescent fix. Here are critics of the field looking at a genre, an art-form, and they have the choice of doing the current Spider-Man of the 500 Spider-Man books that are put out every month, or one issue of this magazine over here that is striving for something clearly different. And they choose to do the Spider-Man over and over again. When you call them on it, you get no response. It’s as if: why is this person talking to us about that which does not have a cape and a cowl?
CoMx: Because they are confusing the medium with the genre. They think “superheroes” is the same as comics. They think superheroes are the important stuff.
HE: You mean all the good, smart shit that Maggie Thompson or Peter David or Gary Groth has been nagging about all these years, none of it has stuck?
CoMx: Where it’s stuck, those people have not gone on to write for the comics press.
HE: That’s pretty depressing: after all these years and all this serious discussion of what comics should be doing by all of the serious critics in the field … that nobody gets it. And they all still think that Superman is the beginning and the ending of this Great American Original Art-form? Kill me now. There’s something awry in the world of graphics. It’s very distressing to me, especially because the new Dream Corridor is out, and it’s probably the last of that kind of thing I’ll ever do.
Harlan Ellison is a force of nature. 
In what is being widely heralded as the only diplomatic success during the Bush Administration, today a treaty was signed between Gary Groth, publisher of 
Before you give your hard-earned money to Gary Groth and Kim Thompson for their recently announced Fantagraphics Legal Defense Fund, you should know a few facts about publishing companies and their insurance obligations. Fact #1: It is highly unlikely that a company the size of Fantagraphics isn’t covered by a standard publishers insurance policy for lawsuits precisely like the one they now find themselves entangled in with author Harlan Ellison.
