RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Media Harlan Ellison dies at 84

[Intermission. Ellison goes to pour himself a drink. As the tape resumes, he is explaining the nature of The Comics Journal to a friend who sat in on the interview. Her question: Is it like The Armchair Detective?]

ELLISON: In a way. Except The Armchair Detective is much more literary and it’s about something of greater substance. I mean, what they’re basically talking about is comic books. Comic books. Whether, in fact, the Hulk is a modern representation of the Faustian legend. Or, does Spider-Woman — I’m being deadly serious — does Spider-Woman more perfectly represent contemporary woman’s search for self-identification and self-fulfillment than the traditional image of Wonder Woman? This is the kind of thing they’re in. Or Steve Gerber: “Why They Threw Me Off the Howard the Duck Strip.”

Steve Gerber is crazy as a bed bug.

GROTH: Is he?

ELLISON: Yes. He’s as crazy as a bed bug. And if he isn’t, Mike Fleisher is. Did you find that review in Publishers Weekly [of Fleisher’s new book, Chasing Hairy] that I told you about?

GROTH: No, I couldn’t get the damn issue.

ELLISON: I read it to Len [Wein] and Marv [Wolfman] when they came out to the house. Their hair stood on end. I want to tell you something. The Publishers Weekly review said, “This is the product of a sick mind. It is so twisted and nausea­ting, it has no — absolutely no — redeeming social value.” It’s a book about a couple of guys who like to beat up women and make them go down on them. In the end, they pick up some woman — a hippy or whatever the fuck she is — and set fire to her and she loves it so much she gives them a blow job. Which is essentially what the review said about the book. It said, “This book is so fuckin’ twisted, there is no point even in discussing it. It is beyond the pale.” Who is the publisher?

GROTH: St. Martin’s.

ELLISON: They’re an A-1 publisher. I mean, they’re not a top rank, but they’re a very reputable house. Fleisher, when he was doing the Spectre — and I guess he did Aquaman too, didn’t he?

GROTH: No, I don’t think so. Steve Skeates did Aquaman.

ELLISON: He did the Spectre and he did something else.

GROTH: And he does Jonah Hex, which is really twisted.

ELLISON: Oh, yeah, right, right. This is a guy — it’s like looking at the paintings of Giger. There is a genuine, twisted mentality at work here, and it’s fascinating to look at. And I understand he’s a very nice, pleasant man.

GROTH: I understand he looks like an accountant.

ELLISON: Aren’t all Texas Tower snipers like that? [In cornball accent:] “He went to church every Sunday. He loved his mother. I have no idea why he cut up those 135 people and mailed parts of them off to other people COD. I don’t know why he did that. But he’s a good boy, a good Christian boy.” Fleisher — I think he’s certifiable. That is a libelous thing to say, and I say it with some humor. I’ve never met the man. But, what I see in Fleisher’s work and in Giger’s work… I mean, Giger’s clearly deranged. I mean, look at [his work]. Show [his work] to any psychiatrist. All of his visuals for Alien are sexual and psychosexual in nature. All of it. Endless vaginas and fallopian tubes and burning penises, and all kinds of fascinating stuff that makes life worth living. But, I mean, he’s really a nut case. His personal life, too. He’s got the skeleton of his second mistress in his home. I’ll tell you what’s really scary. Dan O’Bannon told me how [Giger] claimed the body [of his mistress] — apparently there was nobody to claim the body, so he claimed it. At that, you say, “OK, he loved her. He’ll bury her.” No, he doesn’t bury her. He takes her and he had the flesh taken off. You know how? Carpet beetles. You know what carpet beetles are?

GROTH: They eat flesh?

ELLISON: They eat flesh. They’re used by museums to clean the flesh off skeletons. And they pick it to the bone. They’re like piranhas. He used carpet beetles to clean her off and he’s got her now as an artifact in his apartment. Cute. Cute.

GROTH: Did you read the Jonah Hex story where Fleisher had Hex killed and stuffed in the end [in DC SPECIAL SERIES 16, Sept 1979] ?

ELLISON: [Laughter.] That’s fascinating. What’s interesting is that the thing that makes Fleisher’s stuff interesting was the same reason Robert E. Howard was interesting and nobody else can imitate him. Because Howard was crazy as a bed bug. He was insane. This was a man who was a huge bear of a man, who had these great dream fantasies of barbarians and mightily thewed warriors and Celts and Vikings and riding in the Arabian desert and Almuric, Conan, Kull, and all these weird ooky-booky worlds. He lived in Cross Plains, Texas in the middle of the Depression, and he never went more than 20 or 30 miles from his home. He lived with his mother until his mother died and then he went down and sat in the car and blew his brains out. Now, that’s a sick person. This is not a happy, adjusted person. That shows up in Howard’s work. You can read a Conan story as opposed to — I mean, even as good as Fritz Leiber is, Fritz is logical and sane and a nice man. Or take the lesser writers, all the guys who do the Conan rip-offs and imitations, which are such garbage, because all they are are manqué. They can’t imitate Howard because they’re not crazy. They’re just writers writing stories because they admired Howard, but they don’t understand you have to be bugfuck to write that way. Lovecraft — you can tell a Lovecraft story from a Ramsey Campbell story, from all the rest of those shlobos trying to imitate him, all the nameless yutzes shrieking like Lovecraft, they still have not got the lunatic mentality of Lovecraft. And the same for Fleisher. He really is a derange-o. And as a consequence, he is probably the only one writing who is interesting. The Spectre stuff was fuckin’ blood-chilling, which it was supposed to be. I mean, he really did the Spectre, man. For the first time since the ’40s, that goddamn strip was dynamite. And the first time they looked at what they were publishing, they said, “My God, we have turned loose this lunatic on the world,” and they ran him off. And that was a shame because Fleisher should have been kept on the Spectre forever. It was just the most perfectly nauseous ghoulish thing for him.

[Laughter.] What an absolute fuckin’ booby hatch this whole industry is.

GROTH: Aren’t you glad you’re not in it?

ELLISON: Yeah! I mean, I’m writing a Batman story for Julie Schwartz… [DETECTIVE COMICS 567, finally published in Oct 1986]

GROTH: You’ve been doing that for six years, haven’t you?

ELLISON: I know. I plan on getting it done before Julie retires. I really do. But, every time I get around these people, if they’re in L.A. and they invite me to their Comic Guild artist thing, and I look at some of these people, and I know them socially, and I say to myself, “Do I really want to go sit in a room with these people?”

GROTH: They’re all a little bonkers, aren’t they?

ELLISON: Oh, yeah.

GROTH: Have you met professionals in the industry you’ve felt were, comparatively, normal and well adjusted?

ELLISON: Yeah.

GROTH: Denny [O’Neil] is pretty normal.

ELLISON: Denny’s fairly normal. But, Denny’s got his oddnesses, too. Denny’s self-image is Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai. Black Irish. That’s what he thinks he is. That’s a little deranged for a man his age.

GROTH: Who do you think are abnormal and what are their particular traits?

ELLISON: I think anybody who works for Jim Warren is a card-carrying righteous nutcase who ought to be put away…

GROTH: There’s a great animosity between you and Warren, so your opinion is probably flavored quite a bit…

ELLISON: Well, the animosity is because he screwed me. And he’s got a very small mind.