Hey, Toxic Fans! Get Off My Lawn!

I've had it with these fair-weather Johnny-Come-Lately 4Chan Troglodytes and their mouth-breathing screeds that get slurped up by every nearly-news outlet and then sent back out into the aether to clog up my feed, pushing the puppy pics and the food selfies out of Facebook's algorithm. Knock it off, you assholes.

Of course, I'm speaking about the latest Teapot Tempest: the She-Hulk announcement that Disney made over the weekend. Oh, there was also an announcement about a Moon Knight show, but none of the Innsmouth-Tainted Stumblebums of Twitter are talking about that, nosireebob. It's all about the She-Hulk show, and how Disney is RUINING the world with its Feminist Agenda by turning the Hulk into a woman just to appease the Femi-nazis and the democrats, all of whom only want to kill babies and steal money from hard working Americans, and by the way, Trump rules and you suck, and oh yeah, Marvel isn't ever getting another penny from me.

Stan Lee (1922 - 2018)

This is my enduring image of Stan, and from
the time when I was most enamored of him.

What the hell do you even say? Where do you even start? Ninety-five years. A long life—a charmed, stone-cold lucky, twice over, fairy tale roller coaster of a life—a living reward for a body of creative work that is worth billions today. He died knowing he was beloved, lionized, and canonized the world over. We should all be so lucky.

Stan Lee’s career spans the whole of the comic book industry from its modest origins to the mega-billion dollar Marvel franchise he helped to create. I can’t parse this. It feels like the end of something. Earlier this year when Steve Ditko passed, I knew that there was one shoe left to drop. It doesn’t seem fair to this Spider-Man fan to have to mourn both of his creators in the same year. But Stan Lee was not just Spider-Man’s creator, although if that were all he ever did, it would certainly be enough. Stan was an architect of Cool, the self-styled "Homor of the Comics," the kind of creator that contained multitudes. There's a lot to unpack. Please be patient with me.

Remembering Harlan (1934-2018)

It's appropriate that people don't have any words to eulogize Harlan Ellison's passing. How do you sum up a life so marbled and striated and so deeply influential in a few sentences? And as someone else already pointed out, he used up all of the good words long before us.

Nevertheless, I hope you'll indulge me as I try to bring some understanding for myself on the death of one of my literary inspirations. I can't call him a mentor, because it wasn't an active relationship--or otherwise, he was a mentor to all of us--but he did teach me a few things, even if he never knew it.

It was my old friend Billy Haney who turned me on to Ellison at the age of seventeen. I'm not going to say "It's Billy's fault," because that is a hoary cliche and moreover, I don't blame him for it. We were both writers, and he was the first person I could talk craft with and not get a deer in the headlights look. Instead, I'll say Thank You, Billy, because reading Ellison as an angry young man absolutely changed my life. It got me through high school. I am not kidding about that.

At the time, me and my friends all had front row seats for the giant falling out between Ellison and Gary Groth over remarks he'd made in a lengthy interview about Michael Fleischer in The Comics Journal, which was our New Yorker at the time. The incident turned into a lawsuit that cost everyone a chunk of cash and turned their friendship into an acrimonious sideshow that lasted, presumably, to the end of his life. Billy was the one who articulated to me why this was a big deal, and that alone sent me scouring after his books.

The first Ellison book I got was Strange Wine, a collection that sold me right away on who this Ellison cat is and why he's called a writer. I'd watched his Star Trek episode, like any good nerd, but I was fascinated to know that they changed his script and he flipped out and walked out when they did. But I'd never read Ellison in his pure, uncut form before. I opened the book up to Ellison's introduction, Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don't Look So Terrific Yourself, and that was it for me. This cat had some fire. And I got a little obsessive looking for Ellison books after that.

It was probably six months after reading Strange Wine that this guy walked into the comic and book store where I was working and--my hand to God--he brought a sack of books to sell. Along with some of the usual used fantasy and science fiction titles (did everyone read Stephen Donaldson in the 1980's?) was a cache of twelve Ellison paperbacks. I will explain to you Internet users why that's a big deal.

Before everything from pistachios to porn was three mouse clicks away, if you wanted to read a book, you had to go actually find that book. You had to drive to a used bookstore (because there was no Ellison in print at that time--he sold out quickly) and you had to scour their stock, and then, sheepishly, or in desperation, you had to walk up to the register monkey and ask, "Do you have any Ellison?" and then you had to take it when they gave you a sympathetic shake of their head or worse, a derisive sneer, and they almost always said the same thing. "He sells when we get him." Yeah, no shit he sells. I can't find his stuff anywhere.

That's what it used to be like, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Victoria Vetri was the queen of us all. Collecting books took years. Finding authors whose work you enjoyed was akin to archeology. You bragged to your friends about what you found on your trips.

So, when twelve Ellison books showed up, in my store, in front of me, I bought them. I paid the guy half of what I was going to buy them for, and he left happy. I never saw him again. But I stared at those twelve books: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Deathbird Stories, The Glass Teat, The Other Glass Teat, Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled, The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, Dangerous Visions, Ellison Wonderland, Spider Kiss, and the rest, and I felt like the book-nerd version of Indiana Jones staring at the Ark of the Covenant.

I read those books, nearly straight through, for the next two or three years. Here is a short list of just some of the things I pulled from the pile of books, aside from a mass of thoughtful and intelligent prose, sometimes poetic and sometimes distractingly baroque and dated:

It was in The Glass Teat that I read Ellison talking--as a TV and cultural critic--about the effect that television was having on the American public. Of particular interest to Ellison was the cognitive distortions he witnessed that were occurring to us as a people. An alarmist screed, 90% of which either came true or is still relevant to this day.

It was in Deathbird Stories that I first read"The Whimper of Whipped Dogs," a story Ellison wrote in a blind anger about the murder of Kitty Genovese, was one of those watershed moments for me as a fledgling writer.

It was in Spider Kiss that I realized you could write about someone or something very real without using their name, i.e. Elvis. Ellison had some things to say about the seduction of celebrity and he wanted to use Elvis as a metaphor for that, even as Elvis was still very much alive at the time the novel was written. After reading Spider Kiss, and decoding it as an allegory, I started seeing it everywhere.

Reading the Ellison-edited anthology Dangerous Visions was the first time I'd encountered the work of Carol Emshwiller ("Sex and/or Mr. Morrison), whom I'd never heard of, Samuel Delany ("Aye, and Gomorrah"), who I had heard of, but never read before, and Theodore Sturgeon ("If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?"), who I realized I'd been reading for years in other anthologies and loved him.

In The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, I first read "Along the Scenic Route," about a man on the highway, his car armed to the teeth, that decides to fight back against his unnamed tormentor with a fusillade of machine gun fire. The short story was one of the inspirations for the game Car Wars and probably also Deathrace 2000. My first car, a 1971 Volkswagon Beetle, had a toggle switch on the dash that was labeled "Missile Launcher."

 There are more, but you get the idea. Ellison shaped my tastes and influenced my writing, so early, and so much, that it's difficult to say where, exactly, but I can point to one thing that jump-started what eventually became my "voice": Anger.

Ellison was angry, a lot. Many of his best stories and essays have the white-hot intensity of someone who is righteously indignant about something, and in Ellison's case, it could be anything: creative theft, social injustice, gross stupidity, corporate greed, professional greed, personal greed, pride, avarice, lust, war--pretty much any combination of the seven deadly sins of man--betrayal, mediocrity, and a horde of enemies, a legion of lickspittles and toadies that all conspired to bring us as a people down into the muck, a backslide into barbarism. Ellison hated all of that shit, and he punched back as often and as hard as he could, for as long as he could.

His anger made it all right for me to be angry, and moreover to express my anger. Venting my spleen was good for me. It let me articulate, sometimes better, and sometime worse, what bothered me. It made me choose my words carefully. It sharpened my wit, if not my wits.  It honed my voice. He made me a better writer by his example. I've been thinking about my anger a lot for the past six months and I've spent years strangling it off, bit by bit. I'm not going to do that anymore. I don't know if I'll ever be as pissed off as I was in my twenties, but I've stopped censoring myself. Anything less would be a betrayal of me as a writer, and that's something I took straight from Harlan Ellison's own playbook.

I got to meet him, twice, and the meetings where, thankfully, free of drama. By the end of the 20th century, he'd become something akin to the barker at his own sideshow. He'd been "the angry guy" for so long that people expected it. And many people goaded him, like it was a party trick, to blow up and do his little song and dance. I saw that in action at a San Diego, where a fan in front of me asked, grinning like an idiot, "I wonder if you'd seen the latest editorial that Gary Groth wrote in The Comics Journal where he mentioned you by name?"

By the mid-90s, Ellison and Groth hadn't spoken in years. The lawsuits had poisoned their relationship and they were not in contact. Anyone else would have slapped a smile on their face and said, "No, I haven't. We don't communicate anymore." Or something to that effect. But Ellison woke up like the chicken at the state fair that plays Tic-Tac-Toe and said, "Gary Groth?! Don't ever mention his name to me again or I'll drive to your house and kill your mother!" He vented for another fifteen seconds, and the fan basked in it, like it was a refreshing shower. He walked off. He'd gotten his Ellison story. "Harlan blew up at me for mentioning Gary Groth in a conversation." It was bullshit, and I felt sorry that Ellison felt like he had to play along.

The second time I met him was at an AggieCon in 2000, along with the other members of Clockwork Storybook. We were selling chapbooks and we gave one of each to Ellison. He made a point of looking through them and complimenting us on our attention to detail in the creation of the books. Later, he actually called Chris Roberson to talk to him about things he'd written--and at the time, I was glad he hadn't called me, because Ellison could be just as effusive with his scorn as his praise. Now I wish he had. I would have taken Ellison's abuse and thanked him for it.

I wish I'd thanked him earlier.

Rest in Peace, Harlan. If anyone earned it, it's you.

It's difficult to measure his influence on speculative fiction, a term he used to describe fantasy and science fiction because he thought the genres needed elevating. I certainly took more from him regarding my non-fiction writing, and also a lot of how to conduct business as a writer. He walked away from a lot of jobs, and picked fights and even lawsuits with many others, over the treatment of himself and his work. He made it clear that writers--all artists--have value and should be treated fairly and with dignity. Also, he made it clear that writers were under no obligation to write happy stories. He said it best himself:

I don't know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyes water.

In the next few days, I'm sure that there will be a slew of counter-eulogies, describing what a misogynist prick Ellison was, or how he was an asshole and shouldn't be lionized. They will all be within their rights to offer up such a course of action. And they will be wrong. Now about him being an asshole, but over his canonization. Whatever problems Old Ellison had in the digital age, Young, Fresh, Blood-in-his-eyes Ellison set the pace for generations of writers and artists. He deserves his place at the table, and don't think for a minute he doesn't.

Polemic. Irascible. Curmudgeonly. Alarmist. Controversial. Brilliant. Born out of time and indelibly of his time. There will never be another Harlan Ellison. How could there be?

Len Wein 1948-2017

One of my all-time favorite comics.

It's not fair that we lost both Bernie Wrightson and Len Wein in the same year. You've probably heard by now about his passing on social media, and everyone is reminding us that Lein Wein co-created Swamp Thing with Bernie and also Wolverine with Herb Trimpe and he re-started the languishing X-Men by making them Uncanny and creating a bunch of now-standard--and interestingly, international--characters like Colossus, Nightcrawler, Thunderbird, and of course, the Canadian Mystery Man, Wolverine himself. This is a big deal, and should be mentioned, alongside his stint as editor-in-chief at Marvel comics, and his later career writing for TV animation like the Batman Animated Series. Len deserves every once of credit for all of that, and more.

But I want to talk about Len Wein and what he meant to me. See, I was late to the Uncanny X-Men--my first issue was well into the Claremont/Byrne run (issue #119, if you must know; the second appearance of Moses Magnum). I discovered Swamp Thing later, around age 9, watching them read aloud on television with actors speaking the parts, like a book and record sort of thing. But my first Len Wein comic I ever read was an issue of The Incredible Hulk. It wasn't #180 (*First Appearance of Wolverine-cameo, last panel) nor #181 (*First Full Appearance of Wolverine, worth a small fortune these day). Nope. It was Incredible Hulk #182 (*2nd Wolverine Appearance-cameo, first page). Which, as you may well imagine, ain't worth diddly-squat, by comparison.

Comics History, Bronze Age Style

But that doesn't matter. At the age of 8, I was reading them to be reading them. You couldn't get full runs of anything in Abilene, Texas, in the mid-1970s, and I had to be content with what I could find. So I read these comics very carefully, looking for clues and connections to other comics and stories.  This was, at first glance, a random issue of The Incredible Hulk. I don't even remember where I got it. Probably bought for me by my dad, or possibly included in a stack from a garage sale. Who knows. But this seemingly-innocuous comic hit me like a ton of bricks.

In a nutshell, here' the recap: The Canadian government captures the Hulk, no thanks to their field agent, Wolverine. Hulk gets loose, as per usual, and disappears into the forest. He comes across an old black man who set up camp. He introduces himself as Crackerjack Jackson and offers Hulk some food. He plays the harmonica and they talk for a while.

Elsewhere, two convicts, an angry black man, and a racist white man, have broken out of prison, but they are shackled together, chain gang style. They are not friends, and can't wait to get free of their chains and go their separate ways. They stumble across a mushroom-headed alien and shoot him. The alien is saved by the metal in the bullets and as a thank you for the help, turns their ordinary chain into an energy tether that gives them strength and power. They rebrand themselves as Hammer and Anvil and decide to get revenge on the prison.

This comic broke my heart.

Meanwhile, Crackerjack is teaching Hulk to fish and write his name. Crackerjack tells Hulk, "A man ain't nothin' if he ain't got his name." Hulk is pleased with his results. He agrees to accompany Crackerjack to see his son.

As it turns out, his son is in prison. The very prison that Hammer and Anvil are about to take apart. Moreover, Leroy, now "Hammer", is Crackerjack's son. Crackerjack sees what's going on and tries to intervene, but Leroy is too angry at his absent father to listen. When Crackerjack reaches out to his son, he grabs the energy chain and the shock kills the old man instantly. When Hulk sees this he goes nuts and attacks the pair. They get Hulk in a stranglehold, but Hulk overcomes and tears the bio-chain apart, which stuns them both.

Before the authorities can swoop in, Hulk takes Crackerjack's body in his arms and leaps away. There, in the woods, he digs a grave for his friend, and buries him. Using his finger, he digs into a rock, carving Crackerjack's name into the makeshift tombstone. And then he leaps away.

All of that story happens in a story merely 17 pages long. And at the age of 7, it filled me with such profound sadness, such regret and loss, that it made me cry. I've since revisited the story, and it's...well, dated, to be polite...but at the time, this was great, great stuff.. I'd argue that even though it's dated now, its heart is still in the right place. And that's why Len Wein should be remembered. This wasn't high art. But he took something that could have been just another Hulk comic and made it greater than the sum of its parts.

That was the first time I noticed the writer's name, Len Wein. Two years later, when I discovered Swamp Thing, I would see his name again and the light bulb went off in my head: you could write comics! You didn't have to be an artist. Because (and I say this with all due respect) there is zero chance of mistaking Herb Trimpe for Bernie Wrightson. But the connective thread there was Len Wein, the writer.

Comics, and especially Bronze and Silver Age comics, take it in the shorts for their "simplicity" and being "kid's stuff," and while there was a schizophrenic barrage of message inherent in the way comics and comic properties were marketed in the 1970s, the people writing them weren't writing comics for kids. They were writing things that interested them, based on what they were hearing from fans, who were all ages--thirty and forty year old men and women, even back then. So the themes of casual racism, absent fathers, self-awareness, patricide, revenge, and regret--this was all fair game back then. What the critics of comics never realized, never got, never understood, is that when comics were their very best, they never pandered to the lowest common denominator. All of the best books forced their readers to engage with them at a much higher level. And that's what Len Wein did when he wrote comics.

I've lost, traded, or misplaced many of my "childhood" comics, but I still have my battered and beat-to-hell issue of Incredible Hulk #182. It was a transformative book for me, one that most certainly contributed to my path to being a storyteller. I am deeply sorry I never got a chance to tell Len that in person.

Rest in Peace, Good Sir. And thanks. For all of it.

Edited to correct an appearance error and the weird loss of a paragraph in the posting.